The Game of the Name

By Bryan Gruley

My first novel came out last March. But I knew what the protagonist’s name would be more than twenty-five years ago.

Honest.

At signings and book clubs, readers frequently ask, “Where do you get the names of your characters?” Maybe the better question is, “Where do you get the characters for your names?”

I have read about authors (Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist, a murder mystery disguised as a literary novel, comes to mind) who painstakingly construct their characters, writing down detailed notes about each before committing them to the narrative at hand.

Maybe I’m too lazy or just too day-job-strapped, but I don’t do much if any of that. To some extent, I rely on the names I decide to use to lead me to those detailed descriptions, which I then keep, mostly, in my head.

Indeed, the names of most of my main characters came to me before I knew how the characters would look, sound, or behave. Some of them—the personas, that is--derived from names I’ve encountered in my life or my job (note, incidentally, that I feel compelled to separate those two).

The surname for Pine County Sheriff Dingus Aho, for instance, was inspired by an old man I wrote about on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Toivo Aho organized an annual outhouse-on-skis race in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

“Aho,” I was told then, is a rather common Finnish name. I stole it. “Dingus,” which I’ve heard is German and Scottish, just came to me, and I attached the two. I was aware that they probably didn’t go together well, and perhaps that’s why Dingus, despite being the sheriff, is a man who stands a bit outside the inner circle of his town, looking in.

Some of my readers might think Jack Blackburn is so named because of the blackness of his deeds. Not so. “Jack” came from a coach I knew from afar—a fine coach and man, so far as I knew—and “Blackburn” just came to me, maybe because of the interior rhyme. In fact, late in the novel I considered whether to change the name for fear that some might think it too heavy-handed. But I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.

For less-crucial names attached to incidental places and establishments in and around the town of Starvation Lake, I frequently borrowed the names of pals. Thinnes Park is named for an old Kalamazoo friend who loves softball. The Detroit law firm Eagan, MacDonald & Browne is named for Eegs, Mac and Brownee, some of my oldest and best friends in Detroit. Enright’s is named for Fr. Jim “Punch” Enright, one of my high school coaches. (Come to think of it, I can’t believe I’ve never personally encountered a bar named Enright’s. A Google search reveals Enright’s Thirst Parlor in Rochester, N.Y., where, “You won't be alone if you stop in for a drink at 10 a.m. on a Saturday.” Good to know.)

I have lots of fun thinking up or borrowing or outright stealing names (as I did with the name of the town, which comes from the name of a lake near my family’s cottage in northern lower Michigan). Two names in my next novel—Philo Beech and Parmelee Gilbert—were pilfered directly from a non-fiction anthology of Michigan murders.

But I don’t mean to suggest that naming names is haphazard or gratuitous. As Marcus intimated in his latest blog, characters can help define the plot. I’ll take that a step further--or would that be backward?--and say I think names can define characters.

Soupy Campbell? He must be a dissolute former hockey star. Elvis Bontrager, of course, equals local soapbox blowhard. Darlene Esper shapes a shapely and elusive beauty who keeps her true thoughts as but a whisper to herself. Clayton Perlmutter is a scalawag you could almost love. Francis Dufresne sounds harmless, which in a mystery often connotes danger.

My next book was inspired by a line that came to me in the middle of the night: They found her hanging in the shoe tree at the edge of Starvation Lake. Within seconds, I knew her name: Gracie. Not Grace, but Gracie. She is, as a friend put it, a wrecked woman. “Gracie” puts a more sympathetic face on her, but “Grace” alone would be altogether too dignified for her troubled past.

As for my first-person narrator, Gus Carpenter might suggest someone who builds things, someone who’s good with their hands. I had no such notions in mind.
When I was working at the Kalamazoo Gazette in the early 1980s, I heard a tale about a story that had graced the Gazette front page years before. The article profiled a local man who’d won medals for his war heroism as a Green Beret. Readers loved the story.

A few days later, the Green Beret told the Gazette that he’d made the whole thing up. He’d never been a hero or won any medals. But I presumed that he wished he’d been a hero. And I decided then and there that I would name the main character in my first novel after him: Augustus Carpenter.

How do you name your fictional people, places and things?

Writers, The Oscars, and “Sickly little mole people”

I laughed at Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. when they faced off while presenting the original screenplay award. Their byplay was light, comic, and had just the right amount of truth about how writers feel about their words.

