Martin Roy Hill's Blog, page 5

What's on Your Writer's Bookshelf?

If you live in the U.S., you're probably familiar with that series of credit card commercials that always end, "What's in your wallet?" I was thinking about that the other day as I was browsing my book shelves at home and wondering what kind of books other writers keep around.

Writers are different readers from normal (i.e., sane) people. We not only write for a living, we read for a living as well. We have to read other writers in our own genre to see what the competition is doing (and learn from them). We read for research, so we don't make big mistakes like saying Paris is the capital of Great Britain. And we read to improve our craft.

I write thrillers and mysteries. When it comes to writing about crime, I benefit from a life in which I have worked as a police reporter for a daily newspaper, and been involved in law enforcement operations as a U.S. Coastguardsman, a military policeman, and a sheriff's reservist. Heck, I was even trained as a SWAT medic.

As a result, my bookshelves are filled with books and manual acquired from attending various law enforcement training programs. Yet I still have a number of books that were written about law enforcement specifically for writers. Among these are Anne Wingate's Scene of the Crime: A Writer's Guide to Crime Scene Investigation, Keith D. Wilson's Cause of Death: A Writer's Guide to Death, Murder, and Forensic Medicine, and the Mystery Writers of America's Mystery Writer's Handbook.

Over the years, I've written many articles for magazines and websites on military history. As a result, my bookshelves are crammed with history books on everything from the Napoleonic Wars to the latest conflicts. While these were collected to support my nonfiction writing, they still come in useful for my fiction work.

For instance, when I was writing my military mystery thriller, The Killing Depths, I needed to learn as much as I could about submarines and submarine warfare. Fortunately, I already had several books about submarines, though I ended up buying and reading several more. My history collection also was helpful in writing my noir mystery, Empty Places, which takes place in the mid-1980s and tangentially involves the U.S. involvement in proxy wars in Central America.

My latest book was a step outside the normal lane of thrillers. Eden: A Sci-Fi Novella invokes a great deal of history and religious symbolism. In writing it, I found Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols extremely helpful. Eden describes an alternative history of the rise of mankind.

The narrator is an U.S. Army captain named Adam Cadman, which is an alternate spelling for Adam Kadmon. In the religious writings of Kabbalah, Adam Kadmon is the original or "primordial" man, and that theme runs through the entire book. It was reading Jung's book that gave me the idea for Captain Adam Cadman, and I have turned to the book again and again for inspiration for other writing projects.

Like most authors, I have a number of books on writing. One of my favorites is David Morrell's The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing. Morrell, who created the character Rambo in his novel First Blood, is considered by many to be the father of the modern thriller. In Successful Novelist, Morrell uses his own writing career to illustrate the do's and don'ts of novel writing and publishing.

Others books that have had an impact on my writing include Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, and James N. Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II: Advanced Techniques for Dramatic Storytelling.

As all good writers should, I always have a collection of dictionaries and thesauri. One unusual thesaurus I've found very helpful in my writing is The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. When I get stuck on how to describe a character's reaction to a situation, this book can usually help me get unstuck.

As an independent author, I'm not only the writer of my books; I'm their public relations and marketing director as well. One of the first books I picked up for this was Shelley Hitz's Marketing Your Book on Amazon: 21 Things You Can Easily Do For Free to Get More Exposure and Sales, which I found extremely helpful.

Fellow indie author Jay Allan Storey, author of futuristic dystopian novel, Eldorado, recommended to me Tom Corson-Knowles' book The Amazon Analytics Bible: How To Use Analytics To Sell More Books On Amazon And Make Better Marketing Decisions, which I also found immensely helpful. Another writing colleague, Seumas Gallacher, author of the the Jack Calder series of thrillers, wrote the very informative and frequently hilarious, Self-Publishing Steps To Successful Sales.

Perhaps you have certain books you turn to for help on your research, writing, or marketing. So I ask you, "What's on your bookshelf?"

What's on Your Writer's Bookshelf?

