Acts of Malice

CNN posted today a fascinating list of the final statements of a variety of death row inmates. What strikes me about this list is, by and large, how mundane - even insipid - some of these quotes are. I mean, you’d think that knowing you were living your final moments on earth would give you a certain sense of solemnity about the occasion. But judging from what some Death Row inmates say in those last minutes, apparently not.

Here’s a sampling, with links to information about their crimes:

When I look at this list, I can’t help but wonder what was going through these peoples’ minds, and what was going through the minds of their victims in their final moments. I’m sure it was nothing so mundane as who was going to win the Super Bowl, or what sort of pasta they’d been served the night before. And so, in these last words, I see a continued disregard - right up to the end - for the horrors they inflicted upon the world.

I think that’s part of the reason why I haven’t, thus far, based any of the stories I’ve written (or any now in the planning stages) directly on any real crime. As tempting as it might be to “borrow” a ready-made crime and set of evidence, I have a hard time imagining that anything my mind can conjure up would do justice to the real-life suffering of the real-life victims behind those crimes.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t be tempted, if the right crime came along. I’ve written newspaper articles about a local cold case from the 1960s, whose victim remains unidentified. Despite the fact that Sue Grafton did a fabulous job of creating a happy ending for Jane Doe 1969, I might consider basing a story of my own on the case someday. But I think I’d only do it if I thought that telling her story again might help send Jane home to her family.

Others, of course, may make a different choice. There’s no right or wrong answer, of course.

How about the rest of you? Do you use real crimes as jumping-off points for your stories, or do you prefer to begin in the recesses of your own imagination. Why or why not?

First of all, let me say that this isn’t a book review blog. There are plenty of other great places for that sort of thing, and I have no desire to compete with them. Then, too, there’s the fact that I am a voracious reader and - particularly since I’ve started writing my own mysteries - I have high standards. When it comes to mysteries, I’m just plain picky.

But once in a great while, a book comes along that just plain knocks my socks off. And when I find such a gem, I’m not shy about bringing it to my readers’ attention.

So it is with “The Fault Tree“, the second novel by Shamus award-winning author Louise Ure. You might recognize Louise’s name as a regular contributor to Murderati, where she blogs on a wide array of topics. Louise is somewhat of a rarity in today’s publishing world, in that she doesn’t - at least so far - write series characters. But, after reading The Fault Tree, I sorely wish she did.

The Fault Tree concerns itself with one Cadence Moran, a sassy, tough and fiercely independent woman who works as an auto mechanic. Blinded in a horrific accident eight years previously, Cadence manages not to let her lack of sight be much of a barrier to her. But when she becomes the only witness to a brutal murder, she finds herself squarely in the sights of a killer she can’t see.

Cadence’s story is engagingly told, with crisp and vivid prose. I almost imagine the vibrance of the writing as a metaphor for the acuity of Cadence’s remaining senses, an acuity which keeps her alive through the terrible ordeal that the killer inflicts on her and those close to her. The story seemed to me to move along at just the right pace - slowly enough to let you fully experience Cadence’s terror, but swiftly enough to hook you from start to finish.

Unlike some other books I’ve read, The Fault Tree doesn’t use Cadence’s blindness as a gimmick. Her lack of sight is no crude McGuffin thrown in to liven up the story. Rather, her blindness and the reason for it are an integral part of what drives Cadence; were she not blind, I believe, her motivations and actions would not have been nearly as credible. Cadence Moran is a fully-realized character, and I find myself wishing that perhaps Louise might find another of Cade’s stories worth telling someplace down the road.

Over the past year, I’ve read dozens of mysteries and thrillers. But in only three cases have I turned the final page, set the book down, said “holy crap, that was AMAZING” and picked the book back up for a second reading to work out just how the author pulled it off. The Fault Tree is one of those three.*

If you enjoy the mystery and suspense genre, you owe it to yourself not to miss this one. Louise Ure has crafted a winner, and it’s definitely a book that people will be talking about. Buy it now - you won’t be sorry.

