Don't Discount the Freebie

By Chester Campbell

Some of my colleagues here have been discussing the vagaries of book promotion. It is a subject that strikes the center of what we do, write books we hope others will read. Experience has shown that if we don't promote our works, people will not learn about them and, therefore, not buy. One of the sticking points of late is the subject of free books. Should we give some away in hopes of attracting more sales?

Being a midlist (or maybe sub-midlist) author who has never sold a ton of books, I am acutely aware of this problem. Well, I did sell some eighty-plus books at the Kentucky Book Fair several years ago, though I haven't managed to equal that since. At any rate, I decided a year ago that tales my colleagues were telling about freebies sounded like the way to go.

As it turned out, I got in on the tail end of the boom days. The first few I tried on Amazon's KDP Select program (about one a month) did decently well, then toward the end of the year tapered off as more and more writers jumped into the water. As others have noted, things continued to slip during the first half of this year.

When I first read of BookBub, I checked it out and said no thanks at the sight of that $240 price tag. Then I read experiences of people like Jinx Schwartz and Rebecca Dahlke and decided to give it a try. I put my second Greg McKenzie mystery, Designed to Kill, up free for three days the middle of September. It had over 49,000 downloads, far better than anything I'd done before. In the two-plus weeks since it went back to $2.99, I've had more sales than normal, though nothing outstanding. But the other four books in the series have done quite well, bringing total sales of around 400 ebooks.

I should make at least double what I paid BookBub, and my name has gotten out to thousands of new downloaders. Most of them probably aren't readers, but enough have been to make them come back to buy more of the series. Also the number of reviews on Amazon for Designed to Kill has more than doubled to 44, the latest four hours ago with five stars titled "Great read. Page turner."

BookBub doesn't accept every book, but I'll try another in a couple of weeks and see how it goes. My experience tells me don't discount the value of the freebie.

Visit me at ChesterDCambell,com

Putting Yourself in Your Book

By Chester Campbell

I'm not talking about making yourself a character in your book, but consciously or not we usually include a lot of ourselves in our writing. Back in the days when I made a lot of public appearances (a voice problem limits my talking these days), I would talk about my Greg McKenzie mysteries and someone would invariably ask, "Is Greg really you?"

My standard reply was, "He's bigger and bolder and more confrontational than me, but we think a lot alike."

A lot of my characters have no relationship to me, either in size or demeanor or thought processes. But at least one of the key personalities is bound to express my sentiments about the situation. It just comes flowing out of my fingers naturally. I choose to write about subjects that interest me, which means I have feelings that get expressed in one way or another.

There are other ways we put ourselves in our novels. One is to use experiences we've had some place or another. I've done that countless times. In my first post Cold War political thriller, Beware the Jabberwock, I had my two principal characters, Burke Hill and Lori Quinn, ride the Star Ferry across Hong Kong Harbor. I described it as I remembered from my visit to Hong Kong back in 1987 (the story takes place in 1992).

In the second of the thriller trilogy, The Poksu Conspiracy, I had Burke Hill visit Chiangmai, Thailand. I used the Top North Guest House where my wife and I and our son and his wife stayed during our Far East tour. It was more like an early American motel with limited amenities. I also used places we visited such as the Chiangmai Night Bazaar and Wat Prathat Doi Suthep, a Buddhist temple high on a mountain west of the city.

My first Greg McKenzie mystery was based largely on a tour I took of the Holy Land in 1998. Greg and Jill make a similar journey as the book begins, and several of the characters were based on people I met during the trip. One who played a key role was our tour guide in Israel, an American who had lived in Jerusalem for several years. I used a lot of her characteristics but changed her sex for plot reasons.

I think most writers put a lot of themselves in their books in one way or another. Do you find your thoughts, your preferences, your characteristics, your experiences showing up in your prose?

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Setting...Local or Widespread?