If you live in the U.S., you're probably familiar with that series of credit card commercials that always end, "What's in your wallet?" I was thinking about that the other day as I was browsing my book shelves at home and wondering what kind of books other writers keep around.

Writers are different readers from normal (i.e., sane) people. We not only write for a living, we read for a living as well. We have to read other writers in our own genre to see what the competition is doing (and learn from them). We read for research, so we don't make big mistakes like saying Paris is the capital of Great Britain. And we read to improve our craft.

I write thrillers and mysteries. When it comes to writing about crime, I benefit from a life in which I have worked as a police reporter for a daily newspaper, and been involved in law enforcement operations as a U.S. Coastguardsman, a military policeman, and a sheriff's reservist. Heck, I was even trained as a SWAT medic.

As a result, my bookshelves are filled with books and manual acquired from attending various law enforcement training programs. Yet I still have a number of books that were written about law enforcement specifically for writers. Among these are Anne Wingate's Scene of the Crime: A Writer's Guide to Crime Scene Investigation, Keith D. Wilson's Cause of Death: A Writer's Guide to Death, Murder, and Forensic Medicine, and the Mystery Writers of America's Mystery Writer's Handbook.

Over the years, I've written many articles for magazines and websites on military history. As a result, my bookshelves are crammed with history books on everything from the Napoleonic Wars to the latest conflicts. While these were collected to support my nonfiction writing, they still come in useful for my fiction work.

For instance, when I was writing my military mystery thriller, The Killing Depths, I needed to learn as much as I could about submarines and submarine warfare. Fortunately, I already had several books about submarines, though I ended up buying and reading several more. My history collection also was helpful in writing my noir mystery, Empty Places, which takes place in the mid-1980s and tangentially involves the U.S. involvement in proxy wars in Central America.

My latest book was a step outside the normal lane of thrillers. Eden: A Sci-Fi Novella invokes a great deal of history and religious symbolism. In writing it, I found Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols extremely helpful. Eden describes an alternative history of the rise of mankind.

The narrator is an U.S. Army captain named Adam Cadman, which is an alternate spelling for Adam Kadmon. In the religious writings of Kabbalah, Adam Kadmon is the original or "primordial" man, and that theme runs through the entire book. It was reading Jung's book that gave me the idea for Captain Adam Cadman, and I have turned to the book again and again for inspiration for other writing projects.

Like most authors, I have a number of books on writing. One of my favorites is David Morrell's The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing. Morrell, who created the character Rambo in his novel First Blood, is considered by many to be the father of the modern thriller. In Successful Novelist, Morrell uses his own writing career to illustrate the do's and don'ts of novel writing and publishing.

Others books that have had an impact on my writing include Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, and James N. Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II: Advanced Techniques for Dramatic Storytelling.

As all good writers should, I always have a collection of dictionaries and thesauri. One unusual thesaurus I've found very helpful in my writing is The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. When I get stuck on how to describe a character's reaction to a situation, this book can usually help me get unstuck.

As an independent author, I'm not only the writer of my books; I'm their public relations and marketing director as well. One of the first books I picked up for this was Shelley Hitz's Marketing Your Book on Amazon: 21 Things You Can Easily Do For Free to Get More Exposure and Sales, which I found extremely helpful.

Fellow indie author Jay Allan Storey, author of futuristic dystopian novel, Eldorado, recommended to me Tom Corson-Knowles' book The Amazon Analytics Bible: How To Use Analytics To Sell More Books On Amazon And Make Better Marketing Decisions, which I also found immensely helpful. Another writing colleague, Seumas Gallacher, author of the the Jack Calder series of thrillers, wrote the very informative and frequently hilarious, Self-Publishing Steps To Successful Sales.

Perhaps you have certain books you turn to for help on your research, writing, or marketing. So I ask you, "What's on your bookshelf?"

Expansive Homage to the Greatest Generation

At the center of John E. Nevola's novel The Last Jump is a son's quest to understand the war that so affected his estranged father. But while the son's search is important to moving the story forward, it is a relatively small portion of this expansive homage to the Greatest Generation – the men and women who served their country in WWII either in combat or on the home front in an era when patriotism meant far more than slapping a yellow ribbon magnet on the side of your car.

