Ghosts and Witches, Oh My!

            When I started writing mysteries, I certainly had no intention of getting into the realm of the paranormal. I saw myself as following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, rather than H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Onions, and Jack Mann. But once you start writing, stuff happens.

            The first Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, was entirely rational and grounded in the everyday. The second, Wash Her Guilt Away, which will be out in a couple of weeks, started out that way, but at the beginning I threw in, almost as an aside, one brief supernatural reference — to a rumored witch placing a curse on the place where the action occurs.

            It turned out to be like taking one piece of candy from a box of chocolates, and the next thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole damn box. By the time the book was written, it had an entire coven of witches, a headless boatman, and a suspicious death with possibly supernatural overtones. How did it get out of hand like that?

Was it Carr’s Influence?

            The easy way out would be to blame John Dickson Carr. He was one of the great practitioners of the locked-room mystery (the murder is committed in a locked room, which the killer shouldn’t have been able to enter or leave), and a couple of his books, notably Below Suspicion and The Burning Court also had a strong witchcraft angle. Wash Her Guilt Away is dedicated in his spirit — which, come to think of it, is a loaded word.

            My second book is something of an English country-house mystery, in which a group of people are brought together for a short time, tension develops, and a crime is committed. But it also has a locked-room mystery in it, hence the dedication to Carr. That mystery has a natural explanation, as they all do, but I started to see how other supernatural elements might come into play.

            Because the setting of the book is a lodge in the remote forests of Northern California, it lent itself to an air of the supernatural. After all, there’s a reason that Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” were set in the woods. I stole from both of those, by the way. If you’re going to steal from an author, do it to a dead one whose copyright has expired.

Two Feet Firmly on Ground

            At the moment I’m trying to figure out how much to make of the paranormal angle in marketing Wash Her Guilt Away. A lot of people eat that stuff up, but the fact is that I’m a pretty rational man when it comes to such issues. My favorite ghost stories are the ones written by authors such as J.S. LeFanu and M.R. James, in which the supernatural elements are reflections of the emotional states and consciences of the characters. For a really good example of this, see LeFanu’s story, “The Familiar,” about a man driven mad by mysterious footsteps that follow him through the city at night.

            I’ll probably compromise by teasing to at least the witch element in the dust-jacket blurb, but otherwise not making too much of a deal about it. Any future books I write will appear in the mystery section of Amazon, not the paranormal, and that’s the way I prefer it. The third mystery, which I am now outlining in detail, should again be perfectly rational, and the general ideas I have for books beyond that are also paranormal-free. After all, the real world is scary enough.

           

           

           

End of the Company Man

            Within a few years of going to work for the newspaper in 1972, I had more or less decided I was going to be a company man. John P. Scripps Newspapers was a good organization that valued the quality of the product, and if I couldn’t hit the top at the paper where I started, it offered me a fair chance to do so at one of its other publications.

            As matters turned out, I stayed with them for 19 years and made it to the top where I started. But just as I reached the pinnacle, the company was sold and the whole corporate culture changed — not for the better, in my view. After three years as editor, I had to admit it wasn’t the same place it had been for most of my time there, and that it was time for me to move on. I went before the decision was forced upon me.

            Even so, I still have fond memories of my time at the newspaper, and a lot of those memories relate to the great people I worked with, quite a few of whom were company men themselves.

Hitching Your Star to a Wagon

            For the benefit of readers under 40, if any, I should probably explain what a company man was. He (the term began more than a century ago when women weren’t much in the work force) went to work for one company and was loyal to it. The company in return was loyal to him, moving him as far up the corporate ladder as circumstances and his abilities warranted.

            In his worst iteration the company man could be an unquestioning stooge and lackey for a bad company’s noxious practices. But the term was more commonly benign, referring to such people as the dispatcher who was the sober, dependable, respectable face of the railroad he worked for in the small town where he lived. He either died with his boots on or retired after 40 years with a gold watch.

            The two editors who preceded me were both company men. They worked for John P. Scripps Newspapers for decades, and both of them came to our paper after working for another in the group. The three business managers during my tenure at the paper were all company men as well. They were all great guys and great professionals.

What Sense of Loyalty?

            In recent months, Santa Clara University has been sending me out to do a series of articles on alumni who are starting their own businesses — which seems to be almost all of them. They’re bright, energetic, optimistic and innovative, and a line that came up over and over in the interviews was that they wanted to start their own business.

