On Writing — Reader’s Expectations: To Meet Them Or Not Meet Them

Authors live and die by the reviews. I have been blessed by the attention over the years.  And I thank the highly educated, overworked and often underpaid reviewers who help keep writers afloat.  In my couple of decades I have never argued with or complained about a review. I don’t intend to do that now. But a very recent book review of the second in my new novella series about a forensic accountant touches, perhaps inadvertently, on the topic of authors writing in a different style and or a different genre — meaning he or she is likely not to meet the expectations of a reader familiar with writers most popular or previously accepted work.

This happens to many writers. Some never leave the pattern of their original success. From the readers’ point of view, I understand. It is much like one of those moments when you  expected a Coke and were shocked, even disgusted at the taste of iced tea, though under normal circumstances you like iced tea as well. It was the shock of the unexpected.

 So I’d like to clarify my soon-to-be released novella, The Black Tortoise. For those who followed the more popular Shanahan series, the Peter Strand series is entirely different.  Shanahan is an older man,  former Army sergeant, who came to terms with life and with who he is a long time ago.  The stories are standard book-length and often quirky. They take the tough P.I. approach. The Shanahans are more likely to have violence and, by sheer length, accommodate a more complicated plot.  Peter Stand, introduced in The Blue Dragon, is a young Chinese American, dealing with personal identity as he attempts to solve much more conventional mysteries (almost cozies, puzzles to challenge the reader to find the murder before the book ends) in a quick-easy-to-read style. The Strand series is part of Orca Publishers “Rapid Reads” program designed for the reader who wants a quick read on the flight from Phoenix to New York. Or for a younger reader who identifies with a protagonist still coming to terms with himself and the world around him.

Now, in my world, I can enjoy American Psycho and “Midsomer Murders,” but I would hate to have to watch one when I was expecting the other.

My first real brush with this phenomenon as a writer was when Good To the Last Kiss was released by London’s Severn House.  Compared to the Shanahans, this is a dark book indeed. People I knew and loved, not to mention most critics, didn't want to talk about it.   It hasn’t sold well. Yet I consider it to be my best. I suspect it never got to the readers who might have liked it because my previous books kept me off their radar. On the other hand, this is my problem. I’m not the only one who has to deal with this kind of thing. Writers are finding ways to keep from being completely pigeon-holed. Another book, also one of my favorites, is Mascara: Death In The Tenderloin, a transgender mystery. It was also too different.  Most publishers shy away from books by authors who venture too from the expected.  As have other stubborn writers, I published it myself.  I’ve not gotten rich, but I’m so happy I wrote what my soul was telling me to write because part of being a genuine writer is taking that risk.

Please, read the Shanahans. Perhaps there is a reason why many consider these books the best of what I do (did).  But if you are adventurous, consider reading some of my non-Shanahan work as well.

The inspiration for this post was a negative review from a highly respected source.  The fact is every word in that review was correct, which is why I found it worth comment because it also pointed out the expectation game. While I am working on a new P.I. set in Palm Springs, and a little more in the Shanahan tradition, I’m also working on other mysteries that wander pretty far outside the box.

                                                                                                

Book Notes – Nutshell In A Nutshell, Womb With A View

Ian McEwan

Perhaps I am too literal to be literary in my own writing, but I certainly enjoy reading the elegant prose of Ian McEwan. I’ve long been a fan his work, much of it bound in slender volumes —unusual occurrences compared to most of today’s tomescent best sellers and critical successes. And as a reader and writer, the short novel is my format of choice these days.

This relatively short crime novel, Nutshell operates from a conceit — that a fetus can somehow divine the reality that exists outside the increasingly small space in the womb, and that said fetus is also able to communicate those impressions to the reader with the logic of a sophisticated, mature and literary mind. What his unborn narrator “senses” leads the reader to a view of the kill.

As a fiction writer, one may do whatever one chooses.  Put the Statue of Liberty in Lake Michigan if you like.  However you must convince the reader it’s there. In this case, I wasn’t convinced right away. I read somewhere that most people have little or no memory of what happened in their lives before the age of five. Perhaps that is because without language to describe our feelings and organize our thoughts, if we have them, we are at a loss to recall. To reconstruct is to have once had a construction. For me, I have some infant memories of a Koi pond, a swing set near a creek and my neighbor watering his lawn.  That’s about it before five.  My brother, on the other hand, has birth memories and moments shortly thereafter.  How many, though, can reminisce about their days in the womb as it inevitably closes in around them?

