By PJ Parrish

Mixed Breed Dog (Schnauzer-mix) raising bandaged paw with medical strips on its body

Good morning, crime dogs. I won’t be posting today. In fact, I am not typing this. I’m dictating. My husband is typing. Actually, he’s taking a break from yammering at me because I fell off my bike two days ago and sprained my wrist. He thinks an old fart like me shouldn’t be riding a bike, but shoot, you can’t curl up and die, right?

Anyway, I can’t type right now. And pickleball is out for a while cuz it’s my shooting paw. (leftie here). I feel a little foolish, because, get this — I wasn’t even moving at the time I fell. I had just pulled up to my favorite little watering hole here in town, Traverse City Whiskey Company. I go there to do my crosswords and partake of their cherry whiskey sours. I was dismounting the bike. I caught my foot on the crossbar (No, it’s not a boy-bike but I am very short and was careless). Down I went. At least it didn’t happen AFTER I had the whiskey sour — would have never heard the end of that one from the husband.

Whimper, whimper.

Here’s the warning. Live your life and if that means riding a bike at age 73, go for it. But don’t be stupid. Take your time. Watch what you’re doing. Wear a helmet. And here’s the big thing — if you fall, don’t stick out your arms to brace yourself.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, I can give you a tortured metaphor about trying to do more than you should if you’re getting long in the tooth. Like, don’t even think about starting a novel after age 60. Or don’t try to write something completely new after you’ve been doing one genre forever. Or don’t think you can’t try something challenging when the folks around you are telling you it’s too late.

Yeah, you might fall on your ass. So what? Get up and try again. By the way, the doctor told me that’s what I should have done — fall on my ass.

So mount up. Keep pedaling, keep moving forward, and feel that wind in your hair. If you have any left.

Peace out, guys. I will be back in two weeks.

By PJ Parrish

The opening line of a book is the single hardest line you write.

Many writers would disagree with that. But for my money, those folks are: A. lucky devils for whom all things come easy; B. diligent do-bees who can scribble down anything just to get started and then go back and rewrite or C. writers who aren’t really very good at what they do or maybe are just phoning it in.

I know, that sounds a little harsh. But I truly believe this. I have such respect and, yes, envy for writers who create great openings. I am not talking about “hooks.” Hooks are easy. I am firmly of the mind that anyone can write a decent hook. You’ve seen them, those clever one-liners tossed out by wise-ass PIs, those archly ironic first-person soliloquies, those purple-prose weather reports that substitute for mood.

No, not hooks. I’m talking about those rare and glorious opening moments that are telling us, “OO-heee, something special is about to happen here!”

We here at TKZ talk alot about great openings, especially for our First Page Critiques. We worry about whether we should throw out a corpse in the first chapter, whether one-liners are best, if readers’ attention spans are too short for a slow burn beginning.

A great opening goes beyond its ability to keep the reader just turning the pages. A great opening is a book’s soul in miniature. Within those first few paragraphs — sometimes buried, sometimes artfully disguised, sometimes signposted — are all the seeds of theme, style and most powerfully, the very voice of the writer herself.

It’s like you’re whispering in the reader’s ear as he cracks the spine and turns to Page 1: “This is the world I am taking you into. This is what I want to tell you. You won’t understand it all until you are done but this is a hint of what I have in store for you.”

Which is why, this week, I have been staring at a blank computer screen. I am trying to start a new book. (Yeah, I know I told you I am retired, but the urge is still there.) I have a good idea. I have outlined in my head the first couple chapters. But I don’t have a first line.

I sit here, staring at my blank Word document, as that cursed cursor blinks like a yellow traffic light in a bad noir novel.  I NEED that one line because it’s not just an opening, it’s a promise. A promise to a reader that what I am about to give them is worth their time, is something they haven’t seen before, is something that is…uniquely me.

Well, shoot. I’m rambling. I’ll let Joan Didion explain it. I have a feeling she gave this a lot more thought than I have:

Q: You have said that once you have your first sentence you’ve got your piece. That’s what Hemingway said. All he needed was his first sentence and he had his short story.

Didion: What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Q: The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.

Didion: Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That’s how it should be, but it doesn’t always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.

Didion gave this interview around the time she published her great memoir after her husband’s death The Year of Magical Thinking. The first line of that book is: “Life changes fast.”

