What's In a Book Title?

            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.

Tying Up the Loose Ends

            I once read a mystery novel by a conventionally published author of multiple titles in which four bodies were discovered in a storage locker early on. By the time the book reached its conclusion, there still had been no explanation of who killed the four people and why.

            Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Leaving one murder unaccounted for might charitably be excused as simple carelessness. Leaving the reader in the dark about four corpses borders on gross negligence.

            When something like that happens, the reader is left wondering not only about the lack of editing services at the publishing house, but also dissatisfied in a spiritual and existential way. To put it another way, unexplained puzzles are a violation of the author’s compact with the reader and the reader’s expectations.

Better Than Life

            Life is random, absurd and chaotic, which is why we expect mystery novels not to be. One of the great pleasures of a mystery novel comes from being confronted by a baffling situation (the crime) and seeing smart, competent people (the detectives) work through the confusion and get everything sorted into place. The comfort of seeing chaos turned to order is one of the reasons for reading these books.

            In the classic mysteries of the Golden Age (between the First and Second World Wars), authors took great pains to be sure and dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s at the end of the book. They assumed the reader wanted that, and probably no publisher of the time would have accepted a novel that didn’t explain everything (or almost everything) in the final pages.

            In the hands of masters like Carr, Christie, and Ellery Queen, the explanations made for gripping reading. They were so tight and plausible that, after reading them, you could find yourself wondering why you hadn’t seen what the detective ultimately saw so clearly.

Sometimes Not So Plausible

            Of course, not everyone brought it off as well as the masters. I recall reading one book of that era in which the criminal got into a rowboat during a tide so high it took the water nearly to the top of a 60-foot cliff, enabling the killer to fire a shot from the wave-tossed boat through the windows of the house and plug the unfortunate victim. It was a case of better shooting than plotting.

            As a writer of mystery novels in the classical tradition, I do my best to see that a reader gets a good explanation of the crime or crimes by the end of the book. Loose ends belong in bad hair, not mystery novels. You can no longer call all the suspects into the study, as the detectives of the 1920s and 30s routinely did, but you can show the investigation as it develops and leave the reader in no doubt as to how and by whom the crime was committed.

            Tying the story up neatly by the end is important in a mystery novel, but so are character development, atmosphere and detail. It’s a challenging time to be practicing in the genre, but some of the old ways are still good ways. If nothing else, the reader should finish the book knowing what happened and why.

Can't Tell the Characters Without a Scorecard

Slightly edited version of a post from spring 2013

            A couple of years ago, in the early stages of writing the second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, I found myself thinking about Ellery Queen. Early Ellery Queen, to be precise.

            What drove my mind there was the experience of trying to write a book that is a contemporary American take on the classic English country-house mystery. If you’ve read Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, or any of the other practitioners, you’ll know that’s a story where a diverse group of characters are invited to a country estate for the weekend and a murder ensues, with all the guests being suspects.

            Americans in the present day don’t do that sort of thing (I mean the country-house weekend; we certainly do murders) so in my book the characters assemble at a remote fishing lodge that has a bit of a history. The challenge facing the writer is bringing in all the characters, establishing their characters, and getting the reader interested in those characters before the first corpse makes its appearance.

The Nephew or the Secretary?

            A caring and considerate author also wants readers to keep the characters mentally sorted without too much effort as the book progresses. When Jones reappears after an absence of 30 to 40 pages, you don’t want the reader scratching her head and saying, “Let’s see — was Jones the rich uncle’s nephew or was it his secretary?”

            Based on my own reading experience, this can be a serious problem. Quite a few mysteries (and serious novels, as well) have left me dizzy trying to remember what the relationship between the characters was. That’s what sent me to the bookshelf for a look at Queen’s The Greek Coffin Mystery  to see if my memory was correct.

            The Greek Coffin Mystery was published in 1932, which definitely makes it early Queen, and sure enough, right at the front, I found what I was looking for: A list of characters. Each was described in only a few words, but those few words established the relationships between the characters and generally what they did.

At any point in the book, a reader could flip back to that page to double-check on who someone was.