If you are willing to suspend your disbelief — and McEwan’s words will seduce you, I swear — the story will flow effortlessly and humorously.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

“Compact, captivating ... The writing is lean and muscular, often relentlessly gorgeous ... McEwan is one of the most accomplished craftsmen of plot and prose,” says Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New York Times Book Review

For me, there was, from time to time, moments of a Liberace flourish at the end of a sentence or paragraph; but who, with his talent, wouldn’t want to mug occasionally? The other odd, and I think extremely clever contrivance (not a bad word in mystery-making), is that the fetal narrator somehow makes us part of the conspiracy to murder his/her poet father, a murder about which the infant seems to take an interested, but nonpartisan position. It is an all-knowing narrator without the baggage of good and evil. Can the unborn possess such inclinations as judgment if it has such extraordinary proficiency in language? True objectivity?  Not really. Selfishness exudes from the temporary tenant as expected from a being that only knows itself.  

On Writing — Fiction As History

The Early Shanahan novels

Occasionally I receive comments from people who have read some of the early books in my Shanahan mystery series.   These notes usually come from people who live or have lived in Indianapolis. Rarely are the comments about the plot, though critics at the time were complimentary. Some are about the main characters – Deets Shanahan and his love, Maureen.  But most of the sentiment is about bringing back memories. The 11 novels in the series set in Indianapolis cover 25 years in the life of the Circle City beginning with The Stone Veil in 1980. History is an unforeseen, but happy consequence of fiction.

I haven’t been the only one.  In fact I wasn’t the first one or necessarily the most prolific.  The acclaimed Michael Z. Lewin not only originated the first series featuring a fictional Indianapolis P.I., but is also credited with popularizing the idea of a regional P.I. series. Many others followed.  My Deets Shanahan character also came after Lewin’s Albert Samson.

Michael Z. Lewin

Lewin and I are roughly the same vintage. However he began writing younger in his life.  Counting his Leroy Powder cop series, Lewin has used Indianapolis as a setting for 11 crime novels with a history going back to 1971 with his first Samson novel, Ask The Right Question, among those being re-released as I write.

Re-released

I have inadvertently been part of recording this city’s history when, as its first editor, I helped found NUVO Newsweekly, the longest serving alternative newspaper in the city’s history. Long after I was gone it continues to chronicle my hometown and is a powerful, on-going historical reference. However, I would suggest that fiction could go beyond the news as a historical document in many ways by creating the mood, the ambiance and an in-depth characterization of its neighborhoods, restaurants, transportation and particularly its inhabitants.

There are those, of course, who dismiss genre fiction, including the P.I. novel as something less than respectable. The Shanahan mysteries are definitely genre fiction, as are the Samson novels. We gain a sense of the place in time in a way that may not be academic, but in a fluid, experiential way.

Book Notes — The Whites, A Misleading Title Given The Times, A Powerful Piece of Literature

I’m currently reading The Whites, a highly praised cop/crime novel by Richard Price.  And I’m having trouble.  Good trouble, I suspect; though I can’t be sure. His words send me off on trips unrelated to the narrative.  One detour is that I find myself not reading but wondering, paragraph after paragraph, how he gets it so seemingly right.  I understand how someone like Michael Connelly creates the reality of his acclaimed books.  He spent years as a reporter covering the police and the criminal court beat. But how does Price do it? Some of the great crime writers have been reporters, or cops, or criminal attorneys. Some of them have even done a stint as private eyes.  They rely on what they observed over the years.  It is a mix of imagination, recall and command of the language. Few, I think, achieve this level of realism or grit.

Richard Price

Has Price actually lived this cop life enough to know it so well that he can take me there? I tried to find out. He was one of the writers on the TV series, “The Wire.”  He was a screenwriter for one of my favorite movies — Sea of Love. But then movies and projects like “The Wire” are different. Unlike a novel, they are collective efforts. Yet, it is not a big jump from the highly joint effort “The Wire” to The Whites, an only marginally a collective effort.  Yet the grittiness comes through. And the word perhaps too popular now, “authenticity” rings loudly. I shake my head.  Surely he does not live there.

In an interview in TheParis Review, he said he spent a lot of time researching and hanging out with the police, including ride-alongs in instances where he is not left alone in the backseat while the cops tend to business.  He did (does) his homework. Much like a good reporter or photojournalist, there is a sense of courage and a willingness to impolitely intrude if need be.

