Lea Wait's Blog, page 10

Where we write: A glimpse into our offices

From time to time, we share interesting details about our writing lives. Our favorite writing books. Books we’re reading. Our upcoming publications. Today, a look at where we write.

Kate Flora: Because we have to houses, and also spend a month in Florida in March, I’ve written in a lot of different places. All I need is a seat, a surface, and my trusty laptop, and I’m off and writing. But about ten years ago, recognizing that I was writing at the kitchen table and had to clear away my work every time we had guests, I convinced my husband that we really needed a dedicated office. I call the space the cupcake box, since it’s a small room perched on the third floor of our 100+ year old cottage. Small since it has desks for me and for my husband who is working on a book and some law review articles. Small since it also has bookcases and a reading chair and my mother’s old dining table for reference books to spread out. Distracting because it has ocean views in three directions. Wonderful because it is bright and airy and in summer the winds blow through the room.

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson: I don’t have Kate’s view. Heck, I don’t have any view (by choice), but this is where I do most of my writing.

The rest is done sitting on the sofa with an open looseleaf notebook and a pen with colored ink (sometimes red and sometimes blue, as long as it contrasts with the black on the printout). I revise that way, then make more adjustments when I type the changes into the pc. I did buy a laptop awhile back, when tariffs were first threatened, and also as a back up for when my ancient pc dies. At the moment (knock wood) it’s still going strong and the laptop lives on the kitchen table, essentially serving as (yet) another backup for each day’s work.

Kait Carson: Don’t be fooled. It doesn’t look this good in person. There’s something to be said for staging! Yes, the cats are always with me. Wouldn’t have it any other way. And they participate whenever then can. I take editorial help whenever I can get it – so not  proud.

My office is in the basement. The view isn’t great, unless you’re a cat – lots of squirrels, at least in the summer. In the winter the view becomes a snow drift. All that snow from the roof has to go some place. The photos on the wall are from my days of writing for the True Confessions magazine franchise. Each of those covers features one of my stories. A big deal back in the day.

Piper’s review of the first draft

William and Cub wait for the author to show up for work

 

Matt Cost writes in the living room with head phones on. This is his mess.

Tell Yourself Your Story

Back when I was young and could live on coffee and cigarettes and bar food, I had a friend named John. We shared an apartment on Silver Terrace in Waterville while I worked as a fry cook at Bill’s Lunch. I don’t know how he paid his rent.

John and I were interested in a lot of the same things—poetry, literature, the outdoors, the ocean. He was also a natural storyteller, something I attributed to his youth in the South somewhere, Georgia, maybe. After he left Maine, we kept up a correspondence. He would spin me wonderful tales of his travels, surfing on the Outer Banks. He had a facility with telling a story that I thought was something innate, that people either had or they didn’t.

Now, of course, I know better. There are writers, of course, who seem to spin their stories effortlessly. But I believe now there are ways to make yourself a better storyteller. What I think I have learned is how good storytelling is based not on speaking but on listening.

Dialogue is the most obvious part of storytelling that relies on listening. We’ve all had the experience of reading fiction where the characters don’t talk like real people. George V. Higgins memorably demonstrated this in an article about writing where he published verbatim the text of a criminal deposition. We don’t need the ahs and umms of that kind of speech, but we need to listen to people speaking to capture both the vocabulary and rhythm of speech, if we’re going to render it in any kind of believable way.

But the effect of listening on storytelling goes deeper than the language of the story. The best storytellers I know are actually in a kind of dialogue with their listeners, watching their faces for signs of confusion or boredom, adjusting the story as it goes for maximum effect. In effect, the storyteller is listening to his or her audience. As writers, it’s tough for us to do this except at a remove. But getting better at listening will always repay effort.

Maybe the best we can hope for is to listen, once we have our story out in some rough form, like a reader. Listening like a reader means stepping away from the person who wrote the story and recasting yourself as if you’re hearing it for the first time. Hearing it.