At the heart of the novel are two American paratroopers, both named John Kilroy. Though the two young men are not related, they become the closest of friends as they endure the rigors of airborne training and, later, combat in Sicily and northern Europe. The novel explores the bonds of such friendship and the promises and obligations they create.

Nevola also examines the contributions made at home by women who gave up their youthful years to build ships, tanks, and planes for the war effort, and African American soldiers who labored behind the lines waiting for their chance to show their mettle in combat. Nevola argues that the contributions made by these men and women cracked open the door that led to greater equality for blacks and women. Certainly, it took several more decades for that door to open wider – and it still needs to swing wider – but it was the actions of the Greatest Generation that gave the door the initial shove.

The research that went into The Last Jump was intricate and detailed. The book brings together the best of such writers as Anton Myer and Herman Wouk, with a good dose of Michael/Jeff Shaara thrown in.

If you are an ardent reader of military history, you will love this novel. If you are a Baby Boomer who never talked to your parents about the war, or of a later generation and would like to understand what your grandparents endured during WWII, you should read this book.

6th Extinction Thrilling, Thought-Provoking, and Frightening.

James Rollins scares me.
Well, not the author but the thriller plots he comes up with. 
Rollins isn't satisfied with the run-of-the-mill plots. You know, terrorists planning to set off a nuclear bomb in New York City. A massive earthquake drops the entire U.S. western seaboard into the ocean. A criminal mastermind plans to steal all the gold from Fort Knox and bankrupt the United States. No, Rollins' plots have to be truly apocalyptic, threatening the end of all life on earth. The problem is he backs up all his plots with so much science you can't help but wonder, "Could this really happen?" That's what scares me. That's what keeps me up at night.
In his latest Sigma Force novel, The 6th Extinction, Rollins takes on a true world crisis -- the pending mass extinction of thousands of species due, mostly, to man's stupidity and greed. This holocaust is believed to be the sixth such extinction event to have taken place on this planet. In Rollins' book, sabotage at a secret U.S. government laboratory in California releases an indestructible microbe that kills everything it comes into contact with. In Antarctica, British mercenaries cry havoc and try to let loose the deadly denizens of a shadow biosphere buried beneath the show and ice. Meanwhile, in hopes of creating a new Garden of Eden, a brilliant but deranged scientist in South America plans to release his menagerie of genetically-modified animals on the world as well as a microbe that will return all humans to their simple primitive ancestors.
As over the top as this may sound, it is all based on current ongoing research. Just during the time I was reading this book, I also came across news accounts of scientists manipulating the genes of chicken embryos so the birds' beaks will devolve back into the type of snouts their dinosaur ancestors had. Other scientists are trying to recover DNA from an Ice Age-frozen wooly mammoth to recreate the elephant's long-extinct distant relative.
The 6th Extinction is obviously a cautionary tale about how mankind has failed to be a good steward for this planet. It is also a warning to us of the potential horrors that could come from scientists playing God. In Rollin's fiction, Sigma Force was there to save the world. But in real life, who will save us?
The 6th Extinction is an exciting and thought-provoking read. Scary, too.

