How to Write a Mystery
Page 24
I encounter in the tie-in field a lot of writers who want to write novels about a certain TV series. Some come from the fan fiction community, which didn’t exist when I was starting out. Having written fan fiction can be helpful, particularly if Star Trek or Star Wars, for example, are favorites of yours, but those jobs are hard to land. And writing your own book about one of those franchises and submitting it is almost always a bad idea.
In my view, a professional writer should be able to take on an assignment without having a fannish interest in the material. Going in with that interest can break your heart when you realize how little control you have over these characters you care so much about.
The continuation of famous mystery series by other hands is the most rarefied strata of tie-in writing, deriving not from a TV show or a movie but a body of work by a writer who has put something so personal into it that readers want more even though Elvis has left the building. That requires a respect and probably a love for the work of the writer who created the series.
Bob Goldsborough wrote a Nero Wolfe novel to read to his elderly mother, who was such a Rex Stout fan that the absence of an annual visit from Archie and his boss was too much to bear. And that led to Bob continuing the series for others in permanent Stout withdrawal to enjoy.
It’s clear that talents like Atkins and Coleman bring a love of Parker’s work to the table, and Deaver and Horowitz (among others) clearly admire the much-underrated Fleming. Those who have successfully continued Ludlum and Clancy also have obvious respect for the creators.
I have had the unique privilege of finishing work left behind by Mickey Spillane, who inspired me to want to become a mystery writer when I was thirteen. I became friends with Mickey in the early eighties and we did numerous projects together, including a dozen anthologies, a comic book series, and a documentary. On a visit to his home in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, in the late eighties, he sent two unfinished Mike Hammer novels home with me. These were substantial manuscripts of a hundred pages each.
“Maybe we’ll do something with these someday,” he said.
We grew close over the years—Mickey was my son Nate’s godfather. In 2006, Mickey was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Not long before his passing, he called about the Mike Hammer novel he was working on, The Goliath Bone. He said that though he was deep into it, he might not get it finished. If need be, would I do that for him?
It was both the greatest and saddest honor I’ve ever been paid. A day or so later, Mickey told his wife, Jane, that after he was gone, there’d be “a treasure hunt around here.” For various reasons having to do with everything from disputes with his publisher to objections by his church, Mickey had begun a dizzying number of novels—many of them featuring his world-famous detective, Mike Hammer—only to set them aside. Barb and I went to South Carolina for a tribute to Mickey and stayed behind for that treasure hunt with Jane, going through material in Mickey’s three offices.
Since then, I have completed six substantial Hammer manuscripts and two non-Hammer novels—working from one hundred Spillane pages, sometimes with plot and character notes, including at times endings—and another six Hammer novels from shorter manuscripts and/or Spillane synopses. Additionally, a short story collection—A Long Time Dead—adds eight short stories from Spillane fragments to the Hammer canon. Mickey published only thirteen Hammer novels in his lifetime—a relative handful compared to other detective characters of similar stature—which means this has doubled the number of Hammer books.
These books all have Spillane content, and he shares, quite legitimately, the byline with me. These are not continuations but completions, not pastiches but collaborations.
I prepare for each one, doing some detective work to figure out when Mickey wrote the available material so that I can place it properly in the canon. Unlike most of the popular series detectives of the twentieth century, Mike Hammer grows and changes and even gets older. For prep, I read several novels in close proximity to the time period of the book at hand. From my perspective, while continuation writers should drench themselves in the original novels, capturing the characterizations of the detective and the rest of the recurring cast is far more important than mimicking the author’s style.
Still, my greatest pleasure is when a reviewer quotes lines from one of these novels as examples of pure Spillane, and half of the lines are Mickey’s and the other half mine.
This is in keeping with the best of tie-in writing: when you make a novel based on a film script seem like the book the movie was based on, or write a novel that convinces fans that it’s a valid “episode” of their favorite show.
HAL BODNER
Less-experienced writers often introduce their characters with vast paragraphs of background exposition detailing their fictional creation’s entire life to date. We may read pages and pages about how the infant Amelia was cruelly ripped from her mother’s breast, spent her formative years slaving in the copper mines until, finally, the sight of a free-flying bluebird inspires her to spark a revolution and journey across the sea to freedom, where she devotes her life to teaching macramé in a leper colony. Often, the author believes that the exposition is necessary to give the reader something to latch on to so that the plot can move forward. They believe that the reader needs to have Amelia’s motivations laid out for them in order to understand why she does whatever it is she ends up doing.
