Ron Baird's Blog

Tony Hillerman's name became a brand before we really understood what branding was all about. It may have become THE most successful brand in all of literature, at least until Harry Potter. Among writers, editors, publicists and publishers, the Southwest U.S. has become Hillerman Country.

To a lesser extent, his protagonists--Jim Chee, Joe Leaphorn et al.--became a brand known for their humanity, compassion and flaws, albeit not being particularly emotive, as Native American's tend not to be.

Why then award the prize to an author who is wooden, swearing revenge on his the murderer of his brother (who he didn't particularly like and wasn't particularly close to)? Or have a plot set in Las Vegas and Europe, both of which might as well be outer-space colonies in contrast to Hillerman Country?

Roy Chaney's "Ragged End of Nowhere" is a decent read if you don't care about character depth. But Bodo Hagen makes Jack Reacher seem as flighty as a high school sophomore getting ready for the prom as he coolly faces down a Gordian knot of shady Las Vegas types and finally the French Foreign Legion in trying to ferret out the truth.

The Hillerman Book Prize is awarded to the best novel set in one of the eight states considered the Southwest U.S. That is the only thematic requirement. But what makes it unique is that the entries are unpublished manuscripts and self-published novels that haven't made a big splash.

The winner, decided by St. Martin's Press, is announced at the Hillerman Mystery Writer's Conference in November. He or she receives a contract to be published by St. Martin's and a $10,000 advance against royalties.

St. Martin's should be praised for this undertaking, so unusual in the current publishing climate. But wouldn't it make it much better if the story somehow reflected Tony's work a little more authentically?

C.J. Box and Sandi Ault--not bad for a SELF-published novel, eh?

Sorry, my wife and I have been watching the Canadian TV series INTELLIGENCE, and they say "Eh?" all the time.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Sandi Ault, author of Wild Indigo and three other mysteries, named me as her favorite author in her latest newsletter for Black Wind.

She won the special Mary Higgins Clark Edgar Award in 2008 for Wild Indigo.

She also invited me to sit in with her writer's group for a panel discussion at her most recent book signing in Estes Park.

I met Sandi at the Tony Hillerman mystery writer's conference in Albuquerque in 2007. Since she lives about 20 miles away, we consider ourselves neighbors.
I attended her workshop on writing in New Mexico in 2008. I read the first pages of Black Wind to the workshop and it was well received.

When it came out, I sent her a signed copy to pay her back for giving me a free copy of Wild Indigo. She mentioned putting something in her newsletter about it. I said, "Well, in that case I hope you like it."

About three months later she emailed the following:
Hey Ron -
Just a quick note because I'm on tour and jet-lagged. Eric is fixing to put out the WILD News Newsletter this evening, and (as promised) I asked him to link to your book on Amazon and I gave him a nice little blurb to say about it. Hope it does some good for you. I'm so proud of you, I could burst!
Hope to see you soon, you dynamite author, you!
Big hug to you and yours,
Sandi

The newsletter blurb said: "Ron writes a telling tale and has the experience to back it up with edge-of-the-seat credibility."

Best-selling authors aren't very approachable for good reasons. A lot of people ask for referrals to agents and publishers, or worse ask them to read works in progress. I did neither. I waited until Black Wind was published and fairly well edited before I mentioned my book.

I had been corresponding with C.J. for a couple of years about a mutual passion--fly fishing--and sent him a couple dozen flies but never discussed writing per se.

Sandi was a little different because I took the class from her, but again, I waited for the book to come out. I just wanted their opinions and if good, maybe a blurb for the book.

Both amounted to a very fixed amount of energy that was apparently manageable for a busy author.

So, go to readings/signing, get to know the author, however slowly, and make it as easy as possible for them to contribute.

It worked for me and it can work for you if you remember you are asking a favor of an important, busy human being.

Goodreads

If you're reading a crime fiction book and the protagonist (an ordinary human being, not a superhero) jumps over a small house in order to catch a villain, what would you do?"