            We certainly need innovators and entrepreneurs, and I wish them all the best. Yet I couldn’t help wondering, as I did the interviews, about the desire to start their own business. More specifically, how much of it came from a sense that it was what they were meant to do, and how much of it came from a sense of resignation — a feeling that in today’s business world there’s simply no point to working for someone else.

            Estimates vary slightly, but the average seems to be that 90 percent of new businesses fail. The people who launch those failed businesses can either try again (up to a point) or go to work for somebody else. If they do the latter, they will most likely move from job to job the rest of their lives, rather than becoming company men or women. The two-way avenue of loyalty that made the company man possible has been closed for good, and weeds are growing in the asphalt.

           

           

Every Day and in Every Way

            When I wrote my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, I didn’t really have any goal other than to see if I could come up with a mystery good enough to show to other people. Because it was the first time around, I did it on a wing and a prayer, plodding forward with the idea in my head until it was done. I had no experience or basis to compare the effort to.

            The result was a book that has garnered decent reviews and decent traffic for a first work by an unknown author. But when I was finished with it, I knew I could have done better, and, knowing at least some of where I stumbled along the way, made some effort to change the way I wrote the next one.

            So the second time around I did more outlining — not just of the plot, but also putting down details of the setting and the characters before I sat down at the computer and began writing. I’d done a plot outline for the first book, but the second outline was considerably longer and more detailed.

Pick One Thing and Work It

            I also decided to try to focus on improving in one specific area, and chose character and dialogue. With that in mind, I looked at my grab-bag of story ideas and went for the one that was probably most dependent on character and atmosphere to carry the story forward. The result was the second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, which should be up on Amazon in four to six weeks.

            As I’ve mentioned before, this is essentially an English country-house mystery, in which a group of people — some known to each other, some strangers — are brought together in an isolated setting. Tensions simmer, and eventually someone ends up dead. Because Americans don’t, by and large, do country-house weekends any more, I made the setting a remote fishing lodge, at which the guests are thrown together by a stretch of unremittingly bad weather.

            Starting afresh with the same protagonist, but otherwise a different setting and different cast of characters, I had the freedom to invent anew and be only slightly limited by what I had written in the first book. I even gave my lead character a different fishing sidekick and had some fun developing the new sidekick’s persona.

Diagramming the Plot

            There’s no telling what the readers will think, but I felt there was some improvement and plan to follow much of the same process for the third one.

            Which, by the way, is already started, with a goal of being in print (or at least in e-book) by the end of 2015. At the moment I’m only 90 percent sure about the title, so I won’t be giving that out yet, but I can tell you three things about it:

            1. It will take place in a different setting from the first two books and will have a new set of characters;

            2. The exception being that Gordon and one of the sidekicks from the first two books will reprise his role;

            3. The focus for improvement will be the complexity of the plot and the ingenuity involved in unraveling the mystery.

            This time I’m doing a formal story board and calendar for the action to ensure that everything falls into place as it should and diagramming the plot with even greater precision than before. Perhaps this is an exercise in literary Coue-ism, but if you’re not improving, you’re going backwards. I even know what I want to work on in the fourth novel, but let’s get this one done first.

           

           

Writing It Is the Easy Part

            There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who can’t imagine writing a book, and those who can’t imagine not writing a book. Most of my friends belong to the first group, and they sometimes ask me how hard it is to write a book.

            My standing answer is that any idiot can write a book, but that it takes a certain level of skill to write one that anyone will actually read. That doesn’t entirely answer the question, I know, but it’s the best I can do.

            As I approach the publication, in a few weeks, of my second Quill Gordon mystery novel, it occurs to me that there is a postscript to my standing answer. That would be that writing the book is the easy part; it’s all the stuff that comes afterward that’s the real work.

Mistakes on Top of Mistakes

            I happen to be thinking of this because yesterday afternoon I got an email from Lauren Wilkins, a former colleague at the newspaper, who is doing the final outside edit of book two, Wash Her Guilt Away. I decided to pay someone to do this after hearing from my friends about the mistakes they were finding in the first book, The McHenry Inheritance. (At least Amazon made it easy to go back and clean those up!)

            Already I’ve taken a week off to do nothing but edit and rewrite the second book, and after I was done with that, I gave it to my wife, Linda, for another read and made the corrections she indicated. Now Lauren is saying she’s making good progress and is surprised by how much stuff she’s catching.

            That both gratifies and mortifies me. I’m mortified because I don’t feel so much should still be wrong at this point, but gratified that my decision to hire an outside editor turned out to be justified. With any luck, my friends will have less to point out this time around.

            A key determinant of the ultimate publication date will be how much time it takes me to go through the manuscript and respond to what Lauren caught. I’m hoping the book will be out in late April, but realistically, it might not be on Amazon before May.