Maybe I am more hung up than usual on openings because I have read some really bad opening lines. I won’t embarrass the writers here because they are still alive and I believe in karma. Oh what the hell, I will give you one because this writer deserves to be shamed:

As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.

Okay, I cheated. That is one of the winners from the  Bulwer-Lytton bad writing (on purpose) contest. But didn’t you believe for just a moment there it was real?

Let’s move on to some good stuff. Right now, I am re-reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. Look at his opening line:

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

There, in that one deceivingly simple declarative sentence lies the all tenderness, irony and roiling epic scope of Eugenides’s story. And I don’t even care that he used semi-colons.

And then there’s this one:

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”

That’s from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This is the first line of a long paragraph of description that opens the book, yet look at what it accomplishes — puts us down immediately in his setting, conveys the book’s bleak mood and hints with those two words “out there” that he is taking us to an alien place where nothing makes sense — the criminal mind.

What is so terrifying about openings, I suppose, is that you only have so much space to work with. And, as Didion said, once you’ve moved deeper into that first chapter, that golden moment of anticipation is gone and then you are busily engaging all the gears to move the reader onward.

I read a lot of crime novels. I do this to keep up with what’s going on in our business but I also do it out of pleasure. But too many of them rely on cheap hooks. That said, here are a couple good openings from books I pulled off my crime shelf.

• We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped a girl off the bridge. — John D. MacDonald,  Darker Than Amber
• They threw me off the hay truck about noon. — James M. McCain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
• The girl was saying goodbye to her life. And it was no easy farewell. — Val McDermid,  A Place of Execution.
• I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer’s headless body in the trunk, and all the time I’m thinking I should’ve put some plastic down. — Victor Gischler, Gun Monkeys.

Not bad for one-liners. Then there are the more measured openings:

Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker – somber and sympathetic about it when I’m with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I’m alone. I’ve always thought the secret of dealing with death was to keep it at arm’s length. That’s the rule. Don’t let it breathe in your face.

But my rule didn’t protect me.

That’s from Mike Connelly’s The Poet and it works because it succinctly captures his protagonist’s voice and the theme of the story.

I think this blog post has been therapeutic for me. I think I am going to quit obsessing about the first line and just get the story up and moving. The more I get to know my characters, the more they will open up to me. Maybe one of them will whisper that golden opening line. I can’t remember the exact quote, but Joyce Carol Oates has said that until she knows the ending of her story, she doesn’t know how to start.

I get that. As weird and convoluted as this might sound, sometimes you have to write the last line before you can write the first. Sort of like Picasso signing his painting. Because what a great opening but the writer’s true signature?

By PJ Parrish

Morning, folks. I am a little under the weather today, recovering from Covid. No worries. Am old but healthy and Paxlovid is doing its thing. (Go you little functional virus particles! Inhibit that essential enzyme!)

But shoot, this brain-fog thing is real so forgive me if this post is typo-ridden, terse, or turgid. (I worked hard on that alliteration). Speaking of working hard, here’s a pretty darn good submission for our First Page Critiques. Well, I tipped my hand, didn’t I? So much for writing suspensefully.

There’s still stuff here we can talk about and help the writer improve on. The writer calls this “real-world fantasy.” Not sure what the heck that means. But like I said, I am old and maybe out of touch. See you in a sec.

JULY ASCENDANT

Amidst the roar of the crowd, Johnny Summer stepped into the ring, wondering who they would make him pummel this time.

He tugged off his shirt and threw it aside. The audience jumped to their feet, screaming his name — and a few were even rooting for him. The rest were cursing him out, holding up touching homemade signs that wished him a happy and painful demise. For spectators of an illegal fight, they sure could make a guy feel special. Just to get ‘em going, he turned in a circle, waving, flexing, and grinnin’ like a fiend.

The entire time, he swept his gaze over the floor, looking for his opponent. There was Beverly, flashing him a thumbs-up, there was Uncle Ambrose, of course, chewing on his cigar, but where was the competition?

“Come on!” Johnny roared. “Bring him out!” And let everyone get home before midnight, hopefully.

“Ain’t he amazing?” the announcer said. “Seventeen years old, and ready for blood! Ambrose Girard’s undefeated champion! But will he fail tonight? Will Johnny Summer finally meet his demise? I think so, folks. Coming all the way from Alaska, let’s give it up for Kodiak!”

