Ellery Queen: An Alias For an Alias and an Alias

by Anne Carter

Ha! What’s that supposed to mean, you ask? The name Ellery Queen conjures different meanings to different people. For some, it is the 1940’s radio program that comes to mind (find some of these episodes at RadioLovers.com) For others, it’s the various incarnations of the television series, starring Richard Hart, Lee Bowman, Hugh Marlowe, George Nader, Lee Philips, and probably best remembered, Jim Hutton as the fictional sleuth. Films followed, with Peter Lawford and Ralph Bellamy joining the long list of actors portraying Queen.

Reading fans will be quick to mention that the Ellery Queen novels, first of which was The Roman Hat Mystery published in 1929, preceded all the radio, television and movies starring the popular detective, his father (Inspector Richard Queen) and his assistant, Sergeant Velie. Then there was Ellery Queen Magazine (published by Dell Magazines, Penny Publications), a host of comic books and even jigsaw puzzles bearing the Queen moniker.

But who is Ellery Queen? The character name was also the alias for the two American cousins responsible for penning the novels and creating the image of the puzzle-solving protag. And it is humorous to note that each of the men had aliases of their own: Daniel (David) Nathan, also known as Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofksy went by Manfred Bennington Lee (1905-1971).

Read more about the illustrious career of Ellery Queen at Wikipedia, and this eclectic site chronicling the detective-hero. You can find out more about the magazine here.

Anne Carter is the author of paranormal romantic mystery, POINT SURRENDER. Visit her at Beacon Street Books, and at the Word From Beacon Street.

The Pain of Killing Your Characters

by Jean Henry Mead

Ever wonder how novelists decide which of their characters to kill? I was recently forced to kill a character I loved because I had written myself into a corner. I was so upset that I had to stop writing that day. I then remembered something Benjamin Capps told me during an interview:

“Probably no reader of mine ever felt so strongly [about the storyline] or shed a small tear unless I had already done so in the writing.”

Emotional investment in a writer’s characters is undoubtedly what makes a novel successful. If an author doesn’t really care about his characters, why should the reader? But how involved does a writer have to be to make his readers care? That’s a question someone much smarter than I am will have to answer.

I do know, however, that many of us live with our characters 24/7, until the book comes to a conclusion. Then it’s hard for me to let go, which is why I like writing a series. The characters to whom I’ve given birth can age right along with me, unless, of course, I’m forced to kill them off.

After covering a police beat for eight years and writing about the worst aspects of human nature, I decided to write a senior sleuth series. My Logan & Cafferty series features two 60-year-old widows; one a private investigator’s wife, the other a mystery novel buff. In the first book, A Village Shattered, the women are forced to discover the identity of a compulsive murderer, who is alphabetically doing away with their friends. They also discover that their own names are on the killer’s list.

In the second novel, Diary of Murder, I placed them in a motorhome in the midst of a Rocky Mountain blizzard. I had previously killed one my character’s sister, but the reader doesn’t get to know her until her diary is found and read throughout the novel. I didn’t shed a tear until the last entry was read.

I like my main characters because they’re witty and sassy, according to one reviewer, and I could never bring myself to knock one of them off. But anyone who threatens them in any way is in big trouble in my books.

The curse of pet words by Chester Campbell

When I got the initial edit of Secret of the Scroll (my first published mystery) back from the editor, I shuffled through his nine pages of notes and stopped on this one:

"For some reason you like the color blue. Nothing wrong with that but if it breaks the mood of the story, then we have a problem. You have used blue as follows:

"blue cardigan/sweater

"blue car number one, Israel

"blue car number two, Nashville

"Father Coughlin decked out in blue

"Worker at Kibbutz in blue workclothes

"Blue blazer, and (dark) blue vehicle, shirts

"And the piece de resistence! Jill in oversize blue dress!

"When the reader starts counting the number of times you use something, you've lost him. He's detached from your book. The magic is gone."

Thank God for Word's search and replace function. What Bob Middlemiss mentioned was like the first dandelion in the front yard. When I did a search on "blue," I found the word appeared 48 times in the manuscript. After paring it down for the final version that went to the typesetter, only 17 blue mentions remained. They were spread around over the course of 264 pages.

In subsequent manuscripts, I have found other favorites that turn up way too often. Words like "suddenly." In her book Don't Murder Your Mystery, Chris Roerden cautions, "One 'suddenly' per book, please."