By Chester Campbell

When deciding where to set a novel, an author has a choice of restricting the story to a single locale or spreading it across a wider tapestry. There are several factors to consider in making the selection. Sticking to a single location, which is one of the hallmarks of cozies, has the advantage of requiring a minimum of research. If you are like me and choose the city where you've spent most of your life, it's an easy choice.

My seven books in two mystery series featuring PI's are set primarily in Nashville. Since I've spent most of my 87 years here, it makes describing the locale simple. During the early part of my writing life, I was a newspaper reporter or a local magazine editor, giving me total familiarity with the area. The city has changed considerably in recent years, but I've watched it grow and develop. When I need to, I do a drive-by in a particular area to check out recent changes.

The first two books in the Greg McKenzie series are set only partly in Nashville. The first takes place also in the Holy Land, which I had just visited before I started writing. The second starts in Nashville and then goes to Perdido Key and the Pensacola area. Part of it was written at my brother's condo on Perdido Key, which my wife and I visited twice a year.

Both of my Sid Chance PI stories are set in the Nashville area. But I didn't start out locating books in my home town. My first novels were a trilogy of post Cold War political thrillers. I spread the action across the map.

Research is a major consideration when choosing a widespread setting. Getting an unfamiliar area right can be a problem. I set the first two books mostly in locations I was familiar with.

Star Ferry in Hong Kong Harbor

The first involved the Great Smoky Mountains, an area I tromped about many times in my younger days; Washington, D.C., which I had visited many times on business, and Hong Kong, where I spent several days during a Far Eastern tour. I had made several visits to other American cities used in the story. Brief scenes were set in Vienna, Austria, Tel Aviv, Israel and the island of Cyprus. I used tour books and online research to provide sufficient background for those.

Seoul Subway

A large part  of the second book takes place in South Korea. My familiarity there came from a tour in Seoul during the Korean War, plus a visit to the modern city while on the Far East tour mentioned above. That trip also provided several days in Chiangmai, Thailand, which I also featured in the book.

The third book, written in 1993 but never published, will be out next month. Overture to Disaster required the greatest amount of research, since much of it is set in areas I had never visited. A portion of it takes place in Mexico, mostly in the area of Guadalajara. I had been to Mexico City and taken a bus tour from there to Acapulco, so I knew the countryside fairly well. To get the flavor of Guadalajara and Lake Chapala to the south, the number one destination for retired U.S. servicemen, I corresponded with the editor of a retiree newspaper. She provided loads of helpful information.

The second area was a small community in the Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran. I chose it after reading a book about Army Special Forces that told how U.S. soldiers became heroes to the locals in the wake of a deadly earthquake. That was during the Shah's reign in the late seventies, but the people still would have viewed American soldiers with fondness.

The home of a character who was an investigator for the Minsk prosecutor proved the most challenging area to portray. The time was shortly after breakup of the Soviet Union and formation of the new Commonwealth of Independent States. Things were changing in the capital of the Republic of Belarus. I corresponded with an attache at the American Embassy there who provided me with answers to all my questions, including political conditions and locations of various government offices. 

The important thing in spreading your setting around the globe is to do everything possible to get it right. So far I've had no problem with readers taking potshots at my descriptions. What's your take on how to handle unfamiliar settings?

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Why don't you write a book about...?

By Chester Campbell

Every author gets one of those suggestions occasionally from an acquaintance or a passerby at a book signing. I usually smile or nod or give some such non-response. But when I was getting ready to write my fourth Greg McKenzie mystery, a neighbor pushing ninety stopped with obvious excitement to tell me about a visit to the restored factory and office building of Marathon Motor Works just beyond downtown Nashville. Her father had worked there on the assembly line in 1914, the year the company stopped production.

"You ought to go over there and look at the place and put it in your next book," she said.

An entrepreneur with a vision had bought the old buildings located in an unsavory part of town and long abandoned. He had researched the company's history, learning it had produced a popular touring car in Nashville from 1910 to 1914. the only automobile ever produced entirely in the South. He had been restoring the buildings to provide space for creative types like artists, photographers, and musicians.