So he extends himself, does whatever is necessary for his art. I’m impressed. He brings both journalism of sorts together with the art of literature. I can follow journalism without being taken in unexpected directions.  I can read a straight-forward story, Robert Parker, Dashiell Hammett and the rest.  I like interesting, informing, even puzzle-solving entertainment.  But novels that pick you up and toss you around so much you have to fight your way back to the page is another story.

I’ll not tell you about the plot. That’s available elsewhere and I’m still in the midst of reading it. What I want to talk about is the dilemma a thought-provoking book provides — provoked thought. Sorry.  I needed to emphasize the meaning of the cliché.  Maybe I’m limited by my overall intelligence (stop smirking) or possibly age has shortened my attention span or I’m far too easily distracted. Strange and embarrassing.   Most of the writers I read I don’t wonder how they do what they do. I may appreciate the artistry, even wish I could achieve it, but I’m not usually baffled by them.

So far in this book, one sentence may send me off into some abstract, often unrelated thought.  Instead of going back to the book, I’m forced to leave the book to sort things out.

 

However, one very selfish question started to dominate my mind as I approached mid-book. Given what he is able to do, plunging deeply into both sides – cop and criminal, I have to ask myself, as a crime writer, what are my qualifications? I have no such courage. My rudeness is rarely constructive. I have not immersed myself in the extreme divide between cop and killer, so divided they are more like each other than they are the folks who are neither.

I console myself with the observation that however passive it might be, I write about the world I know, that I limit my expression to my experiences and that I write honestly about what would be therefore comparatively bland.  I read a criticism once about someone tired of reading John Updike, saying he long ago stopped caring about middle class angst.  While it may not be angst exactly or even all the way up to middle class, my Shanahan series takes place in a more civil, more settled world rather than the tough streets of Baltimore, let’s say. 

I do have a hint at Price’s preparation.  Only a hint.  In Good to the Last Kiss, I ventured out. I did research the personally unlikely topic of serial killers.  I not only spent time with the police in homicide, I spent days reading and listening to tapes of psychological research about this type of crime, as well as the sometimes horrific ramblings of serial killers talking about themselves, their lives and their crimes. I was depressed for weeks, maybe months. But I had ventured out, however briefly.

This is what Richard Price does regularly, it seems.  In fact, this is what his main characters in The Whites do.  After writing my grimmest novel, I kept my distance from the darkest reaches of the soul and spent more time working on books with less sensational crimes and more seductive plots, all in my comfort zone. I still connect my stories to social issues, but less intensely.  And I stay with a reality well within my own experience, enhanced I hope by, a creative imagination. But I cannot regularly go where Richard Price goes.  Maybe it’s the very real darkness he witnesses and translates that sends me away from his writing.

The result is that reading these kind of books has become more exhausting than writing books of lesser intensity. At least writing my own stories, I can adjust the light on reality for my own comfort while admiring a much braver soul in theory.

Book Notes — Trace Conger And Mr. Finn, Number 3

Not a lot of moss can grow on Trace Conger’s keyboard. His third Mr. Finn book is out.  I’ve commented here before on the first two – The Shadow Broker and Scar Tissue. I have a feeling we’ll be dealing with Mr. Finn’s fourth sooner rather than later.  The Prison Guard’s Son, just out, continues the adventures of the shadowy former private eye, whose lack of license seems to give him license to do what he deems necessary — legal or not and with moral judgment that is, at best, dicey.

Trace Conger

One of the interesting qualities that comes out of the notion of a series is not only getting to know the main character, a worthwhile endeavor in this case, but also those regular characters that surround him or her. I’m especially fond of Finn’s father, and his ex-love, who may or my not be so ex.  

This tale, full of clever twists, introduces us to a man who suffered the loss of a son in a brutal murder many years ago.  The two nine-year-old boys who were convicted of the crime served their sentences and were released into a federal protection program ostensibly because of how young they were when they committed the crime. The father of the victim has not forgotten nor forgiven, and he hires Finn to find the two so carefully hidden so many years ago.

 

Questions arise, of course.  How does one find people professionally hidden, given completely new and officially sanctioned identities?  Where does one begin?  More important, what happens if they are found? As it was with his previous books, Conger seems to approach his stories from unexpected angles and forces his readers to contend with the complex moral dilemmas that arise when law, justice and pure vigilantism intersect.

Trace Conger’s The Shadow Broker was awarded The Shamus by the Private Eye Writers of America for “Best First Novel.”