But the question remains: are we writers “sickly little mole people?”

Perhaps.

I’m debut, so I have a fresh view of this new world that I’m frequenting, and I can tell you that as a group I find writers to be friendly, interesting, curious, intense, and laugh out loud funny. They’re often quite a bit more relaxed than lawyers, (the world I inhabited for most of my career) and definitely less stressed.

There is an aspect to crime, mystery, and thriller writers that goes a step further. They’re excellent observers of people, and are able to inhabit the mind of their antagonists with often haunting reality, and, yes, this tends to lead to some peculiarities among them. There are some who retreat to their condos for days at a time, emerging only to get a restock of the whiskey and some bagels, some who spend their time writing from midnight to five am and then sleep all day, and some who are so impressed with themselves that they forget to be gracious.

I imagine that you can think of a few people in your own profession that act exactly the same way. The deal with writers, though, is that we can do all this to an extreme, because others will shrug, call us “creative,” and give us a pass. If you’re the nurse working the day shift and showing up late for work, you probably won’t get the same consideration.

I couldn’t help but agree with Tina Fey, though, that for all their quirks, writers create the stories that the actors bring to life, and dialogue in the story is often the key to the telling when you're dealing with a screenplay. A writer sweats blood to have a character say just the right line at the perfect time. If the writer does her job, the dialogue should fit the character, advance the story, and seem completely natural. For an actor to improvise and change the line can often defeat the purpose. It’s a little like working with an editor. They give you nudges, debate the merits of a line, paragraph, or word choice, and in the end it becomes a bit of a compromise between you as to how the sentence will finally read.

While I laughed through the interchange between Downey and Fey, I still knew that Fey was on the better side of things. I’ll bet she wrote the “sickly little mole people" line that Downey used as the perfect retort. After all, she’s a writer.

The Whole Thing Stinks...

by Libby Hellmann


There are signs of spring on the North Shore of Chicago: the cold is loosening its grip, the sun has returned, the crocuses are poking up, and the air is scented with…

The stink of skunks.

Those of you who live up here know there has been a population explosion of skunks over the past few years. There is nowhere you can go up here without breathing in skunk spray. Or seeing one in the road. Or hearing about the travails of home owners whose decks and stoops have been infested and their pets skunked. (You’re about to get an earful from me).

But here’s the thing. No one in authority is talking about this. There is a conspiracy of silence where skunks are concerned. It’s a massive cover-up. I suppose I understand… What would happen to the tony North Shore if it were known to be overrun with skunks? What would happen to home sales? Property values? Taxes? It gets even stranger. Several years ago there was a concerted community response when an overpopulation of deer threatened the day lilies and gardens of North Shore property owners. Despite protests from animal lovers, the deer were quickly culled. Shot. End of problem. So, why no response to the skunks, who are a lot more destructive than little Bambi?

This should be a no-brainer. But it isn’t.

Which means we who are afflicted must act on our own. And I have. I am waging war. No namby-pamby avoidance tricks like red pepper flakes or coyote urine for me. I am so sick (and nauseated) by the situation that nothing less than a full frontal assault will do. I am taking back my deck. And the air. I called the trapper.

He came armed with a trap and set it up just outside the entrance to the den. He promised it wouldn’t be hard to trap them; February and March are mating season so the only bait you need is a female.

Btw, I now know more about skunks habits and habitats than I ever wanted to. For example, did you know they rotate between dens? Like terrorists who sleep in a different place every night, so do skunks. And did you know that, contrary to popular belief, skunks do not ONLY spray when threatened? When a female wants to reject a male, she sprays. When two males are fighting over a female, they spray. And they have. Many times. Under my deck. Turns out my deck has been a frigging brothel.

So, we set the trap. Nothing happened for a couple of days. Then one night, I was awakened around 2 AM by – what else – the stink of skunk. When it penetrates into the house, btw, it’s impossible to sleep. Sure enough, next morning we had trapped a female skunk. (You can just see her in the trap)

Two days later, we caught another one. This one at least had the courtesy not to spray until dawn. The stink is still working its way out.

There have been no more for the past few days and I’m about to permanently board up the last entrance to the den. But it’s too soon to claim victory – my neighbors are still harboring the creatures, and skunks like to reclaim familiar territory.