My wife and I visited the place, now called Marathon Village, and got the grand tour by Barry Walker, the owner and developer. Being somewhat a history buff myself, I found it quite intriguing. He had located a few Marathon cars from around the county and was restoring them. A nifty looking one sat in the old showroom of the headquarters building. I shot a photo of it which I sent to the artist who created the cover.

In wandering around the place, which was still in the process of being restored, I noticed it had thick interior walls. Former office spaces contained decorative wood facing in places such as corners in a wall. I got to thinking what somebody might have hidden behind one of those decorative panels. And a mystery novel was born.

Most of the Marathon Motor Works background in the book is factual, with names changed to protect the guilty. The Marathon car made quite a splash in the automobile world. It was sold at dealerships around the U.S. and in several foreign countries. The owners made several mistakes that doomed the business. They fired the engineer who created the car and brought in new management who knew nothing about manufacturing or selling automobiles. And there was skullduggery afoot, with cars being "sold out the back door" at less than cost.

With this background, I created an assistant treasurer, Sydney Liggett, who disappeared in the midst of this financial fiasco and was accused of embezzling funds. His body was found a few years later seated in his Marathon in an abandoned barn a few miles from Nashville. Thus the cover artwork. Ninety years later, papers are found in the wall of his office that may have some bearing on the case. But the construction foreman who had them disappears before he can show them to Liggett's grandson, now in his eighties and in a nursing home.

It is at this point the story begins with Liggett's great-great granddaughter retaining my senior sleuths, Greg and Jill McKenzie, to find the foreman and recover the old Marathon records. As you might imagine, when they find the foreman, he's in his Jeep at the bottom of a lake. I put the murder in a rural county where the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation takes charge of the case. The TBI detective is a major character in the story.

The Marathon Murders is the fourth book in my six-book (so far) series and was published in 2004. The ebook version will be free in the Kindle Store Monday through Wednesday, January 25-27. If you can't wait till then, it's only $2.99 anyway.

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The Quixotic Phenomena Called a Review

By Chester Campbell

Book reviews are an interesting phenomena. They are so subjective that you have to evaluate them with care and and in many cases take them with the proverbial grain of salt. There has been a flood of posts on various blogs and listserves recently about Amazon's treatment of reviews. And much of it derives from the fake review exposes of late.

Many writers have complained of Amazon's recent practice of taking down reviews from their book pages for various reasons. There is a lot of disagreement about what is taking place. Some say the massive retail site has removed reviews by other authors. Some say it doesn't like reviews put  up by friends of the author.

Happily I haven't noticed any reviews removed from my books except for one, Secret of the Scroll, my first published book and the first in my Greg McKenzie mystery series. However, it's easy to see what they did. The novel was originally published in 2002 by Durban House. I parted with the company after my third book and got my rights back. I also got a large supply of books from their inventory, which I used to keep the books on Amazon and sell at various venues.

I ran out of Secret of the Scroll copies this year and got it printed in a second edition by Night Shadows Press. The  inside of the book is virtually identical, but the cover has several changes, one of which I had wished was there from the start. With nothing but the title and artwork of an ancient scroll on the original cover, many people thought it was a religious book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The new cover includes copy identifying the story as an international thriller.

The Amazon page contained around eight reviews submitted back in 2002 and 2003. After the new edition was put up, Amazon gained another batch of reviews when I did three free days for the Kindle edition. Recently I found that the reviews for the 2002 edition had been removed. I thought that was a little picky, but I haven't complained.

Back to my original premise about the subjectivity of reviews, I found it quite interesting to read a few recent reviews for the second Greg McKenzie book, Designed to Kill. Several reviews were added after I ran its Kindle edition free. Here are three that appeared one after the other. First came a 3-star review titled "It's OK":

"In a nutshell, I felt like this story was a little predictable. I figured out early on who the bad guy was. I continued to read it though, hoping that I would be surprised in the end. Sadly, I wasn't."

