From Fact to Fiction

            Last summer, when I began writing the third Quill Gordon mystery, Not Death, But Love, I expected that it would be finished and up on Amazon by the third quarter of this year. Instead, it became available for pre-order this week.

            The book itself will be available May 27, after my editor, Lauren Wilkins, has given it her toughest look and I’ve accommodated her concerns. That will surely improve it considerably in the details, but it will still be essentially the same book it is now in story outline and tone. I feel pretty good about it — better than pretty good, actually — which scares me, because there’s a saying in publishing that an author isn’t necessarily the best judge of his own work.

            Nevertheless, I’m going to trust my instincts until proved wrong. I think the plot and characters are more complex, and, if I do say so myself, I feel I came up with a pretty good confrontation-with-the-killer scene at the end. Let’s see if the readers agree.

One Thing Leads to Another

            This wasn’t originally going to be the third book in the series, but things happened. In 2012 I was hired by a family foundation to write the family’s history. It’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, because it paid generously and the work was fascinating. By the end of it, I felt the long-deceased family members had come alive inside my head and that I was able to convey a reasonably good sense of them to the readers.

            In the course of that work, I came across several things that were a surprise to the people who hired me. There were no terrible scandals, but there were lawsuits and family schisms they hadn’t known about until I started digging. At the time, I was simultaneously working on my second mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, and at some point it occurred to me that a family history with a deep secret — one worth killing to keep — could make the basis for a good mystery.

            One of my plans for a future book had been a story centering on a controversial land-use plan, something that would make use of the knowledge I picked up working as a consultant for Wells Fargo Bank and The Home Depot more than a decade ago. I decided to combine ideas to make the land development part of the family history, and was off to the races.

In the Character’s Own Voice

            When I was working on the family history, I often lamented that none of the family members had kept journals (at least none that had survived). I decided to give my murder victim, a retired English teacher named Charlotte London, a journal. It was originally supposed to provide a set of clues to complement those in the family history, but it ended up being much more than that.

            Simply put, in the course of creating the journal sections, I discovered that Charlotte had come to life most vividly, and, surprisingly to me, became one of the most dominant and complex characters in the book. Not to be gooey, but I got to be rather fond of her, and I’m hoping the book’s readers will, too.

            The history aspect carried through the rest of the book as well. I found myself wondering about, and inventing, histories of various elements of the book. These included the lake, the Italian restaurant where the characters ate dinner, the Rotary Club, where community and political alliances were cemented, and the town where the story was set. Such details, I feel, are what add richness to a book. They can often be what a reader remembers long after he or she has forgotten whodunit.

The Croatian Telegraph

            When I got hired a year and a half ago to write a family history that eventually came to be called, The Borina Family of Watsonville, there weren’t many expectations about how well it would sell.

The last of the Borinas (at least in the line I was writing about) died in 2000, and the attorney who was mostly administering the family foundation they left behind thought it would be fitting to get the story captured, to the extent possible after all this time. In fact, I recall his saying at the beginning that we’d probably need only a few copies for libraries and archives.

I thought it might have a bit more appeal than that. After all, it was a great rags-to-riches story, in which a Croatian immigrant rides into town at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, makes a huge fortune as an apple grower and shipper, and raises two daughters who were independent professional women long before that became the norm. One of them was the first female district attorney in the history of California.

A Good Story Long Forgotten

The more I worked on it, the more I felt it was a good story, but since most people locally, where it took place, knew next to nothing about it, how well could it sell? Sad to say there isn’t always a direct correlation between the quality of the story and its sales.

So when it was finally ready to go to the printer, the Foundation ordered a hundred copies. They arrived just before Thanksgiving, and I got them out into the three main local bookstores. We got out a press release, talked to the two major local papers, and held our collective breath.

At this point I should probably explain that in Santa Cruz County, and specifically in Watsonville, there is a significant Croatian-American population, most descended from people who came to America in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. The collective story of their migration and pre-eminence in California’s apple-growing industry was wonderfully told by Donna Mekis and Kathryn Mekis Miller in their book, Blossoms Into Gold.

Christmas Present? Who’d Have Thought?

The first news story came out Saturday and the second yesterday. Already, it seems, the Croatian telegraph had been humming and word was getting out about the book. The bookstore in Watsonville sold out in three days and the store in Santa Cruz ordered extra copies.