So Old School It’s Not Even Retro

            Looking through the character list of this particular book, the reader can quickly be reminded that George Khalkis is an eminent art dealer (and the victim); and that Alan Cheney is the son of Delphina Sloane, who is Khalkis’ sister, and who is married to Gilbert Sloane, the manager of the Khalkis galleries. Got that?

            That sort of scorecard to help the reader keep the players straight can be most helpful, but it went out of style in the 1940s. A writer who tried to use the technique today would probably be laughed off Amazon for being so out of date he wasn’t even retro. The contemporary author has to write his way through that problem without the help of a cheat sheet.

            My approach to separating the sheep from the goats, so to speak, is threefold. First, I’m keeping the character list short; Wash Her Guilt Away has 15 characters compared to 39 in The Greek Coffin Mystery. Second, they aren’t related, except for the married couples. Third, I try to introduce them one or two at a time so the reader can get to know them before moving on. Will that help the reader avoid confusion? I don’t know, but the more critical question is, will the reader care about them? Several reviews commented favorably on the book’s character development, so I guess so.

A Half-Century With Agatha Christie

            The first adult mystery novel I read was Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. I was 12 years old at the time, and, my moral scruples not being as fully developed as they are now, I cheated and looked at the last page to see who the killer was. I still got it wrong.

            As I recall, the book was one of several on a shelf in a cabin our family was occupying in Jackson Hole, WY. The cabin was located at a beautiful cattle ranch that was one of the inspirations for the ranch in my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. There was no TV, the summer nights were long, and I was one of those kids who never had to be prodded to read a book.

            Murder in Mesopotamia was one of the Hercule Poirot mysteries, and I went on to read most of them by the time I finished junior high school. It was the beginning of a lifelong mystery habit.

Coming to Appreciate Miss Marple

            During that period I checked out a couple of the Miss Marple mysteries and a couple of the non-Poirot stand-alone books. I didn’t much care for them, which is on me far more than on Dame Agatha. Something about Poirot and his “little grey cells” appealed to my keen adolescent mind.

            After ripping through the Christie oeuvre in my youth, I pretty much left her alone for a couple of decades. There were plenty of other mysteries to read, and I read as many as I could. My preference is for British writers, though I am no absolutist on that score, and one preference I inherited from Christie is an appreciation for a story that wraps up all the loose ends. Few things in a mystery novel annoy me as much as a puzzle that’s dangled before the reader, then never explained at the end — especially when it’s clearly a case of carelessness rather than calculated ambiguity.

            In recent years I’ve started dipping into Agatha Christie’s books again. With the passage of a few decades, my perspective has changed. Poirot I now find a bit pedantic, while the virtues of Miss Marple have risen steadily in my estimation.

Echoes of Austen and Hardy

            What appeals now in the Marple books is the moral understanding of  human frailty. Miss Marple repeatedly points out that having spent her life in a small English village, she has witnessed every form of folly and depravity there is. The people who pine for a Mayberry society should take note. And when Christie develops a theme fully and richly, as in The Mirror Crack’d, the sense of damage done by personal obliviousness calls to mind the irony of Jane Austen, and the way in which a casual, unthinking act can unleash a chain of awful circumstances recalls Thomas Hardy.

            (We’ve even rented some of the Miss Marple films, starring Margaret Rutherford, from the early 1960s on Netflix. They’re not at all what Agatha Christie intended, but are well-done and entertaining in their own right.)

            Something I haven’t done, and don’t intend to do, is re-read Murder in Mesopotamia. I want that book to remain forever fixed in my mind the way I first read it and experienced it, as a 12-year-old in a cabin on a ranch in Wyoming, with the summer sun setting at last. There are some things you just shouldn’t mess with.         

Slightly edited version of original post from March 2013

Unpredictable

            Over the weekend I read a mystery-thriller that, according to the review at the top of the back cover, was “chilling without being predictable.” Why, then, was I able to correctly predict half way through that the babies had been switched at birth and that one of the characters in the backstory would turn out to be an ancestor of one of the characters in the main part of the novel?