On Writing – Short San Francisco Mysteries And Shameless Self Promotion

New Release – Pre-Order

Even before my Shanahan series came to an end, I was investigating, experimenting and completing shorter mysteries. The standard mystery novel is somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 words.  Short stories probably average around 5,000 words. The novella, or short novel, usually comes in around 20,000 allowing, in my opinion, the writer to develop both substantial character and plot development without fluff.

I’ve written two of these novellas for the Lang-Paladino series — Death In The Tenderloin and Death In The Haight.  More recently I participated in Canadian publisher Orca’s Rapid Reads program, easy-to-read short novels. I think of the series of books by popular authors as the perfect read for that flight from Denver to New York or while you under the covers for bedtime but can’t afford to stay up all night. The first novella, The Blue Dragon, received a genuinely warm welcome.  Here is what an early reviewer had to say about the book and the program:

"What an incredible beginning to a new mystery series by Ronald Tierney...This cover art also provides a capsule view of the multi-dimensions of the novella and becomes more meaningful as the reader progresses through each chapter...[This was] my first introduction to “Rapid Reads” and I am enthralled not only by the individual title selection experience but also for the incredible discovery of this reading series...(LibraryThing Early Reviewer 2015-08-23)

Now, we’re ready for book two, The BlackTortoise: When a low-key forensic accountant with a private investigator’s license is asked to investigate a San Francisco-based nonprofit arts organization, he meets a cast of quirky characters who all seem to be hiding a secret. There is evidence of a probable fraud, but when fraud leads to murder, the reluctant P.I. is drawn deeper into the murky waters of a criminal undertaking and shocking personal revelations.

   
The Black Tortoise, now available for pre-order, is the second novella featuring Asian American private eye Peter Strand. The Blue Dragon is available in paperback and digital. Both books are part of Orca Publishing’s Rapid Reads series.

Book Notes: A Chandler-Parker Welcome To Poodle Springs

Robert B. Parker

There has been an ongoing battle between the Raymond Chandler fans and those who prefer Dashiell Hammett about the invention of the modern P.I. in fiction.  I confess that I’m not well enough read to come down on one side or the other. However, spending a couple of decades in San Francisco, I’m more likely to favor Hammett.   It’s a matter of the sprawling suburbs that surround Hollywood versus the mysterious, exotic neighborhoods of the foggy City By The Bay. I prefer the walkable streets of S.F.

Used to be walkable, anyway. In the last few years, age and declining health nudged me from my third floor apartment at the top of a long and high hill.  The cost of relocating in one the world’s most beautiful but expensive cities pushed me out, and I’ve ended up in Chandler territory, two hours out of L.A., in Palm Springs. Here I expect to spend my golden years, or platinum years or titanium years. I also expect to murder someone here literarily, perhaps more than one.

Raymond Chandler

Now, after settling “Down Among The Sheltering Palms,” I wanted to read something that took place in my new town to help get my bearings — preferably a P.I. story.  And there it was — Poodle Springs, the last of Chandler’s eight Marlowe novels. It was left undone at the famous author’s death in 1959, and finished in 1989 by the popular and prolific Robert B. Parker.  I’ve read more than a few of Parker’s Spenser novels over the years. This one reads a whole lot like Spenser, caught in a time machine, a time when Palm (Poodle) Springs was the resort playground for movie stars and gangsters.  In this case, a guy fails to pay off a $100,000 IOU.  Marlowe is hired to collect. Murder ensues in the town of the rich and playful.

Chandler wrote the first four chapters, Parker the rest. Things have changed in the Marlowe series. The heretofore single-guy and L.A. P.I. has suddenly married.  He’s suddenly married a rich woman who delights in trying to make him a “kept-man” (as they used to say) — a theme that would repeat itself in the story.  What it reminded me of was Nick and Nora Charles, Hammett’s lovely, witty couple, so witty they turned The Thin Man series of films into a goldmine for Hammett. What was Chandler thinking? Was it simply the time for Philip Marlowe to settle down? Or did Chandler expect to hit the comedy-romance-mystery jackpot? The main difference between the two couples  —and Marlowe’s comes more than a decade later — seems to be that while Nick liked the good life provided by his wife, Marlowe was a tad threatened by it. And I’ll give Hammett the edge in the witty repartee department. How does it end? That’s for you to find out.  

Poodle Springs is a good, fast read and just what I wanted, a glance at my new home through the eyes of a couple of classic writers and an era I like a lot.