Under that appeared this 1-star review titled "I Didn't Even Finish It":

"It is rare that a book is so bad, that I don't finish it. I have pushed through some terrible books in the past, but this one was an exception. I didn't like anything about this book. I didn't like the characters. I didn't like the story line. I found it boring, and rambling. This was my first and last Greg McKenzie Mystery."

Following that came this 5-star review titled "Killer out there":

"Greg McKenzie retired and living in Nashville with his wife Jill find themselves as amateur sleuths, after their close friends son is found dead from a head wound in Pensacola Florida, the evidence suggest he committed suicide by a gunshot to his head.
Greg and Jill decide to go to Florida to take a look at the evidence as the family believe he was murdered. So the story begins ranging from Nashville Tenn. to Pensacola Flo. This is an interesting book as it teams up a husband and wife who are retired and in their early 60's. A well thought out and plausable plot that will keep you guessing to the end."

You'd have thought they read different books. Fortunately for my ego, the page contains seven 5 stars, including one from Midwest Book Review that ends with:

"A plot that moves along at a rapid clip with plenty of cliffhangers and well-defined characters. Greg McKenzie and his wife Jill are likeable characters who manage to transform retirement into a series of exciting adventures, all the while dealing with aging bodies and minds. A fine second effort!"

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The Genesis of a Character

A couple of my colleagues here have been talking about characters. They are the building blocks of a story. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes may make for excitement, but it's how people react to such phenomena that we enjoy reading about. I know some authors who tear pictures of people out of magazines and post them near the computer to model for their characters. Others base characteristics of their creations on people they know.

For the most part, I create my characters from scratch, giving them traits and history that blends in with their role in the story. I literally build them as I go, adding to the characters as the story develops (I don't outline or plot the book in advance). When I began writing what became my first published mystery, Secret of the Scroll, book one of five in the Greg McKenzie series, the tale I had in mind required a retiree with investigative experience. Since I had an Air Force background, I decided to make him a former Office of Special Investigations agent. And since I had gotten involved in the new Scottish Society of Middle Tennessee, I gave him a Scottish name and heritage.

As I said, that has been the case with most of the characters who people my books. However, there has been one striking departure. It involved the first novel I wrote when I turned to fiction in earnest back in 1989. That time, also, I needed a man with investigative experience. But in this case he would need a background that would allow him to have worked in the past with a CIA officer. As I thought about it, I had the perfect fit in a former FBI agent I had first met during my days as editor of Nashville Magazine.

I discussed the man whose background formed the basis for my character Burke Hill on this blog last April in The Story Behind the Story. I didn't use his physical characteristics for Hill, and I did a bit of tweaking with his backstory, shifting the timeline and fictionalizing his activities following the dismissal by J. Edgar Hoover. A tale about Burke working with his old CIA buddy in Mexico isn't part of the story related by my ex-FBI friend, but he did tell me about a wild concoction produced by a lab at Dugway Proving Grounds.

Hill is the central figure in my trilogy of Post Cold War political thrillers, which had different literary agents when written in the early nineties and wound up in the manuscript pile on my office floor. The first, Beware the Jabberwock, was finally published this year and is available on Amazon in ebook and paperback. The second, The Poksu Conspiracy, will be in the Kindle Store by the end of this month.

Burke Hill's character is further fictionalized in the second book with the revelation of a son by his first marriage. But the basic story of his FBI career, starting with his job of delivering documents to Hoover's home, follows the account the agent told me in interviews.

The other characters in both books are figments of my imagination. Incidentally, I haven't mentioned the former agent's name, but if you're curious, take a look at the dedication in the print version.

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Starting Over with No. 1

I entered the ranks of published authors in 2002 with Secret of the Scroll, which became the first in my Greg McKenzie mystery series. I had a three-book contract with Durban House Publishing Company, now deceased. They published my first three McKenzie books and then let them go out of print. I bought the publisher's remaining inventory of a couple of hundred books and sold them over the years at non-bookstore venues. A lot of readers want the first book in a series.

