Moments In Crime

Carlotta's Music

     When Carlotta first came knocking at my door, I didn't know that much about her. She had a brash voice, a strong voice, a voice that issued from a tall strong body. And right from the start, I knew that she played music.

     Music can work as a kind of shorthand in writing. If a character adores classical music, it might give that character an air of refinement. It can play against type: envision a villain, a mobster who relaxes to string quartettes. I'm a music lover, and I listen to many different styles. I knew from the start that Carlotta played the blues.

     It might have been coincidence. I know I was listening to Bonnie Raitt's album, "Streetlights," when Carlotta was born. And that voice stayed with me; I mention it in the first book, A Trouble of Fools, talk about how Raitt's sound satisfies Carlotta's love of old Delta blues and Detroit Motown soul. Guitar gives Carlotta an outlet, a way to recover her spirits when work gets too much, when cases go wrong, when life is hard and days too long.

     I used to play. One day I'd like to start playing again. In my house, you'll find two six-string guitars, one an old and splendid Gibson, a 12-string, an Ivers and Pond piano, a banjo that I don't recall buying; someone must have left it here, abandoned it. Carlotta plays an old National steel guitar. She stores it under her bed so she can practice blues riffs late at night. I've always coveted Carlotta's guitar. I wish I could play as well as she does. She has more time to practice; I envy that.

      It's risky to use music in a book, especially increasingly obscure music like the blues. Sometimes I wonder when I quote lyrics or mention a particular singer or songwriter, will my readers know this person, will they get what I'm trying to convey? Then, through my website email, I'll hear from someone who decided, because they read one of my books, to listen to Chris Smither, or Paul Rishell and Annie Raines, or Paul Geremia, or Les Sampou, or Rory Block. And it fills me with joy. I feel like an emissary of the music.

     So this is it for me, the final entry of the blog. If you've been listening in, enjoy the music. Enjoy the reading. Before I go, let me whisper in your ear: give Lie Down With the Devil a try. It might not be your kind of music; but then again, it could sing you a brand new song.   

 

 

    

It never rains. . .

     Was it only yesterday I celebrated the arrival of the first pristine copy of Lie Down With the Devil? Now cartons of the book block the front stoop. I'm embarrassed to say I can't lift them (I have back and shoulder trouble) and have to enlist family members to cart them into the house. They're not my books; they're books I agreed to sign for various wonderful booksellers around the country, books I agreed to sign months ago; I had forgotten all about them. Which wouldn't be so bad except that all my chickens seem to be coming home to roost at once, all the commitments I made thinking, oh, August is so far away. Certainly, six months ago, with heaps of gray brown slush on the roads, the idea of August was remote.

     Did I know then that I'd be sending my son off to college in August? Did I realize when I agreed to contribute to one of those each-author-does-one-chapter anthology-thrillers that the writing would begin in August? Did I realize that signing books takes actual real time, unpacking and repacking them, phoning Fedex? That I would need to allow travel time to go to bookstore events, have to decide what to wear in advance? (I know I hadn't imagined that various members of my extended family would come for unexpected visits, that new family members would be born.) It's not like I've never published a book before. You'd think I'd have anticipated the sudden rush of non-writing writerly events instead of being taken, once again, by surprise.

     Writing, for me, seems to requires the luxury of chunks of long unbroken time. I'm always trying to squirrel away days, days with no interruptions, appointments, obligations. And it seems that this has grown more difficult over time. Is it the cell phone that demands my attention, the land line, the doorbell, email, website email? Why, I wonder, do we welcome so many distractions into our lives? More to the point, why have I allowed them into mine?

     Maybe it's that I was born in Michigan, the state that gave us a president who famously couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time (a falsehood, of course; Gerald Ford actually was one of our most athletic  chief execs). I used to be able to multi-task, but wasn't that when there were fewer tasks to go around?

     Somehow I need to make more time in August, to tack a few of those endless gray January or March days on at the end of this last summer month. Maybe I'll just give up reading the daily newspaper; nothing happens in August anyway. Right? 