Quit reading? Keep reading? Vomit? Does suspending disbelief extend that far? I'm willing to bet that many readers would go: Aw, COME ON! And put the book down. (Well, maybe not a Charlie Huston book.) But most.

So what would you do if the protagonist of a story sticks a pistol in his belted waistband then runs down the street, jumps a fence and climbs in a window with the gun still in place.

I read that scene in an otherwise excellent crime novel called the Ghosts of Belfast. And similar stunts in nearly every other crime novel, TV show and movie I've read or watched.

Well, I'm here to tell you: It can't be done. I've tried with a semiautomatic and a revolver, both unloaded, and usually by the forth or fifth step of the jog, I'm grabbing to keep it from popping loose or worse, sliding down into my ass crack. Jumping a fence? Climbing a window? LOL!

Now, they make pancake holsters that fit either inside or outside of your pants, and it can be strapped in so that it will stay in place. And some of the best writers, Connelly and a few others, use this device.

Maybe it is because I was a reporter for so many years. But, though I am willing to suspend disbelief to a great extent, I demand a certain sense of realism concerning the laws of physics, etc. etc.

Is it stupidity or laziness that this continues to show up? I think both. Some (too many) crime writers have never even handled a gun. But many have--CJ Box and Stephen Hunter come to mind. But many others know how ludicrous this is and write it in anyway because that's what everybody has come to accept.

I have to admit, if a book is good enough (the Ghosts of Belfast. Check out my review on Goodreads.com), I'll grouse a bit and usually keep reading. But you'll never find it in one of my stories, unless you pry it out of my protagonist's cold, dead ass crack.

***yes, a repost

This surprises me somewhat but almost all the (unsolicited) feedback I've gotten on Black Wind has come from guys: generally of the nature of "I couldn't put it down. A real page turner."

I say surprise because most of the unsolicited feedback I got on Dark Angel was from women. Their main question was, "Is Cassie coming back in the sequel?" From guys, it was, "This just sounds so much like you I have a hard time believing it's fiction (murder aside, I'm hoping). My favorite feedback came from a guy, however, who said he didn't want to finish the story because he liked the characters--whom he described as old friends-- so much.

For me, that IS the litmus test; books like that are the ones I like the best.

I only count unsolicited feedback, like someone calls me out of the blue, sends me a surprise email or stops me in the yard. I NEVER ask someone how they liked the book.

Sales: well who knows? Amazon has been selling a lot. But I only make 30 cents a copy. But I didn't write the book to make money. I wrote it for people to read. In the absence of any local publicity, it's hard to get a handle on sales. If I break even, I'm happy.

Things are looking up greatly with Sandi Ault's endorsement and my being included in Sandi's Favorite New Authors section in her monthly newsletter. Sandi won a special Mary Higgins Clark special Edgar award for Wild Indigo.

Having 2 Edgar award winners in my corner is certainly a plus, and I'm going to buy either Google or Facebook click adds to promote the book now that my new website can sell books. The Internet is IT for marketing.

So for now, I'm giving the book a B+.

...thanks to a passage in one of Daniel Woodrell's novels, in which he describes "a fried-baloney and government-cheese sandwich." Although I hadn't eaten bologna (not the hillbilly spelling) for 45 years,I've had a hankering for a fried baloney sandwich, which I've given into twice in the past month.

I know, I know: ground up animals parts, animal fats, salt, sodium nitrite; the reasons to not eat baloney are legion. My general diet is the antithesis to baloney. I'm mostly a vegetarian, w/ a small and decreasing amount of fish and chicken. I eat an anti-oxidant rich diet.

But something about memories of fried baloney made me throw restraint to the wind, albeit for a couple of days. It didn't help when a local health-food market put low-sodium bologna on sale and put the line "fried bologna sandwiches--YUM" in their weekly sales supplement.

Maybe it was because of Woodrell's courage at putting such an anti nutritionally correct scene in his book (I don't remember which one, as I read five that week). Or maybe it harkens to a comfort food from my childhood.

