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.

Stopping to Smell the Flowers

            It was Mae West who once said, in a context other than literature, “I like a man what takes his time.” That used to be true in literature as well; readers appreciated authors who took their time to describe people, settings and situations in a way that made them come to life. Think of Dickens’ London.

            These days, not so much. Or so it seems.

            In the past month I’ve read two mystery-thriller novels by two different best-selling contemporary American authors, and what struck me about both of them was the utter lack of description. One book was set in New York and the other in San Francisco, but neither gave the least bit of feeling for the city in which the story took place. Either book could easily have been relocated to Cleveland simply by changing some place names.

            It was not always thus. Dashiell Hammett made you feel San Francisco; Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain caught the spirit of Los Angeles; and Ellery Queen captured the unmistakable aura of New York in the Twenties and Thirties.

Plot Coming; Outta The Way!

            All the aforementioned authors wrote pretty hard-boiled, fast-paced stuff, but they were still close to and felt bound by the older literary traditions that required a scene to be properly set and a character to be properly established. Those guys didn’t dawdle, but they colored in the picture well enough.

            I got to thinking about this on a more personal level lately when I went back and re-read the reviews on Kindle for my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. The book was generally well received by readers and is averaging a bit over four stars, but several reviewers, including some who rated the book highly, complained that there was too much description of fishing in the book.

            As a matter of objective fact, there were two detailed fishing scenes in the book, each about three pages long. One scene introduced the story’s antagonist and the other established the time of death in the murder.

            And, to be fair, a number of readers praised the descriptions in the book, so who do I listen to? At the moment, I have to feel the complainers are so used to books that don’t pause to convey detail — books that race from chase to chase and killing to killing — that they don’t know what to make of a story that stops to smell the flowers occasionally.

Authors What Takes Their Time

            And there certainly are successful mystery writers who do take the time to develop character and atmosphere. Benjamin Black and Louise Penny come to mind. But then, one is Irish and the other Canadian. The list of leisurely Americans is short indeed.

            I personally enjoy the writer who takes the time and effort to establish a setting, develop a character more fully, let me know what time of year it is and what the weather is like, and who even might interrupt the narrative flow of the book to tell, as an aside, a good story that may or may not have anything to do with the matter at hand but is interesting in its own right. Those are the details that make a book more real and memorable.

            That’s the way I try to write my mysteries, and if there’s a smaller audience for that sort of book than there is for the slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am thrillers, so be it. Authors and readers relate to each other as lovers, and I’m content to find the lovers — book lovers, that is — that like a man what takes his time.

What the Future Holds for Quill Gordon

            Like the first blossoms that herald the advent of spring, signs are appearing that my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, is gradually beginning to develop a readership beyond my circle of friends and acquaintances.

            This past Saturday I offered the book free as a promotion on Kindle, and it moved 18 percent more e-copies than were downloaded in my March Saturday promotion. Paid sales have increased every month this year, and as I write this, it appears that April will continue that trend. In the past three weeks, three fresh reviews were posted on Kindle, bringing the total number to ten, all legit. Seven of the reviews gave the book 5 stars, two gave it 4 stars, and one gave it 3 stars. And on top of all that, I just got a free plug from the alumni magazine at my alma mater, UC-Santa Cruz.

            Friday night, I finished the first draft of the first chapter of the next book, working title, Wash Her Guilt Away, which I hope to have published by the end of this year. It’s all beginning to prompt some thoughts about the future of Quill Gordon, my lead character.

The Perpetual Vacation

            When I wrote this book, I did it with a running series in mind, and without giving too much away, I can say that by the end of The McHenry Inheritance, Gordon has decided he’s made enough money in the stock market that he doesn’t need to keep his day job any more. That means he can go fly-fishing whenever he wants, and each fishing trip is an adventure (or mystery) waiting to happen.

            Quite a few people have asked if I’m working on a sequel. If you’ve read the first book, you’ll understand the question; if you haven’t, you will when you do read it. But a sequel generally suggests the same characters in the same place or places, and that’s not happening in the second book.

            In the next book, the fishing trip is to a place a couple of hundred miles away from the setting of The McHenry Inheritance. It’s a different location, with a different feel, a different type of story, and different characters. Gordon is the only repeat personality; he even has a different, and more edgy, fishing buddy than in the first book, and my plan is to switch off the two sidekicks in future novels, depending on which one suits the tone of the particular book.

Fly-Fishing in San Francisco?

            From the very beginning, it was never my intent to have Gordon keep coming back to the same place, as Martha Grimes’ Superintendent Jury does to Long Piddleton, or Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache does to Three Pines. Aside from Gordon and his sidekicks, the places and characters will generally change from book to book.

            That doesn’t mean, of course, that Gordon couldn’t return to Summit County, scene of the action in The McHenry Inheritance, or that one or more characters from a previous book couldn’t make an appearance or play a part in a subsequent one. All I’m saying is I want Gordon’s vacations to be without too much baggage so that I have maximum freedom to create new and interesting situations for him.

            It’s even possible, since Gordon lives in San Francisco, that I might set a future book in The City, with fly-fishing scenes introduced through flashbacks. I don’t have a story to fit that concept yet, but what I’m saying is that readers should feel that anything could happen in a Quill Gordon mystery. Keep reading, or you might miss it.