I will keep you posted.

And yes, the trapper euthanizes them. For all you animal lovers who think skunks should be relocated to live out their demented lives in peace, I invite you over to my place for a couple of days. You take a whiff, then decide what course of action to take. Actually, I think I ought to invite Pat Quinn, Mark Kirk, Dan Seales, and all the village executives over for drinks, too. Then maybe we'll get somewhere.

What do you think?



P.S. On a totally different subject, if you're a writer, you really need to read this essay by Lev Raphael. It spoke to me. I hope it does to you, too.

The Golden Ten Percent

by Barbara D'Amato



You're writing a crime novel. You've worked out a surprise ending. You want it to make sense when the reader arrives at the end, but not to be so obvious that readers go "Aw--I saw that coming." Since readers differ in their ability to deduce, as well as their desire to deduce--like the reader who says, "I try not to guess the ending; that ruins the surprise," -- how far do you go in planting clues?

You might feel good about producing a book that in your opinion was obvious enough so that ten per cent of the readers can deduce, not guess, whodunnit and ninety percent can't. You would delight in the rest being surprised, but telling themselves they had every reason to know the guilty party.

Agatha Christie said that she didn't understand why people didn't guess her endings early on, they seemed so obvious to her. And indeed most of her Marples and Poirots really play fair with the reader. I suspect that she knew perfectly well she was hitting a golden mean of obfuscation.

Where this is really critical, of course, is the traditional puzzle mystery.

Ellery Queen issued a challenge to the reader. Somewhere near the end of the novel was a boxed announcement, saying that the reader now had all the clues that Ellery Queen had seen and that only one solution was possible. I believe his first mystery carrying this challenge was THE ROMAN HAT MYSTERY, but it became a feature in several novels after that. The challenge boxes were inserted at the proper place in the manuscript after typesetting. I would imagine that the writers, Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay, would have been happy if ten or fifteen percent of their readers got it. Then the rest could exclaim "Of course! I should have seen that."

However, the same balance is important in a private eye novel where there is no assumption that the reader will deduce the ending. The reader may find out the explanation at the same time that the shamus does. Or the thriller. Take something like the double-twist, triple-twist endings of Harlan Coben. They may be astonishing, but they can't be out of left field. They have to be satisfying.

Satisfying, of course, is not the same thing as predictable.

Challenge to the reader. Challenge to the writer.

Scary Funny

by David Ellis

For the last couple of my books, I’ve tried to focus on my strengths in writing. There was a time when I was really into experimenting but then I started to think, why should I experiment on the reader? I wouldn’t want someone to experiment on me.

So instead of trying to write from a female point of view or writing a novel in reverse chronological order, I thought I should go back to the things I was doing when I first got into the business. I figured my strength was writing a thriller with a wise-ass, first-person protagonist.

But while it’s been great fun in most ways, it’s also been challenging. I find a natural tension between humor and suspense. A real edge-of-your-seat, ticking-clock thriller with a laugh on every page? Hard to do. The occasional wise crack from the cool hero? Sure. But sustained humor? It’s a real challenge.

I want a protagonist who sees everything with a jaded view, who internally (to the reader) makes fun of situations and people, who manages to put a humorous spin on everything. But does that really work when said protagonist has only 'til midnight to solve the case, or they execute the innocent man?

So, I ask two things of our good readers. One, if you would please explain to me how to combine these two elements in one novel. In a hundred words or less, with monosyllabic words.

And second, what is your favorite example of the pulsating thriller with lots of laughs?

Crime poetry…

by Michael Dymmoch

...sounds like an oxymoron. Poetry is refined. And literary. It’s not something usually associated with crime. But “the ultimate economy” is an art form that lends itself surprisingly well to the subject, to the damage crime inflicts, to the emotions crime arouses. We like crime fiction because it deals with the most serious subjects. And it’s dramatic. It plays with our fears, threatens our hopes. It lets us deal with horrifying subjects at a little distance. Poetry does all that too—but more economically. In good poetry, the point is never lost in a forest of verbiage, the plot never wanders. Far more than in prose, each word has to be precisely right, a sniper’s killshot.

