How Big Is Too Big?

by Janis Patterson

I’m a Texan, so ‘bigger is better’ is part of my DNA… but, I’m discovering, only up to a point.

A week or two ago I was lucky enough to go to the final George Strait concert. The Husband is a rabid fan and I like him, too, which is rare for me and country singers. We knew this was going to be An Event, but nothing could have prepared us for what happened.

The concert was held in the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, the same place where the Cowboys play football. It’s roughly the size of a small European country. Just getting to the parking lot was a trial – a journey that should have taken no more than 45 minutes took over 2 ½ hours – the last 20 minutes of which were spent going about 20 feet so we could turn into our parking lot. We were shuttled to the stadium, then frisked and wanded by security (no purses or backpacks allowed unless they were transparent) before we were allowed to enter the building.

After standing in line for 45 minutes plus for the privilege of paying $35 each for t-shirts, we finally started the trek to our seats. I tell you, maneuvering through a crowd like that gives me new respect for salmon!

We had very decent seats – second balcony, second row. Down on the playing field there were about 1,000 folding chairs set up (and packed!) around the revolving stage on the 50 yard line on which these little ½ inch tall people performed. Yes, it was that far away. I wonder if the people up in the gods could even see the stage!

Not to worry, though – I doubt if there was a seat in the place that didn’t have a direct sightline to at least one of the multitude of tv screens. Yes, multitude, and in all sizes. The biggest appeared to have just about the same square footage as a 70s tract home. So – we had our choice – anything from a ½ inch George Strait on stage all the way up to a George Strait face the size of Godzilla on a tv screen.

I love music, and love to hear all the nuances of it. Good luck there. The sound system was cranked up so high that the sound was hopelessly distorted. It had to be that way, I guess, because of the crowd. I can understand – somewhat – the screaming during applause, but for the life of me I cannot see why people pay the equivalent of a fairly good-sized car payment for a seat to hear an artist and then scream while he’s singing. It makes no sense. It does, however, make headaches.

All of that was cream, however, compared to getting out of the place. We had maps of the area and had plotted a reasonable way of getting out and getting home. Good luck! The police had blocked off streets seemingly at random and sent clogged lines of cars off in torturous directions. We rebelled, and as soon as we could get off the main street we dodged through secondary and tertiary streets until we finally found the southern interstate. This route took us approximately 20 miles out of the way, but traffic there was moving, and there was a much smaller chance of being surrounded by a bunch of concert drunks. Yes, the beer (small - $8) and the margaritas ($15) were flowing freely. Two couples in the row ahead of us had at least 6 margaritas apiece. (I think those were the prices – we didn’t buy any!)

So what does this have to do with writing?

The concert was all out of proportion. The charm of country music is the words (which were lost in the noise) and the music (distorted) and the down-home folksy ambiance (in a concert with a record 104,7?? attendees? Come on…) As in so much of life, it – and we – have lost the human proportion.

Think about it. Most thrillers aren’t about people, they’re about nations and giant corporations and saving/destroying the world. Yes, usually there’s a lone hero who is either an impossibly perfect standard of beauty and bravery with knowledge of just about everything (Jack Bauer, anyone?), or an impossibly average man who rises to the call and eventually reaches an impossibly perfect standard. He’s usually at least good-looking, too. In both mysteries and thrillers there is all too often what I call a Moriarity villain – each time he is vanquished he manages to get away, escaping things that would annihilate a normal person and coming back again and again until it becomes both excruciating and ridiculous. Think Red John on The Mentalist. I personally call it lazy writing.

One of the reasons romance is so popular is that it is human-sized – one man, one woman, a happy ending. Cozy mysteries, too – normal people solving a normal-sized crime in a normal world. These storylines are something to which most people can relate. Country-gobbling corporations or nations setting to enslave the world are – for me at least – too big. I can’t become emotionally or empathetically involved in something set to such a gargantuan scale.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for such large-stage fiction. Or, for that matter, gigantic, record-breaking concerts. Some people enjoy it. I just hate to see it become so prevalent that it sometimes threatens to choke off less strident and overreaching stories.

