L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 5

Book Review: The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty

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I completely blame myself for focusing only on the author and not the title of this book when choosing to read it. I closed the back cover and thought indignantly to myself, “This was a romance!” No $#!@, Sherlock. It’s literally right there in the title! Having said that and despite romances not really being my cup of tea, as with all Liane Moriarty books, it’s better than the average. But it’s some way off her best.

The titular hypnotist – hypnotherapist actually, she reminds several people – is Ellen and she’s finally given in and decided to try internet dating. Patrick is the result. His first wife died of cancer, he has a son and he seems almost perfect. Except for one thing. Patrick has stalker. A former live-in girlfriend who hasn’t been able to let go, Saskia is everything one hopes for in a stalker if you absolutely have to have one. She’s not violent and a lot of the time she’s just in the background watching.

Patrick is exasperated by her but won’t go to the police. And Ellen is fascinated. Her career as a hypnotherapist, helping people quit smoking, overcome fertility issues and manage pain, gives her insight into motivations and for much of the book she seems sympathetic. Her sympathy wanes a little when she finally meets Saskia and realises she has been posing as one of Ellen’s clients and then disappears entirely when she wakes one night to find her standing over her bed and watching her as she sleeps.

Ellen and Saskia are beautifully written characters. They each get to narrate about half of the book and if it weren’t for the fact that Saskia is clearly mentally unstable, they probably could have been good friends. Patrick is less convincing, less perfect than generally preferred for the male love interest, and Moriarty dismisses this as a more mature kind of love than the throes of passion people get caught up in when they’re young. But it means that I wasn’t convinced that he was worth all the considerable effort that Ellen goes to.

As with many of Moriarty’s books, it’s longer than it needs to be but I didn’t mind as much as in some of her other books because I could have read about Ellen and Saskia forever. Patrick and several of the supporting characters are less interesting but I think that was because of how much effort Moriarty clearly put into developing the women. The level of detail regarding hypnotherapy and stalking certainly made it seem like she’d done a huge amount of research and used it really well.

I prefer Moriarty when she writes about suburban mysteries rather than love stories but there’s no denying her catalogue as a whole is a considerable body of work. I’m going to keep reading her books.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 27 September 2019

Book Review: Matilda Is Missing by Caroline Overington

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I am still yet to read a book by Caroline Overington that I haven’t liked. This isn’t her best book but it seems like Overington’s worst books are still better than the best books of many other writers.

Softie Monaghan and Garry Hartshorn should never have gotten married. She was a sophisticated career woman. He was a rough country boy who’d had plenty of jobs but no career. But she was desperate for a child and he knew a good thing when he saw it. Even before Matilda was born, Softie knew she’d made a mistake. But she wanted a proper family for her daughter so she tried to push through.

But after two years, she was a broken woman (it seems clear that there’s some sort of post-natal depression going on as well as having a husband whose parenting approach is completely at odds with her own). So she takes Matilda and leaves.

Garry is furious and doesn’t understand what he’s done wrong. While searching for support online, he gets caught up with the Men’s Rights movement, who push him to go for full custody of his daughter (even though it’s clear he’s not the type who even wants to be a full-time father). And so begins a stereotypical bitter custody battle.

The book is actually told from the perspective of Brian, who is completely unrelated to the story, and the custody battle is long over. Brian’s friend, the Family Court judge who presided over Matilda’s case, has recently died and has bequeathed to Brian the records. He thought a travesty had occurred (despite it being his case) and he wanted Brian, being a former newspaper man, to go through everything and bring the true story to light. Brian is shocked, especially because he was never a reporter, just a factory worker who helped print the physical copies of the newspapers. But he’s retired and his son’s fighting a similar custody battle, so he dives in.

From here on, it’s almost entirely Brian listening to tape recordings of Softie and Garry’s sessions with a court-appointed counsellor as they explain their sides of the story. It focuses heavily on their relationship before Matilda was born and for most of the book I was thinking the title was completely apt, because Matilda seems like an afterthought, only appearing very close to the end.

The format, listening to Softie and Garry talk, is a little annoying, especially when they are relating conversations with other people. “So he said… and I said… then he said… and she goes…” But, thankfully, Brian isn’t the type to interject with his opinions too much. He and Overington both allow the story to simply unfold without telling us how we should feel.