* - For the curious, the other two were Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know, and Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes.

Today is the day of the year when most of us make our New Year’s Resolutions. We look back on the victories and challenges of the past year, see the places we’ve achieved momentary grace and the times when life has knocked us into the ditch. And we decide what we’d like the story of the coming year to hold for us.

New Year’s Resolutions are something of a trap, though. Too often, we know even as we’re making them that our aim is too high, our targets too grandiose to attain. And we know that we’ll beat ourselves up for our failures come next year.

So, what’s a girl to do?

In a post on her blog today, mystery author Laura Lippman challenges us to define our resolution for the new year in terms of a single word. Can you do it? Can you wrap all of your hopes and dreams and plans up into one lowly word?

Here’s mine: Mindfulness.

The 1913 Webster’s defines mindfulness thusly:

Mindful \Mind”ful\, a. Bearing in mind; regardful; attentive; heedful; observant.

As we enter the new year of 2008, I resolve to be more attentive to my family, my work, my creative spirit.

I resolve to bear in mind that my “real job” is but a small part of my life, and that on my deathbed I likely won’t wish I’d done more of it.

I resolve to be more observant of the glimmers of truth and the rich tapestry of stories that can be found in our world and that form the fabric of all our storytelling.

I resolve to be more heedful to the voice of my own creative spirit, and more attentive to my relationships with other writers, readers, and book-lovers.

Yes, I think “mindfulness” just about covers it.

So, how about you? Can you try your hand at Laura’s challenge? Can you sum up your goals for the coming year in a single word?

Happy New Year, and may the worst of 2008 be better than the best of 2007. L’shanah tova u’metukah. May the new year be pleasant and sweet.

One of the first sets of decisions a writer has to make when beginning a new story is the voice and tense in which the tale will be told. There are several choices here, and arguments for and against each one, but ultimately there’s no wrong answer. But the choices made have a profound impact on the feel of the story, so this is a decision best thought out carefully.

Let’s review each one, with examples.

Tense: Past vs. Present

Most mysteries I’ve read lately seem to be told in the past tense. This convention came about, I suspect, partly because it gives the narrator’s words the appearance of truth (as though she is describing events that really happened), and partly because writing in the present tense for any length of time is rather exhausting to the reader. Or at least, it is to me.

Here’s an example of a story told in the past tense. This one is from the opening paragraph of D is for Deadbeat, by the incomparable Sue Grafton:

Later, I found out his name was John Daggett, but that’s not how he introduced himself the day he walked into my office. Even at the time, I sensed that something was off, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. The job he hired me to do seemed simple enough, but then the bum tried to stiff me for my fee.

Do you see? Kinsey Millhone, Sue’s protagonist, seems to be telling us about events that actually did happen, and it gives the story an immediacy and verisimilitude.

Finding an example of a book told in the present tense was easy, but only because I happen to be reading one at the moment. This snippet comes from Patricia Cornwell’s Book of the Dead:

“You can see from this -” Scarpetta points the laser at Drew’s body being lifted onto the stretcher - “her muscles certainly aren’t stiff. They’re quite flexible. I estimate she’d been dead less than six hours when she was found, possibly considerably less.”

Present tense, if it’s well executed, can give the reader a sense of being in the story and watching it unfold around them. However, I’ve found it to be an effort to sustain for long periods of time, and so it’s not the most common choice.

Voice: First Person vs. Third Person

The next decision a writer has to make is one of voice. In other words, will the character tell her own story, or will others tell the story about her? Each is valid, and I think the decision here is largely a matter of personal preference.

Proponents of the first person voice say it fosters better identification between the reader and the character. On the other hand, when your character’s telling her story in the first person, she’s limited to only describing what she can see, feel and perceive. Unless you switch viewpoints between multiple characters, or cut away to a third-person narrator, you can’t look inside anyone else’s head or describe action that takes place outside your narrator’s view.