Or am I all wrong? No matter. I’ll still take things – concerts, storylines or whatever – that are human-scaled.

Do Thrillers Need People Continuously Hanging from Cliffs?

By Chester Campbell

My newest published book takes me back to my writerly roots, meaning espionage fiction, or put more simply, spy stories. That's what I started writing (and not getting published) back in the sixties. After a twenty-something-year hiatus, I returned to the genre when I retired in 1989. I wrote a trilogy of Post Cold War thrillers about an ex-FBI agent who gets caught up in the espionage business. Now revised for publication after another twenty-something years, Beware the Jabberwock has been out as an ebook for a few months and will be up on Amazon as a paperback in a few days.

I have received a few five-star reviews, but I'm wondering how other folks feel about the thriller variety. Do you think it's necessary to have the hero in a constant cliff-hanger status, or is it just as good to keep the tension up but spend some time developing the characters so  you understand why they do what they do? Bad guys as well as good?

Frankly, my thrillers don't move at breakneck speed, dashing all over Paris and France and who knows where else in a 24-hour period. The main part of Jabberwock takes place over a three-week period, but there's always that dealine staring you in the face.

So what do you think? What's a thriller writer to do?

Read more about Beware the Jabberwock at my website.

Publicity is Where You Find It

Publicity is Where You Find It

Randy Rawls

I've been quite fortunate with the number of reviews and postings I've received on my THORNS ON ROSES. Some of the folks who read this will recognize the book as one they gave a nudge to. Thanks to each of you.

But some of the other sources have been quite surprising. The latest is a chuckle and a source of pride(?). I have to admit I'm not a reader of this paper and have mixed feelings about it, based on reputation and rumor. However, I believe publicity is where you find it. And I've found some here. So, this month when you check out at the cash register of your favorite supermarket, I give you permission to scan the tabloids. Pick up the February 6 edition of National Examiner and flip the pages. Yep, that's my THORNS ON ROSES you'll see blurbed. Now, lest you think it's no big deal, consider that I share the page with Richard Gere, Gregory Peck, and Dean Cain. Heck, I feel like I fit right in. :-)

Another one popped up this week that I'm even more proud of. About a thousand years ago, I was the key person in founding a youth travel soccer league in Northern Virginia, then served as its president for several years. We named it the Old Dominion Soccer League. One of the driving provisions that I insisted on was sportsmanship, players and parents. We were the first that I'm aware of to give a Sportsmanship Award each season. We made a big to-do about it, making it equal to the championship award. When I left the area, the membership honored me by naming it the Randy Rawls Sportsmanship ODSL Award. Twice a year when the awards are handed out, my ego swells. And it doesn't hurt that there is usually a plug for my writing attached. The latest
I've seen is at www.staffordsoccer.com/home/592340.html. Enough to make an old man feel like he's done something good for the world.

While I'm on my feel-good platform, there's another that gave me a buzz. It ran in the blog,
BLOGCRITICS.org, and in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. If you're so inclined, the link is at http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Book-Review-Thorns-on-Roses-by-Randy-Rawls-2659670.php The thing about this one that I love is the reviewer, Leslie Granier, really nailed the story. Not just the one I wrote, but the one that did not blatantly appear in words.

And there are many more, each of them presenting my story and me in a favorable light. I'd love to claim this happened because of my sheer talent, but that would be an outright lie. For THORNS ON ROSES, I took a chance and hired a publicist. She did the ground pounding that produced the reviews. Of course, I'm still going to claim it was my book that caused the reviewers to write the reviews as they did.

Does that answer my question as to whether spending a lot of money on a publicist is worth it? No, it doesn't. I won't even have a small clue until the royalty statements begin to come in.
I'm not optimistic.

Just Randy being Randy.