As a result, I suspect this is a book where women readers will sympathise with Softie and male readers will come down on Garry’s side and I think Overington has deliberately written it in a way that makes sure that happens because when the end comes, the lack of focus on what is best for Matilda is the lasting sensation. The Family Court case is to decide the child’s living and care arrangements and instead it becomes a de facto divorce hearing (because, of course, in Australia, all divorces are no-fault divorces). The Family Court judge has an ideology and a recent change in custody laws gives him what he needs to use it.

I didn’t see the exact ending that came but I was able to predict elements of it and like all of Overington’s books, it’s poetic in a heartbreaking way but completely lacking in justice for anyone involved. I’ve read four of her books now and I’ll continue reading her work because she never disappoints. In a word: satisfying.

3.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 14 September 2019

 

Book Review: Tampa by Alissa Nutting

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Let me say straight up, it was a challenge to get through this book. I felt physically sick for quite a lot of it. After all, it’s a first person account of a paedophile pursuing children for sex. It’s literature, it’s well written but don’t have any doubts about the fact that the subject matter is absolutely vile.

I think the reason that Nutting just manages to get away with it is because the paedophile in this case is a woman. Celeste Price is married, young, beautiful, sexy and absolutely the last person you’d think of when describing a paedophile. She is a junior high teacher in Tampa, Florida, for the simple reason that it gives her easy access to her preferred prey: fourteen-year-old boys.

She’s absolutely obsessed with sex and from the first page right through to the last, it’s pretty much the only thing she thinks about. She blames it on being beautiful and wealthy, because that means she has everything else she wants. Obviously, a psychiatrist would have a different interpretation but we see everything through Celeste’s eyes so there’s very little exploration of the many, many things that are clearly wrong with her.

It’s the start of a new school year and Celeste is excited because she’s secured her first full-time teaching position after a few years of being a student and substitute teacher. She plans to choose a boy from her classes, pursue him secretly, statutorily rape him for a year and then move onto a new boy when the next school year rolls around. After a few weeks, Jack Patrick becomes her chosen victim.

A child of divorce, he seems grateful for the attention and they spend the majority of the book having sex everywhere you can think of: at school, in Celeste’s car, in toilets, in Jack’s bedroom, on the dining table in Jack’s house, in Jack’s pool, anywhere except Celeste’s house, which she shares with her policeman husband. When they are nearly busted by Jack’s dad, Buck, Celeste seduces him and uses her pretend relationship with him to spend more and more time at Jack’s house. She even convinces Jack to aid her in drugging Buck into unconsciousness and then having sex above his comatose father’s body.

Of course, it can’t last, not least of all because Jack is physically maturing and Celeste’s attraction to him wanes with every step he takes towards becoming a man instead of a boy. But he doesn’t understand that their “relationship” has a definitive end date and starts talking about love and marriage. How is she going to end it without him running to the police or the school’s principal in revenge? Well, it was never the kind of book that could have a happy ending. And Celeste proves herself willing to do almost anything to avoid getting caught.

One reviewer has called Celeste Price “a female Humbert” and “well worth the wait”. For anyone who doesn’t know, Humbert is the main character in Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita, the story of a paedophile who marries Lolita’s mother in order to be close to the object of his affection. No doubt Humbert and Celeste have plenty in common but Nabakov may have been more successful because he was prevented by the time in which he was writing from being as straightforward in his descriptions of lust and sex, while Nutting leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. Her book shares just as much in common, if not more, with X-rated erotica than Lolita.

The name of the book, Tampa, is brilliantly and subtly clever as a play on the word “tamper” and the cover art is just as genius, a pink button hole that evokes the image of female genitalia. But the story itself lacks the gut punch you would expect from a subject this controversial. There’s no poetic ending. There’s very little poetry at all. So really all that’s left is just under three hundred pages of well-written child sex crimes.

When an author chooses a topic as divisive as this one, I think there’s a responsibility to write a near-perfect book. Maybe it’s just a burden that has to be shouldered. Because it hasn’t been done. It’s brave, Nutting’s a writer for sure, but she ultimately relies too much on the controversy of the subject matter to cover for what’s lacking in the story. Celeste Price is a villain but she’s not a great one. That’s her true downfall.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 7 September 2019

Book Review: Ads R Us by Claire Carmichael

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This is one of those books where it seems like the author thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to write a book about the devastating effects of constant exposure to advertising?” but forgot that she needed a compelling story to go with it.

