Yikes – Friday again, so soon?

Major manuscript revision in process. Article to write on assignment. Blog post for LadyKillers a couple of days ago. Committee reports for a non-profit board I sit on.

It seems that I’m sitting at the keyboard all day. Just ask the little orange cat begging me to throw her mouse across the room just once more. This is good for a writer, but I lost track of time and my Friday post was the casualty. Rather than write something careless, I’m re-posting an old LadyKillers bit that still holds true: LOCATIONS

Well-crafted settings for stories are like characters in the narrative. They drive action, provide context, set up or resolve conflicts, add color or texture. Writers who skimp on making the location vivid and exciting, stark or serene, dangerous or comforting, have missed a large measure of what most readers want in our stories. Here’s a partial list of some of my favorites in fiction, stories that are memorable to me in part because of the setting. Just thinking about these books floods my senses! What would you add?

Bath, England in PERSUASION by Jane Austen

Communist Laos in THE CORONER’S LUNCH, by Colin Cotterill

Heaven in SUM, by neuroscientist David Eagleman

India in THE GAME, by Laurie King

Lake Superior in A SUPERIOR DEATH by Nevada Barr

Moscow in WAR AND PEACE by Tolstoy

Northern Africa in THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

Occupied France in SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky

Paris in MURDER IN THE SENTIER by Cara Black

Post World War I England in MAISIE DOBBS by Jackie Winspear

Shanghai in SHANGHAIED by Eric Stone

Sicily in THE SMELL OF THE NIGHT by Andrea Camilleri

The high seas in MASTER AND COMMANDER by Patrick O’Brian

Victorian London in BLEAK HOUSE by Charles Dickens

LadyKillers have been discussing this all week on our blog site. I’m not on the rotation for the week, so I don’t get a chance to weigh in over there. But the terrific nominations from the other writers got me going and I herewith offer a few of my own. For me, the opening lines need to signal the presence of a good storyteller, someone who is saying, “Draw up your chair to the fire, and let me tell you the marvelous tale…”

In the crime fiction genre, it has recently become a truism that you have to start with a dead body, or at least a shock that pulls the reader into the book forcefully. There are books that do that well, and I relish them. Others, not so much, especially when they’re too obviously manipulative and formulaic. I’ve always been willing to give the writer a little more time as long as I get the sense I’m in the presence of a master who will entice me in rather than yank me by the scruff of my neck.

Not all the best stories are fiction either. As I was searching out favorites that other bloggers hadn’t mentioned, I remembered first lines of poems, histories, social commentaries. All had that power to draw me in, to capture my attention with something clear and yet challenging. Some that I love were far too long to add here, or required that the reader stay with the writer a couple more lines to become fully caught up in the story. I honor them even if I can’t include them here.

• In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Oxford Bible
• Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droughte of March hath perced to the roote… Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Prologue
• It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• There are people who can be happy anywhere. I am not one of them. – Cornelia Read, A Field of Darkness
• Michael Deramo straightened his tie in front of his cracked hallway mirror and tried to imagine how many buckets it would take to hold one hundred thousand dollars.  – Camille Minichino, The Lithium Murder
• This story’s about greed, desire, love, and death – in the world of antiques you get them all.  – Jonathan Gash, The Judas Pair
• If If you had happened to find yourself on the banks of the Ohio River on a particular afternoon in the spring of 1806 – somewhere just to the north of Wheeling, West Virginia, say – you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift craft drifting lazily down the river. – Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

Would love to hear yours!

A year ago, I wrote a blog for LadyKillers, where I blog every other Tuesday, on the assigned topic: Where do you find inspiration as a writer? I’ve updated it here because one can never have too much inspiration, right?

Just finished the highly praised “The Lock Artist” by Steve Hamilton. It’s a strong, compelling story in which the author juggles time, doling out bits of the protagonist’s history in parallel to what’s going on in the more recent past. Time shifts can be hard to pull off and Hamilton does a great job, even if I got a little fatigued shifting gears occasionally. Recommended.

In one of her early books, Sue Grafton has Kinsey hide in a trash bin, as I recall. We don’t know any more than Kinsey whether or not the lid will suddenly be ripped off and she’ll be battered. I still recall the tension I felt – my pulse was pounding. How did she do that?

Cara Black’s scene-setting leaves me with such a clear picture of wet cobblestones on cold Paris nights that my feet feel cold. She can conjure that up in descriptions that don’t leave me thinking of the actual words she writes, only of the darkness of the night. I know how Cara does it: She walks those pavements at night in the rain!

Lee Child’s dialogue pushes the plot along at high speed, and Gar Anthony Haywood’s characters talk like real people – he’s got the gift.

Laurie King echoes Sherlock Holmes in more than one way in her Mary Russell mysteries – she knows how to keep me guessing as to the identity of the murderer. Like Conan Doyle, she seems to relish playing hide and seek with the reader, but always playing fair.

Lately, I’ve been reading perhaps too much R.D. Wingfield, whose Detective Inspector Frost stumbles his way to case-solving, cursing, smoking, and annoying other people every step of the way. I say “Too much” because I realize Wingfield doesn’t let Frost grow much, and even his speech gets repetitive if you read too many of the novels in a row. Plus he (Frost, I mean) has a pretty one-dimensional view of women

How about you? Any good sources of writing inspiration to share?

I’m a little distracted by the world today.

I don’t like the politics, the economics, the suffering and fighting, damn near anything. That ought to make it a good day to write crime fiction. There are so many villains and victims and crimes and nasty situations to choose from.

But for me at least it doesn’t work that way. I’ve always said that a slight to my beloved is what gave me the core of the story and one of the chief characters in MURDER IN THE ABSTRACT. In the sequel, THE KING’S JAR, it was a glimpse into a research world unlike what I’d known previously that led to the central idea for that Dani novel. At the moment, I’m deep into the third in the same series, MIXED UP WITH MURDER, and Dani is doing some due diligence as a consultant on a college campus, a type of community I know well.

I look at crimes close up, basically as failures of character. I can explore evil or moral sickness on that individual level and understand, sometimes even sympathize a little, with it. But the big stuff? Whole cultures of corruption? The rule of law crumbling in entire countries or regions? Mobs stoning teenagers? Soldiers raping and pillaging on a daily basis? When it gets that big in scale, I can’t decipher the qualities that lead people to carry out such crimes. Is it merely a multiple of individual defects of character or madness, or is it something new, a kind of sickness that only infects people when they’re part of a group all of whom have their own weak spots that somehow get exploited at the same time by the same trigger?

Whatever it is, I’m baffled, occasionally speechless, and definitely not up to the challenge of getting it down on paper. John Le Carre was able to do it for Cold War spy agencies, I think, and Dennis Lehane can paint scary portraits of communities that are – and are subject to – prejudice. Lehane and the other writers on “The Wire” did it every week, but they chose to do it the only way I could conceive of the job, come to think of it, through individual stories that sometimes broke your heart.

All of us who write fictionabout crime have to look it in the face, try to parse it enough to understand it, to see through the shock and tragedy of the act into the hearts of the villains as well as the victims. I’m just having a hard time today seeing past the immensity of the real world crimes.