            Was it because the book was poorly done? Not at all. It was actually a pretty good book, and I wish I could recommend it, but having given away a big part of the ending, I can’t tell you its name. The larger point I’d make is that even though I found the book somewhat predictable, that didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of it.

            And the even larger point I’d make is that predictability, particularly in genre fiction, is pretty near unavoidable and shouldn’t, in itself, be held against the author. It’s not necessarily a crime in its own right — only when it’s handled badly.

Somebody Ought to Get It

            Being a mystery writer myself, I read a lot of mystery novels , both for pleasure and to see what ideas I can steal and adapt to my own ends. Sometimes that allows me to spot what the author is doing. For instance, I was reading a Scandinavian detective novel a few years ago, and in the first 40 pages, the author cut from the main narrative to a scene written from the killer’s point of view. As I read it, I thought that if I were writing that scene in that way, it would be because the killer was a police officer. Bingo!

            It’s also true that when a mystery novelist is playing fair, a certain number of readers ought to be able to figure out the ending. Based on reader feedback, about a quarter of the people who told me they’d read my first book, The McHenry Inheritance, said they’d guessed who did it. That’s about right, and a number of people who didn’t guess, said they were really surprised by the ending.

            The reality is that any mystery writer today who fools everybody has either written a new classic or an incoherent book — most likely the latter. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was unpredictable because no one had, up to then, done what Agatha Christie did in that book. A book that used her idea today would be guessed out by half its readers.

Not What You Do, But How

            When you get into the realm of mystery-thriller-suspense-crime fiction, there’s practically no such thing as a new story, so the relevant question is what has the author done with an old one. Has she created a structure and set of details that make it difficult to guess the ending of this particular iteration of the old story? Has he created interesting characters and a sense of pace? Is the writing style muscular and vivid? All those things, I would submit, are more important than the so-called predictability of the story?

            If you read a lot of mystery fiction, as I do, there are pleasures to be had from seeing how each author spins his or her variation of an old tale. When we were kids, we would fall in love with one book and want our parents to read it to us over and over. As genre-reading adults, we read different variations of the same stories and enjoy the twists and quirks of each particular book. I suppose that amounts to growing up as readers.

The One-Hour Mystery

 

            While up in Point Reyes a few weeks ago, doing revisions for my second Quill Gordon mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, I found myself in an interesting market for reading material.

            During the days I was working away on the book, and after dinner I would typically put in another hour or two, depending on what I needed to hit my work goal for the day. That left me in the position of having an hour or hour and a half before bedtime for free reading, and though it might seem like a busman’s holiday, what I wanted was to read mysteries.

            The problem with that was that I couldn’t be sure how much (if any) time I would have the following night or the night after that. I was holding myself to strict work goals and couldn’t really predict how long it would take to meet them. So I didn’t want to start a novel and have to set it aside for a few days. I wanted something I could start and finish in that night’s time.

The Virtue of the Novella

            For that problem, there’s a perfect answer — the novella or novelette. Longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, it can typically be read in the time I had most of those evenings. The problem is finding a suitable supply.

            Even in its heyday, the novelette was the funny uncle of fiction. It was pretty long for most magazines and too short to be bound up as a book. The authors who wrote them typically published books that collected three or four works in the genre, and that was what I wound up with. (Interestingly, owing to the popularity of ebooks, novellas and novelettes are making a bit of a comeback, with some authors issuing them individually, at lower prices than a full novel.)

            A couple of weeks before the trip, at Barnes & Noble, I came across Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Mews, a collection of four shorter cases of Hercule Poirot. It was originally published in 1937 under the title Dead Man’s Mirror, which was another of the stories in the book. There were four stories in all, ranging in length from 39 to 106 pages.

Can Be Read in One Sitting

            Typically the stories a mystery writer does as novellas or short stories are ones that have a good idea, but one the writer doesn’t want to flesh out into a full-length novel. This was early Christie, from the first 15 years of her 50-plus year career, so you’re mostly reading the stories for plot and atmosphere. Of course, if you’re reading for plot, you could do a lot worse than Agatha Christie.

            In any event, the novellas got me through two of those six dark winter evenings I was alone in the cottage. (I’d read two of the stories before I left.) For the rest of the week I worked on a short-story anthology I’d picked up at a used bookstore and brought along.