The U.S. Civil War Through a Cannoneer's Sights

When I saw the announcement of the publication of What the Private Saw: The Civil War Letters & Diaries of Oney Foster Sweet, I requested a review copy from the publisher. It looked like it would be an interesting read and great addition to my military history reading collection. I was correct on both counts. 
Editor Larry Edwards has created a compelling story of one soldier's view of the Civil War based on Sweet’s letters to family and friends, and his diary entries, with occasional historical narrative to put Sweet's comments in context. The book is both expansive and microscopic at the same time. Sweet, an artilleryman, fought in every major battle of the Eastern Theater of war with the exception of First Manassa/Bull Run. Yet this is not the panoramic view of the general, but the tunnel vision of the ordinary soldier, extending not much further than the sights of his rifle or, in Sweet's case, his cannon.
The reader follows Sweet's army career from his first cocksure days as a soldier to his growing disillusionment with the war. Sweet’s letters and diary show his motivation for fighting had nothing to do with being anti-slavery; in fact, he disapproved of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Yet despite his war weariness, Sweet re-enlisted when his first enlistment expired, allowing him to serve throughout the remainder of the war, including the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s troops at Appomattox.
Sweet's letters and diaries also show that soldiering hasn't changed much in a century and a half; then as now, it is largely comprised of days and weeks of monotony spiked with hours of terror and horror. Most of Sweet’s diary entries discuss the routine mundaneness of daily army life—guard duty, policing camp, marches. The battles he took part in are mentioned almost as afterthoughts, as if they were too horrible to mention. In most cases they were.
However, the book does include a retrospective narration Sweet wrote of the Battle of Gettysburg. A member of Battery F, First Pennsylvania Light Artillery, also known as Rickett's Battery, Sweet took part in the bloody defense of the Union's right flank, known as the "fish hook." Like the fight at Little Round Top on the left flank, the successful defense of the fish hook by Pennsylvanian soldiers fighting on Pennsylvanian soil prevented the Confederates from rolling up the Union line.
As historical figures go, Private Sweet was a nonentity. But the writings he left behind provide an important insight to the lives and deaths of all those other nonentities who fought in the Civil War and, on the Union side, brought home victory.

Impressive Thriller Laced with History

In the early years of our country's formation, when the Founding Fathers contemplated replacing the Articles of Confederation with the U.S. Constitution, there were two opposing factions. The Federalists argued for a strong central government, largely run by and for the wealthy and powerful. The Anti-Federalists, favoring individual liberties over central power, feared the Federalist's idea of government would jeopardize state rights and civil liberties. The result was the Constitution, which established a central government able to tax, make laws, and wage wars, and the Bill of Rights which guaranteed state rights and personal liberty.
In Bob Mayer's The Jefferson Allegiance, the war between the two opposing factions never ended. In the early 19th century, Thomas Jefferson, an Anti-Federalist, and Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, agree to a truce between the two factions called The Jefferson Allegiance. The Allegiance holds such power that it could take down any power-grabbing president and, perhaps, the country itself. The anti-Federalist American Philosophical Society was founded to hide and guard the Allegiance from the pro-Federalist Society of the Cincinnati. 
In the 21st century, the Society of the Cincinnati decides it's time to find and destroy the Allegiance and take over the country. Guardians of the Allegiance from the American Philosophical Society start to be murdered, one by one, and usually after being tortured. Paul Ducharme, a Special Forces officer just back from Afghanistan, and Evie Tolliver, a former CIA operative and now a Jeffersonian scholar, discover they have been named the new guardians of the Allegiance and, without even knowing what the Allegiance is, are thrown into battle to protect it from the Cincinnatians. 
The Jefferson Allegiance is a first rate thriller. No one writes action scenes better than Mayer, himself a West Point graduate and former Green Beret officer. The Jefferson Allegiance, however, is more than a thriller. Laced with historic fact, it is a civics lesson for a country that largely no longer teaches civics in school, a country where too many people don't understand how a democratic republic is suppose to work.
Strong writing, strong action, and strong education -- this book has it all. Definitely a five star read.