Ever since his parents died in a car accident when he was a baby, Barrett Trent has been raised by his uncle in a community called Simplicity. With a focus on sustainability and ethics, they farm their own food, reject technology and embrace knowledge. After his uncle dies in a ridiculously contrived incident, Barrett reluctantly goes to live in the “chattering world” (the city) with his aunt.

This near future city is awash with advertising. In car advertising. In home advertising. In school advertising. Everywhere. It’s against the law to criticise corporations (because it might disrupt the economy), surveillance is all over the place and elites can get away with just about anything. (Sound familiar? Yeah, in 2019, we’re probably already there but this book was written in 2006 and back then people thought it was decades away.) Barrett is understandably dismayed, especially because his uncle taught him all about propaganda and brainwashing. He can see that the ever-present advertising is just that.

His aunt is the head of something called the Ads-4-Life Council and decides to conduct an experiment on Barrett to see how he responds to the omnipresent advertising compared to his jaded cousin, Taylor, who has grown up with it. From then on, the only time Barrett can escape it is when the ADA terrorists (Against Deceit in Advertising) hack the broadcasting systems. But the ads aren’t the only thing he has to worry about.

Sorry, that’s the best cliffhanger I could come up with. Quite a bit of effort has gone into world building but very little into the characters or the plot. The characters and plot that do populate the book are amateurishly executed. The teen dialogue feels forced and unrealistic – kids who talked like this in real life would quickly be told to knock it off by other actually cool kids who can see through wannabes. And the ads (in a world supposedly dominated by ads that can convince people to do anything) are so poorly written that they wouldn’t convince anyone to do anything except turn off and tune out.

The only positive thing I really have to say is that it was short enough for the reading experience to be over fairly quickly. Writing books for young adults is too often used as an excuse for failing to include complex prose, characters and plots. But even readers without the ability to analyse this book in detail would know it just isn’t good enough.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 7 September 2019

Book Review: Crimson Lake by Candice Fox

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As I was rushing out the door to the airport on my way to a holiday in Cairns, I grabbed this book from my “To Be Read” pile and I didn’t realise until I was on the plane and turning the first few pages that the story was set in… Cairns!

Crimson Lake is the fictional setting not too far from Cairns where Ted Conkaffey has just moved. There’s humidity (check), crocodiles (check), snakes (check), rednecks (check) and an assortment of colourful characters (check) so it feels somewhat real (at least to an outsider), even though it’s not, which is a credit to Fox.

The main character, Ted, is a former vice police detective from Sydney whose career was cut short when he was accused of abducting and raping a teenage girl. He was never convicted but he lost his wife, his child, his career and all his friends and everywhere he goes, he’s accused of being a monster. So he’s driven to the furthest place he could get and settled into a rented house where nobody knows who he is.

His lawyer gets him a job working for a local private investigator, Amanda Pharrell. When Ted looks into her history, he discovers she pleaded guilty to a murder charge as a teenager and has only been out of jail for a few years. She’s also a bit of an odd bird but she’s willing to work with him when no one else is and he needs to be distracted from the total disaster that is his life. The local police are determined to pin something on him and to let as many people as possible in on exactly who he is.

Amanda is currently working a case trying to track down a missing author. The police are working on it as well but the author’s wife isn’t convinced they’re doing a very good job of it. A ring the author was known to wear has been found inside a crocodile when it was slaughtered on a farm but no one’s actually sure if he’s dead or just wants people to think that.

I could go into more detail about the plot but to be honest, it’s a fairly standard crime novel. There are clues and the story follows them. We learn more about the main characters and the minor characters, we are drip fed pieces of information here and there, and they eventually lead to a conclusion (not one that the reader can guess at because Fox withholds crucial plot points so that Ted and Amanda can reveal them in a thrilling showdown).

The real triumph of this book (other than the setting) is the characters. Ted and Amanda are both fascinating to spend time with, even once you know that one of them is innocent and one of them is guilty of the crimes they were accused of. In the first page of the book, Ted takes in a goose and a flock of baby goslings to spare them from being eaten by the crocodiles he can hear in the wetlands behind his house and you’ll be amazed by how much you enjoy the birds and their antics. The missing author’s wife and son are stereotypes on the surface but reveal their depth as the story unfolds. The local coroner is a cracker. The local criminals are scary. The various police are divided between those dedicated to the job and those dedicated to corruption. There’s a journalist and the missing author’s agent and another author and the family of the woman Amanda was convicted of murdering… and almost all of them are perfect. The only exceptions are the local police who are just too obviously dumb.