            That book was Famous Stories of Code and Cipher, edited by Raymond T. Bond and originally published in 1947. It had everything from classics such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug” and M.R. James’s “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” to works by writers that even I have never heard of (Harvey O’Higgins, Lillian De La Torre). I now know more about code than I think I want to, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to work a code or cipher into one of my mystery novels.

            Oh, and by the way, one of the stories in the code book was by Agatha Christie. She did everything.

The Limits of Realism

            Watching an episode of Elementary recently, I perked up when it got to a scene where the detectives were visiting a witness who had just emerged from a coma after being shot by a multiple killer. Sherlock Holmes had already deduced the identity of the killer and the detective in the hospital room whipped out a photo of the perp and held it up, at which the guy in the hospital bed pointed to it and said “Yeah …”

            So not right.

            Also not so big a deal.

            It wasn’t right because any competent defense attorney could have raised questions about the identification; the victim was essentially asked a leading question of the type not allowed in court. That’s one of the reasons most modern police departments seeking an ID from a photo give the witness a half-dozen pictures of potential perps to choose from. That way the identification does a lot better if the case ever comes to trial.

When a Mistake Doesn’t Hurt Too Much

            On the other hand, the scene occurred in the context of a show in which the basic premise is that the New York City Police Department is using Sherlock Holmes and his associate, Dr. Joan Watson, as consultants on major crimes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s a certain amount of reality avoidance in the show to start with.

            From that perspective, a violation of police procedure for the purpose of wrapping up the story within an hour is at most a minor infraction. Had the scene occurred in a drama that prided itself on being grittily realistic about the details of police work, it would have been a howler.

            Similarly, in the novels of Golden Age writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey, a mistake about the effects of arsenic on the spleen is not a deal-breaker, provided, of course, that the solution to the mystery doesn’t revolve around the reader catching the mistake. Those authors were more concerned with the motives of the suspects, and having one of the suspects behave out of character would be far more serious in their books than getting a scientific detail wrong.

Yielding to the Story

            Nobody who writes a book wants a glaring and laughable mistake in it, and a certain due diligence in that regard is important for all authors. But there are ways of dealing with it other than rigorous research. For example, Catriona McPherson, author of the Dandy Gilver mysteries, said in a newspaper interview that one of the reasons she did a series set in the 1920s was so she wouldn’t have to waste a lot of time learning forensic stuff and writing it into the books. Like Christie, Tey, et. al, she wanted to focus on the characters and situation.

            In the course of doing the final revision for my first mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, I had to make a call in that regard. Re-reading the book, I realized that at one point I had the local sheriff doing something the FBI chief on the scene would surely have done himself. The scene was unrealistic in the same way as the one-photo lineup in Elementary.

            On the other hand, the story was at that point barreling toward its climax, and introducing and developing a new character at that point would have sapped its narrative drive. So, reality be damned, I let the sheriff go ahead and do the FBI chief’s job. When you’re writing fiction, there are times you can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Learning Writing by Reading

            There are several ways of learning to write well, and one of them, certainly, is to learn by reading good writing. My junior high school journalism teacher, Jack McDonald, understood this. He taught us the fundamentals of journalistic style — the five W’s, how to write a lead paragraph, the inverted pyramid — in short order, as we were putting out the student newspaper for one semester only.

            So after the brief instruction, he added, “If you really want to know how to write a good news story, read the front page of the Times every day and do what they do.”

            That would have been early 1965 in Southern California, so he was of course talking about the Los Angeles Times, which, under the direction of Otis Chandler, was rapidly becoming one of America’s best newspapers. Situated in an area that was booming economically and growing rapidly, the Times could spend all the money in the world on its news department and still be spectacularly profitable. And they spent it well, hiring top-notch people who taught and learned from each other, producing a paper that was a joy to read.

Learning from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

            I took his advice and read the front page thoroughly almost every day for the next year, and, by George, I learned how to write a news story. Now that I’ve published a mystery novel and am working on another, I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries by other writers in much the same way I used to read the Times back in junior high. That is, I’m trying to watch what they do and see what I can steal.

