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?

Location by Mark Troy

If you’ve been keeping up with Helen Ginger’s Straight From Hel blog (and why wouldn’t you?) you know she undertook a quest at my suggestion to find and photograph Slip F-18 Bahia Mar, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Along with 221b Baker Street, the abode of Sherlock Holmes, Slip F-18 is one of the most famous addresses in mysterydom,. It’s where Travis McGee docks his houseboat, The Busted Flush. Both addresses are fictitious but their locations are real.

I don’t think I’m an obsessive fan, but if I ever visit London, I will surely go to Baker Street. I have walked the block of Marlborough Street in Boston where Spenser lives, though I could not identify which apartment was his. (Bob Ames of the Bullets and Beer website believes he’s figured out which one is Spenser’s. You can read how he did it here.) I have Googled Woodrow Wilson Avenue in Los Angeles where Harry Bosch lives and, using the street view feature, have found some likely candidates.

Why does it matter where our protagonists live? It’s actually the rare story in which the protagonist’s home is relevant to the plot. If the home figures into the story, it’s usually where the story begins, where we see the hero in his or her ordinary world; and it’s often where the story ends when the hero returns to the ordinary world. In between, the hero might return home to catch his/her breath or lick his/her wounds.

If home is not important to the plot, it is, nevertheless, important to character. Where they choose to live and what they choose to surround themselves with, tell us a lot about the characters and what they value. We never learned much about Philip Marlowe’s pad except for the ever-present, unfinished chess game, but that tells us a lot about his spare, focused personality. Spenser’s Back Bay apartment reflects his appreciation of substance and quality. The location is near the center of his world. In contrast, Harry Bosch chose a house high up in the Hollywood Hills with a deck that overlooks the city he serves. His job takes him into the pit of hell every day, so it’s understandable that he would want to rise above it, literally and figuratively.

The main character of my current project, Ava Rome, lives in Waikiki because she likes to be near the activity. Waikiki, however, is a densely populated area full of high-rise apartment buildings, which, in my opinion, lack character. Ava thinks so too, and refers to their collective style as “Californication.” I looked long and hard for a place in Waikiki that would suit Ava and finally found it on Pau Street. It’s a two-story apartment building that looks like it was built in the early 60’s before the high-rise building boom. It’s next door to a single dwelling home that could be even older and might be the last single home in Waikiki. Pau Street is a one-block street on the western end of Waikiki. Even the name resonates with meaning. Pau means “end” or “finished” so this out-of-date apartment on this tiny street represents a last stand against whatever needs to be stood up to. And that’s what Ava does. She’s the last stand for people who have messed up their lives. Her apartment has one other feature that makes it desirable for my story. The stairs going up to her door are painted red, so blood stains won’t show.

The Busted Flush, Travis McGee’s houseboat, is as much a part of his character as his cynical outlook. It's how we picture him, sitting on deck, waxing philosophic on love, friendship, gin and women. Of course everyone knows he's not there. But if he were there, he would have greeted Helen Ginger and her husband with a cold martini. Then he would have listened sympathetically to her account of the highway clogged with traffic and the ocean views ruined by development and he would have had very harsh words for the people who destroyed his Florida.

So writers, how did you choose where your characters live? Readers, what fictional abodes would you visit if you could?

Mark Troy
http://hawaiian-eye.blogspot.com
http://www.marktroy.net

She said, He said

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. They don't speak the same language. Really? No, not really. Men and women understand each other very well, in spite of a pop psychology industry determined to convince us otherwise. Nevertheless, there are some differences in the way men and women use language in conversation. These are not big differences, more like subtle tendencies. Men tend to do more of this, women tend to do more of that. Writers can add more authenticity to their dialogue by paying attention to these subtle differences. Let's look at an example.

The relationship between Spenser and Susan Silverman is one of the most enduring relationships in literature. They've been together for 35 years since 1974 when God Save The Child was published. Here's the scene where it began.

"Why don't you take off your coat?" she said.
"Well, it's supposed to make me look taller," I said.
"Sitting down?"
"No, I guess not," I said and stood up and took it off.
"I don't think you need to look taller, Mr. Spenser," she said. When she smiled, the color of her face seemed to heighten. "How tall are you?"
"Six one," I said.
"Really? That's surprising. I must admit you don't look that tall."
"Even with the raincoat?" I said.
"Even with that," she said. "You're so wide. Do you work with weights?"
"Yeah, some. How could you tell? Your husband lift?"
"Ex-husband," she said. "Yes, he played tackle for Harvard and stayed with the weights afterward."

Robert B. Parker, God Save the Child.

Notice that Susan has six turns to speak and Spenser has five. Susan utters 58 words; Spenser utters 27. Susan's extra turn, which has 13 words, doesn't account for the difference in total words. Susan says an average of 9.7 words each time she speaks compared to Spenser's 5.4.

We're not going to fall into the old stereotype that women talk more than men. We want to know where the extra words come from. We can see that Susan's speech is more complex than Spenser's. Remember, both of them are very literate people. Spenser reads books that most people would never pick up. Nevertheless, Susan utters eight complete sentences and four fragments compared to Spenser's three complete sentences and four fragments. Correct grammar simply uses more words than incorrect. So one difference between men and women is that women's speech tends to have more complete sentences than men's. Note that both men and women pepper their dialogue with sentence fragments. The difference is simply in the ratio of sentences to fragments--two-thirds of Susan's utterances are complete, whereas only half of Spenser's are complete. So to make your character's speech more masculine, spice it with more fragments. To make it more feminine, check the grammar.

The "do drop." English speakers commonly drop the "do" or "did" from certain kinds of sentences ([Do] You want to get something to eat?) This is another gender marker. Susan retains it when she asks if Spenser works with weights. Spenser drops it in his answer. While both men and women commonly drop the "do," men drop it more often than women.

Women use language to connect, men use language to communicate. Certainly men connect, too, just as women communicate, but women's speech contains more connectors. When Susan says, "I don't think. . ." she is making a connection between herself and Spenser. She could have said, "You don't need to look taller," which would have been straightforward communication and is the way Spenser probably would have said it. Susan makes another connection when she says, "I must admit. . ." Phrases such as "I think," "I believe," "I feel" preceding a statement of fact serve to connect the speaker to the hearer. Such phrases are not exclusively female, but occur with greater frequency in women's speech than in men's.

The art of seduction. Man-to-woman speech is often more wordy than man-to-man. A man seduces a woman by telling stories and jokes about himself. Remember when Eddie Valiant, the detective in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? asks Jessica why she stays with Roger? She answered, "He makes me laugh." I'll bet our caveman ancestors did not club fair cave maiden on the head to get her onto the animal skins. Instead, he probably spun a tale about the hunt and maybe tossed in a joke about stepping in the mastodon dung. Spenser makes a play for Susan with a joke on himself about the coat making him look taller. It earns him a smile from Susan.

There are, of course, no absolutes. You can find men who never utter a sentence fragment (Barak Obama?) and women who always drop the "do." How your characters speak is part of their personality and the more you understand their personality, the more authentic their speech will sound. However, counting words, fragments, "do's," and qualifying phrases can help you add more feminine or more masculine attributes to your dialogue.

For more on this topic, see my Hawaiian-eye blog.

Too Many Killings? by Chester Campbell

How much killin’ is enough? You expect to find murders in a murder mystery, but do some authors go overboard?

Lee Child is one who knows how to knock ‘em off with abandon. Jack Reacher and his antagonists can be counted on to dispatch up to a dozen or more in every book. Reacher does it with a bit of flair, killing in just about every way imaginable.

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser has been known to knock off a few bad guys, though he usually keeps it to a fairly low number. I seem to recall in Potshot, however, that Spenser and his crew stirred things up out in Arizona on a level that outdid the O.K. Corral guys by far.

Of course, when the good guys are pulling the trigger, it isn’t murder, it’s self-defense. But sometimes, it seems, they can get pretty self-indulgent.

When the mystery involves a serial killer, it’s a given that there will be a string of bodies laid out all through the book. Some authors delight in giving us all the gory details of how it happens. But are we any more enlightened than when we only learn the basics of the slaughter from a detective’s perspective or an autopsy report?

I have described a few deaths in my books, but I keep the gory details to a minimum. How do you feel about killings in mysteries? Are there too many? Are they too graphic?

Chester Campbell
Mystery Mania