Fox has written other crime novels in a series and I thought this was a one-off as all the plots and subplots are tied up pretty neatly by the end but there are another three books so far in this series. Because of how much I enjoyed the characters, I hope making them go around again (and again and again) hasn’t ruined the legacy.

Despite the plot being just okay, I’d happily read her other novels, particularly the first two, which both won Ned Kelly Awards for best crime debut in 2014 and best crime novel in 2015. I might have enjoyed Crimson Lake more than I normally would because I was on holiday and it’s a good holiday read. But that’s life, isn’t it? Sometimes when we read a book is crucial to how much we’re going to enjoy it.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 7 September 2019

When Creativity Isn’t Appreciated: Literary Hoaxes

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One thing I would really love to do is perpetrate a literary hoax. I see it as the ultimate in creativity, pulling the wool over the eyes of the gullible and, for a while, even those with a little more sense. The conundrum of a literary hoax is that you must be discovered in order to become famous for perpetrating it. That seems to be the less fun part though. But for those watching from a little distance, the people involved and the lengths they go to are fascinating.

Here are a few great literary hoaxes.

Forbidden Love

Norma Khouri wrote the book Forbidden Love (also known as Honour Lost) as a piece of non-fiction describing the murder of her Muslim best friend by her friend’s father and brother after they discovered she was dating a Christian man. It was a worldwide bestseller. But the book was full of factual errors and was exposed by an Australian journalist approximately a year later.

An absolutely enthralling documentary called Forbidden Lie$ was made in 2007 with the participation of Khouri herself, who continued to defend the story as truth, admitting only that she had changed names, dates and places to protect people. For the first half, I was absolutely convinced she was telling the truth and throughout the second half, it seemed clear that she was just a very good actor. Still, it’s a fascinating tale, particularly because she still hasn’t confessed despite mountains of evidence against her.

Ern Malley

Ern Malley was the creation of Harold Stewart and James McAuley, two Australian poets who despised the modernist poetry movement and particularly Angry Penguins, a poetry journal. In order to expose the editor, Max Harris, Stewart and McAuley created what they considered to be nonsense poems and submitted them for publication. The entire next issue of Angry Penguins was dedicated to Ern Malley and his work.

The hoax was revealed shortly after and Harris’s career was essentially destroyed but, ironically, so were the careers of Stewart and McAuley, who couldn’t shake the notoriety of being Ern Malley’s creators. There is a terrific book on the subject called The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward.

The Diary of Jack the Ripper

Unbelievably, debate still rages over whether the diary of Jack the Ripper is real or a fabulous hoax twenty-five years after it was presented to the public. Is James Maybrick really Jack the Ripper or is he the world’s unluckiest man, murdered by his wife and unfairly defamed as history’s most vicious killer?

It’s about as delicious as literary hoaxes come. Read the original book by Shirley Harrison covering the “discovery” of the diary and if you can’t get enough, read the latest book by Robert Smith who is absolutely convinced it’s true.

The Hitler Diaries

Between the late seventies and the early eighties, a man named Konrad Kujau forged sixty volumes of journals and sold them for $3.7 million. It would have been a bargain at twice the price considering the supposed author was Adolf Hitler. Of course, with a little forensic analysis, they were quickly confirmed as fakes.

Both Kujau and the intermediary who stole a lot of that $3.7 million were jailed for their fraudulent activities.

JT Leroy

JT Leroy is not just a pen name but an entire persona presented as the author of three semi-autobiographical books about a teenage boy experiencing sexual abuse, drugs and poverty. The true creator was a woman named Laura Albert who was eventually sued for $350,000 for selling the film rights for the first book as JT Leroy, instead of herself.

Savannah Knoop, Albert’s sister-in-law, later wrote and published a memoir called Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, about how she would appear in public wearing a wig and sunglasses, pretending to be JT Leroy at Albert’s request.