            Any aspiring mystery writer who could learn plot from Agatha Christie, voice from Raymond Chandler, and sense of place from Tony Hillerman would certainly have a leg up on the competition. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I’ve been learning something else in my readings. You can pick up a lot of writing pointers from a bad book, too.

            Not too long ago I read a self-published mystery that I felt wasn’t very good. You can find it on Amazon, but you’ll have to do it without my help. Attacking an unknown author is bad form; public attacks should be saved for big-buck authors who are coasting, and if you find this particular author yourself, you might disagree with my assessment.

Not So Good, but Compelling

            In spite of the fact that I concluded early on that the book wouldn’t be very good, I read it all the way to the end. A major reason was that I wanted to break down what was going wrong, if only to avoid doing the same thing in my own writing.

            Part way through the book, I realized that one of the major problems the book had was the author’s use of adjectives. In almost every paragraph, there was an adjective that was wrong in some way: it didn’t need to be there at all; it jarred because it wasn’t descriptive enough or overly descriptive in the wrong way; or it editorialized. After all, if you’ve accurately and specifically described what the villain has done, there’s no need to keep referring to him as “wicked.”

            Strunk and White famously wrote, “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak and inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” Bud O’Brien, one of my mentors at the newspaper, used to say, “The adjective is the enemy of the noun.” Like guns, adjectives are good tools, too often wrongly used. The next time I sit down to write, I will be herding adjectives tenaciously and keeping them on a tight leash.

The Return of the Slow Mystery?

            Frank Bruni of the Times wrote earlier this week about the return of “slow TV.” Inspired by the new Holly Hunter cable series Top of the Lake, he wonders if complex dramas with multiple themes might not be making a comeback and finding some sort of market niche with people who are tired of the in-your-face reality shows.

            As a former food writer for the paper, he also wonders if such a movement might not be akin to the “slow food” movement, which has been gaining a following among people fed up with fast food and chain restaurants.

            Maybe that’s all wishful thinking, and there will never be any turning back from the louder, faster pace of both food and entertainment. Maybe it’s all been dumbed down for keeps. But there’s a part of me that would like to hope it isn’t so and would also like to see a return of the “slow mystery.”

They Were All Slow Mysteries Once

            When I wrote my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, I styled it in part on the classic mystery novels of the “Golden Age,” which ran from about 1920 to 1940. In most of those books, the author would set up a situation with a variety of characters and predicaments. The murder would arise organically from the people and the situation, and part of the pleasure of reading such a book would be, for instance, trying to figure out which of the financially strapped nephews had the best motive and most likely character to have dispatched the rich uncle.

            As originally written, The McHenry Inheritance opened with the courtroom scene that now begins Chapter Two, then proceeded for a couple of chapters, introducing other key characters and dramatic situations. Only in Chapter 4 (now Chapter 5) did the simmering characters and tensions boil over into the murder that then drove the rest of the book forward.

            I felt pretty good about the way I had handled all those elements, but the first time an agent took an interest in the book, she said in no uncertain terms that I had to get the murder into the first few pages of the book because that’s what readers expect these days.

Do Readers All Think Alike?

            At the time I had my doubts about that argument, and I still do. My feeling is that agents and publishers expect that body in the opening pages because everybody does it now, and no one is willing to take a chance on failing by departing from the template.

            Readers, I think, have different tastes and sensibilities, and there should be a market out there for a book that offers a more deliberate development, provided the book is well written and plotted. After all, Agatha Christie typically took her time turning a character into a corpse, and no one has sold more mysteries than she has, even through today. And she still sells.

            When you want to get published, there’s a limit to how much you want to argue with the people who can help you get there. So I took the agent’s advice and wrote a new first chapter, “The Angler and the Sharpshooter.” It’s a flash-forward to the murder in what is now Chapter 5, but told from the alternating points of view of the killer and the murder victim. I thought it turned out pretty well, and the agent loved it, but at the end of the day she decided not to represent the book and I wound up putting it on Amazon myself. And I’ll never really know for sure it the change reluctantly made really helped the book find more readers.

Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

            I am nearly done writing the first chapter of the second Quill Gordon mystery, tentatively titled Wash Her Guilt Away, and have found myself thinking about Ellery Queen. Early Ellery Queen, to be precise.

            What drove my mind there was the experience of trying to write a book that is a contemporary American take on the classic English country-house mystery. If you’ve read Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, or any of the other practitioners, you’ll know that’s a story where a diverse group of characters are invited to a country estate for the weekend and a murder ensues, with all the guests being suspects.

            Americans in the present day don’t do that sort of thing (I mean the country-house weekend; we certainly do murders) so in my book the characters assemble at a remote fishing lodge that has a bit of a history. The challenge facing the writer is bringing in all the characters, establishing their characters, and getting the reader interested in those characters without the benefit of the seven or eight corpses that usually appear in the first three pages of a modern mystery.

The Nephew or the Secretary?

            A caring and considerate author also wants readers to keep the characters mentally sorted without too much effort as the book progresses. When Jones reappears after an absence of 20 to 30 pages, you don’t want the reader scratching her head and saying, “Let’s see — was Jones the rich uncle’s nephew or was it his secretary?”

            Based solely on my own reading experience, this can be a serious problem. Quite a few mysteries (and serious novels, as well) have left me dizzy trying to remember what the relationship between the characters was. That’s what sent me to the bookshelf for a look at Queen’s The Greek Coffin Mystery, which I pulled down at random to see if my memory was correct.

            The Greek Coffin Mystery was published in 1932, which definitely makes it early Queen, and sure enough, right at the front, I found what I was looking for: A list of characters. Each was described in only a few words, but those few words established the relationships between the characters and generally what they did.

At any point in the book, a reader could flip back to that page to double-check on who someone was.

So Old School It’s Not Even Retro

            Looking through the character list of this particular book, the reader can quickly be reminded that George Khalkis is an eminent art dealer (and the victim); and that Alan Cheney is the son of Delphina Sloane, who is Khalkis’ sister, and who is married to Gilbert Sloane, the manager of the Khalkis galleries. Got that?

            That sort of scorecard to help the reader keep the players straight can be most helpful, but it went out of style in the 1940s. A writer who tried to use the technique today would probably be laughed off Amazon for being so out of date he wasn’t even retro. The contemporary author has to write his way through that problem without the help of a cheat sheet.

            My approach to separating the sheep from the goats, so to speak, is threefold. First, I’m keeping the character list short; Wash Her Guilt Away has 15 characters compared to 39 in The Greek Coffin Mystery. Second, they aren’t related, except for the married couples. Third, I try to introduce them one or two at a time so the reader can get to know them before moving on. Will that help the reader avoid confusion? I don’t know, but the more critical question is, will the reader care about them? We’ll see.

           

                                               

The Lost Virtue of Brevity

            In his excellent mystery My Late Wives (1946), John Dickson Carr, writing as Carter Dickson, tells the story of serial killer Roger Bewlay. With a wittily observant eye, Carr shows how Bewlay targets vulnerable virgins of a certain age (early thirties, considered past marriage in those days) and woos each according to her ruling passions. One he takes to the symphony; another for long walks along the beach promenade at Brighton, and so forth.

            The result, in each instance, is the same. The lady in question falls head over heels in love, marries him quickly, signs over all her property to him, and they go off on an idyllic honeymoon, from which only Bewlay and the lady’s property emerge. A chance occurrence leads police to become suspicious and another allows them to close the net on Bewlay. But at the end, he slips away and vanishes into the vastness of metropolitan London.

            And that’s just the first 12 pages. The rest of the book takes place 15 years later, when it appears that Bewlay has returned to his old ways, and the detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, attempts to catch him once and for all.

Telling the Story Succinctly

            Carr, a master storyteller if ever there was one, was able to cram enough material for an entire book into a fairly short chapter. In today’s world of mysteries and thrillers, the opposite seems to be happening. More and more books seem to be taking 250 pages of story and stretching it into 350-400 pages.