Who’s Hosting This, Anyway?

            Meanwhile, I met with my webmaster last week to redesign my website. Right now it’s doing a good job of promoting one book, but from here on out, it has to promote a series of books, which means completely restructuring it. That’s daunting enough as it is, but it turns out that neither the webmaster or I could initially figure out who’s hosting the site.

            Eventually that got figured out, but it was obscured because I have two accounts with the server business, owing to my propensity for forgetting log in ID’s and passwords. Fortunately that got sorted out in little over an hour; they were very helpful, and if I’d had to go somewhere else, that might have been a long slog.

            At the same time all this is going on, we’re waiting for rain so the final footage for the video trailer can be shot; a storm just moved in today, and the videographer is hoping to take care of business now. And of course I’m planning the promotional work for the book, which will really pick up once it’s actually published. With such a full plate, I’ll barely have time to follow March Madness this weekend. I’m rooting for Stanford and Tennessee, but only the Vols have much chance of going to the Final Four. You read it here first.

           

Sort of Like Howard Hawks

            Yesterday morning I got together with videographer Chip Scheuer and retired Watsonville Police Chief Terry Medina to shoot a video trailer for my second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away. Along the way, photographer Tarmo Hannula of the Register-Pajaronian, who I’ve known for years, showed up to take a picture.

            And somewhere in the process I got to thinking, this must be what Howard Hawks felt like when he shot a western with John Wayne. Let’s get together with some friends, head for the great outdoors, and have some fun making a movie.

            Of course Hawks was paid handsomely to make his movies, whereas I’m paying out-of-pocket for mine and doing it on a budget. I have to because a You Tube video trailer is considered essential to book marketing in the digital age. I will say this for making a video, though. It’s a lot more fun than applying for an ISBN number for the book.

Shooting in the Great Indoors

            Actually, this video was shot in the great indoors, which if you’re talking about Howard Hawks/John Wayne movies calls to mind Rio Bravo. What we were trying to do this morning was recreate the interior of a hunting and fishing lodge in an isolated mountain area of Northern California, which is the setting for the book.

            Had I but funding enough and time, I would have taken a weeklong trip to the mountains to scout for appropriate locations, rented a place for the day, and brought everybody up there to shoot it properly. In the real world, I was reduced to doing it on the cheap near where I live.

            I considered a few places to serve as the background for the interior of the lodge, but it turned out the right place was literally under my nose. My Rotary Club meets each week at the Watsonville Elks Lodge, which has a huge fireplace, with the head of a mammoth elk mounted over it. The bar and its furniture are of the late fifties, early sixties vintage that the lodge in my book contains. We figured we could make it work by shooting carefully and atmospherically.

            Ideally, we would have had a rainy day, like the ones in the book, but no such luck. It was bright and sunny, but Chip got around that by framing shots tightly and focusing on the fireplace and building artifacts.

One-Take Terry Does His Scene

            Having stood up at numerous press conferences as police chief, Terry is a pro when it comes to being filmed. He also did video training for city employees and earned the nickname “One-Take Terry,” because when he stepped in front of a camera, he generally got it right the first time.

            We did more than one take this time in order to provide different options, camera angles and inflections when the film was edited, then Terry was sent on his way. Then we shot the rest of the scenes and some footage to go with voice-over, and we were finished in three hours.

            When Hawks and Wayne made the classic Red River in 1947, they found themselves sitting on their hands for days because of heavy unseasonable rains. My video has the opposite problem. We’re going to be sitting on our hands until Chip can get out and shoot some rainy-day footage to complete the project. In this year of California’s major drought, that’s a stresser, but the Weather Channel is saying there’s a good chance of rain next Tuesday and Wednesday. I certainly hope so; the show must go on.

           

           

           

Good to See You Again

            Going into the donut shop as usual last Saturday morning, I saw Les sitting at a table in the corner, reading a newspaper. Not surprising, given that the donut shop is across the street from the office complex we both occupied over a seven-year period.

            Les is an accountant, and like me, he works erratic hours, so it was not unusual for us to run into each other on evenings or weekends, when the office was mostly deserted, and strike up a conversation. It’s been more than five years since I moved out of the office, but Les is still there — though apparently not for long.

            After I picked up my donuts we got to talking, and it seems he’s about ready to ease into retirement, which would mean not being across the street from the donut shop on Saturday morning. We caught up on things for several minutes, and I had the opportunity to find out about his big step and to wish him well.