The True Story of Breaker Morant's Fate

Scapegoats of the Empire is the true story of the murder trial of three Australian army officers during Britain’s Boer War, a court martial made famous to modern movie goers by the film Breaker Morant. Its author, George Witton, was one of those officers and the only one to avoid a firing squad.
Witton was a young enlisted artilleryman in the Australian Army when he volunteered for active service in the southern African war. There are many similarities between the Boer War at the turn of the 20th century and the Iraq War a hundred years later. Both began as conventional wars with set-piece battles, then eroded into guerrilla warfare. In 1901, Witton secured a commission with the Bushveldt Carbineers, an irregular counterinsurgency regiment set up to fight the Boer guerrilla units (called commandos) on their own level.
Shortly before Witton joined his detachment of the Carbineers, its commander, Capt. Hunt, was killed and his body apparently abused by the Boers. Lt. Harry “Breaker” Morant, an expert horseman as well as a published poet, took over command. Bereaved over the death and mutilation of his senior officer and close friend, Morant decided to follow Hunt’s earlier orders to execute prisoners, including some who took part in Hunt’s death. Hunt had previously told his men that Lord Kitchener, the commanding British general, had issued orders not to take Boer prisoners. According to Morant’s own testimony, the Carbineers had avoided following those orders until after Hunt’s death.
Witton never knew Hunt, and barely knew Morant and Lt. Peter Handcock when the summary executions of prisoners they were charged with took place. Witton sets forth his version of the facts in plain, unelaborated writing. He shows with quotes from pre-trial and court martial testimony that Capt. Hunt had repeatedly ordered his men to shoot prisoners, saying the order came from as far up as Kitchener. Many other incidents involving the shooting of prisoners on both sides had occurred at this stage of the war, and no British soldier was ever tried for let alone convicted of murder. Kitchener’s testimony was never admitted into evidence, and the general was conveniently out of the country when the three men’s verdicts were handed down so their fates could not be appealed directly to him. Morant and Handcock were sentenced to death by firing squad. Witton’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison. He was released and returned to Australia three years later.
While reading this book, it occurred to me Kitchener may very well have lead some junior officers to believe he wanted prisoners summarily shot without actually meaning to give such an order. It wouldn't be the only time in warfare when a senior officer’s blustering lead to war crimes. During WWII’s Sicilian Campaign, there were several incidents of American soldiers shooting German and Italian prisoners, and even civilians. When questioned, they all said they believed the order to shoot prisoners came from Gen. George Patton during one of his many firebrand speeches (as seen at the beginning of the movie, "Patton"). Patton quickly ordered a cease and desist order, but never took responsibility for the meaning of his own words.
Ironically, at the same time the British were fighting the Boer War the United States was involved in its first empire-building, counter-insurgency conflict in the Philippines. Many of the same crimes that Witton and his comrades were accused of also occurred during the so-called “Philippine Insurgency.”
In Australia, it was and still is widely believed that Witton, Morant, and Handcock were indeed scapegoats for the British Empire. At the time of their courts martial, Germany was considering entering the war on the side of the Dutch Boers because of alleged British atrocities, which included the first use of concentration camps. Convicting the three Australians mitigated the only substantial excuse the Germans had to side with the commandos. No British officer was ever tried for shooting Boer prisoners, though such executions were known to have occurred. As late as 2013, petitions were made to have all three men posthumously pardoned. None have succeeded—so far.

The Egyptian: A High-Speed Race for the Secret of Eternal Life

The search for eternal youth and life has been an obsession for mankind since the first humans could recognize their reflections in still water or understand their own mortality. In Layton Green’s The Egyptian, ancient myths of immortality meet modern day biotech’s search for long-term youth and life. 
This is the second book in Green’s series featuring Dominic Grey and Viktor Radek, private investigators of cults. Grey, a former Diplomatic Security Service agent, is hired by an Egyptian biotech firm, to locate a stolen vial of the company’s new life extension elixir. Grey’s investigation takes him from New York to Bulgaria and finally to the deserts of Egypt. On the way, he picks up a beautiful freelance investigative journalist, a Bulgarian scientist, and a ne’er-do-well mercenary. Eventually, Grey figures out those who stole and vial are not necessarily the bad guys. 
The Egyptian is a well-crafted novel with all the elements I particularly like—a mystery thriller with lots of historic facts, and good character development. There were a couple of times, however, when the story made me come to a screeching halt. For instance, the investigative reporter is said to work for the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO). I’m a former investigative journalist with some twenty years of experience in journalism, and I’ve never heard of a non-government organization like the WHO hiring an investigative reporter, freelance or otherwise. In another part of the book, Grey attempts to staunch the blood flowing from a bullet wound in a character’s back with a tourniquet. Tourniquets are used to stop bleeding from extremity wounds, not truncal wounds. I say this with the expertise of someone who has been a medic with the military, law enforcement, and disaster response teams, as well as a Navy analyst in combat medical capabilities.
These, however, are minor errors which probably wouldn’t be noticed by readers without my particular background, and I plan on reading more of this series in the near future.

