Scott Carson's Blog, page 2

First Chapter Fun

Michael was honored to have AN HONEST MAN featured on First Chapter Fun, and Hank Phillippi Ryan did an incredible job of reading the first chapter! You can watch and listen to the episode below and on Facebook.

There were also a bunch of fantastic questions from viewers, which you will find with answers below.

What are you looking forward to reading this fall?

Just started reading NINTH HOUSE by Leigh Bardugo and it is a very promising beginning. Interesting blend of the history of Yale’s secret societies and some supernatural spookiness. She delivers very nice writing. I have a biography of Larry McMurtry up next.

Is AN HONEST MAN based on real life story/events?

No, not based on any real-life events, although the fictional setting has some inspirations from Maine’s midcoast island communities. All of the books have some textural elements or settings that are inspired by reality. The plot, not so much.

Do you know the key points of your plot before you begin writing? Or do you let the story evolve?

I know almost nothing about the plot when I begin. I try an opening scenario and see if it excites me enough to keep following things. My process requires a lot of rewriting, but I’d argue it’s maybe more fun because I don’t know what happened, who did it, or how!

Was this always the first chapter of AN HONEST MAN, or did you start somewhere else first?

This was always the first chapter. That doesn’t always hold true — I’ve had more where I changed the opening than not, probably — but for this book, the original opening stuck.

Are you a boater? If so, do you have a boat? What type?

I’ve been on a lot of boats of all varieties over the years, but my favorite boat is one someone else owns! Ha. I do have a pontoon boat on a lake, but that’s not nearly as much fun to write about as a lobster boat and a luxury yacht at sea. I love sailboats but I’ve never yet made the mistake of buying one. Hopefully, I can keep my wits about me there.

How long did it take you to write AN HONEST MAN?

About 16 months, and many drafts. I wrote more than 1,000 pages to arrive at the 365 final version.

Was AN HONEST MAN always the title?

Long enough that I don’t remember another one, anyhow! It might’ve been called SALVATION POINT for a while. I usually have the title before the book, but sometimes they’ll change late in the game.

When did you know you wanted to be a professional author?

From the moment I understood you could make a living writing stories. Not long ago, my mother unearthed something I’d written in first grade saying I wanted to be an author. That’s an early commitment! Ha. 

How often do you get your ideas from the news? And do you have specific sources you read for ideas?

 I can’t say that I get ideas from the news, at least not in terms of a plot, but I become curious about a lot of topics from reading the news. I’m a former reporter and a local news junkie. I love the curious/unusual/odd storyline that you can find in local news. For example, I learned that one of the islands off the Maine coast has a single deputy as its law enforcement presence. I thought that was a fascinating role! I read a long piece about the New York water supply that fascinated me, and it led me to the book that became THE CHILL. So the news is often a starting point, but it is almost never a crime story.

Did AN HONEST MAN end up the way you first imagined it or did it evolve along the way?

They always evolve enormously. I don’t know anything about the ending when I start, so I can’t say that I really imagine any clear version at the start. I just follow the characters to the end, then go back and do a second draft that’s much more polished than the first, with a clearer sense of the story.

What are your favorite types of books to read?

I read almost everything. I read about 100 books each year and it’s pretty evenly split between fiction and non-fiction. I like my suspense and thrillers, of course, but a lot of the writers I come back to regularly are far removed from that genre. Recently, I’ve been falling in love with audiobooks, and when you discover a really good narrator, it’s worth following them into new territory. 

What are your pets names & ages?

I’m down to two now: a cat named John Pryor (the name of the gravestone I found him sitting on), and a dog named Lola. She’s almost 11. Pryor is about 10, although if you base it on the gravestone, he’s closer to 125. I lost my old buddy Marlowe, my first cat, this spring. He’d been around for every book since SORROW’S ANTHEM, my second novel. He got the next one, LOST MAN’S LANE, across the finish line before he checked out. I made sure to thank him in the acknowledgments for hanging in there until it was done. I like to think he was curious about the ending, but he never seemed to be a huge fan of what I was up to at the desk, based on his tendency to knock everything off it while I was working.

Are you ever tempted to have an ���unexplained��� crime in one of your books?