I recently had the opportunity to preview the latest issue of The Lineup, an annual chapbook of poems launched in July 2008 by Poetic Justice Press. According to the website, “We do not intend to sensationalize or glorify crime. We ask for poets' honest, powerful reactions to what they see as crime. Gratuitous anything is discouraged.”

I’m not an expert on poetry, but I found issue 3 to be amazinging! Consider this from “Another Hallway Altar in the Projects,” by Jackie Sheeler:
One haggard afternoon lifted its funeral skirts,
tucked a gradeschool girl underneath — “

or from “Anthony Baez”:
So I squeezed his neck.
I learned it in Academy.
I didn’t squeeze too hard, only
hard enough. We had a riot
situation in the street…

and “Panic,” by Francine Witte:
is two men runnin’, scissor legs
cuttin’ up the streets, and the guy
they killed, back there in the house,
his body empty as a coat…

The Lineup represents crime from a number of points of view—criminals', cops' and victims'. What’s common to all the poems is the way a story is presented and emotion evoked with an amazing economy of language.

Many of the contributors are professional poets, but at least one is a cop, and many are the authors of short stories or novels. And one—who would have guessed?—is tough guy Reed Farrel Coleman.


BTW The Lineup, vol 3 is available in April at www.poemsoncrime.blogspot.com/, Amazon.com, or select independent bookstores.

You People Are All In My Head...

by Sean Chercover

There comes a point for me, while writing a book, when the made-up world inside my head becomes almost as real as the world outside my head.

Maybe this isn't something I should admit. Maybe I should see a head-doctor.

Or not.

Anyway, this used to happen a lot: I'd be sitting there having dinner with Agent 99, and I'd just kind of drift away... And then Agent 99 would say, "You're writing your book right now," or, "You're in your head," or something like that. I'm not sure of her exact words, because I wasn't really listening. I was busy, in my head, writing my book.

Which didn't make me the ideal husband.

I've curtailed such drifts lately, because I want to be with Agent 99 and The Mouse when we're together, not just in body, but in mind.

Still, something had to go away for me to get the necessary time inside my head.

And I've found that it is the rest of the world that goes away.

I'm now in the home stretch of my current novel (or, close to the home stretch) - well past the midpoint crisis where I become convinced that the book sucks and I suck and everything sucks, and now cruising along happily in my made-up world, which has become almost as real as the real world.

I love that headspace. I also love that I can now leave it behind and spend time with Agent 99 and The Mouse, building snowmen and snowdogs and snow forts, having snowball wars, tobogganing, playing Joe Mannix, watching the Backyardigans and Wonder Pets and Penguins of Madagascar, reading bedtime stories, and so on.

Life is full. So, as I mentioned above, the rest of the world has gone away.

Things I have missed:

• There was an Olympics (I did see the final hockey game, which was awesome, and the closing ceremonies, which was about as far from awesome as Chicago is from Istanbul).
• The Democrats seem to have made a complete mess of their mandate.
• Somebody changed the rules of the Oscars, and now there are 163 movies nominated for Best Picture.
• I haven't seen any of them.
• Sarah Palin still exists.
• Facebook and Twitter still exist (and I am cautiously dipping my toe back in those waters).
• Toyotas have rebelled against their owners and are now driving themselves.
• There's a new reality show where people like Madonna and Alec Baldwin give marriage advice. Really.
  
• Jay Leno is back on the Tonight Show, and I'll still be watching Letterman.

All in all, I prefer the world inside my head.

Oh, and those crazy penguins...

Can you go home again?

By David Heinzmann

There’s a two-lane road that runs north out of Peoria, cutting through miles of black dirt that was wide-open cropland when I was a teenager growing up in the area.

I think I drove it just once back then, plodding along warily in the darkness behind the wheel of my little Plymouth, looking for the turnoff to a pasture where some kid I barely knew had spread the word of a party—a keg of beer, a sleeve of plastic cups and a bunch of kids stumbling around in the weeds getting drunk, separated by miles of emptiness from the nearest parent or patrol car.

Today, that road is a main thoroughfare through the heart of Peoria’s subdivision sprawl. It’s not far from my in-laws’ home and I drove it over the weekend while I was in town for a book signing. Thousands of new homes have blanketed the rolling landscape over the last decade, and new schools have sprouted while the old downtown schools decay or close. This new growth is the winning end of that fine old riverfront town’s hollowing out into a bifurcated mess of haves and have-nots.