*****

If these snapshots have merely whetted your appetite for literary hoaxes, here are some more that might satisfy you:

*A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

*The Hand That Signed the Paper by Helen Demidenko

*A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by Anthony Godby Johnson

*Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival by Margaret Seltzer

*Naked Came the Stranger by Penelope Ashe

*The Autobiography of Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving

*Coffee, Tea or Me by Donald Bain

*Go Ask Alice by Anonymous

*The Education of Little Tree by Asa Carter

*The life of Dan Mallory – apparently he wrote a “memoir” but decided not to publish it, yet the fiction author has woven a web of lies about his background that are more fascinating than anything he could write as fiction – enjoy!

Book Review: From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage – How Australia Got Compulsory Voting by Judith Brett

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This is the latest book in my year of reading Australian female writers.

*****

There’s a famous quote from Winston Churchill that says democracy is the worst form of government… except for all the others. This is the book that proves Australia’s electoral system is the worst form of voting… except for all the others.

Compulsory registration, a perpetual electoral roll, universal suffrage (all citizens aged over eighteen excluding those currently jailed for a term of three years or more), compulsory voting, postal, absentee and pre-poll voting, preferential voting in the lower house, proportional voting in the upper house, secret ballots, an independent electoral commission (not controlled by political parties), everything Australia does is designed to ensure everyone has a say and the majority is reflected while the minorities are protected.

But the way in which Australia got all of this is almost unbelievable. After the US war of independence, Britain was so determined not to lose any more colonies that when Australia politely asked for theirs, the colonial masters bent over backwards to do what they could while retaining it as part of the Commonwealth. Not a single life was lost.

And the Australian electoral system is also amazing in that when it appears the system is being gamed by anyone for unfair advantage, both sides of politics since Australian federation have come together to legislate the necessary changes to prevent it from happening again. Can anyone imagine that in the US? Ha!

There are some fascinating snippets, like the story behind how the state of South Australia became the first place in the world women could run for office. Hoping to sabotage a bill that would give women the right to vote in South Australia in 1894, opponents introduced an amendment that would also allow women to run for office. It backfired: South Australian women ended up with more than they had even been asking for and South Australia was forever etched in hilarious feminist history.

The book suffers from a few editing errors and the occasional slight political preference appears to have slipped into the text but otherwise it is terrific, especially for political history nerds and those interested in how countries establish themselves. Or maybe I should say only for political history nerds and those interested in how countries establish themselves.

It would probably be worthwhile for all politicians to read this as well as a reminder of a time when people ran for office to better the country as a whole, not to force a personal agenda on others. Of course, there is no system of voting on earth that can ensure a country gets good politicians. What a shame.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 14 June 2019

Project June

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“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” John Steinbeck, interview with Robert van Gelder in April 1947 as quoted in John Steinbeck: A Biography (1994) by Jay Parini

This is the fifth piece in my Project… series (and the title chapter in my next book about writing). For anyone who hasn’t read the first two books in this series or the relevant posts on my blog, here’s a refresher for you:

*Project October is all about intensive writing.

*Project November is all about rewriting, polishing and finalising.

*Project December is all about publishing.

*Project January is all about starting all over again.

So what is Project June? For the purposes of this series, there had to be another Project… piece. I toyed with the idea of Project February, mostly because February comes after January. But I didn’t know what Project February was. I still don’t.

Eventually, I realised that the advice that I wanted to give and the month that went with it was all about the middle. I’d addressed the start, the sprint to the faux finish and the actual finish; the only thing left was the part in between.

Sometimes the in-between can be the most frustrating part. The excitement of the blank page at the very beginning is long gone. The satisfaction of having an entire first draft down on paper feels so far away. And if you’re right in the middle and writer’s block strikes, then what?

The thing I find about writer’s block is that it tends to be project specific. It’s not that you can’t write. It’s that you can’t write that particular topic or story that you want to write.

So Project June is about how a writer should always have more than one writing project on the go. That way, if you get sick of a project or if you get stuck on a project, you can keep working on another without losing precious writing time.

As I write this, I’m 90% finished a standalone novel, have written 30% of sequels to two books I’ve published and have 50% of Project June. I’m also in the development phase of one fiction and one non-fiction book. That’s six projects on the go all at the one time but all at different stages. So if I get stuck on one, I spend some time working on a different one until I get past the writer’s block or whatever it is that’s preventing progression.

The positives with Project June:

*Having too many ideas is better than having no ideas.

*You’ll always have something to work on.

*It relieves the guilt that some writers have when new ideas strike before old ideas are completed.