Leaving Matters to Chance

            Afterwards I got to thinking about the sheer luck of the encounter. If I’d been there twenty minutes earlier or later, as I easily might have, I’d likely have missed him altogether. And if he retired and started getting to the donut shop less because he’s not coming to work on Saturday mornings, I might never have seen him again.

            That chance encounter reminded me again of how fragile our human contacts are, and how easy it is for people to slip out of our lives and for us to slip out of theirs. We have very few people who are friends for life, but plenty of others could have been friends for longer than they were if only one of the parties had taken a bit more initiative to maintain contact.

            Over the years I’ve tried to keep in touch with people and have probably been a bit above average in that regard. Several friends have told me that they appreciate my taking the initiative to get together for lunch or coffee because they often feel too swamped to make the move themselves. Even so, I’m far from perfect  and hold numerous regrets about people I wish I’d called sooner and more often.

The Other Issues

            Two weeks ago I turned 64, and while the indicators are good for my show running a while longer, I am becoming acutely aware of the fact that there’s a final curtain waiting out there — for both me and my friends. Staying in touch with people, and in some cases trying to rekindle friendships that burned out when the fire was neglected have to be priorities now.

            Other issues arise from not seeing people in a while. I’ve been involved in the community for decades and know a large number of people at least somewhat, but I’m starting to find myself occasionally forgetting a name or mistaking one person for another. At a recent book-signing, I was mortified when I called a woman “Gwen,” when her name is Nita. I read in the Times that the reason older people are more forgetful owes less to brain malfunction than to the fact they have so much to remember. I really wish I could believe that — especially when the computer between my ears disconcertingly clicks on the wrong icon.

            On the other hand I was recently reviewing some soon-to-be-public documents for a client and caught a misspelling in the name of a man known to almost everyone in town. So I suppose I still have a few marbles left, and as long as there’s even one, I can keep on playing. And inviting a friend to join me.

           

           

Rebranding My Detective

            When my mystery novel The McHenry Inheritance was first published in July of 2012, I described it in shorthand as a fly-fishing mystery. Although that may have been accurate as far as it went, it’s a marketing decision I’ve come to regret.

            The regret arises from a growing belief on my part that identifying or describing the book in that way may be putting off some readers who would enjoy it but who have no interest in fly-fishing. Nor does it seem to be pulling in large numbers of readers who have that interest; if a fly-fisherperson doesn’t read mystery novels, he or she is unlikely to wade through the other 190 pages of the book to get to the ten that have to do with fishing.

            From the beginning, I saw the book as the first in a series featuring the same protagonist, Quill Gordon. The running theme of the series would be that Gordon goes on a fishing trip, becomes enmeshed in some aspect of the small-town drama at his destination, and plays some part in solving the murder that arises out of that drama.

Lord Peter Goes to Scotland

            In many respects, that’s similar to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Five Red Herrings, in which Lord Peter Wimsey goes on a fishing trip to Scotland, becomes enmeshed in the drama surrounding a group of artists who live in the small town where he is staying, and helps the police solve the murder of one of them. No one would refer to that book as a fly-fishing mystery, and while my tome has more fishing detail than Sayers’ book did, the fishing plays the same role: it gets the protagonist into the setting and situation.

            Sayers used the fishing device only once, whereas I would be using it in every book. But what my books will really be about is an outsider (Gordon) becoming involved in a community and its issues, and in some way bringing his outsider status and perspective to bear on solving a crime that has disrupted the community.

            Several readers of the first book — all male, by the way — have picked up on the outsider aspect and have commented that Gordon reminds them in some ways of Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher. They’re both tall, both loners and they go where they want to go and do what they want to do, but the resemblance pretty much ends there.

Jack Reacher Meets Miss Marple

            Gordon is perhaps what Jack Reacher would be if he had a permanent address and substantial investment income — respectable in other words. In that regard, Gordon is something like Peter Wimsey, but he also is like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who travels about and solves crimes, mostly in small towns, based on her life experience and observations.

            The Gordon series is more in the classical mode of Christie and Sayers than the modern action-thrillers that Child writes. And it has occurred to me that the classical aspect of the series should perhaps be emphasized more, though exactly how, I’m not sure. But with a new video to make and with having to redesign the Quill Gordon website to work in the second book, I’ll have some chances to work on the rebranding.

            If, as I hope, I keep adding more books to the Gordon series, there will be plenty of additional opportunities for redefining what a Quill Gordon mystery is, and maybe I’ll eventually get it right. And there’s always the old fallback. If you tell good stories, which I’d like to believe I do, there will always be readers who appreciate that.