Ah, where is she when I need her? Like right now, with half of the last scene in my book still to be written, and a thousand distrations around me (two of them on four legs with whiskers)? I count on this mythical being to jumpstart my creativity when caffeine hasn’t quite engaged my brain. She’s needed when the idea for a new scene that seemed so exciting at 1 a.m. is looking flat 12 hours later. And who else will save me when a tangled plot thread starts unraveling before my eyes and I freeze, seeing an entire story coming undone at the seams?

I hope you saw “The Muse” with the always wonderfully cranky Albert Brooks and Sharon Stone. I may not have the delectable Sharon Stone – indeed, I could not afford her version of The Muse. I am lucky, though, to have friends and fellow writers who perform some of the same functions, but without the requirement of little, blue Tiffany boxes in payment. On a slogging day, I can email one, who’ll give me a little pep talk. When I’m searching for a character’s uniqueness, I may see it in a friend and morph that onto the page. Yesterday, Val McDermid, author of The Wire in the Blood and  Place of Execution, visited Janet Rudolph’s regular crime author salon, and her matter of fact, thoroughly professional approach to the writing life was the latest inspiration.

Now, to get organized and into that last scene for the last time…I hope.

Dick Cartter, The King of Detectives

Haven’t heard of the Sherlock Holmes-type private detective whose exploits had French readers gobbling up 21 stories in the early 1920s? Not surprising. Even though Cartter’s adventures took place in San Francisco, the booklets, which I can’t quite define as a comic since the only illustrations were on the covers, were conceived by a Frenchman, written in France and published there for the tiny sum of 30 centimes.

I wouldn’t know about them if my ex-pat friends hadn’t found a stash at a vide grenier (a cool flea market in which an entire town empties its attics and basements on the same weekend day) in Burgundy last summer and promptly sent them to me.

The stories are allegedly told by a Captain Browning, who was Cartter’s friend (another Sherlockian gesture) and are replete with pipe smoking, chasing around, exclamation points, and “cadavres.” The French is simple enough that I can stumble my way through them. Even if I don’t know the precise meaning, phrases like “une femme etait etendue, immobile et semblant privee de vie” in “La Chambre Bleue” (#15 in the series) are pretty easy to figure out.

It only adds a touch of craziness for that particular corpse to have been discovered after a horseback ride from the steamboat in Oakland to “le petit village of San Ramon.”

I’m not the only one who loves these little booklets. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley just accepted them with pleasure into their collection. I thought it was unfair to hoard them in my study any longer. So, if you’re a credentialed researcher, you’ll soon be able to find the elusive Dick Cartter in their archives. Until then, enjoy this cover!

Yesterday I took a trip back in time. I boarded a painted bus that was blowing bubbles, said hi to a cute driver in “Yellow Submarine” era pants, and surrendered to a soundtrack that began with Elvis and proceeded through the Mamas and the Papas to the still-amazing and too damn early dead Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. It’s a helluva show, a multimedia experience on wheels, a tour of San Francisco circa 1967. Chris Hardman, the founder and creative spark behind Antenna Theater, developed The Magic Bus, and I heartily recommend it.

But for me and the woman I didn’t know sitting next to me, at least, it wasn’t all about belting out old songs and laughing about the psychedelic thinking of the era. There was a segment that had my seatmate and me, separately and silently, in tears: President Kennedy shot. Martin Luther King shot. Robert Kennedy shot. George Moscone shot. Harvey Milk shot. (Hardman could have added four dead in “O-hi-o,” three shot and buried in Mississippi, four little ones bombed in Birmingham.)

History is powerful, and history one has lived through is perhaps the most powerful of all because it calls up the emotions of the time in a bewildering, condensed, personalized, visceral fashion. I remember how I felt, I remember who I loved, what I thought my life was going to be. I even remember a favorite mini skirt (and wonder what happened to it).

The experience was a reminder for me as a writer that using times the reader might recall from her own life is a powerful tool for getting that reader to jump into your story. After all, it’s her story too. It means, though, that you’d better get the times right – Elvis and the Rolling Stones were not on the Top Ten list together. The world stopped for many people when the President died in Texas, but not everyone mourned. And a lot of the kids – and we were kids, as Hardman’s archival footage illustrated –left bewildered and upset parents back home when they hitchhiked out to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. So much material to lean on! A feast of history in which to place your characters and then see how they react to the freedom and the experimentation and the strangeness and the music that, even know, is astonishingly good.