Woodrell describes another culinary treat of poor people in the Ozarks as the grease jar, where all the leftover grease in the frying pan--be it bacon, pork, chicken, squirrel or rabbit, and reused whenever the need for grease arises. He admits it doesn't sound very savory but claims ANYTHING cooked in it turns out tasty.

I'm not tempted by it anyway. The deadly qualities of superheated, old lard tend to discourage any nostalgic memories I have of the grease jar sitting under the sink.

However, I'm kind of curious about he describes hillbilly fast food: A bottle of Royal Crown cola half filled with peanuts.

Friends and Fans--If you haven't read Black Wind this synopsis may not make as much sense as I would like it to, because I'm not going to add a lot of backstory. Also, this is literally the first draft. I'm simply jotting down the plot as I have it in my head. The reason I'm doing this is because with Black Wind, I went back and rewrote the beginning and end after peddling it unsuccessfully for 2 years to agents. I'm hoping this way, I can avoid having to do that by getting input before I start writing.

The Plot: It's four years later, and Aaron is still with the Jack Springs Marshal's office, filling in for Harlan as marshal, who's having some health problems.

He's still with Belinda but they don't live together. Rosca, Roscoe's daughter is alive and doing well and living with Aaron at the cabin.

His daughter returned without notice, now 21 and carrying a certificate from the Colorado Law Enforcement Academy (3rd in her class) and telling him she wants a job. When Aaron balks, she tells him "Fine, then I'll apply at the Denver PD; they've all but guaranteed me a job."

Knowing when he was beaten, he hired her.

The story begins with a phone message from Carlos Corrigan, an enigmatic New Mexico man who had helped, albeit surreptitiously, Aaron secure justice for a man who deserved harsh justice. His face is badly scarred from a bear aattack, and he carries an original bowie knife, about 16 inches long.

The message says, "I need your help." Carlos was a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service undercover agent whose daughter disappeared several years earlier in the mountains of northern New Mexico under suspicious circumstances. Carlos had been looking for a notorious poacher who had been in the area at the same time.

But now, Carlos has gotten word that the man has been seen in the area of Spring Mountain, Arkansas, somehow involved now in illicit drugs instead of animal parts.

The message hits Aaron particularly hard because he realizes that Spring Mountain, Ark., is where his secretive parents, who have both passed on, were originally from. He learned just after returning from Vietnam, that his parents were from warring clans along the Little Red River in Arkansas, and a death sentence had been handed down through the McAllister clan on Oren Hemingway. But when the cousins of Jesse Fay showed up, she shot them down. It was possible that Aaron had witnessed the shooting.

In any case, Aaron agrees to go to Spring Mountain with Carlos. When they get there, he learns that his father's side of the family has become cops in the area and doing battle against the McAllister clan, which is behind the meth labs in the region.

And the man that Carlos is looking for is an ally of the McAllisters. In the two-weeks battle that follows, the Hemingways, with Aaron and Carlos' help defeat the McA. clan but at a heavy cost. The man Carlos is looking for is also captured. He tells them Carlos's daughter was killed in a fall and most likely eaten the ghost grizzlies that still inhabit the South San Juan mountains.

The theme of Black Wind was: Do we ever learn from our mistakes? And the premise is: Well, not often but sometimes.

The theme of Night Music will be about finding home, but I'm not sure what the premise will be but probably it will be "sometimes we do."

I visited Mt. View Arkansas several years ago, after spending a couple of years in the vicinity and even owned some property there many years earlier. On the last trip, strangely, I felt the sense of being somewhere I belonged. I should probably mention that most of my family is from the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri on one side and the Washita Mountains in Oklahoma, neither place being a model of law abidingness. Mt. View is a bluegrass mecca and a cultural center in other folk arts.

For the most part, these people (real and fictional)were migrants from the Appalachian and Smokey mountains, and before that from the English/Scottish border from the 1300-1600s, often via Ireland, where the King of England deported them because he couldn't otherwise stop the 300-year reign of violence along the border.