The crowd went wild as a man came from the back, his tight shirt practically plastered on his muscles. Huge was an understatement — if they had been on the same side, Johnny could’ve just hid behind him the whole fight. When he climbed in, the ring shook, and even the ref took a step back.

“A kid?” Kodiak scoffed. “That’s who I’m fighting? Really?” Kodiak cracked his neck. “This is gonna be easy.”

Johnny swallowed, rubbing his thumbs over his hand wraps. It just had to be bare-knuckle night, didn’t it? That meant he’d get the full force of every blow, and anything went, too, so he had a variety of ways to get pummeled. Fists, feet, death by biceps… the possibilities were endless.

He glanced to the side. Ambrose was glaring as usual, but Beverly, sitting in the front row, didn’t have a hint of doubt on her “Come on, you can do this, get ‘im, Johnny!”

He turned back at Kodiak. Right. He could do this.

Right?

The bell rang.

_______________________

Like I already said, I like this submission. It has much going for it. More on that in a moment. But as I re-read this for the post, I realized I might have made a dumb assumption. I read this as being set in present time or maybe even future-ish, set in a dystopian Escape From New York cage-match setting. Maybe it was because the writer tagged it “real-world fantasy.”  But the more I read this, I realized this might be in the past — say, the 1800s. Bare-fisted illegal fights were big biz back then.

So…which is it? Does it matter? Does the writer have an obligation, in the first 500 words or so, to let us know where and when the story takes place? I think they do, but given that this sample is tense and compactly written, I am willing to wait a little longer to establish time/place. What do you think?

Let’s talk about specifics. I sense a confidence in this writer, a good grasp of craft basics. So I’m not going to nit-pick there. I love the fact the writer chose a good moment to enter the story — just as the main character (I assume Johnny is such) enters the ring. We are literally entering the story with him. The writer could have entered too early — say with Johnny sweating it out in the locker room, thinking, musing, dreading, and his manager coming in to tell him it was time. The writer could have entered too late — say with Johnny supine on the canvas, spitting up blood.

Always keep in mind that one of the most important choices you make is WHEN to parachute your reader into the story.

I like the sense of suspense created here. Notice how the writer gracefully slips in the characters name and age. We know Johnny has been here before. He knows he feels scared and out-matched. We already want to root for him.

But…

Yeah, the more I like a submission, the more I but it.

What a great PLACE to open a story — a bare-knuckle fight arena. But except for crowd noise, what aren’t we getting? A sensory feel for what this place is like. I really think this writer has it in them to deliver better description, to make us experience this place better. Using all five senses does more than just establish place — it creates suspense!

What does this arena look like? Not enough details for me, and it might go far to telling us where we are in time and place. What does it smell like? Body ordor? Beer? The pungent eucalyptus/menthol of boxers’s liniment? My dad smoked cigars and I will never get that stink out of my memories.

And dear writer, don’t miss any chance to SHOW instead of  TELL. Don’t tell me people are holding “touching” signs or ones that wish Johnny death. What exactly do they say. Details, details, details — they add life to your setting.

You also missed another description chance — Kodiak. All we get is that he’s big. Get in Johnny’s head and senses here — what does he look like? I like that you said he’s so big Johnny could hide behind him. (but might “disappear” be a more telling word?) But you’re good enough to make this important minor character come alive. Maybe you can even make Kodiak represent something deeper to Johnny — not just an opponent, but a personification of something deep in Johnny’s psyche. Apollo Creed wasn’t just Rocky Balboa’s opponent — he was the personification of corporate boxing, a slick publicity-hound, the man that Rocky could never be. Remember that Creed had a bunch of nicknames?  “The King of Sting,” “The Dancing Destroyer,” “The Master of Disaster.”

You’re up for this, writer. When it comes to description, don’t pull your punches. Land em hard and make descrption work hard.

Let me do a quick line edit to point out some other things I think you can improve on. My comments in blue

Amidst the roar of the crowd, Johnny Summer stepped into the ring, wondering who they would make him pummel this time. Not a bad opening but those first six words don’t work for me. First, “amidst” is a clunky and archaic word. It immediately slows down your pace. It belongs in a period romance, not a visceral fight scene. “Amidst the roar of the sea, Cathy could hear Heathcliff calling her name.” If you just delete that, you opening line is better. 