Well, I ended RISE THE DARK with an unexplained crime. The reader knows who did it — but not how, or how it will be fixed. One of these days, I might get around to addressing that!

Do either of your pets ever make cameos?

Not by name, but the dog’s likeness has appeared in several. The cats are more creatures of inspiration than cameo characters. My old cat, Marlowe, was particularly helpful in demonstrating feral feline behaviors while I was writing THE RIDGE, which features some big cats. Marlowe thought he was a tiger, so it was helpful to watch him.

Was AN HONEST MAN easy to write or did it challenge you?

This one was a hell of a challenge. They all are, really — I try not to repeat myself, and that makes each one a fresh challenge in its own way — but some stories put up more of a fight than others, and AN HONEST MAN was one of those. They always end up being my sentimental favorites, because over the years I’ll remember the battle more than I remember the details. It’s like fishing: the one that fights the hardest is the most memorable. It might not be your trophy catch, but it lingers longer. 

ON Maine Storytelling

Beauty and brutality share the same waters and ridges; the place is always active, and the idyllic moment may be swiftly replaced with a punishing one. The past weighs heavily on the present, chilled breaths on the neck as you drive by tilting tombstones in forgotten graveyards.��

Read the article at Crimereads

On Beginning a Career in a Morgue

I���m now 18 books into a career that began in a morgue ��� really ��� and has taken me to the Maine islands where my latest, AN HONEST MAN, is set. After that many books, it���s interesting to look back for commonalities. The obvious answer is that they all fall under the umbrella of suspense ��� the��what if?����� questions, but there are two other things that stand out to me:

Generous people and bad weather.

Those early days in the morgue ��� fear not, it was a newspaper morgue, not a coroner���s office ��� featured treasured journalism mentors who gave me an invaluable writer���s education that led to publication far earlier than I deserved. Once published, the writers I viewed as icons ��� Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Stephen King, Laura Lippman, Dean Koontz, and so many more ��� were invariably (and inexplicably) generous. When it turns out that the books you love are written by good people, it���s both a relief and a gift. To know that they���ve read my stuff at all, let alone supported it, remains surreal. So, a big and enduring round of ���thank you���s��� to all those people.

Now for the bad weather.

I didn���t think about it much early in my career. After��SO COLD THE RIVER��and��THE CYPRESS HOUSE, I was aware that I���d written about tornadoes and a hurricane, sure.��THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD��featured a forest fire. AN HONEST MAN is set on a fictional Maine island in a very-real struggle with rapidly warming waters. While the plot is a crime story, the environment is very much a character, active ��� and aggressive.

As I set out on a book tour that began in Toronto, where forest fire smoke blanketed the country, passes through Phoenix and Houston, where heat records are broken daily, before ending in Maine, where those island communities ponder what comes next, it���s obvious why my books feature an active, aggressive climate character. We���re living with one! There���s been a lot of talk about the crime novel as a social novel, but I suspect if you analyze the past few decades of it, you���ll see a lot of environmental novels in the mix. Fiction, the famous saying goes, is the lie that tells the truth.

With AN HONEST MAN, it is once again a privilege to be in the company of so many great liars ��� and generous people ��� that we know as novelists. Keep your eye out for a truth or two in there! And thank you so much for reading.

The Globe and Mail on AN HONEST MAN

The story begins with a mass murder on a yacht. Seven men are dead, two of them U.S. senators, and the perfect suspect is at hand. Israel Pike is infamous as a man who killed his own father. Elsewhere on the island, a young boy runs away from an abusive father and stumbles upon a derelict house. A woman greets him with a hatchet in her hand and the promise that if he makes a sound, she���ll kill him. How the stories of the boy and Israel Pike converge is what makes Koryta great. His use of atmosphere and his compelling characters keep the action moving to the very end. Again, don���t start this one if you have to stop to feed the cat or sleep.

Click here to read the full article

Tribute to MWA Grand Master Michael Connelly

On April 27, 2023, Michael joined Alafair Burke to present the Grand Master Award to Michael Connelly at the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards ceremony.

Their tribute is below, as is the video of the presentation. Enjoy!

Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts

We have always wanted to collaborate as writers, but also wanted to keep our friendship intact. When Mystery Writers of America asked us to contribute this tribute, we knew there would be no possible creative differences. With a career spanning four decades and nearly 40 bestselling, award-winning novels, Michael Connelly is the gold standard for crime writing, and we join the rest of our community in celebrating his receipt of the Grand Master Award in recognition of his significant contributions to our genre.

More than thirty years ago, we met Detective Hieronymus ���Harry��� Bosch, a Vietnam veteran who served as a ���tunnel rat��� before joining the Los Angeles Police Department, in Connelly���s debut, The Black Echo (1992).  That novel earned immediate prestige, including MWA���s Edgar Award for Best First Novel, but perhaps no one could have foreseen Bosch���s lasting resonance.  Bosch has appeared in 24 novels, a successful seven-season television run, and currently remains on the air in a spin-off series.

Bosch���s mantra from The Black Echo to the present day sums up not only Bosch���s thought about a murder case, but also Connelly���s approach to his craft: ���Everybody counts or nobody counts.���

What those five words have meant to the readers of mystery fiction in the past thirty-one years can���t be overstated. Connelly doesn���t write of infallible police detectives crusading against simple villains. His thoughtful and nuanced approach to character has rendered a fictional mirror to our own reality, examining the myriad struggles, victories, and even shames of a modern police department in one of the world���s major cities. He has written his fiction with the reporter���s eye that earned him a spot on the shortlist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986, and in doing so, has set a new standard for contemporary crime fiction. Connelly writes about the human condition with an unflinching eye, providing readers with an opportunity to consider the lives of others, to think outside of their silos and worldviews. For a writer who got his start when a librarian offered him a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird, empathy has remained a central part of the mission.

Everybody counts.

As noteworthy as the creation of Harry Bosch was to our genre, he���s only one of the enduring characters in Michael Connelly���s Los Angeles. Bosch occupies the same world as his half-brother Mickey Haller, the defense attorney known as ���The Lincoln Lawyer��� for his habit of working from the backseat of his car. Recent novels have found Bosch operating without a badge but frequently partnered with LAPD Detective Renee Ballard, who works the night shift, aka the ���Late Show.���  And watching all of it is investigative journalist Jack McEvoy, first introduced in The Poet. Haller already has a feature film and Netflix series of his own, and a series with Ballard is in development, along with another featuring Bosch sidekick J. Edgar, as Connelly���s characters are now as indelible in Hollywood as in publishing. His work has been translated into forty languages, and more than eighty million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. He has also published more than twenty short stories, edited multiple anthologies, and has appeared in the Best American Mystery Stories series repeatedly.

Connelly has also put his journalistic talents to good use in our genre.  He is the author of the book Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers, chronicling his prior career as a reporter.  He produced two documentary films, Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story (about the lifelong struggles of jazz saxophonist Frank Morgan, ending with a tribute concert at San Quentin State Prison) and Tales of the American (about the American hotel and its cultural role in the development of Los Angeles���s Art District).  He is the creator and host of two true-crime podcasts: Murder Book (a multi-season podcast featuring homicide cases not covered by popular media) and The Wonderland Murders & The Secret History of Hollywood.

All of this work takes all of the work, and managing success is its own challenge. One of his mantras is to ���write with your head down.��� No one has done it better. They say every writer has an ego, but it would take a detective of Harry Bosch-caliber to find Michael Connelly���s.  

We both say we���re lucky to have known Michael Connelly���s generosity since we began our own publishing careers, but that wasn���t really luck, because he has made support of new writers a priority from the first days of his own career. We are among the many writers who have learned from him, not only about craft and discipline, but also the conscientiousness it takes to juggle it all while remaining a good colleague, friend, spouse, and father. We notice when he writes early in the morning and late at night so he doesn���t miss the moments that matter with his family and a tight knit crew of siblings and friends. We see the way his career has been lifted and supported by his wife, Linda, daughter, Callie, and sister, Jane. Michael Connelly might be the face of the gold-star standard in crime fiction, but he would be the first to tell you the work is absolutely a family affair.

As Janet Maslin of the New York Times has said, ���Of all the big-name writers who dominate this genre, Mr. Connelly is the most solid, old-school pro,��� and it is such an honor to celebrate him as he receives the esteemed Grand Master award. Congratulations, friend.