David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 40

W is for Winning

 

At the end of every STAC Mystery Joe, Sheila and Brenda come out winners. They have to. It’s in the nature of the beast. What would be the point if the police solved the crime or if the perpetrator escaped the clutches of our friendly gang of boomers?

Note: there are no spoilers here, but to fully understand what I’m talking about, you’d have to read the books.

But look again at, say, My Deadly Valentine, and how much of a winner is Joe? How many hard lessons did he learn in A Murder for Christmas? Was Brenda really a winner in The I-Spy Murders?

The same can be said of The Handshaker. Is it really a victory? And in Voices, did winning mean everything or was the price of victory too high.

The happy ending is not a prerequisite of any crime novel or thriller, but victory has to be assured. Winning, however, may mean defeating the bad guy, but quite often it leaves the hero with a feeling of that other ‘W’. Sadder but wiser.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

V is for Valentine, My Deadly

 

My Deadly Valentine was the sixth STAC Mystery to be released under the Crooked Cat imprint, and it’s a little different from the others.

It’s the shortest, a shade shy of 50,000 words. The action takes place entirely within the fictitious town of Sanford in West Yorkshire, and it has the distinction of being the first STAC Mystery to break into the UK Kindle Crime, Thriller and Mystery/British Detectives top 100 on the day of its release.

The launch presented us with problems, too. We wanted it out there before Valentine’s Day to give buyers a chance to have it in place on the Kindle for the actual day, but my wife and were on holiday in Spain, and we didn’t get home until February 4th. To further complicate matters, Laurence and Steph Patterson, the husband wife team behind Crooked Cat, were going away on the 7th of February (as I recall). We eventually decided upon Wednesday, February 6th, and still in holiday mode, I recollect it being one of the most tiring launches.

The tale differs markedly from other STAC Mysteries. We get a look into Joe’s private life, his loneliness and his search for female companionship. Worse than that, when serial killer, the Sanford Valentine Strangler strikes again, Joe doesn’t have far to look for the major suspect. It’s him.

If you want to know more, you’ll have to read it, but here’s an extract and Joe is trying to persuade Brenda that she should put out feelers for him with the woman he wants to date.

It was three thirty in the afternoon, and the Lazy Luncheonette was ready for closing. Lee had left at two, the cleaning was done, and the three remaining crew were settled for their customary last cup of tea of the day.

“Faint heart never won fair maid, Joe,” Sheila pointed out.

“Cut the clichés,” he retorted. “Come on, Brenda, you know me. I’m not good with women.”

Sheila almost dropped her cup. “You didn’t waste any time with Melanie Markham over New Year.”

“She hit on me,” Joe pointed out. “Aw, come on, Brenda, all I’m asking is that you ask Letty for a date on my behalf. Break the ice for me.”

“I’ll break a bit more than ice,” Brenda threatened. “You never have a problem speaking to total strangers when they come in the café, do you? I’ve never heard such rudeness.”

“That’s business. And I don’t think walking up to Letty and saying, ‘you’re a rough looking old sow, but you’ll do for Valentine’s Night’, is gonna get me very far.”

“She’s not rough looking,” Sheila pointed out. “In fact, she’s quite pretty.”

Joe took another mouthful of tea and sighed. “I didn’t mean it literally. What I’m saying is I need to be a bit more tactful with her than I am with the customers, and me and tact are not always the best of friends.”

“Tact and I,” Sheila corrected him.

“Oh, I should say you’re a lot more tactful than me, Sheila.” Joe grinned at her.

She tutted and looked up at the ceiling as if seeking divine inspiration. She, too, drank from her beaker. “What is this sudden need for female companionship?”

Brenda guffawed. “Mid-life crisis… about fifteen years too late, I reckon. He’s feeling his oats, isn’t he? Ever since Melanie, he’s been hankering after some more action.”

“Not far off the mark,” Joe agreed. “Look, I’ve been on my own since Alison left, and that’s, what? Ten years? Is there something wrong with wanting a woman in my life again?”

“Nothing,” Brenda agreed. “Go for it, Joe, but go for it on your own, don’t ask me to do your matchmaking.”

“You have more experience than me, Brenda.”

She stared sharply at him. “What?”

“You’ve had more men than Sanford Main Pit when it was running on three shifts, and…”

“You’re walking dangerously close to the edge, Joe Murray. Be careful you don’t fall off.”

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My Deadly Valentine is available as a paperback and as an e-book download in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

 

U is for Underwear and Why It Stays On

 

They say every novel should have sex scenes. Why? Because sex is a part of life.