A MilSciFi Adventure Straight Out of the Great Age of Sail

I'm a big fan of novels about the Great Age of Sail when “ships were made of wood and men of iron,” especially those dealing with Britain's Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I've read all of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower books and Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey books, many of Captain Frederick's Marryat's sea novels, and several other authors who pen tales of that period. So when I read the blurb to H. Paul Honsinger's book, To Honor You Call Us, I knew exactly what he was doing and had to read it.
Set in the 24th century, Honor is the story of a Union Space Navy officer, Max Robichaux, who is assigned command of the USS Cumberland, a space destroyer with such a poor battle record it's known among the fleet as the Cumberland Gap. Max and the Cumberland are given orders for detached duty as a commerce raider in the neutral Free Corridor to stop ships from smuggling war materiel to the Terran Union's nemesis, the Krag. In the few weeks it takes to travel to the Free Corridor, Max must turn the demoralized men of the Cumberland into a fighting crew, overcoming cowardly sabotage and rampant drug abuse.
In its most basic plot elements, Honsinger borrows heavily from the works of Forester and O'Brian. And that's okay. O'Brian borrowed heavily from Forester, who borrowed heavily from Marryat, who borrowed heavily from the real life adventures of Lord Admiral Thomas Cochran, RN, under whom Marryat once served. Max's first battle in his new command – against a much larger Krag warship – comes straight out of the earliest of the Hornblower and Aubrey books. Those battles themselves were inspired by the victory of Lord Cochran, then commanding a small war sloop, over a much bigger and more heavily armed Spanish frigate.
Yet this is not to say Honor's plot is old hat or boring. Like O'Brian's books, Honor is a character study of men at war – a long, often boring war punctuated by moments of terror and self-sacrifice. The major members of the crew are well fleshed out, and the ship's technology is well conceived. The writing pulls you along as if you were a member of the crew yourself.
Honor is a clever idea well executed. A lesser writer may have failed in its execution. As Honor is the first in a series, I look forward to reading the follow-on books.

Bob Mayer Mixes SciFi with Military/Political Thrillers in "The Rock"

 When you talk about military science fiction, two of the names you frequently hear mentioned are Robert Doherty and Bob Mayer. That's quite a coincidence, because both are New York Times best- selling authors of the genre. Both are also West Point graduates and former U.S. Army Green Berets. And both...well, they're both the same man.

 

I mention this because when I first became aware of Doherty/Mayer I was confused. Which was which? Doherty's Amazon page says he lives in Seattle, Mayer's says Tennessee. Would the real author please stand up?

Well, the real author is Bob Mayer, and The Rock—originally written under his Doherty penname—is, so far, my favorite book of his.

The detonation of a nuclear device stolen by terrorists triggers a mysterious radio transmission that emanates from Ayres Rock in Australia and jams American satellite transmissions. Analysis of the transmission reveals a message echoing the recorded greetings the space probe Voyager took on its interplanetary journey, and a set of names. Those people—a deep black special ops soldier, an alcoholic geologist, a psychologically unstable prodigy, and a government analyst of future trends—are brought to "the rock," as it's called, to solve the mystery of the transmissions. In the process, they discover what appears to be an interstellar threat to mankind.

Written in the early 1990s, the book is a bit technically dated—there is no Internet and the characters have to look things up in an almanac—but that doesn't detract from the story. Mayer masterfully mixes elements of sci-fi with thrillers of the military, political, and techno variety. His military background allows him to write believable military and combat action scenes without the mistakes writers without military experience often make. And while I haven't read much of Mayer's expansive oeuvre yet, The Rock seems to be a more serious work than the other books of his I've read. I highly recommend this book to readers who enjoy sci-fi and military action.