Listening is not an innate skill. We are accustomed to rapid fire exchanges of information, questions and answers, communication to get things done. Often when we’re engaged in a conversation with someone we’re only half-listening to what is being said, crafting our response, guessing ahead what the speaker is after. It’s an attempt at efficiency, I suppose, but can be mechanical. If you’ve ever had someone truly listen to you, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a skill you develop and it requires the ability to slow down, clear your mind, and accept what you’re hearing fully. If you can do this with your own work—listen like a reader—I think you will create a stronger connection with your readers.

Weekend Update: April 26-27, 2025

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Dick Cass (Monday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Thursday) and Kate Flora (Friday), with a group post on Tuesday.

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 

Matt Cost will be at A Cool Little Book Fair at the Sagadahoc Preservation Inc.880 Washington Street in Bath, Maine, today, Saturday, April 26 from 10-2 PM. He will be reading from his newest work, Bob Chicago Investigates, at 11:15 and will be selling and signing books the rest of the time. INFO.

 

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Matt Cost will at Novel in Portland, Maine on Wednesday, April 30 at 7:30 PM for Noir At The Bar, along with eight other lit legends of Maine (he is fraternizing up). He will be reading from his recently finished draft of Bob Chicago Investigates. RSVP HERE.

 

 

 

 

Matt Cost will be at Print: A Bookstore, in conversation with Jule Selbo about the launch of her latest Dee Rommel book, 7 Days, on Thursday, May 1st, at 7 PM. For more information, click HERE.

 

 

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

Did I Hear That Right?

By Kait Carson

I have a mug that reads, “Careful or you’ll end up in my novel”. I have another that reads “Writer’s Block when your imaginary friends won’t talk to you”, but that’s another blog.

Writers don’t have to look far for inspiration. It’s all around us. All we have to do is listen. Case in point. I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office when the receptionist asked the man at the counter if the doctor could discuss his medical issues with his wife. He agreed. The receptionist spun her computer screen to face him and asked him to confirm the phone number. His response: “Oh, my God, no. That’s her private family only line at the FBI. She’s an undercover agent.” He scribbled something on a sticky note, presumably the correct phone number, while my mind churned with

possibilities. Family only line. Is there such a thing? Is someone tasked with answering it twenty-four seven? What happens if no one answers? What happens if someone uses the number to draw the agent out? And most important, is her extended warranty still in effect? Okay, maybe not that one. This little snippet of chat appeals to my off-kilter sense of humor and will probably show up in a noir short story.

Then there was the Chinese Restaurant story. I live near a small university town. My husband and I were out to lunch one day at the local Chinese Restaurant. The group at the table next to us were wrapping up their meal when the server brought the bill and fortune cookies. The woman broke open her cookie, read her fortune, and slammed her hand on the cookie halves, crushing them to bits. “That’s it. I’ve had it. I have a Ph.D. and I speak three languages. Why is it that every time I get a fortune in this restaurant, they want me to learn Chinese.” She pushed herself away from the table hard enough to topple the chair. Her companion grabbed the paper, turned it over, and showed her the fortune on the reverse side. The woman blushed while the server righted her chair. I can’t imagine what triggered her extreme reaction. I haven’t used this incident yet, but I will. It’s too good to ignore.

I’ve long wanted to try my hand at a psychological thriller. If you are a subscriber to my newsletter, this story will be familiar to you. A few years ago, I found a letter in my mailbox. No sender name, but both the return address and the postmark were a small town in Oregon. Had it been an email, I would have deleted it unread. But this was a letter. Handwritten, not typed.

Covid was just ramping up. We knew so little about how it spread, but physical contact was high on the list. I considered sending the letter through the microwave, but memories of post 9/11 anthrax mail sprang to mind. Some things vaporize when heated. That may seem paranoid., but I had a long career as an estates and trusts litigation paralegal. Nothing says I hate you like a disinherited beneficiary and we’d recently won a case against a west coast based plaintiff. I put the letter aside, but curiosity won. I opened it.

Turned out the letter was from a boy I’d dated once in 1968. He was in the army and stationed state-side. I was in high school. The day after our date, flowers began arriving. One dozen long-stemmed roses. Every day. For two weeks. To this day, the scent of Joy perfume turns my stomach. Then the marriage proposals began. Every day. Hallmark cards professing undying love. Then silence. Until 2020.