My idea of Peoria has changed a lot over the years, and some of it not for the better. My shabby old Catholic high school—which brought together kids from all walks of life in a broken down campus of historic buildings—is gone. The motorboat that I used to steer up and down the wide, muddy channel of the Illinois River has long since been donated to charity. But mostly, I have changed and am not the kid I was back then. If the old me doesn’t exist, neither does the place in which I was young.

The first book I wrote, which I began in college, was a lousily autobiographical story about a young man losing his hold on the idea of home. Midwestern boy goes east to college. Boy comes home after college. Boy realizes he’s changed and home isn’t really home anymore.

I thought I was Fitzgerald. But I was really just lost. I didn’t know how to write that story then (its dusty pages reside right here in a drawer), and I don’t think I would know how to write it now.

Years ago I asked a writer friend in Chicago, who happens to also be from Peoria, whether he ever wrote about our hometown. He said, goodness, no. He set all of his stories in the cities of his adulthood.

I haven’t done it, either. I write about Chicago and crime—the experiences of my adulthood. I notice that most of us in the Outfit are writing about an adopted place, as well. And most of the crime novelists whose work I admire also write about places far from where they were raised. There’s something about being an observer looking in. And exploring a new place and discovering what makes it tick.

This has been a fairly long way around to a question--and I apologize for my self-indulgence--but I’d be interested in other writers’ thoughts about the differences in writing about the places that we come from versus writing about the places we’ve come to.

The Un-Bitter Man

There's a lot of bitterness going around these days, and everyone can understand it. Years ago, I knew very few people out of work, now it sometimes feels like I'm one of the few people who has a job. Everyone's world has contracted in some way by our economic smack-down. But it's my hope that we fight that bitterness if at all possible. Bitterness starts a swirl, a bad one, that can only lead to other negative emotions and negative events.

How do we do that, though? When I'm fighting some kind of bitterness, I think of the people I know who've managed theirs. And there is no one better than Life After Innocence client, Jerry Miller.

In 1981, Jerry, a 22-year old former Army cook, was arrested and charged with kidnapping, raping and robbing a woman in downtown Chicago. He was convicted in 1982 and served 24 years in prison. His prison record, which numbers nearly 1000 pages, is replete with the statement, Will not admit guilt. He was required to attend sex offender classes and grew increasingly lonely as many family members and friends no longer visited him. "I missed joy," he later told Maurice Possley of the Chicago Tribune. "I missed happiness. It was very painful, being locked up every night."

Jerry (like so many people today) found him self asking, 'Why me?' But he says he finally decided that he had to find a way to gain hope every day. "You open your eyes and you can see there's something here that's more than just me." He says that as he matured, "I came to understand life is to be lived no matter where you are."

A few years ago, when Jerry was 48, he was released on parole as a registered sex offender, requiring him to wear an electronic monitoring device at all times and prohibiting him from answering his door on Halloween or leaving his job for lunch. He continued to attend required sex offender classes, and every time when introducing himself he stated, "My name is Jerry Miller, and I am innocent of the crime of which I am accused."

Miller was fortunate to have the Innocence Project of New York learn about his case. With their help, DNA testing on semen from the rape proved conclusively that Miller did not commit the crime – and instead implicated another man, Robert Weeks, as the actual perpetrator.

Jerry was one of the first clients of the Life After Innocence Project, which we formed at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, in 2009. The project is designed to help innocent people like Jerry to begin their lives over again after a wrongful conviction (or a not-guilty at the trial level). During the time we've worked together, Jerry has become an amazing friend to me and all of the students. He continually inspires us with his constantly positive outlook. "Look, Laura," he has often said to me. "When it comes down to it, I'm blessed." Life, he has told me, is all in the way you look at it. (To see Jerry's elegance and grace, please check out his appearance on the Colbert Report.)

Jerry filed a lawsuit against the Illinois Crime Lab who wrongfully reported so many years ago that Jerry's DNA was inconclusive. On Friday, the lawsuit was settled, putting an end to Jerry's long, long, long battle. The delightful thing about Jerry, however, is that we all knew he would flourish, we knew he would continue to be an inspiration to us, no matter what situation he found himself in. We congratulate him and we celebrate him. And whenever I'm feeling bitter, Jerry is the face who appears in my mind.

