Moments In Crime

One Last Post: The Readers

As I wrote my first book, I was thinking about a lot of people.  My family, of course, all the friends I wanted to put in the acknowledgments, my agent and my editor, who had put faith in me.  My high school reunion!  It would be pretty cool to return there as a published author.

But after the initial hullabaloo of publishing a book, most of those gratifications die away.  Earlier today I received an e-mail from a woman named Mary, who said she liked the book and was excited for the series - and concluded by thanking me.  It meant the world to me, as each e-mail I get does.  Because long after the plaudits and pans are gone, long after your friends have read your books and put them on a shelf to collect dust, some new reader is still picking up your book to start it with a smile.

So thanks.  I'm one of you myself.

The September Society

I'll probably post here again before my time is up this evening, but just in case I don't, thank you so much for reading, and also - here's my pitch - you should read my new book, The September Society.  It's got a great mystery plot and, more importantly to me, the characters from my first book develop in really interesting ways.

And a quick note - I'm always happy to sign copies through the mail, phone in to book clubs, or stay in touch with readers any way I can.  You can always contact me through my website, www.charles-finch.com, or else e-mail me at charles@charles-finch.com

Thanks!

So....Now You're Actually an Author

Already my last day as a guest blogger!  Obviously that's tragic for you, the reader of these wise words (one day....) but it's hard to come up with new subjects, so I'll be at least slightly relieved, as fun as this has been.  Thanks for all your comments!  It's been great.  And for the record, the winning name - which WILL be in my new Charles Lenox mystery - is Nettie, courtesy of Y.S.  Congratulations!

I thought this morning I'd write a few words about what happens AFTER all the hard work, AFTER the agonizing and exhilirating process of finding and agent and then a publisher, AFTER the first pass pages and galleys, AFTER you get your first author copy of the book....what happens when your book comes out.

 

What an exciting time.  Last June (late June, actually) my first book came out.  There's really been no thrill in my young career (I'm 28) comparable to seeing it sitting on a shelf in Barnes and Noble, as if it truly belonged there.  Three beautiful, flawless copies - at my B&N, anyway.  (By the way, I'd like to say a word for Barnes and Noble, which is unfairly maligned in my opinion; I love small independent bookstores as much as anyone, their attitude, their idiosyncrasy, but let's be fair: No bookstore carries as much stock as Barnes and Noble, has as many obscure authors, serves as various a swathe of readers, or is as casual about browsing.  It's addictive.  That came before its gigantism, I'm sure.)

After seeing those shelf copies, and going to every bookstore in New York to "sign stock" - that's how you can buy the signed copies with those little green stickers - I had a sickening realization: At some point I was going to have to read out loud from this thing.

I'm not one of those people who's afraid of public speaking.  (Supposedly the number one fear in America, right?  As Seinfeld put it: "So you mean to tell me people would rather be in the casket at a funeral than giving the elegy?")  I'm used to it, in fact, both from my work in politics and from long years of high school and college seminars talking about books.  But when an American writes a Victorian mystery, there's a big stumbling block - the accent.  Without a kind of Alan Rickman drawl, the dialogue would sound irredeemably stilted.  Try saying, "He's a decent chap, I dare say," in a Brooklyn accent, for example.

I solved this problem in what I thought was a pretty clever way: I didn't read.  Instead I talked (when I was supposed to be reading) about how I was scared to read.  That showed everyone.  But now that I'm less than a month away from another book coming out, I'll be confronted with the same problem again.  And I doubt that old excuse will hold up.

Then there's the tantalizing, maddening existence of the Amazon sales rank.  Authors KNOW that the Amazon sales rank isn't a true indicator of a book's success - but really it's the only raw data we get, and we crave raw data.  I, for one, could tell anyone off the top of my head the lowest number my book reached (low=good), and I bet any other author you meet could too, whether he or she admitted it or not.

And of course the one great truth of publishing a book always exists: As soon as the reviews are in, the parties are over, the sales or booming or slumping, one thing remains at home for you.  The blank page.  Back to square one.