The letter reiterated his undying love. He said he found me through Facebook, but my Facebook presence is as Kait Carson. That’s a pen name. If you look hard enough, I suppose you can find my married name—but not my maiden name, the name he knew me by. Then there was the address – I’ve moved quite a lot since 1968. The only avenue I could think of where all the information was available was through one of those paid background checks. I don’t know what would possess a rational person to spend time and money tracking someone they met once—over fifty years before. Rational. That’s the keyword. But then, had his past actions been rational? I think not. I’m filling a notebook with scenes while I wait for the other shoe to drop. When life hands you inspiration, it’s downright rude to ignore it.

Yes, Friends, It’s Finally Spring

Kate Flora: How do I know it’s spring? Maybe because I’ve spend the past week on my hands and knees in the garden, digging out the persistent gout weed? Maybe because my back aches and the knees of all my pants are muddy from kneeling the dirt? Maybe because every day the forsythia grows deeper yellow and now the weeping cherry is turning bridal white? Maybe because despite wearing my tick pants, tick shirt, and tick socks, last night while I was reading one of the little buggers crawled down my face?

I like spring. Fall used to be my favorite season but now all that graying and browning and death and decay feel a little too close. Passing the three-quarter century mark is a little daunting.

In order to get the gardens in shape, I’ve pressed the hold button on the next Thea. I feel guilty when I leave my desk to go into the garden, but in truth, spring is short, and there are chores that must be done now, while writing can be done in a few weeks, or after dark. If I don’t stay on top of those weeds, my garden won’t be a garden, it will be a well-fertilized and watered patch of weeds. I stop to ponder whether, give their resilience and determination, I ought to wish to be more like a weed?

One thing I especially love about spring is the wide array of greens that are appearing. Every shade of green from the lightest yellow to the deepest forest, and everything in between. Spring colors change every day, as does the emerging plant life. That patch of empty ground in the garden where I was thinking I might transplant a spirea today sports teeny little spikes of green. Even though there is much to be done, I give myself a time to wander, bending down to peer at what is emerging, frequently trying to remember what I planted last year. If it went into the border a full-grown plant, I don’t know what its infant form looks like.

The aging brain makes this trickier. A friend strolling with me will ask, “What’s that plant?” Something I know very well, but the name won’t float into the screen on the magic 8 ball that is now my brain. I am likely to say, “Give me a few minutes and I’ll remember,” and hope I do. How useful is it to wake up at three a.m. and mutter, “Amsonia?”

I’ve blogged about how gardening is like writing, but right now, I am setting that aside (although I am hoping that the next steps in the Thea book will magically appear. There’s something about a conflict and something about a closet) and trying to simply be present. Crouching over the perennial bed, I am asking, “What came back and what didn’t winter over? What is simply slower to emerge and I must give it time?” Despite being frustrated by the gout weed (Bishop’s weed) and the too aggressive evening primrose, getting down close to the soil, surrounded by bird call, reminds me that I am in my happy place. Yeah, I’m a cynic and a grouch. I don’t much hold with happy places and gratitude diaries. But spring likes to kick me out of my grumpiness.

It’s hard to be grumpy when staring at teeny blue flowers or the vibrant yellow of mini daffodils or the pinks and purples of corydalis or spring anemones or the shiny, bulbous purple of emerging ligularia. Hard not to smile when a bulb that the squirrels have moved blooms in the middle of the lawn, or a volunteer of a favorite plant appears in an unexpected place. Hard not to stand beside the glowing yellow of forsythia shifting in a spring breeze and not feel elated.

So yes. Spring is short and right now, I am out in the garden. I wonder sometimes whether my characters, shut up in the computer’s memory, are starting to feel rebellious. I’ve been writing long enough to think that they do and that they will soon assert themselves and demand their right to my attention. For although a writer can escape to the garden, that escape will never be for long. We are writers because we can’t help telling stories. Because we can’t leave the wondering, and the ‘what ifs?’ behind. So maybe, while I putter in the dirt, they are doing some plotting of their own, and soon, when I am lured back to the keyboard, things will be emerging there as well.