    

The Gambling Impulse

       

        The doorbell rang. A brown padded envelope from St. Martin's Press with a single copy of Lie Down With the Devil tucked sweetly inside. The cover is arresting: the woman's back, the red ribbon, the Boston skyline. It's always such a strange shock to see the physical manifestation of something that began as a notion, a niggle, a faint idea, an impulse.

         Two impulses, actually. I know I felt the need to settle, at least temporarily, Carlotta's private life, felt an intense desire to resolve a central tension of the series. I set Carlotta up from the start with a choice: the good lover or the bad lover. For a time I imagined that if she ever made up her mind between Mooney and Gianelli the series would end. For some reason, when I began Lie Down With the Devil, it seemed a matter that could no longer wait. She had to choose. (She could always reconsider, I remember thinking.)

         Some of Lie Down With the Devil is dictated by a plot twist from the previous book in the series. (Yes,this is a shameless plug for Heart of the World, one of my favorite Carlyles, a book that snatched Carlotta away from Boston and set her down in exotic Colombia, a country I have wanted, needed to write about for 20 years.) At the end of Heart, I decided that Sam Gianelli could not return to Boston, because, "Something happened in Las Vegas." To begin the next book, I had to discover exactly what that something was.

         Rereading Lie Down With the Devil, I'm pleased by my second impulse, the choice to make the book's plot revolve around gambling. Yes, gambling has been much in the news in Massachusetts lately, what with Governor Patrick trying and failing to pass yet another casino gambling bill and the Mashpee Tribe buying up a vast tract of land in Middleboro. But more than being timely, the gambling plot echoes and emphasizes the emotional core of the book. Because, truly, what is Carlotta doing but gambling, rolling the dice with either Sam or Mooney?

      Oops, I don't want to give any plot details away. After all, it is a mystery.

Exercising the Series Escape Clause

      Maybe it's because I'm currently at work on an out-of-series novel (Oh, no! I hate it when one of my favorite authors doesn't deliver the next book in the series!) that I feel the need to address this issue, feel compelled to defend myself. How can I even contemplate abandoning my heroine, going off the reservation, doing such a perverse thing when I'm such a fan of the series novel, when I feel exactly the way I imagine Carlotta's fans will feel?

  I love the series novel because I want to learn how characters develop over the long haul. (I've never been a short story reader; I prefer thick novels, long, extended series.) I want to revisit my favorite characters, see them in different settings, under differing circumstances. I want to visit them periodically, the way I see my extended family at Thanksgiving. (A series is far better than Thanksgiving because I get to decide if and when I want to visit. Plus I don't have to make the stuffing.) I love the series novel because the main character does not, will not, die. There is, despite peril and suspense, basic ground-level safety within a series mystery.

    Long ago, I made a choice not to let Carlotta walk down the mean streets alone. It seemed a realistic choice at the time: the cops I knew had families; few of us lead loner cowboy lives. It even seemed a brave choice, one that separated Carlotta from the herd. But now I know why those guys choose to cruise solo. Putting the plot elements of a mystery together is tricky, but group dynamics are far trickier. When I begin a Carlyle novel, I need to place everyone in context. Where's Paolina, Sam, Mooney, Gloria, Roz? Sometimes it seems as though all these people dropped by my house for a party and now refuse point-blank to leave.

     So I've decided to take a break before I get tempted to stuff them all in a room and blow the room sky-high. With an even dozen Carlotta novels on the shelf, it seems to me that now is the perfect time for a change, the moment to listen to other, fresh new voices clamoring in my head. Time to write some third person narrative. Oh, I'm not saying the tall redhead won't be back; we've been together a long time. I still jot down ideas for new Carlotta cases when I wake in the middle of the night. But doing a new and different book feels right. Like cross-training, it will strengthen my Carlotta muscles by giving them a well-earned rest.

     Some nights I wake in a panic, missing her, longing for the comfort of her sure voice. I worry that I will give up and tailor my new book to her. She is very persistent. But so am I. And for now, I'm listening to another muse. I simply wish I were a faster writer.

So why do you write this stuff?