Johnny Summer stepped into the ring, wondering who they would make him kill this time. I know literally “kill” is not right but it’s stronger. And you can quickly turn it on its head:

Johnny Summer stepped into the ring, wondering who they would make him kill this time. The roar of the crowd swept over him, and for a second, he had to steady himself against the ropes. He hadn’t killed anyone with his fists, not yet at least. But that didn’t stop the crowd from screaming for it.

He tugged off his shirt and threw it aside. The audience jumped to their feet, screaming his name — and a few were even rooting for him. The rest were cursing him out, What specifically are they yelling? Details add suspense. holding up touching homemade signs that wished him a happy and painful demise. Same thing here. Details! For spectators of an illegal fight, they sure could make a guy feel special.

New graph here, I think. Just to get ‘em going, he turned in a circle, waving, flexing, and grinnin’ like a fiend. Cliche. This phrase is not yours. You can do better. Grinning but what is he really feeling at this moment?

The entire time, he swept his gaze over the floor, looking for his opponent. There was Beverly in the front row, flashing him a thumbs-up. There was Uncle Ambrose, of course, chewing on his cigar, but where was the competition?

“Come on!” Johnny roared. “Bring him out!” And let everyone get home before midnight, I like that you’re giving him a thought here, but it’s kinda meh. Is this man confident going into this? Is he tired of fighting? He’s only 17, but does he feel suddenly old and worn? Missed opportunity to begin layering in, via a few emotions and thoughts, some backstory hopefully.

“Ain’t he amazing?” the announcer said. “Seventeen years old, and ready for blood! Ambrose Girard’s undefeated champion! But will he fail tonight? Will Johnny Summer finally meet his demise? I think so, folks. Coming all the way from Alaska, let’s give it up for Kodiak!”

The crowd went wild Cliche! You can do better. And filter it through Johnny’s senses, not your own. The ring began to shake and it took Johnny a second to realize it was the stomping of feet. The noise didn’t even sound human anymore, and Johnny could hear the scream of pigs back on the farm as they were hit with electric prods. (Have it relate to something in his world!)

Johnny turned. There he was, a massive thing, rolling slowly through the crowd. Or something better, more specific to JOHNNY’S experience and background. How does this huge man APPEAR to Johnny from the FRAMEWORK of his senses and background (not yours). 

A man came from the back, his tight shirt practically plastered on his muscles. Huge was an understatement So it this. SHOW US don’t tell us. — if they had been on the same side, Johnny could’ve just hid behind him the whole fight. When he climbed in, the ring shook, and even the ref took a step back.

“A kid?” Kodiak scoffed. “That’s who I’m fighting? Really?” Kodiak cracked his neck. “This is gonna be easy.”

Johnny swallowed, rubbing his thumbs over his hand wraps. It just had to be bare-knuckle night, didn’t it? That meant he’d get the full force of every blow, and anything went, too, so he had a variety of ways to get pummeled. Fists, feet, death by biceps… the possibilities were endless.

He glanced to the side. Ambrose was glaring as usua. But Beverly, sitting in the front row, didn’t have a hint of doubt on her face? Is she is girlfriend? You could drop a hint of description here. He’s just a kid, after all, but here he is, in the man’s ultimate arena. You must have had a reason for putting Beverly in here. Make it mean something.

Need new graph whenever you have new dialogue. Come on, you can do this,” she yelled., get ‘im, Johnny!” Because you dropped the H, I am now assuming she’s cockney? Are we in London? 

He turned back to at Kodiak. What does he see on the man’s face? What is he thinking, feeling? Right. He could do this.

Right?

The bell rang. I like this part. Like how you set each into it’s own graph. 

Okay, as I said, I really like this submission. I think it’s a really strong start. But this writer is capable of much more. Work harder on your description and don’t stint. Get in Johnny’s head a little more and drops some hints about his background. HINTS! Just a few well chosen words or thoughts will create more even  sympathy for him.

I would definitely read on, and I don’t even like fight stories. But I like Johnny. Don’t be afraid to inject a little more emotion into him, even in this opening round. You need to spill a little blood onto your pages. Good luck, keep working, and let us know how it’s going.

