Opening Remarks to the Book Club

            First of all, thank you for choosing my mystery novel Wash Her Guilt Away as your book to be discussed this month. I hope, most of all, that it entertained you and would like to say a few words, before the discussion begins, about how it came to be written.

            When I wrote the first Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, in the late 1990s, I drew up a list of stories for additional novels in the series in the event an agent or publisher asked. Unable to publish conventionally, I put the book aside for more than a decade until Amazon and Kindle came along to make self-publishing a viable alternative.

            Gratified by the response to the first book, I decided to proceed with the second on the list, which had already been titled Wash Her Guilt Away, after the Oliver Goldsmith poem at the front of the book. I began writing it in early 2013, and it was published April 30, 2014.

Borrowed Elements

            Wash Her Guilt Away is an attempt to put a modern spin on two tropes of the classic murder mystery — classic referring to those mysteries generally written between the two world wars. It’s a variation on the British country-house mystery, in which a group of diverse guests are thrown together and tensions arise; and of the locked-room mystery, in which someone is found murdered in a hermetically sealed chamber, or locked room, from which the killer should not have been able to depart yet somehow did.

            The book also borrows elements from certain American authors. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, who wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” widely considered to be the first locked-room mystery.

            Because the novel is set in the wilds of the Northern California mountains, I also drew on the work of early American writers and their depictions of a vast, untamed landscape. The discovery of the witches in the forest and their role in the community owes something to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown,” and the headless boatman at Indian Hollow is direct idea-theft from Washington Irving’s headless horseman in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Trying to Be Better

            With each book I write, I try to improve as a writer and try to work specifically on a couple of issues. I felt that The McHenry Inheritance was a respectable debut novel that introduced a character, a premise, a style, and that demonstrated a level of fundamental storytelling competence.

            That said, I felt that parts of it were underdeveloped and decided to work harder at developing character and creating crisp dialogue. The story line of Wash Her Guilt Away lent itself very well to this consideration, dealing, as it does, with a group of people forced together by circumstance and bad weather. More so than my other two novels, Wash Her Guilt Away attempts to build tension through atmosphere and the development of characters and situations. Each of you must, of course, judge for yourselves whether or not that effort succeeded.

            Finally, in an attempt to cut to the chase, let me answer the most-frequently asked question: Where do you get your ideas? I never have any shortage of ideas; the problem is pulling several of them together to create a coherent and satisfying story that allows me to develop character and atmosphere. It takes time for the right ideas to align into a workable story, which is why I probably spend as much time outlining my books as writing them.

            Any questions?

            (I will be appearing at a book club discussing Wash Her Guilt Away in January, and a follow-up post will likely ensue.)

America on a Bookshelf

            For reasons that might be gone into at a later time, I found myself the other night wanting to re-read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown.” No doubt it could have been done online, but it wasn’t necessary. I just sauntered over to the bookshelf where I keep The Library of America and took down the author’s Tales and Sketches, some 900 pages worth. Goodman Brown occupied pages 276 to 289.

            It’s a luxury, one of the few I can afford, to be able to do this. I began subscribing to The Library of America, an attempt to provide definitive high-quality hardcover versions of this nation’s written classics, when it first started in the 1980s. A few years ago, when the offerings seemed to be getting more and more abstract, I let my subscription lapse.

            Despite some issues with the series’ editors (why did it take them more than two decades to get out a book of H.L. Mencken?), I regard those books as treasures and go back to them often. The big name books and stories are all there, of course, but that only scratches the surface.

From Abe Lincoln to Bill Clinton

            Speeches? You want speeches? LOA has the usual suspects, such as the Gettysburg Address, but also the full text of Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech, which arguably won him the presidency. Not to mention FDR’s first inaugural, Martin Luther King’s last sermon, and Bill Clinton’s remarks on the 40^th anniversary of the integration of Central High in Little Rock. That last one is all but forgotten, but also absolutely terrific.

            There are Edward R. Murrow’s World War II reports from London during the Blitz, casual letters that Lincoln tossed off during the Civil War, reports on commerce that Alexander Hamilton wrote for Congress, speeches and pamphlets produced during the debate on the Constitution, and reporting of all kinds from the Vietnam war.

            Francis Parkman’s seven-volume history of France and England in the New World is in the canon, as is Henry Adams’ history of the United States from 1801 to 1817. (I’ve read Parkman, but haven’t got to Adams yet.) If that’s a little too dry and schoolmarmish for your taste, you could salaciously turn to Mark Twain’s after-dinner speech on Onanism or Benjamin Franklin’s letter to a young man about the virtues of older women as mistresses.

The Pleasures of Discovery

            Much of what I’ve written about above I would never have encountered without those books on my shelves. From time to time, when I’m at loose ends, I’ll pick up one of the books and thumb through the table of contents to pick out something to read. And I’ve found a lot of neat stuff that way.

            To me the big difference between books and the internet is this: The internet is great for looking up things you specifically want to know about; it’s not so great for serendipitous discoveries. That’s where books excel. I can walk over to the Library of America shelf on a slow day, scan the authors names, decide I’m in the mood for a bit of Hamilton or Jefferson, pull down a book, and select something to read that will about fill the time I have at my disposal.

            It’s a good way to be exposed to something you would never have set out to look for. That exposure, in turn, holds the potential for adding to your store of knowledge and exposing you to good ideas. Random learning, to be sure, but sometimes that can be the best kind.