So readers and authors: Do you have any advice for my next reading?  What makes for a good public appearance?  A disastrous one?  I'm curious to hear.

Books and Food

One thing I often got accused of after A Beautiful Blue Death came out was putting too much food into my books.  I don't know why I did that (and I scaled it back slightly, if not entirely, in The September Society) but I think it was because I've always relished the descriptions of food in writers I love, whether in The Wind in the Willows or in Hemingway's books.  (A Movable Feast wasn't just a metaphor for Paris.)  So I thought I'd list a couple of books with great food in them.

1) School Days - Robert Parker (Spenser's always cooking and drinking, isn't he?)
2) Happy All the Time - Laurie Colwin (One of the great underrated novels.)
3) A Horse and His Boy - C.S. Lewis (My favorite Narnia book.)

Any food books you know?  I'm supposed to cook this week!

Quick Hit Suggestions

A couple of quick recommendations for those who like period mystery - all of these are similar in tone to my book, and I enjoyed them all!

A Poisoned Season - Tasha Alexander
Tell Me, Pretty Maiden - Rhys Bowen
A Pale Horse - Charles Todd

What's everyone out there reading?  I'm always on the lookout for good reads.

Writing: The Process

Of all readers, I think mystery-lovers are often the most passionate.  And a surprising number of them also want to be writers.  What was interesting as I met people after my first book came out was the questions I got.  Often I heard:

- How do you come up with your characters?
- How do you invent a murder and a solution?

These questions are essentially impossible to answer.  (Think of them; think of it - those would be the real answers.  Usually I waffle around and talk about imagining my characters are real or imagining that I was the detective or the murderer.)  But mystery readers also ask a second batch of questions which are more interesting to me.  Like:

- Do you write longhand or on computer?
- How many hours a day do you write?
- Where in the process do you revise?
- How do you develop a structure?
- Do you write in the morning or at night?
- At home or in a cafe?
- With coffee or without?

Even a writer who was insistently reluctant to talk about his imaginative process would open up straight away at these questions, I suspect.  (There's a tip for what to ask at a reading with a gloomy author.)  The way a basketball player who can't describe his on-court thinking will talk endlessly about how he practices, a writer can't talk about imagination will always debate pencil vs. typewriter vs. computer.

So for all of the people reading this who have always wondered, I thought I'd describe my daily routine.  (Or at least, my ideal daily routine.  Often I sleep later than I should, or have had a couple of beers the night before and feel foggy, or simply can't face the computer screen.)

I usually try to write beginning in the later morning, when I've truly woken up and had a little breakfast.  At the beginning stages of a book I write out a schematic for the plot and the character in my notebook, as well as several crucial scenes (the murders, for example, or when the solution comes to Lenox).  As I get deeper into the book I write on my wonderful MacBook, referring to my notes as I go.  At first I worried that writing on a computer would be TOO easy, that I would prattle on without the succinctness I wanted, but let me tell you - it's never too easy to write.

Often I'll have a little something to eat or drink.  I usually write at home, but every fifth day or so I go to a small cafe - really no bigger than a standard living room - here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  It's better for my soul than feeding the green monster, Starbucks, and the coffee tastes better too.  It's called the Cafe Saint Honore.  When I feel myself lagging a little bit, the cafe can always pick me up.  I have a theory that a fresh environment refreshes my thoughts.

After working for a few hours in the morning, I read in the early afternoon, and then in the late afternoon I go back and read over what I've written to make sure it's coherent and that I haven't made any MAJOR mistakes.  (The small ones can wait - the worst mistake is trying to get a perfect first draft.)  Finally, if I'm in the mood at night, I work again.  Often my best ideas come at night, for some reason, even though the slog of the mornings is what gets the book done.

And that's about it.  How about you?  I'm curious to hear what any mystery readers/writers do as they work.

The Five Best Holmes Stories

Another list.  Sherlock Holmes is THE reason I'm a mystery novelist - I reread the stories and novels endlessly, most of the stories about once a year. Recently I got the annotated stories as a present, and I was in seventh heaven. All of these are available on line too!