Weekend Update: April 19-20, 2025

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kate Flora (Monday), Maureen Milliken (Tuesday), Sandra Neily (Thursday) and Kait Carson (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

Matt Cost will be participating in A COOL LITTLE BOOK FAIR in Bath on Saturday, April 26th,, from 10-2 p.m. There will be a plethora of amazing Maine authors there signing and reading from their work. Check it out. Winter Street Center, 880 Washington Street, Bath .

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

How It All Began, Part Three

Before I was a writer, I was a dancer. This was at rehearsal in the art room for a number in The Music Man

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. My original plan was to tell you “How It All Began” with the early equivalent of blogging. That would be journals written in the form of letters to imaginary friends. The first was named Estelle, the second was Mara. Before the first of the journals, I had fat little daily diary books with dinky locks. To be honest, I mostly pasted in clippings from TV Guide to record what shows I watched.

It was sometime in high school that I switched to writing journal entries and I gave those up when I started college. When I was in my twenties, I destroyed all of the old diaries except for seventeen pages from the journal written during my senior year. I wish now that I’d kept the journals, or at least a few more pages from that one. And I wish I still had the essay I wrote for English class about the events that are on those pages, the one the teacher told me was “too personal to grade.” Why? Because those accounts literally spawned one of my earliest novels.

original 1988 cover
Just as well it wasn’t published since there’s no prom scene in the novel!

Way back in 1987, I sold a YA romance titled The Missing Bagpipe to an imprint of Silhouette Books. The editor who bought it, Carolyn Marino, liked my writing and asked for more, so I immediately started work on an idea I’d first had back in 1982—to use some of my own high school experiences in a novel. That book, Someday, just about wrote itself, especially when I incorporated a couple of short stories I’d already written, ones no children’s magazine had wanted to buy. I finished the manuscript in two months, sent it in, and Carolyn bought it as soon as she read it. It was scheduled for December 1988. Just before that, after I’d seen page proofs and had been sent a few copies of the cover flat, Silhouette discontinued the entire line. By then Carolyn had also bought rights to a sequel to The Missing Bagpipe. Yes, that’s right. All three were cancelled. Fortunately I got the rights back, and kept the advances, but it was still a big disappointment.

To make a long story short, The Missing Bagpipe resold to Avon Camelot for middle-grades readers as The Mystery of the Missing Bagpipes, the sequel was revamped into an adult category romance, and Someday took a long, winding road, with many revisions, until I finally published it myself. Today’s Someday is definitely not an autobiography. Believe me, I never had two guys vying for my attention, and the “Project Graduation” movement didn’t exist back in 1965. But there are a lot of moments that come directly from my life, starting with the first line of the novel:

“Someday, Kristy, if you stay as sweet and innocent as you are now, you’re going to make some lucky guy a great wife.”

That’s what the boy Kristy Russell is crazy about tells her, and that’s what I boy I had a crush on said to me when I gathered up all my courage and asked him to be my date for graduation night. In the novel, written for ages twelve and up, sixteen-year-old Kristy reacts as I did—the last thing she wants is to be thought “sweet and innocent.” Unlike me, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery, trying to figure out why he rejected her. In the attempt, she comes to realize that her own self-esteem is more important than what anyone else thinks of her and that knowledge enables her to make the right choice when she is faced with a potentially life-altering decision.

The pages recounting that painful experience with rejection are long gone from my  journal, but the ones from May 14-17, 1965, during and just after our high school production of The Music Man, for which I was choreographer yielded lots of details to augment what I could remember of the experience. My fictional Kristy is the choreographer for the same show, but although I used some bits and pieces, her relationships and how she deals with them are very different from mine. She has to choose between two boyfriends. I was a late bloomer in that area. Kristy has to deal with a “mean girl” but instead of putting up with her taunts, as I did, she resolves the situation by discovering what is behind the other girl’s animosity.

rehearsal, 1965

Anyone who was in our 1965 production will probably recognize a few incidents, from mishaps during the two performances, to a prank some of us played on an unpopular teacher after a rehearsal, to the way we socialized with and idolized the teacher who directed the production.

One thing I couldn’t use was our after-party, since a group of us celebrated at a nightspot in a nearby town. Although the drinking age at that time in New York State was eighteen, I was still underage, as were some of the others who managed to avoid being carded. By the time I started to write Someday, attitudes on alcohol at teen parties, even among teens, had undergone considerable change.