Here’s an example of a first-person narrator, from Gillian Flynn’s debut work Sharp Objects:

My sweater was new, stinging red and ugly. It was May 12 but the temperature had dipped to the forties, and after four days shivering in my shirtsleeves, I grabbed cover at a tag sale rather than dig through my boxed-up clothes. Spring in Chicago.

See what I mean? Flynn’s narrator, newspaper reporter Camille Preaker, pulls us at once into the story and makes it clear that it’s her story she’s telling. There’s an immediate personalization of the story and, if you care about the character, an immediate identification between narrator and reader.

By contrast, here’s what third person looks like. This example comes from J.A. Jance’s novel Dead Wrong:

Joanna stayed at the scene long enough to listen as Jaime Carbajal interviewed Wally Rutterman, the Border Patrol officer who had discovered the body. Then she watched for a while as Dave Hollicker did a painstaking inch-by-inch survey of the dump site. Neither effort revealed anything worthwhile.

Though we’re a little more distant from Sheriff Joanna Brady than if she was telling us the story in her own words, the third person voice allows Jance to cut away to things happening outside of Joanna’s presence.

So, how about it? Which voice and tense do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write? Why? There’s no right or wrong choice, of course, but I’m curious what you like.

Some writers hate research. No, I mean really hate it. And, sadly, it shows in their work. Like the book I read once in which a character thumbed back the hammer on his Glock. A writer who doesn’t do her homework is all too prone to getting critical details seriously wrong.

And woe to those who think nobody will notice. Believe me: People will notice. I once shared a short story of mine on a small and little-known Web site. The story itself is best forgotten, a poorly conceptualized and poorly written example of fiction produced when I was still learning my craft. But what’s important here is that I made a critical factual error that undermined the premise of the story, and fully 10% of the people who downloaded the story wrote to tell me about it.

In the realm of mystery fiction in particular, you can’t afford to get it wrong.

There are an assortment of online research resources for writers. Many of these are great, such as the crime-writers Yahoo group or Leslie Budewitz’s Law and Fiction site. I firmly believe, though, that there’s no substitute for getting out there into the real world and learning first-hand.

Here’s an example: In my novel, I have a scene where my main character is incapacitated by a TASER. So, I did my research online, reading TASER International’s product literature and watching demonstration videos on YouTube. And that was helpful, but not enough. So I did what I should have done in the first place: I picked up the phone.

A word to the wise: If you write mystery or police fiction, make friends with your local police agencies’ public information officers (sometimes called public affairs officers). These are the folks who work with the media, and it’s their job to help folks like us. I called my local police department’s PIO, and in relatively short order I was talking to the department’s weapons instructor.

“Why don’t you come on down to the PD on Friday?” he told me. “I’d be happy to show you what we use.”

At the appointed hour, I appeared at the police station. I was shown to a conference room, and told that the Sergeant would be with me in a few moments. When he entered the room, he laid a TASER down on the table. “What can I tell you about this?” he asked.

Despite a busy schedule, the Sergeant spent about 40 minutes with me, showing me how the TASER worked and answering my questions. When we were done, he excused himself to let the rest of the office know what we were up to, and then he fired the TASER into a cardboard target. I got a first-hand look at how a TASER works, how it sounds, how it smells. I have an idea of what kind of wounds it leaves behind, and the Sergeant told me from his own experience what it feels like to be Tased.

It’s hard to beat that kind of firsthand information. Plus, now I have another source in law enforcement, never a bad thing for a crime writer. And I’ve found, almost without exception, that people are more than willing to share what they know with us if we only ask.

So next time you need to research something, why not get out of the office and go to the source? Your readers will thank you for it.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that we writers are, as a group, dreadfully superstitious creatures. We observe the things that we’re doing on the days when the words flow freely, and we convince ourselves that those tools and actions are the keys to our creative success. We are, in that way, very much like a giant cargo cult.