With my supply depleted, I turned to my current publisher, Night Shadows Press. As a result, Secret of the Scroll will be available to bookstores in the next few days. The text is identical with the first edition, but there's a new cover, shown here. It closely resembles the original, with the addition of a blurb identifying the book as "An International Thriller, Greg McKenzie Mystery No. 1."

One of the problems I've had since the book first came out is that just glancing at the cover, people presumed it was about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The novel involves a fictional parchment similar to those famous documents, but it's hardly a religious book. It won second place for Thrillers/Horror in the 2003 Bloody Dagger Awards and was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Mystery Book of the Year.

The book has been available for more than a year on Amazon for the Kindle and Smashwords for other e-readers, and it will now be on sale in a new paperback edition for those who like to hold a real live book in their hands.

Chester Campbell

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My Field of View Is Narrowing

I've realized that the focus of my writing has narrowed over the years. My first three novels written in 1990-93, but never published, have a decided international flavor. The first ranges from the U.S. to Austria, Cyprus, Hong Kong, and Israel, winding up in Toronto. Book two takes us from the U.S. to Korea and China, while the third wanders among Ukraine, Iran, Belarus, Mexico and the U.S.

This trilogy of post-Cold War spy stories grew out of my love of the espionage genre, which I had followed for years with authors like Helen Macinnes, John le Carre, Graham Greene, and Robert Ludlum. The international scene was fresh in my mind from travels across Europe and around the Far East in the eighties.

While revising the books with an eye toward publication, I was reminded of how much additional research I had done in preparation for writing them. I make folders for each of my books and place all of the research material in them. Besides notes they include call slips for various books I checked out of the library. I also have a supply of maps and travel books covering the areas. The shelves in my office include books on the CIA, the KGB, and such famous spies as Harold Adrian "Kim" Philby.

By the end of the nineties, my settings had narrowed down to mostly U.S. locations. After a trip to the Holy Land in late 1998, however, I set my first Greg McKenzie mystery half in the U.S. and half in Israel. My second McKenzie book wandered off to Perdido Key, Florida where we vacationed often in my brother's condo, but since them the mysteries have all taken place around my hometown of Nashville.

I suppose this is part of the aging process, since my wife and I have cut back on our personal wanderings over the years. There's probably a bit of laziness involved, also, as it's much easier to write about an area you are intimately familiar with. I enjoy venturing out to re-check locations I haven't visited in a while, and I'll occasionally include a place I've never been before.

I still enjoy the high-octane machinations of the spy story, though I haven't read a good one lately. Who knows, I might just stumble into a dead drop  or pick up a one-time pad and get motivated to turn out another espionage tome. Meanwhile, look for the Burke Hill trilogy in the near future.

Chester Campbell
http://chesterdcampbell.com
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G-Whiz, the PI's Have It

I write two mystery series featuring PI's. In the first series, my protags are a couple in their latter sixties. Greg McKenzie is a sharp investigator and is fascinated by all the new surveillance gadgets, but when it comes to telephones he's a bit old-fashioned. He thinks telephones are communication devices for people to talk on, just like they were back when you stuck your finger in the correct holes to dial a number.

The G-revolution has changed all that. If you're like Greg, you've seen all the G signs around kiosks at the mall but never bothered to find out what it's all about. The modern PI knows. In my second series, Sid Chance's sidekick, Jaz LeMieux, has all the latest smart phone gadgetry and uses them to her advantage.

So what is this G business all about? Greg McKenzie stepped on the G1 rung when he bought an analog cell phone. For an investigator, it was a great time. You could buy a scanner that would sweep the cell-phone spectrum and listen in on your target's conversations. No need for a wiretap and all that business.

That ended when G2 came along, the digital cell phone. Digital transmission improved the quality of the signal but made it quite difficult to listen in on the conversations. You had to know the algorithms used by a particular cell company to unscramble a call.

Greg was okay with the G2 step, but then along came another advance known as G3. That was a bit much. Cell phones suddenly started sprouting up that would tune into the Internet, receive emails, text messages, pictures, most anything you could imagine. A bit slow for downloading large files, but doable.

