Pausing to Take Note

            In my third mystery novel, Not Death, But Love, several of the key characters gather for dinner at an Italian restaurant in a small mountain town, and considerable relevant information is exchanged. But any reader of the book will get more than the relevant information.

            I devote a bit of space to explaining the history of the restaurant; to giving the owner a few lines of dialogue that flesh out his character; to describing the interior and furnishings of the place; and to telling readers what music is playing on the sound system. None of this is at all essential to the story or the solution of the mystery. But I put it in, regardless, because I believe it helps to create a real sense of place that, along with other descriptions in the book, ultimately makes the story seem more real, more genuine.

            And I do this because it’s often the incidental details — the “feel” of the book, if you will — that linger in my mind long after the story has receded into the mists of memory.

When the Place Is a Character

            In my second book, Wash Her Guilt Away, most of the action takes place at Harry’s Riverside Lodge, a remote resort tucked into the dense forests of Northeastern California. I put a lot of effort into describing the place and how it felt to the characters as the story moved along. If I pulled it off, the lodge should have come across as another character in the book, and several readers have told me they felt they had come to know the place intimately by the time they finished reading.

            I tried to do something similar for the McHenry ranch in my first book, The McHenry Inheritance. In that aspect of that book, I think I succeeded less than in the other two, but I tried nevertheless and believe I conveyed some sense of the place.

            This sort of description used to be de rigueur for a novelist. In Great Expectations, Dickens spent more than a page describing the stormy night on which Magwitch turned up at Pip’s doorstep in London, building a highly charged atmosphere that made their encounter the more memorable.

The Interstate or the Scenic Route

            Quite a few authors these days don’t bother much with descriptions. It’s possible to read novels by bestselling authors where the reader doesn’t know what time of year it is or what the weather’s like because the author never says anything about it.

            James Patterson and Mary Higgins Clark, for instance, don’t linger much on details and focus on driving the story forward. They sell exceedingly well, so there’s clearly an audience that’s fine with that. But there are other authors, such as Louise Penny and Sue Grafton, who do stop along the way to give some atmospheric description, and they do all right, too.

            I liken the two approaches to the difference between driving from San Francisco to Seattle on Interstate 5 or taking Highway 101 up the coast. The first way gets you there faster, but the second way exposes you to sights and places and people. It makes the journey a travel experience, rather than a headlong rush to a destination. Because I believe that reading books should be an experience of discovery, I’m partial to a little well-done description along the way.

Teachers Who Mattered

                  The late, great American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor once observed, “There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” That quote was put out recently in a writers’ affinity group to which I belong, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

                  It so happens that my next Quill Gordon mystery, still untitled, features a retired English teacher as the murder victim. In the book, I’m trying to portray her as a carrier of the highest standards — definitely someone whose students would never grow up to write Valley of the Dolls. Come to think of it, does anyone under 60 remember Valley of the Dolls? It was a sixties-era sex-booze-and-drugs shocker that was the sort of bestseller O’Connor was probably talking about.

                  But I digress. My point is that in my boyhood, teachers like the one in my book roamed the hallways of nearly every public high school, but, alas, no more.

Swift and Sure Punishment

                  My wife, Linda, teaches biology at a state university. One of her classes is a lower-division course intended to teach students the correct techniques for writing a scientific paper. She sometimes finds it frustrating when it’s clear she’s dealing with a student who seems never to have been instructed in the basic techniques of writing of any kind.

                  At the public high school she attended decades ago, the teachers were unforgiving of gross errors. She recalls that Mrs. Roark, an English teacher, and Mr. Hashimoto, a history teacher, demanded good writing. Another English teacher would give a student an F on a paper if it contained a single run-on sentence. Or a sentence fragment. Late at night, reading a muddled effort by one of her students, Linda is given to putting her head in her hands and saying, “This poor kid never had a Mrs. Roark or Mr. Hashimoto in high school.”

                  Attending public schools in Southern California in the 1960s, I was blessed to have three outstanding English teachers between ninth and twelfth grades.

Three Who Mattered

                  Mr. McDonald, who taught English and journalism in ninth grade, probably was more responsible than anyone else for setting me on my career path. He also assigned Gone With the Wind as a book in the English class, which was hugely valuable. No one who took that class would ever again be intimidated by the length of a book.

                  Miss Irwin, who taught American Literature my junior year in high school, taught us how to appreciate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick. She also showed how to handle the racially-charged issues of the former book in an enlightened and sensitive way.

                  Mrs. Carruth was my senior year English Literature teacher, who had us read Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, among others. The way she drew us into Austen’s moral world was a triumph of good teaching.

                  Reflecting back on those wonderful teachers, I’ve decided to dedicate my next mystery novel to them, in appreciation for what they taught me about how to write and how to read a book. The more I think about it, the more I figure it’s the least I can do, really. After all, if not for them, I might have written a bestseller.