One of the county’s judges heard about the book and rushed out to buy a copy to see what it said about the female DA. And although the Borinas are gone, the maternal line, the Secondo family, is still quite large and they bought copies. The owner of the Watsonville bookstore told me that some people were buying multiple copies to give as Christmas presents.

In the few days the book has been out, I’ve already received some emails from people telling me how much they enjoyed it. One was from the granddaughter of the sister of the woman who became Mrs. Borina, who said she knew many of the people in the book and was glad to see their story in print.

A second printing has been ordered, and I’m looking forward to this Saturday, when I’ll be doing a book-signing at Crossroads Books in Watsonville. I’ll undoubtedly be told I got some things wrong and left some things out, but that’s all right. The book clearly touched a nerve with people who felt that, even though it wasn’t specifically about them, it told their story. You can’t beat a personal connection like that.

The 20-foot Ball of Yarn

            After more than a year of research and writing, The Borina Family of Watsonville, a history I did for that family’s foundation, will be published next month, and I expect it to make a modest contribution to the knowledge of local history in our area.

            A couple of months ago I blogged about how the research for the book sometimes seemed like chasing ghosts. That piece was about the difficulty of running down information on people who are all gone now, with few others remaining who knew them personally. The handful of people alive who still remember the Borinas will soon be gone themselves, but the book will keep the family’s memory alive to at least some small extent.

            There’s another issue involved in doing a family history like this, and it’s a paradox. In the course of running it down, the author comes across a heck of a lot of information, and massaging and condensing it into some sort of halfway interesting narrative is a true challenge.

The Histories Nobody Reads

            Quite a few people try their hand at writing a family history every year. Most of them can handle the first part of the job, which is ferreting out the information. Whether there’s a lot of information or a little, it’s generally available to anyone who can muster a bit of dogged persistence when it comes to going through raw materials — whether those are online sources or old-fashioned letters and diaries in a box in the attic.

            Figuring out what to make of it and how to use it is the rub, and that’s where family histories can turn unreadable.

In my case one storytelling challenge was that the family patriarch figured out a way to develop a lucrative market for apples in Asia during the 1930s. The details of how he did it eluded me; he never recorded the story, and whatever part of that story his daughters knew died with them.

            There was, however, a considerable body of work about developing markets for California fruit in Asia at the time. One 1930s article on the subject, which I encountered in an archive ran about as long as my entire book. How does something like that get worked into the story in a compelling fashion? (I used the gist of it and a piquant quote.)

The Great Unraveling

            It occurred to me at some point along the way that researching a book like this is a bit like picking up scraps of yarn here and there. At the end of the research process (and it ends when you decide it does, because in theory it could go on forever) you have a ball of yarn 20-feet in diameter.

            The writing process is about turning that enormous ball of yarn into a beautiful Christmas sweater with a reindeer pattern. In order to do that, you have to remember all the individual bits of yarn that went into the ball and spend a great deal of time and effort unraveling it in search of the bits you can use.

            Most of the yarn you’ve amassed never goes into the sweater, and some really nice material inevitably gets left behind. Part of writing involves being ruthless about leaving out good material that doesn’t fit your pattern. I seem to have a mind that’s naturally inclined to do that sort of thing, but I have no idea at all how I would go about trying to teach someone else to do it. All I know is that my way seems to work for me, and in a couple of months, we’ll find out if it works for the readers of the book as well.

Preserving the Family History

            One of the things I’ve been doing over the past year, when not writing a mystery novel, is a family history, which is now getting close to publication. The family in question died out a decade ago, but left behind a charitable foundation that gives millions of dollars a year to local nonprofits.

            It was the administrator of that foundation who decided a family history would be a good idea and brought me in to do it. He sensed, correctly, that time was running out to talk to people who still remember the family members, and that the story might be lost if it wasn’t captured now.

            Running down that story (or as much of it as possible) has been one of the most interesting and challenging things I’ve ever done. I find myself in the position of trying to bring to life, for a modern reader, a group of people I’ve never met, and of making their story interesting. The latter isn’t too hard because they accomplished quite a bit; for instance, one of the daughters was the first female district attorney in California when appointed to that position in 1947.