            How and when this happened is a mystery to me, but I can trace some examples. One successful author began writing about 30 years ago and originally wrote brisk 250-page books. Then she started adding characters, and in subsequent books, each character had to be brought in, often to the detriment of the narrative. On the other hand, she sells way more books than I do, so either the readers don’t care, or they like her enough to put up with it.

            The bloat in book size affects even older books. I have in hand a recently published copy of Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? In this version, the spacing between lines is generous to a fault, as are the margins. That makes what was probably a 225-page book originally come out at 279 pages.

            When I wrote my mystery, The McHenryInheritance, I deliberately tried to keep it to 200-225 pages so it could be read on a cross-country plane flight or on a rainy afternoon. It came in at 200, but I wonder if anyone appreciates the brevity.

Longer Movies, Too

            Movies, like books, seem to be getting longer as well. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot, writing about her father, the actor Lyle Talbot, noted that a number of the films he made for Warner Brothers in the 1930s were an hour and ten minutes long. These days, it’s hard to find any movie that comes in at less than two hours. It seems as if fewer directors today know how to move a story along, the way directors like William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks used to do.

            In 1935, MGM made a movie of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, starring Greta Garbo and Frederic March. The book is more than 800 pages, but after some competent scriptwriters got through with it, and it was turned over to veteran director Clarence Brown, he was able to get Anna under the train in a brisk hour and 35 minutes. If they tried to make it today, they would sink so much into stars, costumes, props and locations, it would turn into a three-hour epic and probably be less entertaining than Brown’s version. Less is often more.

My Initiation into Mysteries

            The first adult mystery novel I read was Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. I was 12 years old at the time, and, my moral scruples not being as fully developed as they are now, I cheated and looked at the last page to see who the killer was. I still got it wrong.

            As I recall, the book was one of several on a shelf in a cabin our family was occupying in Jackson Hole, WY. The cabin was located at a beautiful cattle ranch that was one of the inspirations for the ranch in my current mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. There was no TV, the summer nights were long, and I was one of those kids who never had to be prodded to read a book.

            Murder in Mesopotamia was one of the Hercule Poirot mysteries, and I went on to read most of them by the time I finished junior high school. It was the beginning of a lifelong mystery habit.

Coming to Appreciate Miss Marple

            During that period I checked out a couple of the Miss Marple mysteries and a couple of the non-Poirot stand-alone books. I didn’t much care for them, which is on me far more than on Dame Agatha. Something about Poirot and his “little grey cells” appealed to my keen adolescent mind.

            After ripping through the Christie oeuvre in my youth, I pretty much left her alone for several decades. There were plenty of other mysteries to read, and I read as many as I could. My preference is for British writers, though I am no absolutist on that score, and one preference I inherited from Christie is an appreciation for a story that wraps up all the loose ends. Few things in a mystery novel annoy me as much as a puzzle that’s dangled before the reader, then never explained at the end — especially when it’s clearly a case of carelessness rather than calculated ambiguity.

            In recent years I’ve started dipping into Agatha Christie’s books again. With the passage of a few decades, my perspective has changed. Poirot I now find pedantic and tiresome, while the virtues of Miss Marple have risen steadily in my estimation.

Echoes of Austen and Hardy

            What appeals now in the Marple books is the emphasis on human frailty and folly. Miss Marple repeatedly points out that having spent her life in a small English village, she has witnessed every form of human folly and depravity there is. The people who pine for a Mayberry society should take note. And when Christie develops a theme fully and richly, as in The Mirror Crack’d, the sense of damage done by personal obliviousness calls to mind Jane Austen, and the way in which a casual, unthinking act can unleash a chain of awful circumstances recalls Thomas Hardy.

            (We’ve even rented some of the Miss Marple films, starring Margaret Rutherford, from the early 1960s on Netflix. They’re not at all what Agatha Christie intended, but are very well-done and entertaining in their own right.)

            Something I haven’t done, and don’t intend to do, is re-read Murder in Mesopotamia. I want that book to remain forever fixed in my mind the way I first read it and experienced it, as a 12-year-old in a cabin on a ranch in Wyoming, with the summer sun setting at last. There are some things you just shouldn’t mess with.