(Post Script-an unofficial celebration will be held for Jerry tonight, February 25, at The District (170 West Ontario), starting at 6. For those in Chicago, join us!)

Palate Cleansing

by Marcus Sakey

So yesterday I sent the draft of my new book to my editor.

This is a very good thing. But it’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what happens now.

My typical process when I finish a book is to tuck it in a drawer for as long as possible, then read it in one sitting. Then I combine my own notes with feedback from buddies, writer friends, and most particularly my agent and editor, in order to edit the thing.

But while in one sense I'm highly focused on the book, at the same time, something else is happening. I'm beginning to let go of it.

This isn’t a simple process, a flip of a switch. When you’ve lived with a story for a year, it takes time for it to drift from your head, which needs to happen in order to leave space for the next one. So during that time, besides editing, I like to read a lot. I mean a lot.

I read all kinds of books, in every genre. But during these periods I focus on books that will inspire me. Not novels I want to emulate per se, but books that take the broad genre I write in and do something innovative with it. That do more than just present a thrilling tale—they do it in an interesting way, or put a twist on it, or cross the border into other genres.

Novels like these are palate cleansers. They perk up my brain, get it receptive to new ideas and new directions.

For example, yesterday I reread WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen. It’s a lovely book, one of those that you can heartily and universally recommend. And it’s a hell of a palate cleanser, because it takes what is at heart a traditional boy-meets-girl and weaves in a wonderfully realized world, some compelling musings on growing old, and healthy doses of cross-genre material. The result is magic.

Thing is, of course, it’s not easy to find books that are at once innovative and commercial. That’s the sweet spot for me during this period: much as I love David Foster Wallace and David Mitchell, much as I dig postmodernism, or the textual play of a book like HOUSE OF LEAVES, it doesn’t work as a palate cleanser. I need books that balance invention and accessibility, that startle and surprise while also seeming familiar.

That, in the Hollywood parlance, do the same thing, only different.

And since I’m part of this wonderful community, I thought I might ask you for some recommendations. What have you read that did this well?

I’m especially interested in books that have a strong commercial appeal, but they don’t need to be straight-ahead thrillers—just a hell of a tale that’s also got something to say. Books like WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, or THE STAND, or THE HUNGER GAMES.

What have you read that you couldn't put down--and couldn't forget?

Go David!

Hey all, great news--our own David Ellis was nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize for his novel THE HIDDEN MAN.

Congratulations, David! Hell of an honor.

Chasing a Great Premise

By Jamie Freveletti I have two different techniques to keep going forward whenever I’m working through a scene in my manuscript and get stumped. The first is to switch screens and work on a second book. (I always keep two going, though deadlines force one to take a back seat at times), and the second is to pop in a DVD of a favorite movie. I like the movie approach, because it gives me a complete story arc in an efficient one and one half hours. My last was The Bourne Identity, based on Robert Ludlum’s novel. A bit of background; I fell in love with Ludlum after reading The Matarese Circle. Ludlum published the Bourne Identity in 1980, one year later, and I think this novel captured the essence of a thriller while delivering a twisty tale and great mystery. While I prefer the book ending-won’t tell it here to avoid being a spoiler-I like the simplified movie version just fine. While I watched I thought about some themes that I love to read about in novels. I’m always interested to read another writer’s take on the thorny problem of time travel. A number of authors have inserted their protagonist into various eras and then explored the results, and each have a slightly different approach. Two other themes I enjoy are double lives: when one person is secretly living an alternate existence, and amnesia: when a person has no sense of his or her own history. Both these require a writer to show various sides of their protagonist’s personality, and the results always fascinate me. The Bourne Identity tapped into both of these, which is why I loved it. I’m wondering, what are the themes that you’ll always take a chance on reading? Bad man turned good and trying to leave his former life behind? Revenge? Capers? Mafia wars-the real ones not the Facebook version. (I hear some Facebook members groaning, but it must have been fun or everyone wouldn’t have gotten quite so addicted). Also, if you have great examples of writers that nailed the theme you love to read then by all means list them! Labels:

Blind Spots

By Irene Reed

Please welcome Friend-of-the-Outfit Irene Reed, a Chicago native and Harvard-educated lawyer who has come to her senses and now enjoys writing fiction. Despite her fascination with murder, mystery and true crime, she swears that she is perfectly harmless and sane. She is in my writing group, and she has a fascinating take on the Amy Bishop murders.