So there is more than a fanciful attachment to the place.

Anyway, here are the questions. You are not limited to answering these questions. Any comments are appreciated.

What had Cassie been doing in the previous six years that she had disappeared, at least from Aaron? Her mother had moved her to keep her way from Aaron, but she's a strong woman and would have been unlikely to have let her wander the streets as a "wild child."

I want Cassie to have a personal issue that's causing her a problem and a professional issue involved with a criminal enterprise or something similar. The story will flash between events in Arkansas and Cassie's situation in Jack Springs.

What could these be?

My action scenes kind of write themselves but if anyone has any thoughts about the situation in Arkansas, let me know. I want the action to start pretty quickly, with both Cassie and Aaron.

Any possible sub plots for the Arkansas side of things?

Does Carlos believe the poacher? If not, why not. What will be done about that.
That's about all for now. All suggestions will be taken seriously. But alas, in the end, I will make the decision.

Please respond to rebaird@indra.com -- not Facebook or Goodreads.

Under the guise of research, I've spent a solid week reading the works of Daniel Woodrell. What a stunning experience it has been. Seven novels in 22 years and I have a feeling that very few know of him.

Maybe, unless you're John Steinbeck or more recently Stephen Hunter, the mileau--the dregs of southern culture--the poor white trash--just aren't worthy of much interest.

But Woodrell makes it interesting if not particularly comfortable. I have to say there is absolutely no formula to this guy's work. Some are hopeful, showing how the human spirit can survive in such dire circumstances, how others are inevitably lost, and some of the absolutely twisted results may result. And one is even humorous.

I've been reading these to get an idea of the styles of writing out there on this subject because I'm going to set my next novel in the midst of centuries old clan and internecine warfare in the "modern" South. So I've read Hunter's and Chris Offut's work, as well as Joe R. Lansdale's novels set in SE Texas.

They are all good, but to me Woodrell's are the most honest and therefore the best. One of his books (Woe To Live On), has been made into an excellent movie (Ride With the Devil)set on the Kansas/Missouri border during the Civil War. Woodrell wrote the screenplay and it's probably the most realistic movie of those times, or even a western I have seen.

If you might be interested, start off with Give Us a Kiss and follow with Winter's Bone. If you like that, try the Death of Sweet Mister and Tomato Red. Then read Muiscle for the Wing, an early novel that's stylistically like James Lee Burke, but may proceed Burke at least with the character of Cletus Purcell.

Next (really!) The rough plot.

August 1953
Late-morning sunlight streamed through the kitchen window as Jessie Faye hummed an old-timey tune and dried the dishes. Her eyes had wandered outside to the play of light on the shimmering aspen leaves when she thought she saw a movement in the shadows at the forest’s edge. It gave her a start because a panther had been about and Oren was worried it might take a calf.

When they’d first moved here, every little noise or passing shadow sent her into a panic, but as the years went by she had learned to relax some. If only the place weren’t so dang far away from everything and everyone.

Not that she was complaining. They had come seeking solitude, and it was a miracle she and Oren had stumbled on this hard-bitten chunk of mountain someone had called a ranch and sold to them. Working from daybreak to nightfall, winter and summer, they got by. Lord knows it wasn’t easy.

Hard, yes, but there was much good about the place. Everything here was of such a grand scale. The sky⎯who would of ever thought there could be so much of it? Those cottonmouth-infested hollers of home were so steep that a body had to climb clear up the ridges to get a thimble full of blue sky. Here, the sun seemed to shine forever. No, she wasn’t complaining, not when she thought about what they had left behind back in Arkansas.

Another movement in the trees jolted Jessie Faye out of her revelry. A frown creased her face, still unlined despite the hard ranch work and harsh winters. And still pretty beneath the curly brown hair piled high on her head.

She wiped her hands on the apron and backed away from the window, moving toward the front room where she would have a better view. She kept to the darkened area of the room as she sought the patch of trees where she had seen…something.