By PJ Parrish

So there I was, on a panel at the Miami Book Fair. This was decades ago, and I was still a novice — I think my third book had just come out — and how I snagged a spot on this panel I’ll never know. My stuff was out only in paperback original, and back in those days, well, that was lesser-than.

I don’t remember the title of the panel. I do remember it was something smug-sounding. You know, like — Voice and Validity In Post-Mo Femme Fiction. Okay, I made that up, but dontcha just wanna slap whoever it is that names some of these panels?  Just once, I want to see something like this on a writer’s con program:

• Name Dropping. How To Do It Well, And Badly.
• The Unhappy Authors Panel
• All About Crystals, Rainbows, and Unicorns
• How To Corner And Pitch An Agent In The Lobby Can
• Men Who Cannot Stop Speaking and the Women Who Put Up With It
• Rambling and Off-Color Jokes By Almost-Major Authors
• Enough About Me. What Do You Think of Me?

And the last panel on Sunday morning in the half-empty auditorium because everyone has left early to catch their planes:

• This Is What Authors Look Like Who Drank Too Much Last Night.

I’ve been on that last panel more times than I can count. Hat-tip, by the way, to children’s writer Mette Ivie Harrison whose material (above) I borrowed.

Anyway, there I was. Sweaty, nervous and wedged between Carl Hiassen and some quasi-famous author whose name here I shall not reveal. I was pretty bad at public speaking in those days and sat there like a traffic cone. Our moderator was a dud, but Carl was a pure gent, trying to create a dialogue among us. Sensing my unease, he lobbed a few “what do you think?” softballs my way. One of them was: “Who do you write for?”

My mind blanked. I finally mumbled something into my mic about wanting to entertain readers, and maybe, if I was lucky, to emotional connect with them. Then I made what I thought was an okay joke: “And it wouldn’t be bad if I made a little money doing it.”

The audience, thank god, laughed. The quasi-famous author on my right grabbed my mic and said: “I don’t write for money. And I don’t write for anyone but myself.”

You know how when you’re in an awkward social situation and you think of a great comeback — two weeks later? What I should have said was “I think they call that literary self-abuse.” But I didn’t. Nobody said anything. Dead silence in the room. Mercifully, the moderator pulled the plug soon after.

I never forgot that author. She had a big name and a couple of big literary awards. She’s dead now, but you can still find her books on Amazon if you look hard. But I never forgot what she said that day,

What a bunch of bull-crap.

Who do you write for? Carl knew the right answer. All of you guys out there know the right answer. Sure, you write for yourself because it’s something you love doing. But it’s like playing the piano or gardening. Why play the piano if there is no one there to listen and be moved? Why toil in a garden unless the moods of passersby aren’t lifted by the roses they see?

And what is so wrong about wanting to make a living doing this? Even if it’s just to keep your dogs in Greenies.

So yeah, guys, write for yourself. It can make you feel dumb at times. It can make you feel wonderful at times. It humbles you, teaches you, heals you, Write because it makes you hear the beat of your own heart. But never, ever, forget that there is someone else out there who wants to hear you. Who might need to hear you. Maybe you’ll just make them chuckle. Or feel less lonely on a bad day. Or maybe you’ll change their life in some small way.

A couple years back, I had a story in a Mystery Writers of Americ anthology called “One Shot.” It was about a man who is emotionally crippled by a haunting childhood memory. The character and his best friend had been playing with dad’s revolver and the gun went off. The memory was, as often is the case for little kids, only half-there, obscured in a haze of pain, fear, and regret. But the adult character remembers the dead boy had been bullied as gay and he comes to realize the boy had killed himself. But a cabal of parents and priests had convinced him it was his fault.

I got an email about a year after the story was published. It was from a father whose gay son had shot himself. The writer told me the story had helped him come to grips with his own guilt and with his decision to leave his church. He thanked me for the story. Even as I write this, I can’t think of him without great emotion.

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to put yourself in your stories. And when you feel the time is right, don’t be afraid to put yourself and your stories out there. You need to connect.

I ran across this quote the other day, which is what clicked my memory of that poor lonely quasi-famous author, and what inspired this post. It’s from author Ursula K. Le Guin:

“The unread story is not a story. It is little marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live, a live thing, a story.”

Send yourself out into the world. Someone out there is waiting for you.

By PJ Parrish

This is a story about treasure hunting.

