In the past
couple of months I’ve been thinking a lot about book titles. It’s the sort of
thing authors do when they’re nearing the end of a book and haven’t yet named
it. Nonfiction writers have it easy; they can always go with something drawn
from the subject matter. With fiction, one has to be a bit more opaque.
I’ve
written on this subject before, and to summarize my conclusions, a good title
for a work of fiction should ideally convey a sense of the feel and tenor of
the book. I don’t believe titles sell books as a rule, and the reality is that
most books have rather prosaic titles.
Looking at
the mysteries on the bookshelf in front of me, for example, I see: The Stone Wife (Peter Lovesey), Taken at the Flood (Agatha Christie), A Beam of Light (Andrea Camilleri), The Return (Hakan Nesser), and Finding Moon (Tony Hillerman). Well
known authors all, but the titles hardly grab you by the lapels.
It Was Easy at First
For my
first two mystery novels, I had decided on the title before I even started
writing. The McHenry Inheritance was
a straightforward distillation of the essence of a book that revolved around a
challenged will, and Wash Her Guilt Away,
taken from the well-known poem by Oliver Goldsmith, got to the heart of the
murder victim’s character.
The third
book was more of a struggle, title-wise. At the outset, I considered a half
dozen possibilities, but wasn’t satisfied with any of them. Two thirds of the
way through the first draft, I was no forrader, when, flipping through my
Oxford Book of English Verse, I came across a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett
Browning that ended with the words, “not death, but love.”
The sonnet
itself dovetailed wonderfully with the themes of the book, and the final words
of the poem made for a great title. So, Not Death, But Love it was.
Seems to Get Harder
The fourth
book, which should be out in a few months, was even harder to name than the
third one. Coming up with a title was like digging a ditch in frozen ground. I
had a couple of ideas early on, but the more I thought about them, the less I
liked them. Given that I still like the titles of my first three books, that
probably meant the early ideas for Book Four weren’t right.
Finally, a
breakthrough of sorts came when I was discussing the matter with my sister
Susan, a poet of some renown in New York City. She asked me what the name of
the town was, where the story took place. Alta Mira, I said. She suggested
something like Bad Day at Alta Mira.
That title
didn’t fit the book, but it got my train of thought on the right track. The
book is about a mountain town undergoing a double trauma. Several female
students have inexplicably gone missing from the local community college, and a
high school cheerleader has accused the quarterback of getting her drunk and
raping her at a party.
It occurred
to me that the book’s theme is that the young women in town — its daughters, if
you will — are in danger, and the book is about attempts to set right the
wrongs done to them. So I came up with The
Daughters of Alta Mira, and that one felt right the more I thought about
it, so that’s what it will be.
Now all I
have to do is come up with a title for Book Five.
