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.

How Important Is a Book Title?

            My friend and sometime marketing guru John Bakalian was visiting us a few weeks ago, and the topic of discussion turned to book titles. John suggested that perhaps for my next mystery novel, I should research the bestseller lists to find out what words appear most frequently in the titles. Then, he said, I should come up with a title that uses the most common words, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with the book.

            The problem with that, I countered, is that James Patterson could call one of his books Scrubbing Linoleum Floors, and it would sell a million copies. Authors and books sell books — not titles and covers, though they can help at the margins.

            (On an impulse, I decided to try out John’s theory by coming up with a title that would meet his criteria, Death Lust for Sex, and doing a search for it on Amazon. Nothing turned up, and I won’t be using it myself, so feel free to appropriate it if you’re so inclined.)

Part of the Filtering Process

            Ideally, of course, a title should be catchy and memorable and capture the spirit of the book. Three good examples would be Gone With The Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Farewell to Arms. On the other hand, you have to remember that The Great Gatsby was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s worst title, but his best book.

            In the mystery genre, in which I work, a book title is probably first of all the beginning of the potential reader’s filtering process. Mystery readers tend to favor certain subgroups of books, and titles can help them sort things out. A book called Dead Meat, with a cover illustration of a meat cleaver dripping blood, is probably going to appeal to the hard-boiled action crowd, while The Ellsmere Manor Murders, with a pastoral image on the cover, would likely appeal to readers of classic British mysteries.

            When I’m browsing, either in a bookstore or online, a title that catches my eye (and not many do) will likely lead me to look at the cover, then the dust-jacket blurb. Those three things, along with a glance at the first page to check for fundamental writing competence, will typically lead me to a decision. The title, then, is part of the filtering process, not the deal clincher.

Which Comes First?

            Another interesting question — and the answer varies from author to author — is which comes first, the title or the book? In the case of my first two mysteries, I had a title in place before I started writing.

            Book one, The McHenry Inheritance, had a title that suggests a legal conflict and characters of considerable wealth. Since my mysteries are more traditional than hard-boiled, I felt that was a good choice.

            The second book, Wash Her Guilt Away, takes its name from a famous Oliver Goldsmith Poem. I’d like to believe it suggests a quest for redemption, a strong female character, and an emphasis on personal moral responsibility, rather than corporate or organized crime.

            With the third book, it’s different. I’m well into writing it now, but haven’t yet decided on the right title. I’ve come up with four candidates, and at the moment I’m liking the fourth one. They’re all good titles, in my view, but each conveys a different feel, and there’s the problem.

            At times like this, I envy Sue Grafton. All she has to do is come up with one word to match a letter of the alphabet. Maybe that’s why she picked that title format.

A Question of Literary Timing

            Time, in the fictional sense, has always been a vexing problem for the writer, and especially for the writer of a series of books featuring a recurring character or characters. Different writers have handled the issue in different ways.

            In the mystery genre, to which I am a recent contributor, two polar examples come to mind right away. Martha Grimes, an American who writes books featuring a Scotland Yard superintendent, Richard Jury, wrote the first book in the series in the early 1980s and established that Jury had been orphaned when his parents were killed in the London Blitz during World War II.

            When her first book, The Man With a Load of Mischief, was published in 1981, this was no problem. Jury was a healthy bachelor in his early 40s. As the series grew in popularity, it became more of an issue. Jury was still going strong a couple of years ago, but by all rights he should long since have been pensioned off.

Still Working With Typewriters

            Then there is the approach taken by Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone mysteries. The first, A Is for Alibi, was released in 1982; the most recent, U Is for Undertow, came out in 2009. Kinsey, the female detective, has been in her thirties throughout, and the penultimate book in the series, T Is for Trespass, was set in 1987, with the characters still using typewriters and pay telephones.

            I’m not in the same league as those two authors, but had a time-frame decision to make when I recently published my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance.

            The first draft of the book was written in the latter part of 1994, and had a number of contemporary references. It was revised a few times over the next few years, then put away when no agent could be found. It sat in various computers for a decade until I decided to put it up on Amazon this summer.

            In doing yet another revision for publication, I had to make a determination about the timing. Should I leave the book set, as originally written, in 1993, or should I try to update it? Pretty quickly I decided to go the first route.

Hindsight Helps the Author

            A big reason for that decision was that the book’s story revolves around a “citizen militia,” something fairly prevalent at that moment in history. The militia in my book was headed for some sort of uprising or spectacular “statement” action, along the lines of the Oklahoma City bombing, which took place in April 1995. Leaving the story set in the fall of 1993 kept it at a point in history between the Waco and Ruby Ridge debacles, which inflamed the militia movement, and Oklahoma City, which was the “payback” for the first two and the point at which the militias began to fade.

            Beyond that reason, it seemed to me that there was a certain pleasure in looking back on things of that period through today’s eyes. At that time, the laptop computer was a wondrous new invention, owned by few, and CompuServe (remember that?) was a cutting-edge online service.

            Finally, I decided I liked the idea of being able to riff off the past from the perspective of the present, sort of like Mad Men. In the book, I was able to have the lead character cashing in on the stock market boom of the 1980s; in a future book, I might have him solve a mystery by knowing something everyone knows now but that few knew in the time the story occurred. There are no mulligans in my life, but I can experience them vicariously through my detective.