I think that’s the lesson for me – pulling your reader into the story is what we all want to do. Anything that triggers an emotional memory can accomplish that as long as it’s true to the moment and you write about it in a way that doesn’t denigrate the truth of your reader’s experience.

NOTE: I HAVE NEW READINGS AND TALKS SCHEDULED. PLEASE CHECK OUT THAT PAGE ON THIS WEBSITE FOR DATES AND DETAILS. I’D LOVE TO SEE YOU AT ONE OF THEM!

How important is it to have spent time in a location you use for your fictional story? Can you write about a place you’ve visited only in the imagination, or in travel literature, or online? Authors of historical novels can’t literally recreate the reality of a place, so how do they deal with describing something that no longer exists? Few of us can live in New York or Shanghai or Paris for months at a clip just so we can record and play back for our readers the daily habits of residents. But I think most readers can tell when the sense of place is real, crackling with energy, and specific without being pedantic. (I do not need to know every step the protagonist takes along a street in Oxford, but I like to feel the chill of old stone under her feet.)

Lisa Brackmann’s “Rock Paper Tiger” blew me away from the first lines. It’s a Beijing that simply reeks of life, shabby, crowded, the threat of trouble always in the air.  Lisa has lived and traveled in China and her keen observations help make this book an outstanding read.

Kelli Stanley has two books out set in San Francisco circa 1940, the latest of which is “City of Secrets.” At a recent panel on San Francisco noir, she explained how she conjures up a different time in a familiar place. From old souvenirs and vintage perfumes to reading the newspapers of the day, Kelli steeps herself in the times. And she visits the places as they are today, some quite different and others remarkably the same.

My fellow blogger on LadyKillers, Ann Parker, has a whole series set in the Colorado Rockies town of Leadville late in the 19^th century. The latest is “Mercury’s Rise,” which is launching this week. Ann spoke at a panel at Left Coast Crime last year in which she talked about the extensive research she’s done in the region, in the library, in conversation with people, and even by devouring old diaries. Reviewers and readers agree she brings the place and the issues of the day vividly and believably to life.

There are other books that don’t do this for me, that seem to be cribbed from travel brochures or movies. And when I’m not in the place, I have a hard time staying involved with the protagonist unless the writer is brilliant and is deliberately holding his hero at arms length from his surroundings, keeping them abstract in order to show me something important about the character.

Note: There is a bonus for committing to doing place well in a novel: You can write off your trip. And if you must set your novel in a city’s sewer system, be sure to have it be Paris’s, as Cara Black did in a recent Aimee Leduc novel!

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.

Good news from Publishers Marketplace today: “Mystery and detective fiction became the top-selling genre in 2010, up from fifth place in 2009, according to Simba Information, which tracks the publishing industry.”

I have heard, however, that publishers are so scared of losing money in this crazy new world that they’re sticking with proven authors – writers whose series track records pretty much insure a waiting readership to buy their books. Newcomers have it harder. Remember the first job conundrum: You couldn’t get that first job in high school or college because you didn’t have experience, and you couldn’t get experience because you didn’t have that first job? Well, getting in the door at a traditional imprint is a bit like that these days.

I’ve been watching a couple of authors I know who are in their second, third, or fourth books, and I’m happy to say they are good at what they do, and have publishers that are sticking with them. Talent, a distinctive ‘hook’ in their work, and hard work paying off.

I have other friends who are fine writers but who can’t break into this market. (I’m somewhere in between, having done rather well with my debut novel, but being unable to show a longer or bigger history of sales yet.) Some are considering self publishing for e-book readers, most likely on Smashwords, an innovative new company and concept. But new technology attracts spammers and crooks like honey does flies, and there are some nasty people out there taking advantage of ‘free’ content and the lack of gatekeepers to put out fake or pirated books cheap, collect credit card payments, and vanish into the internet mists. Anyone scammed that way is likely to be shy about doing it a second time. what will that do to the e-book ‘revolution’ in the short term?