The STAC Mysteries have no sex scenes. Why? Because they are written as entertainment, not a reflection of reality, and sex would be a distraction from the main thrust (no pun intended).

Sex rates no more than passing mention. Brenda does her share of bedhopping, and Joe does fairly well with various women in the novels. There are other characters who blatantly indulge their passions. George Robson like to put it about a bit, Alec and Julia Staines are never slow to lock the door and close the curtains when they get to their hotel, and in A Murder for Christmas, Jennifer Hardy is described as a high class, academic tramp.

But on every occasion, we stop at the bedroom door. We never see them at it.

There are other considerations. Sex scenes, when properly written can add to a tale, but when they’re badly written, they become laughable.

My other works contain such scenes.

The Handshaker is the tale of a sadistic serial rapist and murderer, and it is littered with such scenes, but they are not erotic, they are not arousing. If anything, they should convey a sense of horror that a human being could perpetrate such crimes upon another. I also have to say that it he original draft they were omitted, and I only put them in because an editor with a well known publishing house suggested I should.

Where STAC is concerned, I have never found any need to insert graphic scenes of a couple carrying one another to the nether realms of ecstasy, and for that reason, the underwear will always stay on.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

T is for Top 100

 

Writing the book is, in many ways, the easy part. Once it’s written and out there, getting it noticed then becomes the main aim, and it’s a time consuming, frustrating job.

Amazon come in for a lot of criticism, but in their defence they provide authors with all the tools they need to raise their books’ visibility, and the best amongst them are the genre or category charts.

The STAC Mysteries are classified under Crime, Thriller & Mystery/British Detectives. As I write this, seven a.m. on a Tuesday morning all seven STAC Mysteries can be found in that genre’s top 100.

The Filey Connection is placed highest at about number 20, My Deadly Valentine is lowest at number 94 (and by the time I post this, it could all have changed again).

The categories were designed to make life easy for book buyers. The genre chart is a useful by-product, and it’s one any author can use.

I follow the chart movements daily, always ready to tweet or post significant events. Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend was the first title to make the top 20 of the British Detectives chart. My Deadly Valentine set a precedent when it entered the Top 100 on the day of its release. None of the previous titles had done so. It peaked at an absolute high of number 22. The Chocolate Egg Murders went one step further. It, too, entered the chart on the day of release, but within a week it had made the top ten and eight days after launch, it sat at number 5. You can imagine how I felt with one of my titles sitting alongside the greats of whodunit writing; Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Christie.

The genre top 100 helps raise the visibility of the author’s work. Most buyers look at the first four or five pages of a site. If your book is in the genre chart, it will be found in those pages.

But you should never forget that it is not you, the author, who puts the book in that chart. It is the readers. I offer my thanks to them every time I see my book(s) climb another few places.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

S is for Speed

 

I’m fortunate in that I can work very quickly. When I think of a novel, it pops out of my head almost fully formed. I have only to write and tweak it. Here again I’m fortunate in that my typing speed, while nothing near secretarial standard, is nevertheless quite fast: 35-40 wpm. The genre, too, doesn’t demand great length. Anywhere from 60,000-80,000 words is sufficient for a cosy whodunit.

I refute the idea that there is a formula to whodunits. There is a broad pattern, certainly, but a formula would turn out precisely the same story every time, only with different the characters. A pattern on the other hand, lets me play with the system to produce work that I sufficiently varied to keep the readers happy and guessing, and I can vary that pattern any time I wish, as indeed I did with My Deadly Valentine.

All these factors come together to let me turn out the books quite quickly. If I seriously applied myself, I’m sure I could produce one every 4-5 weeks, but I do have a life to lead beyond STAC, thank you very much.

Do we pay a price for speed? Yes. The result of, say, two months work is not going to challenge the depth of larger works such as my novel, Voices, but then I’m not trying to. In Voices, it takes 800 words (2-3 pages) to get Chris from the gates to the front door of Moor Grange. In The Chocolate Egg Murders it takes 26 words (about two lines) to get Joe from the bus to the hotel reception. I’m turning out light-hearted mysteries, not commenting on the human condition.

I don’t set out to write fast. It just happens. Are the results worth it? All seven STAC Mysteries are still in the UK Kindle Crime, Mystery & Thriller/British Detectives top 100, and one of them, The Chocolate Egg Murders, has never been out of it.