Another of those unbiquitous terms I have encountered too many times in my prose is "laughed." He laughed. She laughed. They all laughed. I wind up going through and creating some other way to indicate amusement.

Then there are words like "almost" and "about" that should be turned into definite quantities whenever possible. And there's "just," which one blog titled "Just Is a Four-Letter Word" went on to say, "It's a dangerous word that should be used as sparingly as possible."

These are "just" a few of the words that hound me. What about you? What words do you find difficult to eliminate from your writing?

Check The Marathon Murders for a sample of my efforts.

By the numbers by Mark Troy

I'm a numbers guy. Measurement and statistics is my field. I believe that anything that exists, exists in quantity. Now and then folks ask how I can immerse myself in numbers all day and write fiction at night. Well, they are not incompatible. Measurement and statistics is one way of knowing and understanding people by measuring their attributes. Fiction is a way of knowing and understanding people through the workings of the plot.

That's not to say I don't leave the counting at work when I read or write.

Whenever I pick up a novel, I immediately find the last page number and divide by four. That gives me the location of the three major plot points in the book. Act I takes up the first quarter of a story, so somewhere around the one-fourth mark will be a scene that spins the story into Act II. Some people call it a doorway. I usually mark it with a post-it note. I also put a post-it at the mid-point of the book, which is the middle of Act II, and likewise at the three-quarter point which is where the story spins into Act III.

I'll do this for most books, especially authors that are new to me. If it's a book by an author I know won't disappoint me, such as Michael Connelly, I don't bother with the notes, though I still do the arithmetic in my head.

The spin points are such an integral part of the art of storytelling that you can find them very close to those numbers in any good book. The scenes might not begin exactly at that location, because a scene in a book takes several, perhaps many, pages to work out, but, in my experience, the better the story, the closer the plot elements will be to the numbers. On the other hand, nothing happening where it should happen is an indication of a flawed book and I probably won't finish it.

Let's use The Da Vinci Code, as an example. The book has 489 pages so my first post-it note was stuck on page 122. Page 122 is the first page where the Priory of Scion, the shadowy group at the heart of the story, is mentioned. Langdon, the point of view character, is ready to leave the Louvre and make his escape to the American Embassy when he realizes that the P.S. clue left by the dead man referred to the Priory of Scion. Up until that point, we have had the set-up to the story. Langdon has been trying to get out of this murder investigation and return to his normal life. But, when he discovers the meaning of the code, he heeds the call to adventure and returns to the Louvre, giving up his chance for escape. The doorway between the first and second acts closes and he is irrevocably committed to the adventure. To show us that he cannot go back to his previous existence, the author has Langdon attempt to reach the embassy early in Act II, only to find the police blocking the way.

I put the second post-it on page 244, the middle of the book and roughly the middle of the second act. The first half of the second act is sometimes called the testing phase in which the main character learns what he or she needs to know to survive the adventure. Langdon learns that he can't get back to the embassy and that he and Sophie will have to be partners in this adventure. He also acquires some skills at solving riddles, at deception, and at thinking on his feet. He even learns to drive a stick shift.

At the end of the testing phase, in the middle of Act II comes a revelation of some kind. Indeed, only four pages past the post-it on page 244 comes the story of the grail told by Langdon's mentor in whose home they are seeking refuge. This point in the story is also called the crisis because it initiates a low point for the main characters. Sometimes the entire second half of the second act is called the crisis where the main characters experience the "dark night of the soul." In DVC, Langdon is knocked unconscious by the albino monk and Sophie suffers a crisis of faith on hearing the grail story. All of them have to flee the house where they had sought refuge. During the flight, they continue to struggle with the meaning of the clues in their possession. Sophie struggles with her feelings for her grandfather.

The mid point of the story is also where the main character is likely to go into the cave or the belly of the beast. The reader doesn't know it yet, but when Langdon and Sophie entered the mentor's house, they entered the cave of the beast.

I put the third post-it on page 366 for the plot point which spins the story from the crisis into the resolution. All through the crisis period they have been trying to escape from their pursuers and decode the cryptic poem left by the dead man. On page 362 they make good on their escape and on 366 they deduce that the poem refers to the Templar Church on fleet Street. There are still red herrings and clues to figure out, but now they begin to fall into place when the mentor is revealed to be the bad guy.