*Rather than having to abandon a project, you simply put it on hiatus. If it’s in the back of your mind that you’ll eventually go back to it, it can percolate quietly in the interim. And by the time the percolation becomes an intense boil, that’s when you know it’s time to pick it up again.

*Sometimes publishers and agents like the way you write but not a specific piece. With Project June, you’ll always have something else to give them. It might not be a finished piece but it shows them that you’re not just a one trick wonder.

*It’s the mark of a professional to be able to work on multiple projects at the same time.

The problems with Project June:

*You can’t just do it, you have to work your way up to it until you have multiple projects on the go and keep starting new ones as you finish old ones or even before you’re finished old ones.

*It can pull your attention in multiple directions, which can be annoying, particularly when all you want to do is write one story and your multiple projects are in the various stages of writing, editing, designing, publishing and marketing.

*It doesn’t help if you are working on a writing project with a specific deadline.

*You must be able to compartmentalise, that is to completely forget about all other projects for a little while.

*You must be able to remember which storylines go where. If you’re constantly having to refresh your memory on where you’re picking up the story from, you’re going to waste a lot of potential writing time. And you don’t want to get them mixed up. A lot of writers have a lot of similarities between subsequent books. You want it to be because they are deliberate themes, not because you couldn’t remember you’d already used that plot or that character in another book.

*You might be one of those people who just can’t do it (and that’s fair enough – it’s not for everyone).

Stephen King isn’t a fan of working on more than one writing project at a time. I think he must be one of those people who just can’t do it, although he says that he thinks it impacts the quality of the work. Maybe when you’re pumping out books at the rate with which he does, that’s the case. For the rest of us, it’s less of an issue. After all, there are no Project June rules about how quickly you have to turn over your multiple ideas. I suspect a lot of the things I subscribe to when it comes to writing would have to get tossed out if I wasn’t able to work at my own pace.

So have as many ideas as you like. As many as you can handle. As many as you need to minimise writing downtime. Whether that’s two or ten or even more is entirely up to you and your imagination. And how to manage them all? Well, that’s another blog post for another day…

Have You Ever Heard of Zane Grey?

[image error] I was recently reading an article about the biggest fiction sellers going back over the last one hundred years and how so few of the biggest sellers at the time are still read all these years later. One name kept jumping out at me. Zane Grey. I’d never heard of him. But he wrote the bestselling book of 1918. He wrote the third bestselling book of 1919. He wrote the bestselling book of 1920. He wrote the third bestselling book of 1921. He wrote the ninth bestselling book of 1922. He wrote the eighth bestselling book of 1923. He wrote the sixth bestselling book of 1924. From 1917 to 1926, he was in the top ten of the list of bestselling books nine times. According to Wikipedia, he was one of the first millionaire authors.

His first four novels were rejected by publishers and he self-published the first. In 1910, he wrote his first bestseller, The Heritage of the Desert. In 1912, he wrote his all-time bestseller, Riders of the Purple Saga. He wrote so much that even though he died in 1939, his publishers continued publishing a new Zane Grey book each year until 1963.

Many of his novels were made into films by early Hollywood. One novel was adapted four different times. He was President Dwight Eisenhower’s favourite writer.

So why has he virtually disappeared in the calculation of writing history?

Possibly it has something to do with the fact that he wrote mostly westerns and few “classics” seem to fall into this category. But I suspect more likely is the fact that the critics didn’t much like him. Despite the fact that he was immensely popular and extremely wealthy as a result of his writing, one critic wrote, “The substance of any two Zane Grey books could be written upon the back of a postage stamp.”

Sound like any other writers we know? So, so many. In all likelihood, this means that in one hundred years, writers like EL James, Stephenie Meyer, Ann Rice, John Grisham, Dan Brown and James Patterson will have disappeared onto an obscure list of bestselling authors that nobody remembers or reads much anymore. Not because their books aren’t any good – they’ve all managed to find a niche and exploit it admirably – but because their books don’t transcend those niches.

Technically, Bram Stoker’s Dracula falls into the same niche as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight but Dracula is the vampire novel while Twilight is just a vampire novel, merely one of many trying to emulate what Stoker managed to achieve all those years ago.

The thing about legacy – how long pieces of writing and the authors themselves will be remembered and revered – is that it’s impossible to control. One hundred years after the height of a writer’s success, the odds of having died are pretty close to one hundred per cent. And how they were perceived during their lifetime could be a world away from how they are perceived one hundred years later. While he was alive, Bram Stoker was best known as the personal assistant of an actor and as a theatre manager. And before he was a writer, Zane Grey was a dentist.