For the final revision, the one now available in paperback and e-book formats, I moved the story to Maine in 1992. My niece, who posed for the cover, gave me insight into both the differences and the similarities in our high school experiences. She found a reassuring number of similarities—human nature, after all, doesn’t change a whole lot.

I intended to reproduce several pages from my journal here, but when I reread them I discovered two things. First, most were written in the wee hours of the morning after each of the two shows. Can you say “stream-of-consciousness?” I jumped around a lot, referred to people by initials and nicknames (almost sixty years later, I have no idea who some of them are) and overused expressions like “Too funny!” Second, I included confidences from girls I was particular friends with in the cast and crew. Even all these years later, I’d feel guilty if I revealed them. So, you only get to see one page. If nothing else, reading it should prove that my ability to write an essay has improved considerably in six decades.

 

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

A Variety of Author Events by Matt Cost

One of the hats that we wear as writers is that of author events. They can take many forms, varieties, and types, but I thoroughly enjoy all of them. As my latest book, The Not So Merry Adventures of Max Creed, publishes this month, I am ramping up my promotional efforts. The variety of venues can easily be seen by my first couple of weeks of author appearances.

On April 17th, I will be at the Brown Memorial Library in Clinton, Maine. I do quite a few library COST TALKS surrounding the release of my newly published books, but what makes this one unique is that it has been requested that the focus be on At Every Hazard, my historical novel about Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War as the book is quite popular there.

A week later, I will be doing a radio podcast interview for the new book with Lisa at Big Blend Radio. To be perfectly honest, I often forget the details of my books by the time they publish. I finished editing The Not So Merry Adventures of Max Creed eighteen months ago. In that space of time, I have finished the sixth Goff Langdon book, Mainely Mayhem, the sixth Clay Wolfe book, Glow Trap, a new historical PI mystery set in 1955 Raleigh, the second Max Creed book, EveryThing vs Max Creed, and am just about to finish up the first draft of Bob Chicago Investigates.

Thus, this weekend, I read The Not So Merry Adventures of Max Creed to brush up on the finer points of the book that I wrote so as to be ready for interviews and talks. Good luck remembering the finer details of At Every Hazard which I wrote twenty books ago.

On April 26th, from ten to two, I will be attending A Cool Little Book Fair at the Winter Street Center in Bath, Maine. This was set up by Irene Drago, showcasing the power of the Maine writing community in boosting each other up. This will be a sign and sell event, but I will be doing a brief reading at some point during the festival.

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On April 30th, I will be participating in Noir at the Bar, at Novel, Book Bar & Café in Portland. This was the brainchild of  our very own Gabriela Stiteler and promises to be a rambunctious good time. There will nine authors, including me, reading from their own books. It is a chance to interact with fellow writers and readers, have a drink and a bite to eat, and have an all-around good time.

 

 

On May 1st, I will be in conversation with, and interviewing, our very own Jule Selbo, for the launch of her latest book, 7 Days, at Print, a Bookstore in Portland, Maine. It was an honor to be asked to participate in this event and discuss with her this fantastic fourth addition to her Dee Rommel series.

The Sounding Board has asked me to be their featured author for an event at the Skidompha Library on May 6th. The Sounding Board, amongst other things, hosts a writing group, and have asked me to come talk about my process and read something new to be discussed with the group, and then audience members will have a chance to read something they are working on.

Of course, there will be an entire host of more interviews, library COST TALKS, bookstore signings, festivals, and opportunities to get away from laptop screen and meet and speak to people face to face.

Come say hi, and if interested, give The Not So Merry Adventures of Max Creed a read. It might spark some ideas.

What sort of writing events do you like, either as a writer or a reader?

 

About the Author

Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries.

Cost has published six books in the Mainely Mystery series, starting with Mainely Power. He has also published five books in the Clay Wolfe Trap series, starting with Wolfe Trap. And finally, there are two books in the Brooklyn 8 Ballo series, starting with Velma Gone Awry. For historical novels, Cost has published At Every Hazard and its sequel, Love in a Time of Hate, as well as I am Cuba. The Not So Merry Adventures of Max Creed is his 17th published book.

Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. They have been replaced in the home with four dogs. Cost now spends his days at the computer, writing.

We May Be Terrible People

Rob Kelley here, thinking this week about the origins of our stories, but less “where do your stories come from?” and more “why the hell would you write about that awful stuff?” (I have a very dear friend, a kind, gentle soul, who has cheered on my publishing journey, but who has told me in no uncertain terms: I love you, but there is no way I will ever read your book. Ever.)

Credit: NOAA

I learned recently about the deeply unfortunate predicament of a professional acquaintance. They had given up a big job to take on an even bigger one in a different city, uprooting their family for the opportunity, only to land as a huge scandal erupted, positioning them as one of the poster children for the new company’s very public malfeasance. Wrong place, wrong time. Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, really. Just awful.

So what did I do? I sat down and feverishly outlined a plot of a new novel based on a similar tragedy.

Maybe this is how crime writers’ brains work. Humans tell stories to make sense of things. Mythologies tell stories of how the stars got in the sky, why the sun rises and sets, why hurricanes sweep whole villages away, why we have to die. Generally, why things happen, especially bad things.

Last Wednesday . . .

The human brain is a meaning-making machine. We look at a series of events and try to connect them, post hoc ergo propter hoc: after that because of that. Of course, sometimes those explanations are wrong. Hades captures Persephone but she eats pomegranate seeds in the underworld so must spend part of the year there, causing winter. (This year she seems to be hanging around a little longer than we might like.)

Of course, that’s the not the real explanation. It took millennia to develop the science and technology to observe the tilt of the earth’s axis and reason about its impact on solar radiation intensity. Hence, winter.

Crime writers make the most of that rationality to help guide a reader along a path of clues, misdirections, revelations, and realizations. It’s what our readers crave.

For me as a thriller writer, and I suspect crime writers in general, our books are also meaning-making machines. Not like we’re struggling to find the meaning of human existence (though sometimes we are), but we are working to bring order to chaos. Bad stuff happens to good people for no good reason. But we writers get to hijack that narrative and upgrade it: bad things happen to good people then good stuff happens: justice is served, the oppressor is overturned, the good guys and gals get their day in the sun, or, if not, we at least get to understand the reasons behind the bad stuff.

Although literary fiction needn’t follow this pattern, much of it does, and certainly most genre fiction does. The couple meets, sparks fly, but bad things intervene, then they struggle to get back together. A crime occurs and someone takes it on–an intrepid cop, detective, librarian, a symbologist, anyone really–and brings justice despite adversity. A bad thing happens and our hero is caught in a web of deceit with powerful forces arrayed against her until she finds help, courage, defiance, fights back and wins.

But when I share what I’m working on at the end of the day, gleefully recounting to Margot the absolutely awful thing I’ve invented to bedevil my protagonist or the horribly reprehensible thing I’ve realized my antagonist can unleash, I probably sound a bit evil (See my Mr. Burns impersonation from last month’s post!).

But the real joy for me in creating these impossibly dire and dark situations is the chance to create the inspiring character who is ultimately undaunted by them. To create the power to resist the really bad stuff that happens, to channel it into a form that shows that we can overcome adversity.

In short, we find bad things in the world and make them better. So, I’m not saying I’m not a terrible person for inventing all these horrors to unleash on my characters, I’m just saying I might not be.

What Keeps You Coming Back?

Hi all. Gabi here.

Last week, I was meeting with a group of crime writers and somehow we ended up on the topic of the subconscious. So stick with me. We are going to go deep today.

When I told my Abuelita, who is now 96, that my first story was going to be published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, she told me about how, when she was little, Tita Tey (my great-grandmother), would send her to pick up copies of that very same publication at the library in the small and dusty town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. She remembered her mother reading them, with her hair tinted red and a gin cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Mysteries are in your blood,” she said, a touch dramatically because that is how she rolls, but also with a certainty that 96 years of living allows for.

Any maybe there is something to this idea. My Abuelita remembers her grandfather, which would be my great-great grandfather, reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins in a dusty library in Mexico in the 1920s.

