How to Bake a Murder Was a Pleasure to Read

Now that I'm part of the older generation, I find it difficult to discover books containing heroines with whom I can relate. Many books seem to be about younger people. 

However,  I did stumble upon a great cozy mystery called How to Bake a Murder by K.J. Emrick. In it, the older heroine is actually depicted as savvy and kindhearted, not a feeble woman who does dumb things. 

If you'd like to read my review, you can find it at this link.

This ebook is available on Amazon and worth checking out.

Morgan Mandel

http://www.morganmandel.com

About Book Titles

by Linda Thorne

If you follow suggestions for writing book titles, you will be discouraged from writing long titles (more than four or five words). The reasoning, keep them short so they’re easy to remember and easy to post anywhere. I talk about the exception to this, the one-word title, in the next paragraph. After you hear the lecture on size of title, the suggestions go on to include giving your title twists, humor, gusto, anything to find a way to make it memorable and provocative.

When considering short titles, one of the problems with the one-word title is the likelihood of it being duplicated by other people’s books. This is totally legal but many authors don’t want their books competing with a long list of the same title. Another problem is the difficulty of describing your book properly in a single word. Think about how much more defined a book title is when a second word is added. For example:

A couple of two-word titles in Marilyn Meredith's Tempe Crabtree series are Raging Water and River Spirits. The words Raging and River are meaningless standing alone as would be Water or Spirits. The dual words need each other to make sense and give these titles "oomph."

The same holds true of the debut novel by S.J. Francis, Shattered Lies. The two strong words, shattered and lies, would not mean much of anything if not coupled together. Either word as a single title would lose all its zest.  

I could go on and on: Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Now, having spoken on the negatives of titles too long and one-word titles, does any of this matter in the big scheme of things if you find that perfect title? Take a look at these exceptions to the popular advice:

Long

John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden and Good and Evil.
Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Alan Brady’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

One-Word

Rebecca
Shogun
Jaws
Carrie

I had the idea of writing a book long before I actually knew I’d really write one, so I was one of those people (annoying to some) who would occasionally tell others, “I’d like to write a book and I’d call it, The Termination of Jolene Cromwell. My lead character was a career human resources manager, so terminations were part of her job. This was the book in my head back then, in the years long before I started writing. The title is so, so, and rather plain. No oomph, no action, no underlying statement.

When I did start writing the book, the termination of the character named Jolene Cromwell was no longer the story. It was something that happened in back-story, something that gave motivation to my protagonist. The story starts when a no-call-no-show employee is found shot to death. My protagonist, like me, is a career human resources manager and regardless of how any employee leaves a company, they must be terminated. Then death itself is a type of termination. As writers, we’re told to stay away from the word just, but I thought it worked well in my title because it turns out to be anything but just another termination. The addition of the word, just also eliminates duplication of other book titles. When I Google Just Another Termination, I pull up one book and that’s the one I wrote.

The title of my second book, a work in progress, is A Promotion To Die For. My character gets a promotion that requires her to move to a place where she lived close to twenty-nine years earlier. She was in danger then and her move back puts her in danger again. This title is also a play on words. The promotion is a high paying “dream” job that could easily be referred to as a promotion to die for. In this case, the words could hold to their literal truth as well since someone plans to kill my lead character.

What's Your Sort of Sleuth?

I've recently been reading a cozy, or cosy, as the English would say. The main character is quite engaging, but does some odd things. She jumps to wild conclusions, and goes around asking bold questions of suspects who could be the actual killer. However, the author's humorous voice shines through, making me want to read more, despite the character's silliness.

At the other side of the spectrum are the super clever sleuth characters who make a habit of analyzing everything to the last detail, and the author takes pains to share that knowledge as well. I find those characters boring. I read for pleasure, and don't want to go through brain gyrations. However, I realize many readers enjoy actually enjoy brain workouts, and more power to them.

My ideal sleuth is a person of loyalty, humor, and common sense, thrown into a strange or deadly situation. That person may not even consider herself or himself a sleuth, but just wants answers to a problem, or a way to solve a crisis. That's why I enjoy reading books by Mary Higgins Clark and the late Dick Francis.

What sort of sleuth do you like?

Find Morgan Mandel's mysteries
and romances at her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/author/MorganMandel

Book excerpts at:
http://www.morgansbooklinks.blogspot.com

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/morgan.mandel

Twitter: @MorganMandel

Got Shtick?

Wikipedia calls shtick a comic theme or gimmick. 

About a quarter through the cozy, A Good Man Gone by A.W. Hartoin, I must confess to enjoying the comical aspects of depicting the main character as a Marilyn Monroe double, who puts that likeness to good use while trying to solve a mystery. The Kindle edition, by the way, is still free today (Monday) at http://www.amazon.com/Good-Gone-Mercy-Watts-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00D1CPG5I
(I'm not sure how long the freebie will last.)

In A Perfect Angel, my current romantic comedy work in progress, the shtick is my character's penchant for perfection, and her struggles to break ingrained habits.

Other gimmicks can be found in Joanna Slan's cozy series featuring Kiki Lowenstein, a scrapbooker, as well as Lois Winston's cozy series with Anastasia Pollack, a magazine crafts editor.

Outside the mystery genre are Celia Yeary, Cheryl Pierson, Caroline Clemmons, and other authors at the Sweethearts of the West blog. Their shtick is using the West as a setting for their romances.

Can you think of other examples from your own novels or someone else's? 

Find Morgan Mandel's mysteries and romances at
http://www.amazon.com/author/morganmandel

Excerpts at http://morgansbookslinks.blogspot.com

Connect on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/morgan.mandel

Twitter: @MorganMandel

The two faces of Kaye

by Kaye George

public domain from wiki commons

My friend and fellow blogger here, Marilyn Levinson, suggested this topic, for which I'm grateful! The gist of it is that I write a lot of different things, but the biggest contrast is between my cozy and my noir. I do hit spots in between, but I think many writers stick to one type of writing.

I started out to write traditional mysteries. Really, I did. The one that fits that category the best, I think, will be put out by Barking Rain Press next spring. It features a classical composer sleuth. (That hook isn't considered viable by the big cozy people, but I think it's a good hook, and so does BRP. We'll see, won't we?) An actual cozy will be out for Berkley Prime Crime in either 2013 or 2014, God willin' and the crick don't rise. That one will have recipes and a cute cat.

Here's what I think happened. On the way to getting published in novel form, I turned back to scribbling out short stories, my first love. I got one published that was twisty, but not too dark. However, the more short stories I wrote, the darker they got. Some slipped over into noirishness. In fact, when I decided to gather my short stories together in one volume, I was at a loss as to what to call it, how to market it. There's everything in there from light and fluffy to deep and dark. When I was casting about for something to tie the stories together, for days, I spied the baby quilt a friend had made for my first baby. I was in the process of mailing it to my daughter for her baby and took a few pictures to remember it by. A light bulb went off. My collection was a patchwork! (Hence the title, A PATCHWORK OF STORIES.) One of those photos became the cover, too.

Why did my short stories get so dark? Maybe it was frustration at writing novels for years and not getting them published. Or maybe that's a part of me that I only want to explore in small doses. The dark side is there in all of us, of course, even if some of us can't access it very well. I think it's healthy to acknowledge it, though, and feel lucky that, as a writer, I have a good, harmless way of doing that.

I don't think I want to dwell there too long, though, so I'll stick to humor and traditional in my full-length mysteries.