Just finished a historical suspense novel that I paid full price for because the New York Times recommended it. I dragged myself through it (in part because it cost $25), refusing to quit until I found the key to its advance billing.

I never did, sorry to say. On reflection, there were several aspects of the book that didn’t work for me. They might please many – most, even – readers, as they did the book critic. But for me, they were impediments to enjoying the story.

First, too much history. Enough to set the scene is important, and enough to provide the context for the crime is critical. Why did the crime happen here? What about this place made the crime and the solving of it inevitable, shocking, unique? But that’s not to say I need to know everything about the place that the author found out. In this novel it got tedious, and drew me away from the mystery, not into it.

Second, too much place detail that only served to prove the writer had done full-out research left me thinking I didn’t need to travel every cobblestone of the town every time the protagonist left his room. Sketching the physical scene well brings the story to life, and I love it when an author does that for me. But the adroit writer picks and chooses which details will move the story forward, explain movement or mistakes, keep us deep inside the dream.

Third, the crime – the heart of the story. Yes, the writer kept me guessing about who killed innocent people, but not caring. There was almost a throwaway tone to the prose about the victims. I had the feeling they didn’t matter to the author, that they were merely there to engineer the plot, not to make readers aware of the injustice and the need for things to be made right. And, if the author didn’t care, why should I?

The reason I spent time thinking about the book as I put it on the “Not to Keep” shelf in my library is that these are common mistakes, traps into which I can fall as easily as anyone else writing crime fiction. I hope I will bring a critic’s eye back to my own manuscript and be quicker to see when I fall into these self-designed traps. That’s probably worth $25 right there!

(Warning: spoiler alert!)

What if you had to live every day over until you got it right, until you made the most out of every minute, every opportunity to be kind and honest and to use your talent?

For the jaundiced T.V. weatherman in the film “Groundhog Day,” it’s a nightmare…until it isn’t. Bill Murray’s face registers annoyance, anger, fear, and disgust as he walks through the same day and deals with his own attitudes again and again. In this wonderful fairy tale, which I think ranks with the best classic films of its kind, it’s the love of a good woman – and his ability to recognize and appreciate it – that ultimately saves him.

Every year, I watch it again for the pleasure of realizing that I get to choose how I will live my life. For me, the chance to write creatively and see my books in print is a gift, and if I sometimes forget that and start muttering about how hard it is or how much of my day it consumes, I remind myself that I was caught up in a million other things for years, wishing I had time to write.

Last week, I lost a good friend. I’m glad I took her to dinner last summer to thank her for arranging a lovely book launch party for me. It gives me satisfaction that she saw herself among the acknowledgements in my debut mystery for her singular help in bringing it to a publishable form. She knew how much I cared for her because I told her so. It helps to look back at that now.

It really would be scary if I had to learn the lesson of the fable the way Bill Murray’s character did, by waking up every morning to the sounds of Sonny and Cher singing “I’ve Got You Babe.” With apologies to the lovely Cher, there’s a nightmare!

Nice news today: World Wide Mystery, a mass market paperback book club publisher, has picked up MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT. Timely, too, because the original hard cover edition by Avalon is virtually sold out. There’s a hard cover, large print edition out there too.

None of this means the author is becoming either rich or famous. It does mean Dani O’Rourke may find more fans, and that’s good news for the series. I’m writing number three now, and it gets more fun all the time.

In a series, the writer comes to know the central characters well, has history to draw on, hears a defined voice (if it’s first person), and can pull in ancillary characters from previous stories. In my series, Dani’s ex-husband keeps popping up as only he can, perpetually hopeful that she will forgive his past indiscretion. The green-eyed cop she met in ABSTRACT shows up in the second and has just waltzed into the third for one of their typical dates in which he’s interrupted by the cell phone telling him yet another poor soul in San Francisco has been murdered. Suzy, who was in a terrible accident in ABSTRACT is her old self – warmhearted, gossipy, and supportive. Teeni Watson is about to put on the art exhibition that will cap her Ph.D. studies at Cal, and Fever the cat is… well, Fever never changes and why should he?