For long moments she watched. But nothing was moving out there now, so she relaxed a bit. She felt a little foolish. Heaven’s sake, she wasn’t some vaporous Mississippi belle. She was a McAllister girl, raised in the hard country of the Little Red River, and a ranch woman these past six years surviving in the high Colorado Rockies. She moved back to the kitchen and the bread dough that was rising on the counter.
Still, almost against her will, her eyes wandered to the yard from time to time and she caught herself pounding the thickening mass, beating down her fear. With long, slender fingers she molded the dough into loaves and set them on the counter to rise. Something was wrong but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Then she had it⎯the magpies hadn’t showed up. They came up every day and raised holy hell, waiting for her to carry out the trash. They screeched and strutted and made an awful nuisance of themselves, but they kept her entertained and helped fight off the loneliness when her husband was gone. She had even given them names, although she would never have admitted that to anyone, lest they accuse her of being addle-brained.

But the magpies, with their blue, black and white feathers flashing in the sunlight, their goosey steps and bobbing heads, were not about, and they were always here this time of day, leastways when she was home by herself. She worried it was because something was out there in the trees and had scared them off. A small tremor of fear shook her body.

For God’s sake woman, she chastised herself, there’s nothing out there you haven’t seen the worse of. Go on and settle this thing in your mind. She felt better for making the decision, so she slipped into the mudroom and changed from her housedress into canvas overalls, a flannel shirt and heavy boots. The overalls still had bloodstains and a burnt-hair smell from castrating and branding the calves last week. The blood she didn’t mind so much, but the smell of burned hair and flesh made her stomach churn.
She knew she had to wash them out, but there was so damn much work to do around here it was near impossible to get caught up.

Still, first things first. She picked up the shotgun, broke it open and saw the brass of the 12-gauge shells gleaming like new pennies. She snapped it shut and reached up to the box on the shelf, grabbed four more, and slipped them into her pocket. The door of the mudroom faced away from the side of the house where she’d seen the movement, so she slipped out that way. Using the squat, brown ranch house for cover, she walked into the trees and hiked a ways up the hillside.

The long-barreled shotgun felt natural in her hands as she eased down through the trees, minding her footfalls the way Pappy had taught her. But the ground was moist, thanks to the afternoon rains they’d been getting, and even the dead branches on the ground were too soft to break if stepped on.

About forty feet above the forest’s edge, she came up with a jerk, her heartbeat echoing in her ears. She could barely make out two figures hunched down watching the house, but she could see their sweat-stained brown slouch hats. Those hats told her all she needed to know: the thing she feared most for the past six years had come to pass.

She crept forward to where she had a clear view, stopped next to a thick white tree trunk, brought the shotgun up to her cheek and thumbed back both hammers, a sound that had only one meaning to anyone who’d ever heard it.

The men below had, and they flung themselves backward and rolled over, raising heavy-barreled pistols in her direction.

“Don’t,” she said, her voice not showing the fear she felt, “or I’ll shoot.” The men squinted over the long, thin beards favored by the folk back home where she and Oren had come up.
“Jessie Faye? Is that really you? Come on now, you wouldn’t up and shoot yer own kin, would ya?” The men rose to their haunches. Their wide, evil grins revealed rows of stubby, tobacco-stained teeth. She recognized one of them⎯cousin Purvis. She reckoned if you put his brain in a bullfrog, it would be too dumb to croak. How in Hades had they found her and Oren and made it all the way up here to the ranch?

“Quicker’n I’d squash a bloody tick, Purvis. What’re y’all doing here?”

“We come for ya, Jessie. It ain’t right desertin’ yer family like that. We come to make things right and take ya back home.”

Make things right. How many times had she heard that growing up? Her stomach lurched like she’d eaten some bad meat, pain stabbed at her bowels. Her legs grew weak. These murderous sons-a-bitches, her kin, had come to kill Oren for marrying her and taking her away. The idea that she’d wanted the same thing and went along willingly couldn’t even be absorbed in their moonshine- and chaw-pickled brains. She left as much to get away from her family as for love. But she did love Oren, and she had her boy and a good life here. She be damned to hell before letting them make things right.