The love of crime fiction goes back five generations which somehow seems significant. That is more than a hundred years of mystery loving.

Why?

***

I have three very distinct formative memories of my love of reading mysteries.

In one, I am sitting on the wrap-around porch of the family farm in Somerset, PA. It is a summer night. It is raining. There is a bug zapper and a porch light and I’m sitting in a rocking chair with a small bowl of salted peanuts reading an Agatha Christie that somebody else left behind.

In another, I am in the bath tub reading a somewhat water-logged Elizabeth Peters that my aunt gave me. It’s sometime near Christmas. I read until the water goes cold and I am young enough for the romantic subplot to feel vaguely subversive.

And in the third, I’m bed at my grandparent’s house. In this memory, it’s a dog-eared copy of a Perry Mason that I smuggled upstairs and am reading with a book light under the covers. Downstairs my grandparents are in their recliners watching Matlock. My cousin is in the other room, already asleep.

Since then and now, the family farm has been sold, my aunt is living with Alzheimer’s, and my grandparents are buried next to each other in the Presbyterian cemetery in Greensburg.

I myself am a very different person than I was 30 years ago, carrying a knapsack filled with all sorts of both good and bad things.

***

In Black Cherry Blues (1989) by James Lee Burke, there is an especially moving passage that goes: “That night I dreamed of South Louisiana, of blue herons standing among flooded cypress tress, fields of sugarcane beaten with purple and gold light in the fall, the smell of smoldering hickory and pork dripping into the ash of our smokehouse, the way billows of fog rolled out of the swamp in the morning, so thick and white that sound — a bass flopping, a bullfrog falling off a log into the water — came to you inside a wet bubble, pelicans sailing out of the sun over the breakers out to the Gulf, the palm trees ragged and tree and clacking in the salt breeze, and the crab and crawfish boils and fish fries that went on year-round, as though there were no end to a season and death had no sway in our lives, and finally the song that always broke my heart, ‘La Jolie Blonde,’ which in a moment made the year 1945.”

The narrator, Dave Robicheax, meanders through a childhood memory that is so rich with details that I am thinking of my brothers and my sisters, of the neighborhood kids that I grew up with and will probably never see again, of the house that raised me with a blue barn and never-ending list of projects. It makes me think about all the things we hold on to as we age, and all the things we lose.

In this instance, Burke’s stream of conscious, poetic meditation is woven into well-developed plot with a narrator who is reluctant to involve himself in the business of others, but does so when he’s backed into a wall. (There are very few things I love more, it turns out, than a reluctant, imperfect hero.) Of course, there is a murder. There are clues. There are subsequent murders. There are buried bodies. There are more clues. There is a ticking clock. There are sympathetic but deeply flawed secondary characters. There is another body. There is a villain.

So perhaps part of why I love crime fiction is the form itself. The guideposts and guardrails of the genre: the red herrings and the smoking guns and the pursuit of justice.

But, perhaps even more so, there is a sense of returning to people and places and moments and discovering them anew. Maybe when I pick up a mystery, a piece of me feels the way I did when I was reading under the covers in the green room at my grandparent’s house. Maybe some part of my subconscious recalls the Klondike bars after dinner and the smell of chlorine from swimming at the Boyton’s pool and playing table tennis with my cousin in the basement. Maybe, the tropes and beats integrated into crime fiction trip these formative experiences, a thread pulling the me of the past to the me of now, allowing for a more fully integrated self.

***

I have taken to reading with my children, piled into one bed with Jack, our rescue lab. I know there is a finite amount of time for this sort of thing. These days seem long now, but I get that the years are short.

I wonder if one day, when I’m older and maybe far away, if they’ll pick up a book for a class or on an airplane or maybe with their own children and think about this sort of thing.

The brain works in mysterious ways, after all.

***

I’m wondering what you think. What are your formative crime-reading memories? What drew you to the genre? What keeps you here?

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In other news:

I’m hosting a Noir at the Bar on April 30 @ Novel in Portland with some other amazing local writers. Join us for a drink and some moral ambiguity. Event starts at 7:30 and is free.

I’m going to be interviewed on 5/1 on WABI 5 Bangor for the Book Club segment.

Gabi

www.gabrielastiteler.com