The largest incidence of cargo cult thinking seems to have arisen in the Pacific islands after World War II. During the war, these islands were used for troop support and resupply. The Allied forces air-dropped goods and supplies onto the islands, which benefited the indigenous populations as well as the troops.

The trouble for the cargo cults came after the war, when the cargo planes stopped coming. The islanders attempted, as best they could, to recreate the circumstances that led to the magical arrival of goods on their islands. They built runways and taxiways out of palm fronds. Stuffed mannequin people, with coconut shells for radio headphones, stood in for the air traffic controllers who guided the planes.

And yet, though they had the form of the ritual down as perfectly as they could manage, the planes never came.

We writers seem to be like that sometimes. We focus on the superficial details of form that seem, to us, to describe our good writing days. And we recreate those details, over and over, trusting that so doing will keep the muse whispering sweet nothings in our ears.

And then one day we sit down with our favorite notebook and our special fountain pen, in our lucky chair with the best view of the vegetable garden, at precisely the right time of day, after we’ve consumed exactly seven ounces of our favorite tea, and the words don’t come. And the outcome of cargo cult thinking comes crashing down around our shoulders.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many writers become depressed and disillusioned?

The solution is simple: We need to recognize that the magic isn’t, in fact, in the small details. Jupiter need not be in perfect alignment to cast the spell that invokes the muse. We can use a ballpoint pen scavenged from the drawer under the microwave in place of our lucky Montblanc. If our special leatherbound acid-free notebooks are empty, a sheet of paper from the printer works just as well.

The magic isn’t in how we work. The magic comes from the fact that we work.

That’s not to say, of course, that tools which feel comfortable to us aren’t a good thing to have. I like my Circa notebooks, my Levenger fountain pen, and my AlphaSmart just fine. Other writers have their own favorite tools. And using tools we like is fine. The trick, I think, is not to become so dependent on the tools that we can’t function without them.

Rituals are fine, in other words, so long as they don’t consume us.

I admit it: I’m a notebook slut. Or, more precisely, an office supply slut. Office Depot is like my version of an alcoholic’s favorite neighborhood public house. I own four nice fountain pens and countless disposable ones. I’m never without at least one notebook, and I routinely have more than one. The clerks and managers in Staples all know me by name. When I find a new Levenger catalog in my mailbox, my pulse races.

I suspect that my addiction is not an uncommon one for writers. We are, I think, creatures driven by the right brain’s wonder at the world. Right brain, or Younger Self (as Starhawk calls it), is easily distracted by shiny new toys. When you have nice things to play with, Younger Self is much more likely to come out and play.

There’s a serious side to my lust for nice things to write with, though. I find that when I have tools which entice Younger Self, both the quantity and texture of my writing changes for the better. I can nearly always revive a stuck story by sitting down with my favorite fountain pen and writing a scene or two longhand. My ideas come more freely, and more fully developed, when I write on paper.

In the four years since I made the decision to consciously approach my writing from a professional’s standpoint, I’ve filled at least six letter-sized notebooks and a handful of Moleskines with snippets of stories, ideas, scenes, character exploration and brainstorms. I’ve also written page after page of whiny, self-indulgent tripe that I’d be embarrassed to have anyone read. But that’s okay - writing that stuff down gets it out of my head and gets me focused on more productive pursuits.

How about it? Any fellow supply sluts out there? What kinds of tools do you use? What wakes up your Younger Self and gets her out and talking? Let me know in the comments.

In the meantime, I’m off to Staples.

Welcome to “Acts of Malice”! My name is Tammy Cravit, and I’ll be your hostess for this journey into the twisted passages of the mind of a mystery writer.

A bit about me: I’ve published more than 200 articles in newspapers and magazines, as well as several short stories in FLASHSHOT and other online publications. Several of my stories appeared in “Slices of Life”, an anthology of the Lompoc Writers Association. I’m also a working freelance photographer and photojournalist.

Enjoy the ride, and don’t mind the dust — we’re still under construction here.