Now we have the fourth generation (yes, G stands for Generation). The 4G phones are faster than ever, four to ten times faster than the previous generation. The high-speed addition will allow a PI to sit at a table watching his target chat with a potential bad guy, flip through photos on his cell phone and try to pick out a match. It provides all kinds of possibilities. Do a real-time background check.

This newest revolution won't affect Greg because he's still living in 2004, but you can bet Sid and Jaz will put it to good use. Have you encountered the G-whiz factor in a mystery?

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Putting History in Your Mystery by Chester Campbell

Trousdale County, TN Courthouse

I’ve always been a bit of a history buff, which I suppose contributed to my love of research. The problem, as any conscientious researcher knows, is that you invariably come across some interesting tidbit that has no relation to the subject. However, it seems too intriguing to pass by, so you’re off on a tangent.

When that happens, I try to find some way to work it into the story.

Take, for instance, when I went to the small town of Hartsville, about forty miles northeast of Nashville, looking for good places to commit a few murders. I always consult AAA maps and Mapquest and Google maps before making such ventures. I had found a likely spot along a bend in the Cumberland River and decided to check it out.

To get there, I had to go through downtown Hartsville. You’d miss it if you blinked twice, but I stopped to admire the century-old Trousdale County Courthouse, which looks more like a very large red brick residence. Although it stands more than a mile from the river, it was deluged with several feet of water during the disastrous 1927 flood season. What I found most interesting was a tall granite obelisk in front bearing a tarnished metal plate that read:

THE BATTLE OF HARTSVILLE
HERE, DEC. 7TH 1862,
1500 CONFEDERATES UNDER
GEN. JOHN H. MORGAN
SWIMMING THE ICY CUMBERLAND
SURPRISED AND CAPTURED
A LARGE FEDERAL GARRISON.

Though not a Civil War buff, I had heard of the famous John Hunt Morgan and his cavalry raiders. But I put that aside as I took a major highway south from downtown (in this area that means a nice, paved two-lane road). Shortly before reaching the river, I spotted a sign pointing toward the Battle of Hartsville Park. I detoured over to take a look.

I learned that Morgan’s advance had worn Union blue uniforms to fool the enemy sentinels. In less than two hours of fighting, the Confederate party of 1,500 had surrounded the Federals and convinced them to surrender, taking 1,800 prisoners. Casualties, dead and wounded, included 1,855 Union soldiers and 149 Confederates. Checking the battlefield maps, I found Morgan had placed his artillery across the river at the exact spot I planned to leave a corpse.

This had to go in the book. I had my protag, Greg McKenzie, visit the park and comment on the Union soldiers suffering their own Pearl Harbor, seventy-nine years to the day before Dec. 7, 1941. When he visits the murder site, he muses:

“Realizing a party of tired, half-frozen Rebel soldiers had fired cannons in this area nearly a century and a half ago, I wondered if any Confederate ghosts had lingered about Monday night when someone fired three shots into (the victim). If so, they weren’t talking.”

It was an opportunity to provide a little local color and add to the realism of the story. The moral: research is hardly ever wasted. If we look around, we can probably find a use for it. If not, hey, chalk it up to education. We can all use more of that.

Aging Series Characters by Chester Campbell

The age of your character could become a problem if you’re writing a series. The best known current series character is Robert B. Parker’s Spenser. Since I don’t have the early Spenser books, I’m not too sure how old he was when he started out, but it was at least mid-twenties. The Godwulf Manuscript was published in 1974 and the 2009 model, The Professional, will appear later this year.

With thirty-seven books in as many years, that would make the wisecracking, rough-and-tumble private detective almost sixty years old. He’s pretty agile for that age, but I’ll go along with it. My new protagonist, Sid Chance, is fifty-nine in the first book, The Surest Poison. He’s physically big and tosses a couple of guys off the porch.

Lee Child’s rugged Jack Reacher should be mid-forties in the thirteenth book, Gone Tomorrow. He would have been around thirty when he got out of the Army six months before Killing Floor chronicled his first brush with the law and the world of bad guys. Who knows how long he’ll be able to continue his superhuman escapades in wiping out a host of nasties in each book.