In most cases, this is a flawed technique. It usually ends up boring the reader with information that they do not really need. In the worst cases, the information dump is simply too massive for the reader to digest. It’s far more interesting and effective to show your audience how Amelia responds to the obstacles and plot twists that you throw in her way. If you’re not able to create believable situations to which your character can react truthfully, if you’re not able to use words to sculpt a character that leaps off the page with vitality, then no amount of background explanation is going to help you.
After the Writing
Oline H. Cogdill—Secrets of a Book Critic
Reviews and reviewers: what to learn from them, and what to ignore.
Liliana Hart—Self-Publishing
How to flourish as an independently published writer.
Maddee James—Authors Online
Building your author identity and reaching out to readers, online.
Louise Penny—Building Your Community
It’s the writer, not the book: finding a home in the virtual village.
Daniel Steven—Legal Considerations
What every mystery writer needs to know about publishing law.
Secrets of a Book Critic
Reviews and reviewers: what to learn from them, and what to ignore.
OLINE H. COGDILL
For many of us who review books, especially mysteries, critiques are both an art and a craft, and, more important, a mission to let readers know about new titles.
That certainly is the case with me. On average, I review about 100 to 125 mysteries a year. That may seem like a lot, but it is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the more than 1,500 mysteries published annually.
For many authors, a review is the first time that word of their new book finally reaches beyond the safe boundaries of family and friends. Now strangers will weigh in on what they think about a book, and their unbiased opinions may not always be as kind as your inner circle’s impressions.
But book reviewing is at a crossroads.
Today, more people than ever are giving their opinions—from paid professional critics, to bloggers who write for their own websites or online or print publications, to amateur reviewers who write for sites such as Goodreads.
At the same time, fewer newspapers and magazines publish reviews in print; most are posting these critiques online. Fortunately, reviews are finding a home in publications that cover the mystery genre, such as Mystery Scene, Strand Magazine, Crimespree, and Deadly Pleasures.
(Want to see more reviews? Make sure to tell your n
ewspaper or favorite magazine! Respond to these reviews, talk about them on social media, and let the publications know that books coverage is one of the reasons you’re a subscriber.)
Ethically Speaking
Book critiquing is in the midst of an ethical crisis.
First, there are still a good number of professional book critics and thoughtful bloggers who care about reviewing and believe in analyzing books ethically and fairly. But many people are pretending to be reviewers to receive free books or to get attention from authors; some have agendas—they hate the author or the genre or believe that reviewing is a license to be nasty.
Even more bothersome is the flux of paid reviews.
As a professional critic, I am paid by the venue for which I write. I am not paid by the author, the publisher, or a bookstore. Bloggers may not be paid; ethical ones do it strictly for the love of the genre.
Unfortunately, an author can buy a review. For years, legitimate publications have been offering book reviews for sale in addition to their authentic coverage. Writers can pay $600, or even more, to be guaranteed a review. While these are presented in a specific part of the magazine and labeled as paid, they are designed to look like legitimate reviews. And writers often try to brag about these glowing reviews.
Websites keep popping up offering review packages. As soon as one site shuts down, another starts.
Let me be blunt: Any author who buys a review is a fool. Buying a review goes against every ethical and professional standard that real critics and reviewers hold. Media outlets such as newspapers, magazines, and some review websites will not touch these reviews—yet these businesses thrive because enough venues will pick up their reviews regardless of the provenance.
Fairness Is No Mystery
As a journalist, I am trained to be objective in coverage.
But being a critic also means one is subjective about what one reviews. And this is where the conundrum comes in—a critic must be both objective and subjective. One should be reviewing the book solely for the reader. We are not doing it to curry favor, or to strike up a friendship with the author, publisher, or bookstore, or to launch our own writing career. We have to be honest and fair with integrity.
And while it can be fun to write a totally negative review, being nasty for nasty’s sake is not acceptable. One can give an honest negative review without trashing the book or taking pot shots at the author. A critic reviews the book, not what they personally think about the author.
Reviewers who are consistently mean-spirited are more in love with their own voices than giving solid evaluations of books.
Writers—and readers—also should not pay attention to reviews that contain multiple errors, such as the names of characters and major plot points. Yes, the occasional error can creep into a review—and the critic should feel terrible when that happens. But many errors are the sign of an amateur, and an undisciplined one.
Do Reviews Work?