Seeing what they took for hesitation, both men rose. She snapped the gun back to eye level.

“Don’t,” she barked again, the old steel coming back into her spine. “Put them guns down.”

They held them pointed at the ground. “Now Jessie, we cain’t do that. You know that us McAllisters would die ‘fore we’d surrender our guns.”

“If that’s the way you want it, then. I’m gonna count to five. Should I count out loud or just surprise you?”

“Ha!” Purvis said. “That’s a good un, Jessie Faye. ” Despite his tone, she noticed a tick beneath his left eye and sighted on it. Whether or not they believed her, they did start backing down the hill toward the house.

She advanced step for step as they retreated. Just as they moved out of the trees into the yard, the whine of a truck engine coming up the grade reached them, and Oren’s red International stakebed loaded high with hay lurched into view.

“It’s him,” Purvis shouted with glee, as if the fact that she had a double-barrel 12-gauge scattergun pointed at them was less of a bother than a hungry skeeter. They had turned and were raising their pistols at the oncoming truck when Jessie Faye cut loose with both barrels, shredding a tunnel of foliage between them and knocking both men down like hollow reeds in a stiff wind. The double recoil wrenched her halfway around, but she managed to turn back as Oren’s truck roared into the yard. As Jessie Faye stared at the bodies of her cousins through the floating confetti of leaves and twigs, she thought she saw the curtain in the front room move, though there was not a ripple of wind.

Both men were twitching, probably mortally wounded, so she ran to the house, emptying the spent shells and stuffing two new ones into the chambers as she ran.
She toed the screen door open and, holding the shotgun at hip-level, she checked the front room, then the others; no one but the boy was there, in his bedroom, sitting up in sweat-drenched pajamas with both hands pressed to his ears, a look of absolute terror on his face. She stood the shotgun against the wall and waited for the roaring in her head to die down so she could say something to comfort him.

Before she could, two booming gunshots came from the yard outside, which Jessie Faye mercifully recognized as the flat pop of Oren’s Army .45, not the booming echo of the long-barrel .44s the men of the McAllister clan carried. The shots, however, brought her son up and out of the bed at a full gallop. She grabbed him and pulled him to her to hold, but his little fists were flailing. They struck her several times before she could pin his arms in her embrace. He moaned like a wounded animal but stopped thrashing.

She stepped to the bed and lay his now-limp body on the tangle of sweaty sheets, wondering about the swaying curtain. She lay beside him, pulling his small body tight into the protective cove of her bosom, whispering from the core of her heart, “It’ll be all right, baby, it’ll be all right.”

But Jessie Faye wondered if she were trying to convince her son or herself, now that the evil of her blood had touched her family.

Next--the plot

Rated: Four stars.

I'm not a fan of novels about dysfunctional families. But I am a fan of crime fiction. Her earlier novels have different degrees of both. But "Die For You" comes down a little more solid on the crime elements, and the family disfunction elements make it work and helps the book transcend either genre.

Isabel Raine is a successful crime novelist and has been married to a loving husband for five years. One day he disappears and takes the money of both her and her sister's families.

She's emotionally devastated but quickly her ability to write about crime directs her to solve the mystery. Which is good because nobody else seems to care, at least until they realize two families' money is all gone.

The answer seems to be as twisted as a Gordian knot. But as she unwinds the strands of truth and lies, it becomes clear she's threatening something a lot more dangerous than she realizes.

But she can't stop because, more than the money, she has to find out how she could live with and love a man who's actually a total stranger.

One of the things I like most about the book is that Unger doesn't resort to a device that many female mystery writers (Edna Buchanan, Nevada Barr et al.) use of including a scene in which the protagonist does something so utterly lame brained that you just want to reach out and slap her.

I'll be looking for her next book to see if she keeps getting better.