The Write Stuff

As not enough of the world knows, I write thrillers and mysteries, 17 and counting. I love doing it and have gathered some great reviews from people I don’t even owe money to. But I’m only human and can’t help being a wee bit envious of more financially successful authors. (“Wee bit” might be an understatement; should anything untoward happens to some of the authors, I’ll probably be a prime suspect.) Needless to say, when I’m not feeling sorry for myself, I often wonder if I could duplicate some of the mega-authors’ success by imitating them. That is, by switching genres.     The temptation is powerful. And, of course, sex comes to mind. No surprise there. The Mayo Clinic did a study in which it found out that the only time the typical American male doesn’t think about sex is when he is playing golf and his thoughts revolve around suicide. (I just made all of that up.) Fifty Shades of Grey , originally a self-published ebook by British author E.L. James, ...

Shortly after our hairy and smelly ancestors climbed down from the trees, they discovered that long pieces of wood tipped with sharp points not only discouraged sabre-tooth tigers but also put Wooly Mammoth meat on the table (where there were more empty seats, since the uncooperative mammoths often stepped on the hunters).   The more literate among the un-stomped cavepersons (although they couldn’t have known they were literate since the word hadn’t been invented) soon found out that by dipping smaller versions of those sharp points in a liquid – probably mammoth blood – they could start writing books. (I’ve skipped over cave paintings as a story-telling medium, mainly because they were probably done with fingers, which annoys the hell out of me since they are much more sophisticated than anything I can do 30,000 years later.)   The first books were non-fiction. With a life span that didn’t extend much past puberty, most people didn’t have enough experience to make u...

There is a marvelous book: The World of Raymond Chandler (In His Own Words), edited by Barry Day. As a thriller writer myself, I didn’t think I had so much in common with Chandler, the acknowledged master of the genre. We both like cats and cocktails. What? You expected me to say that we are literary equals? There aren’t enough martinis in the known universe to make me say something like that. (By the way, is there an unknown universe? How would anyone know that?) Chandler never wrote a memoir or autobiography, so the surest insight into his mind (at least his literary mind) is through his novels, short stories, letters and the many interviews he gave after he became famous. Day’s book is loaded with excerpts from all those sources, as well as fascinating photos of Chandler and his contemporaries. I’m ashamed to admit that most of my previous exposure to Chandler is through the movies made from his novels, including The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Go...

When I’m reading a novel, nothing annoys me more than an author who interjects his or her own prejudices and/or politics into the narrative. Except, of course, if I’m the author. Truth is, I can’t help myself. I have a lot of axes to grind, and where better to grind them than in my thrillers and mysteries. In everyday life, when I spout off, it’s usually after the second martini, and everyone stopped paying attention to me midway through the first. But in a novel, after I’ve presumably hooked my readers with a few murders and sex scenes, I can usually say something that I think needs to be said. Hey, it’s a free country. In various books, I’ve taken aim at Wall Street greed (like shooting fish in a barrel), as well as   academic elitism, the publishing industry, the media, unethical politicians (there may be a bit of redundancy here) and the sports establishment. I try not to overdo it. I’m not writing polemics. I fully understand that most of my readers are more in...

“You can’t judge a book by its cover.’ Oh, really? Have you scanned the covers of the “romance” novels that populate the best-seller lists, particularly those devoted to self-published eBooks. Unless you are suffering from a terminal case of macular degeneration, a book cover showing a long-haired, muscular young man ripping the clothes off a sultry and bosomy woman should give you a pretty good idea of the prose you will find within.   In case you are still in doubt, try these titles on for size: The Earl’s Inconvenient Wife; Marcus Wilding: Duke of Pleasure; How to Catch a Wild Viscount; The Desperate Love of a Lord; The Earl’s Desire, and Dukes for Dummies. OK, I made that last one up, but you get the idea.   The “Bodice Rippers”, as these actual purple-prosed books are called, are hugely popular, both in print and online. In addition to the catchy titles (did earls, lords, dukes and “wild” viscounts really get that much action? – it would certainly explain...

In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice , Bassanio, who in his quest to woo Portia borrows money from Shylock, at one point says, “I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind”, which has been loosely translated to mean, “I don’t like it when a villain acts nice”. Au contraire. Far be it from me to disagree with any statement originating from the Bard’s quill, but I like it when villains act nice. In fact, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to write a thriller or mystery in which all the bad guys and gals are one-dimensional scuzzbuckets. I’ve always hated books and movies where characters show up as faceless mountebanks and are immediately dispatched (often after being shot in the face), just to show how mean they are and/or how heroic the hero is. Of course, every work has to have a couple of “Star Trek Extras,” characters whose only job is to die, usually quite horribly. (John Scalzi wrote a hilarious sci-fi novel, Redshirts , about such characters – from their point of vi...

John Semley once wrote an interesting article in The New York Times Magazine entitled “The Death of the Private Eye”, which was not about the demise of a particular gumshoe (think Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon ) but about the entire genre in print and film. Needless to say, I found the article interesting because that is the genre in which I write. Semley suggested that modern technology has made the traditional private eye – the dogged hero of so many wonderful novels and films – largely irrelevant. In this era of smart phones, the Internet, GPS and drones, how hard is it to nail your cheating spouse? Your next-door neighbor’s kid could probably get the goods for you. OK. You may not want the little snot to know your personal business, so you might hire a private detective (or, more likely, an “investigative service” with dozens of ex-cop operatives working on their fifth and sixth pensions). What used to take 50 pages in a thriller now takes a few strokes on a keyb...