[Note to readers: If you notice problems with fonts, spacings, etc, in the next few posts, be assured that it’s neither your eyes nor your computer.  WordPress geeks in their infinite wisdom eliminated the W-button I used to employ to insert post rough drafts from MS Word.  I’ve found a temporary fix, but I’m still exploring work-arounds.  Apparently, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” isn’t a workplace motto at WordPress where they’ve adopted a policy that users are beta-testers, just like Microsoft, the company they hate.  I won’t apologize–they should.]

This question is appropriate when considering Afghanistan.  The good Afghans don’t seem capable of standing up to the Taliban.  The bad Afghans—and these aren’t the Taliban, who are worse than bad—are poppy farmers and the people like Karzai, who, through graft and corruption, exploit everyone and everything.  Karzai bites the hand that feeds him too: he has to know that his life wouldn’t be worth a Russian ruble if the Taliban take over again.  And, let’s face it, the Afghan landscape is more desolate than the moon’s; only Iceland’s is worse.

The recent murders of three doctors is but another instance of why we should write Afghanistan off.  There are good people there.  These doctors were on a mission to help them.  One, I believe, had been doing so for seven years.  The Taliban don’t care.  These doctors were Christians, foreigners, and not supporters of the Taliban’s vicious brand of radical Islam.  The Taliban’s ideology is one of death.  Doctors, a little girl making appeals for the right of women to educate themselves, and many others who dare to work for peace and a better life and naysay Taliban fanaticism, are targets.  They are now claiming they shot down a NATO helicopter (the Pentagon claims this is false—I’m not surprised, because the Taliban would probably take credit if Karzai got a cold).

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Every once and a while I make a mental list of what has recently irked me.  Today I thought I’d share the most recent list with you.  Who knows?  Maybe these things irk you too.  And maybe I’ll make this a regular feature.

Item 1: Gum-smacking waitress in a restaurant.  I suppose I should be PC and say waitperson?  Somehow this smacks me as unhygienic.  What’s the problem?  Does she need to keep the saliva going so she can spit in my food?  I hadn’t even tipped her yet!

Item 2: Young gen-Xer passing me on the right to turn left in front of me.  Twenty feet into that next intersection, he’s waiting for a red light as I come up behind him, hoping he sees in the rearview mirror that I think he’s number one.

Item 3: Popcorn and soda at the movies adding up to more than the tickets.  That’s tickets in plural.  We go to matinees.  And we don’t buy any of their crap anymore.  90% of the movies are crap; we don’t need to be fed more crap while we’re watching.

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Probably not.  Its champion is.  Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1982 Nobel Prize winner, died at 87 in Mexico City.  His word mastery and acerbic humor will be missed.

Magical realism is seeing a fantasy-world amidst stark reality, a technique that intertwines the mystical and sensual with the everyday trials and tribulations of ordinary people, making their lives extraordinary.  It has influenced many authors since Garcia Marquez, and not just Hispanic authors.  He wasn’t the first either.  Kafka and some of the early dystopian sci-fi writers practiced magical realism—nowadays King and Koontz practice it in their cross-genre alloying of horror and sci-fi.  Many tales about drug addiction and mental cases contain elements of magical realism, but it can creep into mysteries, thrillers, and that nebulous and catch-all genre we call literary fiction.

My personal discovery of Garcia Marquez was probably a bit different than your average gringo’s.  While my sojourn in Colombia led to a cultural immersion so profound that I soon found myself dreaming in Spanish, I didn’t feel capable of tackling the grand master’s tomes until late in that sojourn.  I’m not going to claim that one must read a great author in his own language—modern translators are rarely literal and often profoundly capture the author’s true meaning—but I’ve never read Gabby in English.  You’re probably familiar with the great trio—One Hundred Years of Solitude, Autumn of the Patriarch, and Love During the Time of Cholera (these are my title translations that don’t necessarily agree with accepted ones)—each novel a masterpiece and each novel totally different.

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(Harry James Krebs, Vengeance Is Mine, Peak City Publishing, 2014, ASIN B00IH8H0KA)

Not really a who-did-it but who-IS-it, this exciting mystery is suspenseful and entertaining fun, its protagonist a bit of Spenser, Lincoln Rhyme, and Alex Cross all rolled into one.  You shouldn’t miss reading this one, although it’s not for the squeamish.

I suppose that more than who-IS-it, the ubiquitous why is also part of the discovery in this mystery.  The author spins both of these questions out in classic mystery-thriller-suspense fashion.  Readers will love this; writers should take note.  You would never find Agatha Christie doing it this way, but this is how modern books in this genre should be written.  We have a case study about the violent depravity existing in some individuals and how much damage they can do to innocent people.  Fortunately, these cases are exceptional, but the exceptions, even in fiction, provide a warning: watch your back—there are evil people out there.

I’m also impressed that the author resists the temptation to make his protagonist a two-dimensional bastion of virtue.  He’s complex, conflicted, and at times comically confused.  He has mental hang-ups about his past, has gone through a bad divorce, and is a bit of a Don Juan, although his philandering causes more self-doubt than pleasure in the long-run.  In many ways, he’s just your average Joe muddling through life, taking what it gives him the best he can.  And, in the few weeks the novel covers, life throws a lot at him.