By calling attention to a book, reviews work for the author. Murder on the Beach Mystery Bookstore in Florida makes a prominent display of my annual list of top mysteries. Buyers respond to it. The store’s manager also said that customers often come in with copies of my reviews, looking to buy the books.
Several publicists at major publishing houses say that reviews often result in an uptick in sales. As one publicist said, “As a reader, if you’re seeing a book get reviewed in multiple media outlets within a six- to eight-week time frame, it’s on your radar and you might be curious to buy it or mention it to someone else who might buy it. Publicity and reviews definitely are a tool to help build sales for a book.”
Another added that “for literary fiction and mysteries and thrillers, reviews still seem to really matter. Some are definitely more effective than others—People magazine, a daily review [in the New York Times]—they can really give sales a lift.”
But not every reader buys national magazines or lives in New York. Writers may think the gold standards for reviews are the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. And that is true—to a certain extent. But writers receive more coverage from the Associated Press because those reviews may run in more than three hundred newspapers and websites, as well as from regional newspapers with a strong commitment to books coverage. More readers rely on their local publications or genre magazines or links to reviews on legitimate sites posted on social media.
And more is definitely more in terms of reader response. Added another publicist, “In general, quantity is better—more reviews equal better sales, but it’s far from a hard and fast rule.”
Privately, several authors have mentioned how reviews helped them. One author, who was being considered to continue a deceased author’s series, said that my review was the deciding factor in his favor. Several authors said they felt reviews came just in time when they were about to negotiate a new contract.
(However, let me caution authors that these days it takes so much more than just a review to make a book work, so being creative and having a varied marketing campaign is very important. That’s where a publicist is invaluable.)
The Dreaded Amazon Review
Reviews on Amazon and other websites are among the most controversial. While Amazon has tried to weed out fake reviews, some with agendas have slipped through.
An average of four- or five-star reviews is good news, and maybe worth the author and readers paying attention. But writers, especially new authors or those with a thin skin, might want to avoid reading reviews with one star or less.
Writers often are at the mercy of unscrupulous reviewers. One “reviewer” trashed a book because he had heard the author discuss the work in progress. At the time of that discussion, the book was to be set against the backdrop of World War II, but the finished book ended up set in a different era. The “reviewer” gave the book a low score because it wasn’t the book he was expecting. A review should focus on the book that is there, not the one the reviewer anticipated.
We’ve seen negative reviews because a person didn’t like the cover, was shocked that a book called The Death of X does indeed contain the death of a protagonist, or the author cursed or put sex in the book. A self-published author I know once received glowing reviews from five different people—all of which were his wife using fake names. When the two got divorced, an avalanche of negative reviews appeared, the work of the ex-wife.
Writers should ignore these reviews, as did a famous author who remembers the one-star Amazon review where the text read, “The book never arrived—I’m not sure if I even ordered it.” That says it all.
Men versus Women
Complaints have arisen during the past several years that reviews give preference to male writers over women writers and that authors of color or gay and lesbian writers are further marginalized.
Having read countless reviews by other critics through the years, I fear this may be true.
On one hand, an author’s gender, race, or sexual orientation should not matter when choosing a book to review. But on a much greater plain, it matters immensely. Critics should strive for balance in the books they choose to review, taking into account the types of stories and genres. A mix of different types of authors and different types of mysteries (hard-boiled, cozy, historical, etc.) makes for a better critic and more interesting reviews.
We live in a multicultural world and that makes for better stories.
A reviewer who refuses to read female writers or dismisses those of color or gay and lesbian authors is unprofessional. Mystery readers love to discover new worlds and will follow a good story no matter where it takes them or who is telling the tale.
Convincing a critic to read outside their comfort level is difficult but not impossible. I recommend publicists continue to write convincing releases to critics—and even copy their editors—about how good a story is. Posts on social media about this inequity has, in a way, shamed critics into looking at the rich variety of stories available. And that’s a good thing.
Attention Must Be Paid
Authors should allow publicists to pitch books to critics. Publicists have accumulated years of knowing how to promote a book, how to approach a critic, and, just as important, how to accept rejection.
Whether writers hire a private publicist or utilize the one who works for a publisher, these are professionals. They know that turning down a book for review may have nothing to do with the quality of the book; it may be that the critic already has too many books of that category planned for review.
An author who believes that constantly asking for a review will eventually work is wrong. You cannot wear us down. Keep in mind—you are not the only author vying for that review spot. An author who sends a postcard every day for a year—yes, this happened—is just being irritating, not effective. The book, not the author, has to speak to us.