Writing with a legacy in mind seems like a perfectly good way to ensure a writer won’t have a legacy at all. It’s hard enough to predict what will resonate now, let alone long after we’re dead. And even though Zane Grey isn’t at the top of any list of classic authors now, he’s still on the list of the bestselling authors throughout history and has an extensive Wikipedia entry profiling him for when someone like me notices his name appearing over and over on a one-hundred-year-old list. Maybe that’s legacy enough.

*****

Here’s a funny twist. About a week after I wrote this blog post, I popped in the DVD of The Third Man and settled in to watch it. I’ve had it in my collection for a while but never got around to it. About half way through as the main character, Holly Martins, is giving a talk at a local literature appreciation group, the following exchange takes place:

Man in audience: “What author has chiefly influenced you?”

Holly Martins: “Grey.”

Woman in audience: “Grey? What grey?”

Holly Martins: “Zane Grey.”

Facilitator: “Oh, that’s Mr Martins little joke, of course. We all know perfectly well Zane Grey wrote what we call westerns… cowboys and bandits.”

 The man in the audience then asks a question about James Joyce, clearly implying he is a much more worthy author for discussion. The movie was made in 1948, about a decade after Zane Grey died and obviously before he finished his progression into relative obscurity.

It just goes to show that no one ever really disappears completely from the public consciousness, no matter how hard the self-proclaimed arbiters of taste might try.

How to Write a Serial Killer Crime Thriller

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To me, there is nothing scarier than a fictional serial killer. Yes, real serial killers are terrifying but most people are very unlikely to ever come across one and know this. Fictional serial killers, however, are everywhere: there are more book, film and TV show serial killers than there will ever be real ones (thank God).

I’ve come to realise that there seems to be a bit of a formula for writing a serial killer story. It’s not compulsory, of course, just a set of common steps that run through quite a few of them. The steps don’t always occur in exactly the same order. The steps don’t always occur in isolation; sometimes multiple steps are happening at the same time. And the steps are abstract enough that despite appearing in almost all serial killer movies, the stories are still distinct because of the details of each different serial killer, their methods, their victims and the people trying to track them down.

I’ve tested this formula on a few of my favourite serial killer movies (many originating from books) including The Silence of the Lambs, Frequency, Jennifer 8, Copycat, The Bone Collector and Kiss the Girls and it seems to hold true. So if it can help with plot, allowing writers to focus on the specifics instead, maybe we might be lucky enough to come up with a character as iconic as Hannibal Lecter.

I’ve used The Silence of the Lambs as an example below.

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Establish the Main Character

It’s usual in many stories to show the main character in their normal world before the events of the story force them into an uncomfortable new reality. For Clarice Starling, this means training at the FBI academy. The main character may be an investigator or a witness or someone being framed for the crime. The step usually occurs before the main character is even aware of the serial killer. At the very least, it occurs before their involvement.

Establish the Unsolved Sequence of Crimes

The main character is drawn into the serial killer’s crimes, usually as a way of explaining to the reader or watcher the known details. Clarice is summoned to the office of Jack Crawford, head of the Behavioural Science Unit, on a seemingly unrelated matter.

Establish a Seemingly Unrelated Subplot

The unrelated subplot is often the key to solving the crime, even though nobody knows it at the time. Jack Crawford asks Clarice to meet with Dr Hannibal Lecter as part of a project to interview all serial killers in custody.

Establish a Bureaucratic Naysayer

The bureaucratic naysayer tends to get in the way of the case being solved, often due to ego, sometimes due to wanting to do everything by the book. It may also be someone who desperately wants to involve themselves in the investigation. In the case of The Silence of the Lambs, it’s Dr Chiltern.

Establish an Inappropriate Relationship

Calling it an inappropriate relationship might not be quite right, but often the relationship will cause the main character to be removed from the official investigation or the person in the relationship with the main character will betray them. It’s not necessarily a romantic relationship. Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter’s relationship is based on professional respect (despite what happens in later books).

Establish the Traumatic History of the Main Character

All good main characters are tormented by their past in some way (or at least that’s how it seems). In Clarice’s case, her socioeconomic background is called out almost immediately by Dr Lecter:

“You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition’s given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you’ve tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? You know how quickly the boys found you… all those tedious sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars… while you could only dream of getting out… getting anywhere… getting all the way to the FBI.”