       Hello, everyone and anyone. The occasion of this, my maiden voyage on the Good Ship Blog, is the upcoming and much-anticipated (by me, at least; it takes ages to go from final manuscript to print!) publication of Lie Down With the Devil, the 12th (my God, the 12th!) Carlotta Carlyle novel. (Who would have thought? What keeps the woman coming back for more? You, dear reader. You.)

     When I write a novel, I have a reader in mind, a voracious omnivore of books and ideas, a person who shares my love/hate relationship with violence. (That I've never met this person in real life does not deter me; I'm sure he/she exists.) Writing this text seems different, more like a direct encounter with a specific reader, more like speaking on a book tour, which I admit I have found difficult from time to time. I have a past life as an actress, and when I go on tour, I bring Linda the Actress out of the closet, dress her in my idea of what a writer should wear, wind her up, and let her go. She is vivacious and chatty, whereas Linda the Writer is a downright curmugeonly hermit.

      Why do I write the things I write? I often cite a most likely apocryphal Stephen King interview in which, when asked the Why question, he responds: What makes you think I have a choice?  I am and have always been drawn to crime. I attribute it to two occurrences in my past. The first: a murder on my front lawn when I was a child in Detroit. The second: the still-senseless-after-all-these-years suicide of a dear friend. But the sister who shared my bedroom on the night of the murder does not write obsessively about crime. The small group of friends who continue to mourn the suicide don't all write about crime. That I am both control freak and loner must contribute to my career choice. Always supposing it was a choice.

       Time for a quote from a book I'm currently rereading, Diane Johnson's Lying Low.

       "At times, Theo feels that she understands everything, can look into every life, into every shopping basket, can see the young mother clutching food stamps buying the best baby food, can see the youth stealthily secreting Tang beneath his dirty old bum's coat. . . At other times, she feels that she understands nothing, has never understood a thing."

       That about sums it up: I write because at times I feel I understand, but most of the time I don't. I want to understand, and in order to understand, it seems to me that I need to put myself into the life of another person. For a while, I did it through acting; now I do it through writing.

       The impulse to write crime is linked to the impulse to solve things that are basically unsolvable. I don't know the answers to the big imponderables like why is there consciousness and why does my mind peck like a chicken at some ideas and totally ignore others. Each day I open my newspaper to a bizarre juxtaposition of world events, personal disasters, senseless crimes, sporting triumphs, and handbag advertisements. The world around me may make no sense whatsoever, but within the circumscribed world of a Carlyle novel, I can find reason. I can even find justice.

      

Blogging this Week: Linda Barnes

Blogging this week is LINDA BARNES. Linda is the author of fifteen previous novels, eleven of which are Carlotta Carlyle mysteries. Her work has won the Anthony and American Mystery awards, and received numerous nominations for the Shamus and Edgar awards. Born in Detroit, she lives in the Boston area with her husband and son. Visit her Web site at www.lindabarnes.com.

Bestseller and multiple award–winning author Linda Barnes returns with the most personal case to date for her popular Boston PI, Carlotta Carlyle. Carlotta, in unfamiliar territory working on her own behalf, finds herself in the middle of a complicated case that has as much to do with the people she loves as the backstreets of Boston, and beyond.

For starters, Carlotta wants to know what her on-again, off-again boyfriend Sam Gianelli did to earn himself a secret indictment for murder that’s keeping him out of the country. A man with plenty of secrets, he won’t tell her anything, much less let her help, and she isn’t having any more luck with her old friends at the Boston PD. Sam’s exile could be connected to the mob—he is in the family—but she’s not buying it. It couldn’t be that simple. Nothing involving Sam ever is.

Faced with nothing but dead ends, Carlotta goes back to basics and takes a case for a nervous bride-to-be who wants to make sure her fiancé is being faithful. Simple enough, but when her client turns up dead, Carlotta catches the kind of break she wished she hadn’t.

While nothing is as it seems in Lie Down with the Devil, one thing is clear: Readers know that when they’re reading Linda Barnes, they’re in the hands of a maestro.