But I’ll have a bit more to say about that tomorrow.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

R is for Romance

 

The STAC Mysteries don’t go a bundle on romance, but Joe, Sheila and Brenda are no strangers to it.

As part of a writing course I took many years ago, I have read a few romantic novels, and I can hardly criticise them. They are perennially popular, and for anyone who says that they’re rose-tinted tosh, bearing little resemblance to the real world, let me remind you, the STAC Mysteries are rose-tinted snapshots of crime, with little resemblance to the reality of murder.

My only beef with romances are the heroes. They’re usually wealthy, incredibly good looking alpha-males. Oh yes? And us short, overweight ageing crumblies don’t know what it’s about? As one author of such romances pointed out to me, if you’re looking for escapism, who’s going to be interested in a short, overweight, ageing crumblie?

Point taken. But how does this explain Joe’s attraction? He’s short, mean, moody, scrawny, terminally tight-fisted and obsessed with business. Yet women fall for him all the time.

And Joe, too, feels the pinch on loneliness. That’s why he dated Letty Hill in My Deadly Valentine, it’s why we find him cuddling up to Brenda in The Chocolate Egg Murders.

Although he admits his share of blame in the breakdown of his marriage (his obsession with the Lazy Luncheonette) his judgement is nevertheless often suspect. He tends to gather the wrong kind of woman.

Desperation?

It’s certainly a search for that special someone with whom he can share his life, and it’s a point that will be brought home with a vengeance in a title due out later this year.

Watch this space.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

Q is for Questioning

 

There are rules for the police when it comes to questioning a suspect, and a suspect is entitled to legal representation while he/she is being questioned.

Joe, Sheila and Brenda, and every other sleuth in history suffer no such restrictions. They are free to ask what they want of whom they want.

This is not, however, the advantage it might at first appear. The suspect is just as free to ignore the question, and it’s fun putting this kind of obstacle in Joe’s path. It’s not difficult to get round, either. I simply put Joe alongside a police officer who insists that if the suspect doesn’t answer, then he will ask the same question, possibly under caution, and demand an answer.

It can also get Joe into quite a lot of trouble. He’s been threatened in a number of the titles, most notably The Chocolate Egg Murders. Joe may be afraid, but he is not fazed by it. He knows his friends from the Sanford 3rd Age Club will back him up when he’s in trouble.

He was also on the receiving end of it in My Deadly Valentine, when he is a suspect. I’m not about to give the game away, so I’ll say no more than that, except that, when he is suspected, he is at his most irritable, and some of his comebacks are downright insulting.

A salesman friend once told me that the best way of maintaining control in any situation is not to answer questions but ask them. It’s odd, but it seems to me that when Joe asks questions, it’s usually the signal for things to get out of control.

But as a private investigator, albeit only part time, that’s his job. It’s when he gets the answers to those questions that he finds the piece of the puzzle that don’t quite fit, and it leads him to the truth.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

P is for Proof

At the end of A Halloween Homicide, the perpetrator challenges Joe, “You can’t prove one word of this,” to which Joe responds, “No I can’t, but I don’t need to. The police will do that.”

In most detective mysteries, the crime is murder, and in the UK that demands proof beyond reasonable doubt. In real life, the police have an army of scientific methods available to them in order to establish the proof, backed up by statements from witnesses and sometimes, confessions from the accused.

Joe, Sheila, Brenda and their ilk, don’t have such resources, so their deductions are based on observation and conflict of evidence. In The Filey Connection, someone was not where they had claimed to be, in A Murder for Christmas, someone left a trivial, but vital piece of evidence where they shouldn’t, and in the The I-Spy Murders, something was only possible from one specific location.

In all three cases, and in most of the other titles, there may be alternative explanations for the Joe’s observations, but it is not his role to deal with it. That’s up to the police.

These observations can be used to send the sleuth in the wrong direction, and Joe gets it wrong as often as he gets it right, but it’s in the nature of the genre that he will eventually correct his error.

So if our trio of tec’s don’t prove their case, what do they do?

They observe. Joe has a keen eye, Sheila has an intelligent mind, and Brenda is a people watcher. Between the three of them, they can demonstrate the likeliest scenario, outing the police on the right track.

And how do the police react this? They’re grateful… until Joe is gone, and then they’re grumbling that this little smartarse and his two companions made them appear incompetent.

But then, that’s in the nature of the genre, too.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

O is for Other Work

 

The thrust of this Blogging from A to Z Challenge has been the STAC Mysteries, but they’re not the only works I produce.