Chasing Ghosts

            The finished product resembles an unfinished jigsaw puzzle that conveys a definite image, yet one with a number of pieces missing. Some of the people I wanted to interview turned me down. Some that I did talk to died after talking with me (I’m not implying a connection here), and at times I’ve felt as if I’m chasing ghosts, one step ahead of the undertaker.

            One of the things that made the task difficult is that the family in question wrote down almost nothing. If they kept diaries or journals, none has survived. Correspondence is similarly sparse. The two daughters wrote letters to each other regularly when they were off to college, but the collection the Foundation has is surely only partial. With the exception of the daughter who was district attorney (and even she, not so much) they weren’t often in the newspapers.

            One of the daughters did do an oral history interview with the University of California in 1977, and that was helpful, if far from complete. By and large, putting together this story has been like building a beach one grain of sand at a time.

A Date Would Have Meant So Much

            There are several photo albums, one of which has handwritten captions. But on a couple of the really critical photos, there is no date and the caption information is sparse at best. One, for instance, shows a row of people standing stiffly in front of the family packing house. The caption reads: “Ma with Chinese visitors from Honolulu.”

            Based on my research, I can hazard a highly educated guess as to who the visitors were, but it’s still only a guess. Without their names, I can’t be certain. And if the visitors are who I think they are, the date of the photo would have been hugely important, but it’s not in the caption nor in the processing stamp on the back of the print.

            Experiences like that have led me to some philosophizing. Most of us go through our lives thinking we’re the most important person in the universe, but we don’t act like it in other respects. If we were really that important, we’d figure that people in years to come would be looking at our stuff and needing information. I’ve come to believe that everyone who has family artifacts, should pull them together and catalog them as best possible. You never know who might need the information 75 years from now.

Research: Old School and New

            When I’m not writing mystery novels, I write other things that people pay me to do. Right now one of those is a family history, and in connection with that, I recently had an interesting research experience.

            One of the family members in the story is a fellow who escaped from Yugoslavia when it was under Communist rule in the 1950s. The escape was something straight out of a spy movie: He and two friends got into a 13-foot boat and left the country under cover of darkness, headed across the Adriatic to Italy.

            I was fortunate to have a fairly detailed account of the escape that his grand-nephew in what is now Croatia had compiled from family lore. It gave a really good outline of how the man had escaped and made his way to America, and there was considerable valuable detail in the story. There were also a few holes in it, too, and that’s where the Internet came to the rescue.

A Quick Answer and No Answer

            One aspect of the story was that when our hero had made good his escape and was in Italy and Germany as a refugee, he feared, according to the account I had, a Yugoslavian secret police organization called UDBA, which was believed to operate throughout Europe, assassinating and abducting people who had fled the country.

            I’d never heard of UDBA and didn’t know if I could trust my source, so I Googled it and was able in a few minutes to confirm its existence and reputation. That was sufficient to verify the reported fear, which was all I needed.

            Another seemingly simple question, though, proved difficult to nail down online. When our three escapees fled, the motor on their boat broke down a few miles from shore and they had to get out the oars and start paddling for Italy. The obvious question was how far that would be.

            Wikipedia told me only that the widest point of the Adriatic was 120 miles across, but what I needed was the distance at the point they were crossing. Google searches revolving around Adriatic distances turned up no solid information, though I did find a ferry that covers approximately the same route the escapees would have tried to travel. No mileage was given, but the ferry time was 7.5 hours. At an average speed of around 15 mph, that would put the distance at 100-120 miles — close enough for government work, but not a historian.

The Old-School Ruler Rules

            Finally I got so frustrated that I decided to go offline and take an old-school approach that I knew would work. Grabbing a ruler from my desk, I threw it into my car and drove a mile and a half to the Aptos Public Library. After a brief wait at the reception desk, I was directed to the National Geographic atlas of the world, which looked as if it hadn’t been used in a while.

            Opening it to the Europe section, I flipped through the maps until I came to one that showed the Adriatic Sea and the countries on both sides of it. I set one end of the ruler down on Cavtat, the fishing port from which the men left, and pointed the other end at the closest outcropping of land on the Italian side. After measuring that distance, I set the ruler down on the map’s mileage scale. The distance I got was about 100 miles. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it — in the family history and everything else.