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#360: Poisoned Ground.  I just reviewed Sandra Parshall’s new Rachel Goddard mystery for Book Pleasures.  If you missed it, you can also look in the section “Book Reviews” of this blog.  It’s an entertaining read for all mystery fans.  Ms. Parshall is a cut above Mary Higgins Clark and Carla Neggers, those Big Five superstars; she doesn’t receive enough recognition.  But there are many authors like that who have written very good books but are unsung.  I try to do my part by pointing them out to readers.

#361: Vengeance is Mine.  I also just reviewed Harry James Kreb’s mystery on Amazon (I’ll repost this review next week here).  Unlike Sandra, Harry is an up and coming mystery writer who is a bit of Robert B. Parker, Jeffery Deaver, and James Patterson all rolled into one.  Read my review and check out the book.  Looks like this is mystery week at “News and Notices”—I’m working on finishing and content editing of The Collector, a new Chen and Castilblanco mystery that I hope to release this year.

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[Note from Steve: I wrote this a while ago as a guest post for Shah Wharton’s WordsInSync website.  It seemed appropriate to dust it off and repost it here with a few edits that make it more contemporary.]

Many writers are avid readers, at least in their own genre.  In fact, I can’t understand how anyone can be a writer without being an avid reader.  I suppose there are exceptions.  I am also a reviewer, but I read many more books than I review.  Some of my reading is information-oriented; most is just entertainment—TV for the most part has few good programs.  Consequently, as a native Californian, it’s obvious that American sci-fi has influenced my writing.  Less obvious is the influence of British sci-fi authors.  There is a reason for that—dystopian vision.

Some of my novels, especially Soldiers of God and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” have lurking in the background what I call “the social singularity”; my novel Survivors of the Chaos moves through it, for example.  Unlike a black hole, this singularity is diffuse in space and time.  It represents a particular state in world affairs where social problems become so complex that politicians and political institutions are incapable of solving them; where fundamentalist attitudes and local xenophobia have become so prevalent and ingrained that traditional empires break up into more homogeneous, almost tribal units; and where multinational corporations, ever greedy for new markets and more profits, hire mercenary armies in an attempt to keep order.  This state I call the Chaos.  In brief, it’s my dystopian vision of humanity’s future.  It’s not all bleak—I always sprinkle in a bit of hope here and there, created by heroic individuals, of course!

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[Tom Pope is a writing teacher—see the interview with him in a post from a few days ago—and yours truly writes thrillers.  We put our emails together to produce this Socratic discussion about several elements associated with writing thrillers.  This is part two of that discussion.  Enjoy.]

Steve: What you call third person internal is just a temporary lapse into first person.  Putting the thoughts into italics allows the writer to make it present tense: What’s my partner doing? Instead of, What was that partner doing?  The first moves the prose along more.  However, if italics aren’t used in the first, readers are justifiably confused due to the tense change.  Moreover, many authors make the mistake of putting italicized thoughts into past tense, which is also confusing to the reader.

I’m even more of a minimalist writer.  In one of your dialogue lines, it’s clear who’s talking to whom.  You’ve replaced “Are you tracking badges now?” with “You collecting badges now?” while I’d replace it with “Collecting badges now?”  The first might be appropriate for that nebulous genre of “literary fiction,” the second for a thriller, and the third for a hard-boiled mystery or police procedural.  Depending on the person with whom I’m conversing, I might say any of the three in an office situation, but the last really moves the dialogue forward.

These examples are minutia, of course, but over the length of a novel, probably 60 to 80 kwords, the minutia can add up.  Same goes for slang and street jive.  If there’s a lot of dialogue—I mean pages and pages of it—and the slang or street jive used isn’t found in my normal conversational quirks, I’ll eventually tire of it as a reader.  There’s nothing bigoted or hypocritical about this.  When I lived in the Boston area, I found the ubiquitous accent there tiresome at times.  This is a cultural phenomenon.  Same goes for foreign language terms—I use those more than most authors, but I’ve become more careful.  The Goldilocks rule applies here: use just enough to provide color, but not too much.  Of course, too little and too much depend on the reader—you have to aim for the average person in your targeted audience.

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[Note from Steve: I usually don’t write about the paranormal.  But those of you who’ve read “The Town Hall Gang” and “The Bridge,” short stories in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, my anthology of tales of speculative fiction, know I CAN write them.  You also might be familiar with hard-boiled Detective Rolando Castilblanco, of the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” though, so here’s one of his most unusual cases, a cross-genre short story, if you will.  Enjoy.  And, don’t miss the intrepid detectives in my new novel, Aristocrats and Assassins, or The Collector, which is coming soon.  More of the detectives’ cases can be found in the short story collection, Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java.]