Maybe, it's because I'm a numbers guy that I find the symmetry of a story, any story, so compelling. Seeing the underlying architecture of a story is as exciting to me as being swept along in the narrative. Some people say that analyzing a story takes away from the enjoyment. Not me. If anything, it adds to my enjoyment, though often times the experiences seem to go on simultaneously in two separate compartments of my mind. Knowing when the curtain will drop on an act while reading the story is like knowing how much time is left in a football game or how many innings are left. It adds another dimension to the action in front of me.

It's not only novels, either. I count the words in short stories and the minutes in movies to find the plot points.

If I weren't writing stories, I might not be so interested in counting pages. Without question, writing has influenced the way I read. I took to counting pages so that I could learn how to plot my own stories. Not only do I read by the numbers, I write and revise by the numbers. If the doorway to the second act doesn't occur one fourth of the way through, for example, I revise until it does.

What about you? Do you count words and pages when you read?

Mark Troy
http://hawaiian-eye.blogspot.com
Read "Horns" at http://www.thrillingdetective.com

Countdown for Birth of Latest Book

Countdown begins for the birth of my latest Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novel, No Sanctuary.

For those who have read other Rocky Bluff P.D. novels, they are about the members of a small police department located in a small beach community located north of Ventura in Southern California. Though different members of department are featured in each book, in No Sanctuary Officer Stacey Wilbur and Detective Doug Milligan have starring roles.

My aim has always been to show how the family affects the job and job affects the family.

In previous books, Stacey vowed to never date a member of the Rocky Bluff P.D., but she has changed her mind after helping Doug on a several murder cases in Smell of Blood and getting to know him better. The attraction continues in the latest book.

No Sanctuary centers on two churches, two ministers, the death of one of their wives, and a pedophile. Stacey is confronted with several major decisions, one of which puts her in jeopardy

The cover is great, after checking the galley proof twice, the book has gone to the printers. Now it’s time for me to get busy with the promotion. I’m in the middle of planning a launch party which will be held in our church (thought it a fitting place for this particular book) fellowship hall at the end of the month.

A virtual book tour is planned for March though I don’t have any definite dates as yet. April is full of exciting events from a library presentation, to a talk to a writers group in a bookstore, and a booth on the coast at the Celebration of the Whales.

While doing all this, I’m also writing another book. Hasn’t been easy–but it has been exciting.

I’ll be posting more about the book later, but I do know it’ll be available from the publisher’s website http://www.oaktreebooks.com/ soon. I’ll also have it for sale on my website http://www.fictionforyou.com

Marilyn

Family Has Its Place by Morgan Mandel

When you're writing a mystery or novel, remember to include family. Here are some handy ways to take advantage of family members in mysteries:

• Mob families, such as in the Godfather, can either turn a character toward or away from crime.
• A threat to a family member - A character may perform extreme measures when the safety of any or all family members is in question.
• The death of a family member - All sorts of possibilities with this one, from determining why the dear one died, to learning something from that person's past which solves a puzzle.
• Following in the footsteps of a family member and becoming a law enforcement officer or some sort of solver of crimes is a positive way to include family.
• Childhood abuse by a family member leading to a villain's psychosis - this one I've used in one of my novels not yet published.

I'm sure there are many other ways to use family when writing mysteries. Can you think of any? Does one of your mysteries include family in a way it moves the plot? Please share.

Morgan Mandel - For a Morgan two-for-one, hop on over to Double M, my daily blog at http://morganmandel.blogspot.com/

If you're on twitter, please follow me at http://twitter.com/morganmandel

Do You Make Your Characters Sick? By Morgan Mandel

Today's usual blogger, Dana Fresti, is under the weather, so I'm posting today in her stead. Her illness made me wonder. How often do authors let their characters be sick?

I'm trying to think if I've been so unkind to my characters. In Two Wrongs, as well as many mysteries, lots of characters are killed off, but that's not being ill. Then again, in Two Wrongs, the two major characters are consumed with a desire for revenge. One overcomes it, the other doesn't. That could qualify as being sick mentally.

In Deadly Dreams, a mystery for which I'm seeking publication, two of the characters deal with sickness and injury, one with hypoglycemia, another with repercussions from an automobile accident. There I've allowed illness to creep in.

In Girl of My Dreams, my romantic comedy with a slice of suspense, I don't recall my main character being sick a day in the story, although the antagonist is definitely mentally ill.

What about you? Do you make your characters sick? Or, do you recall any authors who do? Please share.

Morgan Mandel - For more Morgan - Come on over to Double M at
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com/
Sunday's topic is Why do you watch the Super Bowl? For the Games Or the Commercials Or Both?