1) The Red-Headed League
2) The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
3) Silver Blaze
4) The Greek Interpreter
5) The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans

I have to admit - the fourth and fifth are at least partly on this heady list (after all there were 64 stories) because they feature Sherlock's inegenious brother, Mycroft.

What are your favorites?

A Good English Name

Victorian names - though if you based your perception of them on my books everyone would be called George or Jane - were strange.  Take a look at this compendium; I, for one, have never met a couple named Zebulon and Zylphia.  Or for that matter Micajah and Mahulda.

Still, these are some of the names that I wade through as I try to make sure I'm using authentic period names.  It's always a battle.

And so I'm challenging you (lazy writer that I am) to come up with a name for a minor character who I'm currently calling "Joan Smith" but who deserves a better appellation.  A great name can spice up even the least significant passage of a novel - so bring on your Heneage Dundertons and Theodosia LaRue's.  You can either submit a name in the comments section here or e-mail me at charles@charles-finch.com.  The name you pick will genuinely go into the book.  Good luck!

Three Great Victorian Novels You Might Have Missed

I thought I'd chime in with a quick post while I was on the subject of the Victorians, mentioning a couple of novels I've often recommended to readers:

1) North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
2) The Claverings - Anthony Trollope
3) New Grub Street - George Gissing

Needless to say there are dozens of others (and I could write a list of twenty novels by Trollope that fans of Victorian mysteries would love) but those are three fantastic novels that are overlooked, if not obscure.

Back soon.

Who the Victorians Were

Let me begin my stint as guest-blogger here at Moments in Crime by paraphrasing Oscar Wilde: To write one Victorian mystery novel may be an accident; to write two begins to look like carelessness.  On Thursday I started my third.  Suddenly it seems as if I have a series on my hands.

The Victorian era is so immensely appealing to me as a mystery novelist.  For one thing, the tradition of the mystery story began in earnest there, with the famous "penny dreadful" or "penny blood" stories, and reached their absolute apex when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins were at work.  The wonderful, evocative, sinister images of criminal London are already in a reader's mind: flickering streetlights, rolling fog, hansom cabs, dark alleys, gin mills, street toughs.  Take John Atkinson Grimshaw's wonderful painting of the Liverpool Docks.  Doesn't anyone who loves the Victorians start with that image in their head?  I know I did when I sat down to write A Beautiful Blue Death.  I wanted to write a book that would give me the sensation of those Victorian streets.

And yet as I revisit Charles Lenox, the quiet, affectionate amateur detective with political ambitions at the center of my books, as well as Lady Jane, his oldest and best friend, and Thomas McConnell, the trouble doctor who helps Lenox with his cases - as I visit these old friends again I try to force myself past that initial image I have of crime in Victorian London.  It was a much more interesting era than that.  Think about it: At the same time as the staid bankers and proper old maids of Anthony Trollope were alive, Parliament was absolutely revolutionizing England, granting the vote to more and more people, repealing unjust laws, and passing the Reform Acts.  As country squires who had never left Sussex ate their beef and potatoes every night, England was sending boats around the world to fetch spices, colonize burning hot islands, and fight wars.  While Charles Lenox sat (theoretically) in the Devonshire Club in London, at those Liverpool docks Grimshaw painted a mixture of Indians, Africans, Englishmen, and Asians were living and drinking together.

What an interesting era it was!

My second novel, The September Society, tries to explore the vast possibilities of that time.  It's easy to fall into the trap of focusing on Hyde Park and the Duchess of Etc. - but in this book I include a chapter set in India and take Lenox within reach of his political dreams.  Now as I write and research the third Lenox book I have to constantly remind myself that the Victorians were so much more than Sherlock Holmes or Plantagenet Palliser.  The modern writers best able to reach back there have all known that secret.  If you look hard enough, the Victorians will always proffer something new, will always reveal themselves in some unexpected way.

I'm excited to have the chance to guest blog here.  In the coming days I'll talk more about how I write, ask for advice, and roll out some of my favorite Victorian quotes.  Please watch this space.