Inspirations That Didn't Pan Out

By Chester Campbell

My colleagues Mark Troy and Ben Small recently wrote about inspiration, so I thought why not (thoughts are usually italicized, aren’t they)? Mark wrote about things that inspired his plots, while Ben wrote about locations and music and such that inspire his muse. I decided to make mine a trip down memory lane, to use an appropriate cliché, and cover works never published.

Going back into ancient history, 1948 to be exact, my first mystery novel was inspired by the reading of No Pockets in a Shroud by Horace McCoy. The book told the story of a crusading newspaper reporter fighting crime. I was 22 at the time, a neophyte reporter for The Knoxville Journal at night, a journalism junior at the University of Tennessee during the day. In my spare time I pounded out a mystery on my little Smith-Corona portable about a reporter solving a murder. I later learned McCoy was born near Nashville, my hometown. Dear old Kirkus called No Pockets his worst book. They won’t get the chance to say that about Time Waits for Murder. It rests peacefully in the brittle brown envelope in which it was returned by THE EDITORS at David McKay Co. in Philadelphia.

Following an all-expense-paid vacation in Korea during the early fifties, courtesy of Uncle Sam, where I worked as an Air Force intelligence officer, I shifted my reading preference to Cold War spy stories. Helen Macinnes, John Le Carre, Graham Greene and Len Deighton were my favorites. And my inspiration. In the mid-sixties, while editing Nashville Magazine, a slick paper monthly, I squeezed in time to write a novel dealing with a Russian plot to foil U.S. radars in Iran that monitored the Soviet Union’s airspace. I got the idea from my familiarity with radar, having gone on active duty in 1951 with the 119th Aircraft Control & Warning Squadron of the Tennessee Air National Guard. This manuscript also resides in the historical section of paper piles on my office floor.

After retiring from the Air Force Reserve and from management of a statewide trade association, I turned to writing fulltime (more or less) in 1990. The Cold War was coming to an end with the Soviet Union going down the tubes, and I penned my first spy thriller. Actually, I didn’t pen it. Anything I write by hand is undecipherable a few hours later. I had upgraded my computer and bought a rudimentary word processing program that would only hold a few chapters in a file. The inspiration for the character was an ex-FBI agent I had met during my magazine days. His almost unbelievable experiences provided the protagonist’s background. The story involved a plot to save the Soviet system by killing the American and Russian presidents.

Titled Beware the Jabberwock, that was the first book in a trilogy. Number two came out of my service in Korea and a visit there shortly before my retirement. The plot involved the assassination of North Korean President Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il. It would surely have saved us a lot of current trouble if the plot have proven true. My character from the Jabberwock was set up as head of a company that was a CIA spinoff. He made a business trip to South Korea to coordinate the operation.

Book three found ex-KGB agents working to thwart the governments of Russia and its former satellites and re-establish the old Soviet state. The inspiration for that one came from my habit of watching the Independence Day symphony concerts on the Mall behind the U.S. Capitol. As I watched the canon fire during the 1812 Overture, I thought what if somebody used that as a cover to fire nerve gas mortar shells into the crowd? This manuscript got me a contract with John Grisham’s first agent, who he later sued. I didn’t sue but wound up canceling the contract after they let this one and the next two gather dust on the shelf. When they had finally sent it to Tor Forge, the editor liked my writing but said the manuscript was “dated.” If it had been picked up and published when I first submitted it, the book would have come out about the time of the subway nerve gas attack in Japan.

A son and daughter who graduated in computer science and pursued careers in computer programming led to the story of a young programmer working on a voice synthesization program that would mimic a person’s voice enough to fool a voice print analysis. He gets involved with an investment firm I modeled after a famous Depression Era case. It winds up with a chase around Nashville by the bad guys and an attempt to eliminate my hero by funneling carbon monoxide into a sealed-off computer room.

The next book was inspired by stories told by my younger son who served for several years in Army Special Forces. A former Green Beret officer comes across a document that indicates a paramilitary outfit is preparing to bomb critical installations in two weeks. He talks to a former FBI agent who turns up dead. He winds up on the run from both the police and the secretive militia organization.