I have my fingers crossed that THE KING’S JAR will be out soon and that Dani’s next adventures will follow. She has so much to do and so many places to visit, and I’m itching to go along for the ride!

I’m delighted to welcome Margaret Lucke as a guest blogger this Friday. Her recent LadyKillers post on the topic of a narrative voice was so useful that I asked her if I could share it with readers of this blog. Thanks, Peggy!

Some years back when I was the president of the Northern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, I went to New York for the Edgar Awards banquet. Seizing an opportunity, I extended my visit a couple of days and set up interviews with a dozen mystery editors at major publishing houses. Then I wrote up our discussions in a market report for the chapter newsletter.One of the questions I asked them was, “What grabs your attention when you’re reading a submitted manuscript? What makes a book stand out, so that you want to buy it?”

“Voice,” said the first editor I interviewed.

“Voice,” said the second editor.

“Voice,” said the third, fourth, and fifth editors, and every other editor right up to number twelve.

“A fresh voice.” “An original voice.” “A powerful voice.”

It was unanimous. They might differ about what other aspects of a story were important, but they were in complete agreement on voice.

I was excited. I felt as if I had just been handed the key to success. All I had to do to succeed as a writer was come up with a — voice?

What the heck was that? So I asked them, “When you say voice, what do you mean exactly?”

Again, the responses were unanimous: “Um, well, er … “ They hemmed. They hawed. Finally one of them came up with a comment that seemed to represent the consensus: “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I read it.”

So voice, like beauty, is in the eye (or perhaps in this case the ear) of the beholder. It’s that quality of a story that makes the reader go “Wow!”

Or not. While every writer has a voice, not every voice counts as fresh, original, powerful, or even interesting. As a writer, I began to wonder — if voice is something every editor wants, yet no editor can define, then how do I get one? As a teacher of writing classes, how do I explain to students what voice means?

I’ve given a lot of thought to these questions, and I’ve come up with a few answers. Whether they’re the right answers, I don’t know, but to me:

•   Voice is the way the story is communicated to the reader. Characters, plot, and setting, taken together, define what the story is. Voice is how the story is told.

•   Voice is the sound of the story, what the reader hears in her head as she reads. It’s the music and rhythms and beat created by the writer’s choice of words and the way those words get arranged into sentences and paragraphs.

•   Voice is the personality of the story, its mood and its emotional flavor. It’s a mix of the opinions and attitudes and kind of humor that come through in the writing. It’s whether the story expresses itself in way that’s open and direct and outgoing, or instead feels closed and reserved.

•   Voice is the energy of the story. It’s the device a writer uses to transport readers into the story world and hold them there. The stronger the voice, and the more appropriate it is to the story you’re telling, the more likely it is that the reader will stick with you until the last page and come away satisfied.

•   Voice is what makes your story sound like you. It’s the way you imbue the story with your singular perspectives, interests, ideas, and insights, as well as your own particular approach to language. While you can take steps to make your voice more powerful, to make it better serve the purposes of your story, it will still be your voice, as unique to you as your fingerprints.

Don Foster is the author of Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous, a book about literary forensics. He says: “Since no two people use language in precisely the same way, our identities are encoded in our own language, a kind of literary DNA.”

Here’s the definition of voice that I finally came up with: “Voice is the way an individual writer combines ideas and language to create a dramatic effect or elicit the desired response from the reader.”

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Margaret Lucke flings words around in the San Francisco Bay Area as a writer, editor, and writing coach. Her latest book is House of Whispers. An earlier novel, A Relative Stranger, was an Anthony Award nominee. She is also the author of Writing Mysteries and Schaum’s Quick Guide to Writing Great Short Stories. Visit her at http://www.margaretlucke.com.