Sue Grafton took a different tack in dealing with her smart and headstrong PI, Kinsey Milhone. Since A Is for Alibi came out in 1983, there have been twenty-one books, including U Is for Undertow, due for publication later this year. As far as I know, Kinsey is still in her thirties. I believe the books are set in the seventies, before cell phones and DNA and a lot of other forensic stuff. It works well for Kinsey as she ages slowly.

When I wrote Secret of the Scroll, published in 2002, I didn’t have writing a series in mind. I liked the characters, though, and decided to keep them around. But age was a problem. Greg McKenzie was sixty-five. I didn’t plan on him tackling the villains like a football player, but I wanted him to be a physical challenge. The Sue Grafton method seemed like a good solution.

Designed to Kill took place a year later. Since then, the stories have been separated by three or four-month intervals. Book two was set in November, Deadly Illusions the following March, The Marathon Murders in August. The fifth book, now underway, takes place in December of the same year. So in Greg and Jill McKenzie time, it’s still 2004.

How do you feel about aging characters? Should they follow the calendar, or take their own sweet time?

Making Characters Come to Life by Chester Campbell

I think we all agree that characters are chief ingredients that make our mysteries come to life. “Cardboard characters,” as the terms implies, leave stories flat. I thought it might be instructive to peel away the layers and see how a protagonist comes into being.

The person in question is Gregory McKenzie, the lead character in four Greg McKenzie Mysteries. When I came up with the idea for Secret of the Scroll, I wanted a man who would do anything to save his wife from a murderous group of terrorists. I preferred someone with investigative experience who could track down hostage-takers without taxing the reader’s credibility. Since I had an Air Force background, I decided a retired Office of Special Investigations agent would be an interesting departure from other protags.

I wrote two-and-a-half single-spaced pages of background for Greg, which also included basic information on his wife, Jill. I put his age at sixty-five, hers a few years younger. One of my intentions was to show retired seniors as the competent individuals that I know them to be. I was tired of reading blundering caricatures of my age group.

Re-reading my notes from ten years ago, I found a lot of information that has never come out in the books. I also noted more than a few incidents that appeared in the book originally, but were dropped after being axed by my editor. I may find a place to use some of them eventually.

To make him sort of Joe Average, I set Greg’s birth in St. Louis. For a good Scottish background (after all, I am a Campbell), I made his father a burly, garrulous, red-faced Scotsman who emigrated at age fifteen and became a master brewer for Anhauser-Busch. His mother also contributed some Highland blood from her side of the family, as did my own.

Greg retired as a lieutenant colonel, held down in the ranks by his penchant for stepping on as many toes as necessary while pursuing the truth in criminal investigations. He angered a brigadier general early in his OSI career who came back later as a three-star general to stop him in his tracks. His doggedness is a characteristic that hasn’t changed over four novels.

I have added more background to the character as different stories came along. One involved his family’s military history. This is how Greg described it in a paragraph from the second book in the series, Designed to Kill:

When the 98th Argyllshire Highlanders were first mustered in 1794 at Stirling Castle, north of Glasgow, there were sixteen McKenzies on the roster, one of them an ancestor of mine. After the unit was re-designated the 91st, other McKenzies followed him on down to 1881 when the 91st was merged with the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders to form the regiment my grandfather fought with in the Boer War and World War I. My dad, Rob McKenzie, was a little less combative, serving as a U.S. Army cook in World War II.

One of Greg’s little idiosyncrasies, seemingly unlikely for a former Air Force officer, is his fear of flying. This despite the fact that his wife, Jill, is a licensed commercial pilot who owns a Cessna 172. It makes for interesting scenes when they need to fly somewhere on a case as private investigators, which they become in books three and four.

Family backgrounds, personal foibles, and other intriguing aspects of character help mold our protagonists and antagonists into real people for the reader. And our protags become our personal friends as well. It makes life at the keyboard more interesting.

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