Art Taylor's Blog, page 58

The First Two Pages: City of Woe by Christopher Ryan

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

Last year’s Deadly Ink introduced me to a lot of great writers, and I’ve been fortunate to host several of them at The First Two Pages already: Teel James Glenn, Carol Gyzander, and James McCrone.  Today, Christopher Ryan offers another essay—and a very special one, examining both the first version and the final version of the opening pages to his novel City of Woe.

Not only is Christopher a fine novelist but he’s also accomplished in several other directions: journalist, screenwriter, actor, director, producer, and teacher. He’s written YA fiction and comics as well, and he works with Alex Simmons on the podcast Tell the Damn Story. I was very grateful to be a guest on that podcast recently—a fun conversation Chris and I had in the hallway at Deadly Ink!

For more information on his work, check out his website here—and enjoy the essay below!

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

Ryan City of Woe

SleuthSayers: On Subplots & Multiple Points of View in the Short Story

SleuthSayers allowed me to step back in the rotation for a guest post on short stories—sparked by a couple of questions I’d seen online recently about incorporating subplots and multiple points of view in short fiction. Here’s the set-up on those questions:

Back over the holidays—just before Christmas, then just after the new year—a couple of questions online got me thinking about specific aspects of short story writing, how I teach students to write them, and how I write them myself. First, Amy Denton posted a question on the Sisters in Crime Guppies message board: “Depending on the length, is there enough room in a short story for a subplot?” Responses ranged widely, and the discussion was extensive, but with no clear consensus.

Then, reviewing a couple of short stories from a recent issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Catherine Dilts wrote, “A rule beginning writers encounter is that multiple points of view can’t be used effectively in short stories…. How does telling a tale through more than one narrator work?” A story by fellow SleuthSayer Robert Lopresti, “A Bad Day for Algebra Tests,” offered Dilts one example of how well that approach can succeed.

Read the full post here.

The Wickeds: On Uncomfortable Reading

Thanks to Liz Mugavero for inviting me to contribute a guest post to The Wickeds. A post  last week mentioned books everyone got for Christmas, and one that I received myself stood out as something worth talking about. Here’s a preview of the book I write about:

The premise of Mirror, Mirror is intriguing: The main character, Peter Hibben, finds in his bathroom “a large, fleshy, terrifyingly lifeless woman on the floor, apparently shot to death by the gun lying beside her.” He recognizes the gun, doesn’t recognize the woman, but as he admits, “trembling, sweaty, nauseating logic tells me that since the lady’s remains repose on my bathroom floor in my own locked, barred, closed-circuit-TV-guarded apartment on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, and since she is semi-clothed in a way that makes it clear she had not simply stepped in off the street, there could have been some connection between us. With emphasis on the physical.”

A locked room mystery then, and as Martin Edwards described it, a “whowasdunin” too. And the book’s structure proves fascinating. As Peter struggles to remember (or admit?) who the victim is and his own role in the death, a fantasy or dream plays out in that bathroom: his therapist and a lawyer (also his ex-wife’s new husband) taking opposing sides in a trial scene, interrogating Peter as well as his family members and others, each new round of questions delving into some new chapter from his past and trying to figure out the truth of what’s happened.

As for what stuck with me and how it circles back to the headline about being “uncomfortable”—well, read the full post here.

The First Two Pages: “The Cardboard Box” by Terence Faherty

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” appeared in the July 1891 issue of The Strand Magazine. Nearly a century and a quarter later, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine published an “earlier draft” of Conan Doyle’s famous story, courtesy of Terence Faherty—the first of a series of parodies which reveal Terry’s winning mix of cleverness, wit, and, in equal measure, affection for the Sherlock Holmes stories.

EQMM‘s January/February 2019 issue features the latest of these stories, “The Cardboard Box”—which is the subject of Terry’s First Two Pages essay today.

I’ve admired Terry’s Sherlock stories since the start and love his short fiction generally; his EQMM short story “Infinite Uticas,” a 2018 Macavity Award finalist, was one of my favorites I read last year—brilliant really. He’s also won the Shamus Award and been an Edgar finalist for his novels, including both the Owen Keane mysteries and the Scott Elliott mysteries. To find our more about his work, visit his website here.

And if you enjoy the essay below and the short story in EQMM, here’s some additional good news: Gasogene Books, an imprint of Wessex Press, will launch a collection of these stories at the Baker Street Irregulars annual get-together this coming weekend, January 10-12 in New York. The True Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Annotated Edition, including all seven stories from EQMM and four additional ones never before published, will be available on the Wessex Press website beginning January 13—and then available more widely (Amazon) in June.

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

SleuthSayers: Revolutions, Resolutions

As an erstwhile SleuthSayer (not hardly emeritus and with columns still ahead too), I was pleased when Robert Lopresti nudged me to contribute a resolution to the round-up he was coordinating. The post came out today on New Year’s Eve, and my fellow contributors have a wide range of plans and goals for 2019—and some obstacles and struggles to overcome too, some larger than others (my heart goes out to Melodie Campbell).

My own resolution relates to a few current projects including my boarding school project—and some new reading connected to it, including Michael Gilbert’s Night of the Twelfth.

Check out the full list of resolutions here. And Happy New Year to all!

Washington Independent Review of Books: Keigo Higashino’s Newcomer

The first thing heard about Newcomer, Keigo Higashino’s newest book in translation, was about it being a novel in stories—right up my alley, of course. I was pleased to have the chance to review it for the Washington Independent Review of Books—and even more pleased to find the book itself delightful!

Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Each section of Newcomer — nine in all — is a self-contained story, with its own conflicts, its own resolution, and its own focus character, the latter loosely identified in each story’s title: “The Girl at the Rice Cracker Shop,” “The Apprentice at the Japanese Restaurant,” “The Clock Shop’s Dog,” and so on.

To the author’s great credit, the individual tales stand strong one after another, and the accumulating storyline gains momentum and weight in the process. Structure and character ultimately intertwine nicely with Kaga as the supporting person who connects each tale — searching for Mineko Mitsui’s murderer but solving other, smaller mysteries along the way, funny, seemingly throwaway questions: Who spiked a snack cake with wasabi? Why would someone buy an extra pair of scissors when the ones they have work just fine?

In solving these little side puzzles, however, Kaga also helps to resolve personal dramas and dilemmas….

Read the full review here.

Happy Holidays!

Sherlock reunited with Irene Adler—newest Christmas ornament on the tree!

A fun present on a fine day.

Happy holidays to all!

Lark! The Herald Angels Sing—In Stereo!

A few days ago, when I went to shelve my inscribed copy of Lark! The Herald Angels Sing, Donna Andrews’ latest Meg Langslow novel, I was surprised to see I already had another copy there. How in the world…?

Well, quickly I realized what had happened, but I decided to have fun with the extra copy, so I posted this challenge on Facebook:

It would take a little bit to explain why I have duplicate signed copies of Donna Andrews’ latest Christmas mystery. So in the spirit of the season, an odd giveaway! Come up with the best reason (not necessarily the *correct* one, btw) WHY I have two of them (by midnight Friday!) and I’ll send the extra to you for free—maybe even with a little revised personalization if I can get together with Donna! (And psst, Donna: no hints why I have both!)

I so much enjoyed the responses that friends offered. Below is a quick sampling of some favorites.

From Greg Herren:

To fulfill the ancient Mayan prophecy, written in glyphs in a forgotten pyramid somewhere in the jungles of the Yucatan: if someone buys two copies of Donna Andrews’ latest Christmas mystery in the year 2018, peace and prosperity and enormous success will come to that person.

From Richard Nanian:

You suspect she had been kidnapped and replaced by an imposter, so you had a second one signed to compare the handwriting.

From Dave Stroup:

During a high-energy particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, a mouse carrying a piece of cracker dropped it into the proton beam. The beam was deflected into the Earth’s core and split into multiple pathways that briefly opened small, book-sized windows into a parallel universe identical in almost all ways to ours. This occurred exactly as you were grabbing your original copy of the book, resulting in its “duplicate” taking it’s place. The scientists shut off the experiment and no other interactions with the parallel universe have been reported.

From Mark Baker:

You were time traveling again. You went back in time to when you were getting the books signed, but by reliving the moment, you discovered you had two copies when you arrived back in the present.

I know that getting Donna’s signature is the moment I’d travel back to if I were able to time travel.

From Wendy Watson:

I’m going with Occam’s razor here: the simplest answer is usually the right one. Clearly the second Art you’ve been growing in that vat in the basement has finally matured and is reading at grade level.

And the suggestion that maybe Donna had signed Alan Orloff’s copy to me sent both Alan and Donna double-checking to see if that’s what actually happened!

Really, everyone who responded showed great imagination and a great sense of fun. But the winner was Teresa Wilder for celebrating the Christmas spirit in a couple of ways:

You bought a copy while shopping with the Ghost of Christmas Future one night. Of course, you didn’t remember (since it hadn’t happened yet) when you hit the bookstore with the Ghost of Christmas Present the following night. Now the future has arrived–and you have 2 copies! Voila! (If I win, I’ll donate the copy I already have to our junior high library, and cherish the one autographed by you & Donna!)

Needless to say, generosity goes a long way in the holiday season.

As for the real story…

Because of my review work for various publications and for my own blogs over the years, publishers often send me copies of new releases. Donna and I are in a writing group together, and when each of us has a new publication, it’s become customary to give copies to the other members of the group. So when I got Donna’s newest in the mail—knowing I had a copy coming—I decided to give this extra to her for a giveaway of her own. But she said, “Why don’t I just sign this one to you and that’s one less I have to bring to our writing group later.”

You can see what happened next, of course.

Thanks to Donna for her own generosity and for playing along here—and for the fine book too, a joy as always.

Congrats again to Teresa. I hope that she enjoys her soon-to-be twice-inscribed copy of Donna’s latest—and that the library enjoys their copy too.

Happy holidays to all!

The First Two Pages: American History by J.L. Abramo

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

I first “met” J.L. Abramo when I was editing the 2015 Boucheron anthology Murder Under the Oaks; Joe’s story “Walking the Dog” was the longest of the stories included in the collection—and one of the strongest and most interesting as well: a story that might have seemed a bit discursive and digressive… until the end, when everything fell so beautifully in place.

The night I met Joe in person was also the night his book Circling the Runway took home the Shamus Award for Best PI Paperback Original at the 2016 Bouchercon—and such fun to meet him in person and congratulate him all his awards and accomplishments.

It’s a real honor to host him today talking about his latest book American History—an ambitious title, of course, with a decades-spanning storyline, as you’ll hear about in the essay below.

Pick up the novel itself here, and check out Joe’s website for more info on his novels and short fiction.

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

AbramoThe First Two Pages

My December Newsletter

My last quarterly newsletter of the year looks back at some highlights and milestones of 2018 and ahead toward new roles and new challenges in 2019 as well.

Highlights include news about board membership at Mystery Writers of America, a full year curating the First Two Pages blog, some recent reads, and a bit of writing too—including a preview of my wife Tara Laskowski’s debut novel, coming out next fall!

Check out the full newsletter here!