Like most writers, I began years ago producing factual articles and short stories, but I hankered after turning out full length novels, and one of the first major projects I turned out was a book entitled Murder By Suggestion. In its original form, it never really got off the ground (although it very nearly became a TV mini-series). Much later, I rewrote it, and it became The Handshaker.

 

The premise is simple: how far can you push a hypnotised subject? Can you get them to commit murder? Suicide? Passively submit to rape? No spoilers, but that’s where we open the hunt for a serial killer and rapist, The Handshaker.

Note: this is not a police procedural.

Voices is another of my darker tales. At 110,000 words, it’s also the longest novel I’ve ever produced, and the first draft was even longer.

 

The catalyst for this story hinges on my deafness and the brains tricky little habit of trying to persuade me everything is fine by producing unintelligible muttering. Rather like the noise of next door’s TV heard through the walls.

Part horror, part sci-fi, a complete thriller set in the everyday ordinariness of a mundane English town, it also ranks as the finest work I ever produced. Not a STAC Mystery by any stretch of the imagination.

There are two other titles I’m going to mention. Both are ribald, sledgehammer humour, both acted as safety valves, dragging me away from the pressure of work and giving me something lighter to potter with.

They’re Flatcap’s works.

 

We all know Flatcap. He’s the old git who sits in the corner of the tap room, taking two hours over every half of bitter and voicing opinions on everything under the sun, and he really knows what he’s talking bout… according to him.

Here’s a snippet of Flatcap and his advice on camping holidays.

Many camping sites have toilet facilities, but some don’t, so just to be safe, you should carry a bi-pot. These portable lavatories come in three sizes based on the waste tank capacity: 10, 13, and 20 litres. If you’re the kind who likes a lot of curry, I’d go for the 20-litre size and plan on emptying it every other day.

If you’re determined to carry your own khasi, make sure the tent is well secured to the ground before using it. It’s no use pleading ignorance when hurricane Nora pays a visit and whips the tent away to reveal Her Indoors snoring her head off on her cot and you sitting on the portapotty reading the Sunday Mirror.

And if holidays don’t interest you, how about Flatcap’s Guide to Sex? Once gain, our man’s proves that when it comes to not knowing what  he’s talking about, he is world class.

Here again is a little taster of what you can expect.

 

I know you can buy flavoured condoms, but have you seen the price? Outrageous. Whereas there’s always a drop of custard left over after your sticky toffee pudding, isn’t there.

A word of caution. Most restaurants, even the downmarket, pub grub type places, frown upon their patrons smothering rubbers in custard, especially while it’s still behind the counter. Even when it is delivered to your table, it’s still pretty bad form. Aside from attracting more attention than Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, the management are likely to take the hump, label you a pervert and throw you out.

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Voices and The Handshaker are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats

Flatcap’s Guide to UK Holidays and Flatcap’s Guide to Sex are exclusive to Amazon Kindle.

N is for Naughty Language

 

There isn’t any. At least, not what you’d call naughty language.

The STAC Mysteries are cosy crimes. The accent is on the mystery, not a graphic depiction of real life, so there is no need for strong language.

It’s over fifty years since the famous Chatterley trial brought the word ‘fuck’ onto the printed page. It’s now so commonplace that it’s lost much of its power, and most of its ability to shock. And yet, as far as I’m concerned, it has no place in the STAC Mysteries.

That is the extreme to which I won’t go, but stepping back from that particular boundary, it’s sometimes difficult to decide what is and is not acceptable. I even stressed the point in the text of The I-Spy Murders, when the producer and her assistant discuss Brenda’s irritated language.

In the control room, Helen blanched. “Should we bleep that out?”

“What? Arse?” Katy demanded. “That’s nothing.”

“I still think we should bleep it out.”

That’s nothing, Katy insists, but to some people it can still be construed as rough language.

The good people at Crooked Cat also take this matter quite seriously. There’s a gag in My Deadly Valentine, where Joe is recalling having told Chief Inspector Vickers to get a dog so he can tell the difference between a bark and berk (berk is common a English word for a someone behaving like an idiot).

In the original draft, however, Joe had been talking about typographical error whereby Vickers had left the letter ‘o’ out of the word ‘count’. Crooked Cat were (rightly) concerned that it was a step too far for a cosy crime novel, so I changed it.

I write material which is much darker than the STAC Mysteries, and I have no hesitation in using ‘industrial language’ in those texts, but such words have no place in the world of Joe, Sheila, Brenda and the Sanford 3rd Age Club.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats