Burden of the Badge

For the last few months, I’ve been one of the judges reading short stories for BURDEN OF THE BADGE, a new Mystery Writers of America anthology edited by Michael Connolly that will be published next year by Little Brown. My fellow judges and I — Ed Hoch, Marcia Talley, Barbara D’Amato and Bill Crider — read hundreds of blind submissions (the authors were not identified) and picked the following winners:

What A Wonderful World – Paul Guyot

Rule Number One – Bev Vincent

A Certain Recollection – John Buentello

Burying Mr. Henry – Polly Nelson

A Change in His Heart – Jack Fredrickson

Serial Killer – Jon Breen

Such a Lucky, Pretty Girl – Persia Walker

Oaths, Ohana and Everything – Diana Hansen-Young

Congratulations to all the winners!

Big Day for Two Crime Writers

Variety reports that novelist James Ellroy will adapt Nicci French’s thriller LAND OF THE LIVING for New Line Cinema. Literary agent Joel Gotler will be among the executive producers, presumably for brokering the deal.

Story concerns a promiscuous woman who’s
captured and tortured by a serial killer. After surviving the ordeal,
she has to figure out what happened because cops and even her friends
think she fabricated the story.

Alexandra Milchan brought the book to
Ellroy, who just adapted his own "The Night Watchman" at Paramount.
Milchan is producing that pic with Lucas Foster and Erwin Stoff.

Things not to worry about

Novelist PJ Parrish offers some very good advice to aspiring writers under the heading "10 Things  You Should Never Worry About." Among my favorites:

7. I’m querying an agent. Should I send my first chapter or my best chapter?
If your first chapter isn’t your best chapter, you’re in deep doo-doo.

8. Who should I dedicate my book to?
Geez…

9. Should I include my picture with my submission?
Only if you’re Brad Pitt or his wife old whatshername.

Dem BONES

Variety reports today that Fox has picked up BONES, based on the Kathy Reichs novels, for a full 22-episodes next season… but the future isn’t looking so bright for the new midseason crime dramas HEIST, CONVICTION or THE EVIDENCE, which are suffering from anemic ratings. HEIST was partially undone by poor lead-in from LAW AND ORDER, which reportedly had it’s weakest ratings in 15 years, presumably thanks to its new 9 pm Wednesday timeslot.

“Brilliant Writing…This is why the English Language Was Invented!”

Chicago Sun-Times reviewer David J. Montgomery is single-handedly revolutionizing the publishing industry. No longer will authors have to scrounge through his reviews looking for a blurbable phrase. Today, David has launched his Blurb Machine.

My reviews get blurbed fairly often, but that seems like such a
roundabout way of doing it. Why not, I asked myself, just give the
blurb directly and cut out the middle man?

Why not, indeed! The first recipient of a Blurb Machine Blurb is Lee Child:

"The Hard Way is the best book
yet from one of today’s top thriller writers. Put a pot of coffee on
before you start reading it, ’cause this one’s going to keep you up all
night." -Crime Fiction Dossier

Dem BONES

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BONES may just be the most unusual notion for an tie-in novel since THE SPY WHO LOVED novelization (a novel based on the movie based on the book by Ian Fleming). BONES: BURIED DEEP is an original novel by Max Allan Collins based on the Fox Television Series BONES created by Hart Hanson featuring the character created by Kathy Reichs from her best-selling series of novels. Whew. I’m winded just typing that.

What I don’t get is why Kathy Reichs a) allowed the studio to shop tie-in novels based on the series based on her books while she’s still writing books in the series herself (and her old titles are still in print) and b) why, if the tie-in books were going to be done, she didn’t do them herself. Isn’t the whole idea behind selling your book to TV to boost sales of the books? It would seem to me that authorizing original tie-in novels would actually work against Reichs’ best interests. On the other hand, the format of TV series and the tie-in novel, while featuring the central character from Reichs’ books, differs substantially from the books from which they are derived.

It’s very interesting to me and I’m eager to get the scoop from Max (who, by the way, also writes the CSI novels and is co-founder, with yours truly, of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers.

Gone Baby Gone

Variety reports that director/writer Ben Affleck’s feature film adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s book GONE BABY GONE has started production in Boston, with Casey Affleck and Michelle Monahan as private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.

Do Mystery Novels Suck?

My brother Tod is going to get in big trouble. In a post today, he explains why he doesn’t ready mysteries any more. Because, in his view, most of them suck.

I used to read a lot of mystery novels but in the last several years
have found myself easily disappointed by the easy conventions I find in
what are acclaimed as the finest in the genre…

…Part of it is a craft issue: I find a lot of mystery novels lazy in
characterization and lazy in drama, relying more often on tricks than
truth…

For instance, Tod recently read the acclaimed new bestseller by a beloved mystery author:

It had plot holes on every page, as if
someone had been fisting it. I solved the mystery in the first ten
pages. The villains were stock. The hero was suitably flawed but easily
redeemed and the ending was so schmaltzy that I literally said aloud,
"Oh, come on!" I then went and looked at the reviews of the book and
was stunned to learn it was the writer’s "best book in years." That the
novel was the "finest mystery of the year." That the writing was
"superb" and evoked "Chandler." That the twists and turns of the plot
kept reviewers "constantly guessing." That the ending packed "an
emotional wallop that will keep fans chatting for months!" Had I read a
different book?