And then as the film progresses, the story of her father’s death and the screaming lambs that gives the story its name is detailed by Clarice herself.

Discovery of Seemingly Unrelated Evidence

The seemingly unrelated evidence will make sense later on but for now it appears to be a frustratingly irrelevant. Lecter telling Clarice to seek out Miss Mofet is a prime example.

Offer of Assistance from Someone with Ulterior Motives

Once Clarice has found Miss Mofet, Dr Lecter offers to provide a psychological profile of the Buffalo Bill killer. He’s pretty clear about his ulterior motives – escaping Dr Chiltern’s clutches – but there’s nothing to say ulterior motives have to be secret motives.

Disappearance/Discovery of the Latest Victim

In most serial killer cases, real and fictional, the disappearance or discovery of a new victim can be crucial in providing further information towards the discovery of the killer. It’s often a fifty/fifty prospect of whether the victim is named or not. In The Silence of the Lambs, there are two latest victims – the woman found in Elk River, West Virginia, who is never named and Catherine Martin, the senator’s daughter, who is kidnapped with the intention of being the killer’s next dead body.

Behaviour from a Superior that Belittles the Main Character

There is almost always an act of belittlement from a superior or a direction not to pursue a particular lead that only makes the main character more determined. At the funeral home, Crawford asks the local sheriff to discuss the case away from Clarice because of the nature of the crime.

Evidence Begins to Emerge

Evidence begins drip, drip, dripping in (the moth in the throat, the patches of skin missing from the Elk River victim’s body) and suddenly one thing leads to the next, and then the next, and then the next.

Evidence from the First Murder Proves Crucial

Because serial killers tend to start close to home, the first murder and the first victim often prove crucial in getting the investigators very close to identifying the killer. Real life investigators know this long before it ever seems to become important in fiction but it makes for a dramatic revealing moment:

Clarice: “Fredrica Bimmel, from Belvedere, Ohio. First girl taken, third body found. Why?”

Ardelia: “Because she didn’t drift. He weighted her down.”

Clarice: “What did Lecter say about ‘first principles’?”

Ardelia: “Simplicity.”

Clarice: “What does this guy do? He ‘covets’. How do we first start to covet?”

Ardelia: “We covet what we see…”

Clarice: “…every day.”

Ardelia: “Hot damn, Clarice.”

Clarice: “He knew her.”

Misdirection

At this point in the story, the killer is close to being caught even if nobody in the story really understands that yet but for some reason, either intentional misdirection from the killer or the wrong evidence being followed leads the police or investigators down the wrong path. In The Silence of the Lambs, this is the taskforce flying to Calumet City to raid an old address for the man they’ve identified as importing the specific types of moths being left in the victim’s throats.

Main Character Follows the Road Less Travelled

The main character isn’t distracted by the misdirection or is asked to follow up on something that isn’t thought to be as important in tracking down the killer and unexpectedly comes across the killer earlier than anyone expects. Clarice is in Belvedere, Ohio, reinterviewing witnesses in relation to the kidnapping and murder of Fredrica Bimmel and knocks on the killer’s door without initially realising she has found him.

A Battle of Wits and Then Bodies

And then comes the brutal and bloody battle of wits and usually bodies as the main character and the killer fight to gain the upper hand. Buffalo Bill escapes down into the basement where he has hidden Catherine Martin and all the evidence of his double life, and Clarice follows him with her gun drawn. When he shuts off the power and all the lights go out, she must beat him against all the odds.

Final Resolution

Which, of course, she does. The serial killer is either captured or killed, often after having the chance to avoid both and failing to take the opportunity. Buffalo Bill reaches out and nearly touches Clarice multiple times as she fumbles around in the dark, managing to reveal his position and allowing her to shoot him.

Return to Normal Life

And then everyone returns to their normal life, which isn’t really normal because it has now changed forever as a result of the events that have led them here. Clarice graduates from the FBI academy, so her life is back on track, but then Lecter calls her from Bimini after having escaped, where he is “having an old friend for dinner” (Dr Chiltern who is desperately trying to hide, knowing he has tormented Lecter for years and the favour will be returned).

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And there you have it. It’s not perfect because no formula is but it works in so many already successful stories that it is ultimately useful.