After that came a story that mirrored a trip I took with a church seniors group to New Orleans. In my version, one of the passengers is a former investment advisor to a Mafia family. He testified against the mob and went into the witness protection program but left it to pursue his own path. After several years, a mob enforcer finds him just before the bus leaves for the Big Easy. There are a lot of complicating factors, but it ends during a hurricane just outside New Orleans. The touring events on the trip are exactly as I experienced them.

I wrote one other manuscript during this period which I won’t go into for personal reasons. Suffice it to say after nine unsuccessful tries, I finally hit the shelves in 2002 with Secret of the Scroll, my first Greg McKenzie mystery. I now have five books out, but I’ve run out of space to talk about them.

Overlapping

How many of us read both mysteries and thrillers with equal enjoyment? What’s the difference? Well, according to International Thriller Writers, a thriller is characterized by "the sudden rush of emotions, the excitement, sense of suspense, apprehension, and exhilaration that drive the narrative, sometimes subtly with peaks and lulls, sometimes at a constant, breakneck pace."

From www.who-dunnit.com a mystery, in books, is defined as “mysterious, unresolved and unexplainable circumstances with which the hero or heroine comes in contact. This can be anything from the occult realms, strange disappearances, unexplainable sudden affluence or sudden monetary loss, psychological distortions, property destroyed or desecrated without known reason, suicide when no suicide seemed feasible, and of course, murder."

Those may, at first, seem very disparate, but any of the circumstances in a mystery can result in a thriller’s “sudden rush of emotions” and, while some cozy mysteries may not proceed at a “constant, breakneck pace,” most mysteries have a sense of apprehension and suspense. Without it, why would we worry about who dunnit?
Who are your favourite mystery and thriller writers – and who would you consider a crossover author?

Mysteries, Mysteries Everywhere by Vivian Zabel

Mysteries come in all shapes, sizes, level of violence, and degree of suspense. Mysteries have had so manly titles or labels attached over the years. Many people have tried to classify the genre -- basically the mystery or crime story.

Essentially, detective fiction, crime fiction, thrillers, mysteries all have been used to describe, or try to describe the genre.

Let's look at some the sub-genres for mysteries (remember that all "experts" don't always agree on the classifications, but this give us an idea):

Straight Mysteries are character driven. Action happens to center around a crime.

Puzzle Mysteries or the classic detective involves a problem and the writer "toys" with reader, matching wits with clever detectives.

Novel of Pursuit often involves espionage. The protagonist getting out of a situation is the foundation of the writing. Action, terror, often technology, methods of pursuit, as well as entrapment or capture are more important than internal motivation and psychology of characters - plot driven, rather than character-driven. This sub-genre has several sub-genres:
Spy Novel
Man-on-the-Run Mystery
Metaphysical Mystery - Gothic or occult in nature
Doomsday Mystery - threat is global

Hard-boiled Mysteries are adventure stories focused on the exploits of the protagonist, such as a private detective of nearly super-hero status.

Whodunit Mysteries are character-driven mysteries where the solution of the crime comes as a surprise to the reader, but the detectives or more featured more than the deductive process.
Sub-genres of this mystery include the following:
Caper Mystery - reader is knows the perpetrator and all details of crime.
Cozy Mystery - an amateur detective solves a mystery, usually without graphic violence.
Romantic Suspense Mystery
Period Mystery - takes place in the past
Western Mystery - has a western setting
Police Procedural Mystery
Private Eye Mystery
Camp Mystery - of any sub-genre presenting in a comical way.

Finally we have Thrillers, characterized by fast pace, frequent action, and resourceful heroes. Suspense, red herrings, and cliffhangers are found often. Sub-genres include many variations of the thriller concept.

I hope you enjoyed our foray into types of mysteries.

Vivian Zabel
Brain Cells & Bubble Wrap
4RV Publishing
Midnight Hours
Prairie Dog Cowboy