He wonders if critics and readers go easier on mystery novels because they expect less from them than they do from other literary works. He also has a problem with the stagnant character development in some mysteries.

Most mystery novels I’ve read lately feel like just another episode,
the characters stuck in a commercial break until the next book comes
out. That, certainly, was the case with the novel I read…a continuing
series character, widely loved, widely praised, widely selling and so
cliched and trite now that it makes the previous works by the author
now seem something less. It’s a bland book, inoffensive in every way,
except that it made me wonder what mystery reviewers (and readers)
truly consider classic or brilliant anymore.

While I agree with Tod in some ways (look at the lambasting I got for not jumping on the Ken Bruen bandwagon) I think there’s a big difference between a series novel — which is, indeed, intended to be like an episode of a TV series — and a standalone thriller. 

Like TV shows, readers expect a series novel to be the same book as the one they read before in the series — only different. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but we TV writers do it every day. A TV series gives you the same episode week after week, year after year, but with enough differences in the individual stories to make the show seem new and fresh.  Marshall Matt Dillon was essentially the same guy in 1955 when GUNSMOKE premiered as he was when the show was cancelled in 1975…and none of the relationships in his life had really changed. The same is essentially true of most other non-serialized TV series and most series novels.

Stephanie Plum, Nero Wolfe, Phillip Marlowe, Shell Scott, Spenser, Elvis Cole, Kinsey Millhone, Jack Reacher, John Rain, Inspector Rebus… none of these characters have really changed in the course of their respective series. That’s one of the pleasures and comforts of the books…you know exactly what you’re going to get when you open one up.

Can it get dull? Yeah. Can the writers get sloppy and complacent? Sure. Are readers and critics more forgiving of successful series books and the authors who write them? I think so, because the authors and their characters are so beloved. You are pre-disposed to like the book and to cut it a lot of slack (whereas someone coming to the book fresh, without having read the previous titles, might judge it far more harshly and see the cliches the long-tme reader doesn’t).

The problem, perhaps, is that too many new mystery novels these days are reading like pilots for prospective book series rather than as strong, individual novels. You can feel the writer’s burning desire to create a franchise in every paragraph. In some ways, this goes back to the earlier discussion here about creating suspense. Nothing kills a book faster for me than the sense the author is more interested in marketing and promotion than in actually creativing vivid characters and telling a compelling story. He’s looking ahead to the hoped-for series rather than concentrating on writing a fresh, powerful, and provocative book.

You’ll Never Go Wrong with Harry

I’ve never read a bad book by Harry Whittington. Ed Gorman posted an appreciation of Whittington’s A NIGHT FOR SCREAMING on his blog today.

You want twists and turns? You want to be knocked out of your seat not
three but four times in about the last forty pages? You want to change
your politics and take up with a chick with Hooters and run away to the
sunny beaches of Indiana and hold yur breath for six days? Well, this
slender little novel with one of the truly classic cover paintings will
make you do all those crazy things and more. I promise.

This is an example of taking a familiar set-up and turning it into
a novel you’ve never read before. I’m in the process of outlining it
now. I want to see how he did it.

What I find fascinating about this post isn’t the rave for Whittington — Ed has done that before and he’ll do it again. It’s the idea that Ed, the acclaimed author of countless mysteries, westerns and thrillers of his own, is outlining Harry’s novel for himself.

It just goes to prove that a true professional writer knows there is always more to learn about their craft — and that the best way to do it  is to never stop reading, appreciating, and studying what other writers have done.

What Happens When the Mystery is a Mystery to the People Writing the Mystery

The Fox show REUNION was supposed to be murder mystery that spanned decades in a single season.  But the show was cancelled in November, leaving the show’s handful of fans wondering whodunit. The problem is, the writers of the show didn’t know whodunit either. Zap2it reports:

When FOX lowered the boom on
"Reunion" in late November, the show’s creator says there was no way to
resolve the show short of a full season because of how "intricately
plotted" it was.  It was so intricately plotted, in fact, that the question of who committed the murder at the show’s center was still up in the air.

That, at least, is the word from FOX Entertainment president Peter Ligouri, who on Tuesday (Jan. 17) addressed the show’s early demise with reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour.

"’Reunion’ was particularly cumbersome in terms of trying to provide an ending for
the audience," Ligouri says of the show, in which each episode represented a year in the life of six friends, one of whom ends up dead. "How [creator Jon Harmon Feldman] was laying out the show to gap those additional 14, 15, 16 years was an incredibly complex path. There were a number of options, and he didn’t make a definitive! decision on which option he was going to go with as to who the killer was, and there was just no way to accelerate that time."

Feldman himself hinted at that in a statement following the show’s cancellation, saying that solving
the mystery of who killed Samantha (Alexa Davalos) was "partially reliant on characters we haven’t yet met — and events we haven’t seen."

Ligouri says the network and the show’s team talked about several ways to go with the killer’s identity, but "the best guess was at that particular time that it was going to be Sam’s daughter," whom she gave up for adoption early in the series. The why of the murder remains a mystery.

Especially to the show’s writers, which may be why the series didn’t work. If the show’s writers didn’t even know whodunit or why, then what were they writing about? If the clues led nowhere, how did they expect the story to actually payoff in the end? Is it any surprise viewers didn’t get hooked by the mystery since it, um, actually didn’t exist?

(Thanks to Bill Rabkin for the heads-up!)