Singing Ghosts

Steven M. Moore

                I hate old houses.  Creaks and groans.  Radiators wheezing strange country’s national anthems.  Windows painted tightly shut with old lead paint.  Damp basements, dark attics, and cubbyholes.  The East Coast has old houses in abundance, some dating back to the early 19^th century.  And people still live in them and sleep in them alone at night.

Ghost?  I put down my sandwich and stared at Tia Lucia who sat at the end of the long dining room table.  Heard Stuart try to stifle a chuckle so my aunt wouldn’t hear.

Lucia Castilblanco had married Samuel Lloyd and lived in that Long Island house for more than forty years.  Uncle Sam was police chief; Tia Lucia ran a bakery.  They’d enjoyed a long and happy marriage, but she was a widow now, retired from the bakery, and living all alone in that house that was already old when they bought it.

Through lunch, we had chatted about police work while we munched on ham and Swiss cheese on rye with spicy mustard, taco chips, and drank lemonade.  Because Stuart was a crime reporter for a local TV station and I was a cop, we were interested, but Lucia knew more about forensics than either one of us.  I’d long suspected Tio Sam had tested ideas about cases with her.

My father was only slightly shorter than I am, but Lucia is tiny.  Genetics plays tricks in all families, I suppose.  She was well-proportioned, although barely five feet tall, but she had a big personality.  She still but infrequently drove her lime-green Caddy with the huge fins on the back, using a couple of old Yellow Pages to see over the huge steering wheel.  She’d picked us up at the train station.  I had put Stuart on the front bench seat with my aunt because I didn’t fit; I sprawled in the back amidst grocery bags that she obviously had picked up on her way.  Tia Lucia was organized.

But my father had always said his sister was crazy.  As a kid, I thought she was crazy like a fox, and always enjoyed my visits with my Long Island relatives.  Did I say she ran a bakery?

Long Island has seen better times.  It was still a rich person’s playground, especially in the Hamptons, with huge estates reminiscent of Gatsby’s.  But other parts were becoming run down.  The cops had closed down a meth lab less than a mile away from my aunt’s house, and parts of the island were having heroin-addiction problems, including a few deaths by overdoses.  I didn’t like that Tia Lucia lived alone in that environment in a house that was too big for one person, especially an elderly one.

“Aren’t you just hearing old house noises?” I said.

“Oh, no, this was humming.  Sometimes there are songs with lyrics in some foreign language, but I could tell they were words.  They’re a little sad, like those songs I like so much in the Village.  Someone’s in the house at night, Rollie.”

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(Sandra Parshall, Poisoned Ground, Poisoned Pen Press, 2014, ISBN 9781464202247)

Although Sandra Parshall is an Agatha-award winning author, she exemplifies how much mystery writing has evolved since Ms. Christie penned her characters Miss Marple and Hercules Poirot.  The lines between mystery, thriller, and suspense have blurred, not only in more hard-core police procedurals but also in books that focus on the quiet, rural violence so prevalent in Ms. Christie’s books.

Dr. Rachel Goddard, veterinarian and protagonist in the author’s series, belongs to that old class of sleuths, neither cop nor agent but concerned citizen.  All the action takes place in a rural mountain community in Virginia, but this book has plenty of action and misdirects to keep any reader of the mystery genre intrigued and entertained.  Goddard is married to Sheriff Tom Bridger, and the two form a mystery-solving power couple.

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[Tom Pope is a writing teacher—see the interview with him in a post from a few days ago—and yours truly writes thrillers.  We put our emails together to produce this Socratic discussion about several elements associated with writing thrillers.  This is the first part of that discussion.  Enjoy.]

Tom: What are your impressions on the role of the clock with the threat?  I think that a threat should be a major one and the protagonist should face some time limit before all havoc breaks out.  Example: The protagonist has to stop a nanite infection of fifty cases in a major hospital within twelve hours or the infection spreads to the entire country.

However, the role of the clock does not end there. I think the clock can work with segmenting the conflict into mini conflicts.  Example: Your protagonist has one hour to find the exact nature of the nanite, but doctors block every step.  He solves the nature of the nanite, but then faces a two hour window to find how the nanites are being activated by outside EM frequencies.

Of course, those are just the beginnings of the major problem, but the use of the clock and threat seem to work hand in hand.

Steve: The first movie I ever saw was High Noon, the quintessential “clock movie” and a thriller in its own right (my father let me tag along—he was a Gary Cooper fan).  Of course, there was that famous Fox series too.  In my thriller, The Midas Bomb, Detectives Chen and Castilblanco are working against the clock to stop a terrorist strike.  In the last tale of my short story anthology, Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java, Castilblanco is waiting for a drug-crazed killer to return home.  The clock is almost a protagonist in this yarn.

A thriller without any time crunch lacks suspense.  It’s a critical element.  It also provides a key distinction between mystery and thriller.  In the former, something bad has already happened and the protagonist has to figure out the how’s, why’s, and who’s.  In the latter, something bad is going to happen and the protagonist has to try to stop it, usually with a time constraint.  Of course, there are other differences between the two genres, but these are key.  In brief, the time crunch makes a thriller differ from a mystery.

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