The good news is there are plenty of crime fiction readers waiting for new content. Readers, keep reading, keep looking for/asking for new authors to investigate. My hope is the publishers will feel the demand and open the gates a bit more, and that the e-book market will mature quickly so we can all enhance our reading options.

Writing Rules to Ignore #4: Start your crime fiction with a bang

The current thinking is readers need to be grabbed in the first page – no, the first paragraph – no, the first sentence. If your story doesn’t begin in such a compelling way that they have to keep reading, you are doomed.

Doomed, for one reason, because editors at publishing houses have the same attention span that readers do. But also because in this age of instant gratification, constant distraction, short form communications, and time pressures, consumers of books need to know you’ll whip them in and out of your story fast. Efficiency, organization, clarity, and main-lined thrills sell books at airport kiosks, which is where the new readers pick up their fiction while skimming along moving sidewalks between planes.

And then comes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. By my count, nothing – nothing – happens until page 135 in the edition I read. How many copies has that sold so far? Did the writer not get the message? Is it possible he ignored the rule and just started writing his story, with all that background and setting of scene, and showing us a handful of people slowly moving to the center of a story that would eventually capture millions of readers for several years?

It is true that a story that begins badly, with graceless writing and no tension or conflict, isn’t likely to get better. The novel has to be excellent from the first sentence on to be worth $27.95 or $7.99, (or 99 cents on Kindle). But since when is good writing synonymous with finding dead bodies on the stairs in the first paragraph?

But we poor authors want our books to be read, and the marketing and sales staffs at publishing houses need to sell our books at the airport kiosks, and the sociologists tell us the world is spinning faster and faster and taking all our leisure habits with it.

This doesn’t mean you can’t ignore the rule, but you’d better have an ace up your sleeve, something with which to seduce that speed reader to stay with you as you unfold your tale.

Writing Rule to Ignore #3: Never kill a cat

This is a standing joke, among crime writers at least. The thinking goes that the reader will be yanked out of the story, transfer all his sympathies to the animal, and write you a nasty letter asking what you have against cats, or dogs, or hamsters, or whatever cute thing you submitted to the axe or the gun.

I once started a short story for a themed competition. Without planning it, I found myself having the suspicious character kill one of his wife’s dogs outside her front door. She could hear the horrible act happening but not see it through the locked door. I wanted to create terror for her and make this guy such a horrible specimen that the reader would be on the wife’s side when she took her revenge. But the scene creeped me out even before I got to the end, and I felt like washing my brain out with soap for even imagining such a heinous act.

Odd, isn’t it? We write (and read) crime fiction in which people are murdered left and right, often in gruesome ways. But we’re squeamish about killing animals. I’m not a psychiatrist so I have no explanations.

I do think the rule can be ignored as long as the writer knows the immensity of the effect and uses it to make a huge emotional impact. The Godfather anyone? The horse’s head under the covers?

Writing Rule to Ignore #2: Avoid adverbs

David Hewson, the British thriller writer, once told a group of writing students that he didn’t understand why American authors and writing teachers were so set against the use of adverbs. He said that British writers didn’t get so uptight about it, that if it was called for, they didn’t try to write around it.

“Is that a gun?” she said, her voice small and wobbly.

“Is that a gun?” she said, a sob in her throat, which was almost closed with fear.

“Is that a gun?” she breathed.

“Is that a gun?” she said breathlessly.

There are times when each of these might be the right choice. I agree that the rule exists for a reason. The writer who uses an adverb with every verb is obvious, and boring. He’s also lazy. It shouldn’t be necessary to tell the reader what’s happening.

The door closed loudly.

The sedan’s brakes squealed noisily.

The redhead grinned shamelessly.

The stronger writer shows the reader through precisely imagined action sequences and specific, distinctive dialogue. In theory, if we’re doing it right, the reader knows by the time he comes to that place that the door would be slammed because the character going through it is mad as hell and doesn’t need to worry that someone with a gun is listening for signs of movement in the building.

Writer and teacher Peggy Lucke recently noted that one exception to the rule is when what is being said contrasts sharply with the meaning expressed in the tone of voice.

“Go to hell,” she said sweetly.

I think the real rule is never rely on one way of communicating your story. Variety, surprise, conflict, tension, humor – the best writers weave words into something that is so compelling that we readers don’t notice things like parts of speech and word order.