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.

A Question of Literary Timing

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

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

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

Still Working With Typewriters

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

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

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

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

Hindsight Helps the Author

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

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

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