Violence in America is an odd thing. It exists everywhere, yet the details never cease to amaze. And sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.

Last week, professor Amy Bishop murdered three members of University of Alabama faculty. Before that, she had a history of erratic behavior, including suspected involvement in a pipe bombing, a meltdown at a pancake house, and difficult relationships with several graduate students. In 1986, at just 21, Bishop shot and killed her brother, then sought a getaway car from a local dealership.

Bishop, a Harvard graduate, mother of four and respected biology professor, has now taken as many people out of this world as she brought into it. Whether verbalized or not, the questions persist: how could this go on for so long? How did so many miss the signs—and why?

Maybe it’s because Bishop occupied a societal blind spot.

There were the Massachusetts police, reluctant to prosecute a young girl from a good family and middle-class suburb. And her parents, unwilling to face the possibility that their daughter needed help. Later, academic institutions probably focused more on Bishop’s academic success than her character or personality. And finally, there was the fact that Bishop didn’t fit The Profile. She was a 45-year old mother—she couldn’t possibly be that bad.

It happens all the time. Take the Washington, D.C. snipers. Nobody expected them to be Black, because the Profile says that most serial killers are White, male and smart. Ditto for Seung Hui Cho of Virginia Tech. The Profile always works—until it doesn’t.

Why, then, are we so committed to our summaries, analyses and pre-packaged beliefs? I think it is because we need to believe that we can understand evil. That if we encapsulate it, box it away, and break it down, it will finally make sense.

But imagination gives voice to the truth. Crime fiction is popular partly because it is an expression of our greatest horror—that evil cannot be anticipated, understood or controlled. The best fictional killers reflect our underlying fear: that evil is random, pervasive, and without reason. That it simply exists, like air, water or love.

Curiously, Bishop was also an aspiring thriller writer. She had three unpublished novels, including one about a scientist who was also an IRA operative. She is also related to John Irving, whom she hoped would help launch her literary career.
What, I wonder, prompted Bishop to write? Did she know, on some instinctive level, that something was wrong? Was she trying to give us clues? And what did Irving think of her work? Did he even read it? Did he try to help, or was she the crazy cousin he wanted to forget?

And what about the people in our own lives? How many blind spots have we missed? What new, unknown horror have we failed to identify? When I read about Bishop, I always wonder: how many other Ivy League-educated, cardigan-wearing, SUV-driving killers are out there, waiting to be recognized for what they are?

What do you think?


Thanks to Libby Hellmann, my mentor and friend, who has allowed me to guest blog. Also thanks to Michael Dymmoch and Jamie Freveletti, who have offered me endless friendship and support during my creative journey so far.

Going for the Gold?

by Barbara D'Amato

I play online games. Even when I should be writing, or paying bills, or cleaning a closet.

One involves shooting colored balls at moving targets. My all-time best in this one is a score of 4400. I was near 4200 this morning when I made a dumb move and the game ended. I was NOT pleased with myself. But I got to thinking, am I enjoying the game less because I make it such a challenge? After all, there is probably a limit to what score I might optimally make, so am I beatying me head aainst the wall?

I do crossword puzzles against time too. And jigsaws.

Why fight it? Who am I competing against? Just myself.

Isn't this like writing?

When I'm working on a book, I find the characters occupy a lot of my thinking, and pace is the aspect I worry about most. But there's always the sneaking question--can I make this book better than the last one?

Once in a while a description or a piece of dialogue is so right that I go "wow." But pretty soon I experience the fear that all the rest of the book may not be as wow.

Of course you are writing your best. Be all you can be, right?

It's yourself you're competing against. You aren't competing against Rex Stout, or trying to out-Wambaugh Wambaugh. [Actually, I did try that once, in GOOD COP BAD COP, and I thought the results weren't too bad, but it was more of an homage than a competition.]

Still we are always competing against ourselves, aren't we? Against books we've written in the past and against what we think we can do now. It's why we try something entirely different now and then, even though we aren't sure we can bring it off.

Writers--do you ever type a page and think "It's perfect. But I'm never going to be able to do better."

If you really believed that the book you just finished was the best you could ever do, would you go on writing?