I am a sucker for estate sales. We have a lot of them in summer up here in northern Michigan. My town, Traverse City, is awash in splendid old Victorians left over from the days of the logger barons. And we have hundreds of listing barns crammed with family flotsam.

Among the cool stuff I’ve gathered: A set of ten Baccarat champagne coups (eight bucks) Two circa-Forties prints of gaudy cockatoos from a Miami Beach hotel (how they got in a Michigan basement I can’t guess). A Paint-by-Numbers of a naughty can-can dancer. A pathetic sock monkey (I have a huge collection, the uglier the monkey the better). And a dirt-encrusted mantel clock from the Fifites that keeps perfect time.

But yesterday, I struck gold. An old antique store was going out of business here. You know the place — an old barn stuffed rafters-to-basement with jade jewelry, molting hats, rusty New Era potato chip tins, lethal looking pitchforks and creepy one-armed baby dolls.

I spotted a handsome looking leather book. It had heft and smelled like rotting candy.

A digression: That great old book smell? You’re not imagining it. It comes from the chemical breakdown of the books after they’re exposed to light and heat for a long time. The break down releases volatile organic compounds that create a palette of those old book smells — mainly almonds and vanilla but also toluene, which produces coffee overtones.

That old book smell has an official name — bibliosmia. In other words, what you’re smelling is the scent of a book slowly dying.

I had to save this one. The title on the spine was The Omnibus of Crime. The name was Dorothy Sayers. It is a compilation of detective stories she gathered together. It is pristine, first edition. I Googled it on my phone and it goes for about $300 among collectors. It bought it for $20.

It wasn’t until I got home that I found a leaflet stuck inside. It is the original Book-of-the-Month Club News. Sayers’ anthology was the August 1929 selection. Its price was $3. I think I got a bargain.

The book is over 1,200 pages and many of the stories are by names lost in the haze of our genre’s history. But there are some famous folks — Poe, Doyle, Stoker, Dickens, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Ambrose Bierce. Did you know Aldous Huxley wrote a short story called “The Giocanda Smile”? From that story:

Whatever she said was always said with intensity. She leaned forward, aimed, so to speak, like a gun, and fired her words. Bang! the charge in her soul was ignited, the words whizzed forth from the narrow barrel of her mouth. She was a machine-gun, riddling her hostess with sympathy.

The book is arranged historically, from the seminal roots of our genre in Latin, Greek and “oriental” primitives, logs through the “modern” contributions of Poe and Doyle, lurks through the shadows of vampires, witches and ghosts and ends with a section titled “Tales of Cruelty and Blood.”

Can’t wait to get to that part.

But I’ve just cracked the book, and first lingered in Sayer’s inspired introduction. I have to share my favorite passage from that intro, wherein Sayers argues why detective stories are, in the words of the Book of the Month Club editors, “sufficiently dignified”:

There is one respect, at least, in which the detective story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle and end. A definite and single problem is set, worked out, and solved; its conclusion is not arbitrarily conditioned by marriage or death. It has the rounded (although limited) perfection of a troilet.

Okay, I looked up a couple words for you:

Aristotelian: Coming from the philosophy of Aristotle, an emphasis upon deduction and upon investigation of concrete and particular things and situations.

No argument from us on that, right?

Troilet: A poem form, invented by 13th century French minstrels. It has — get ready folks — eight lines, with the first line being repeated as the fourth and seventh lines and rhyming with third and fifth, while the second line serves as a refrain in the eighth and final line and rhymes with the sixth. Most commonly written in iambic tetrameter but almost as often in iambic pentameter.

Let’s just say that Sayers is trying to tell us that a good detective story has a nice structure.

I can’t tell you much more about my book yet. The editors of the Book-of-the-Month-Club news are sort of stuffy and borderline snide in their introduction, burbling on about how the English write better detective stories than Americans, that the Russians had a влюбился on Sherlock Holmes and that Sayer’s collection is “an agreeable summer’s afternoon reading.” (Is that like a Beach book?). They finally, at the end, loosen their man buns and concede:

“But come! The Omnibus of Crime is intended to be enjoyed. We can think of no book that offers so sure and innocent a nirvana for an active mind.”

I guess that means they thought it was sorta kinda okay to like detective stories. I’d rather you listen to what Dorothy Sayers has to say about our genre. Her words are as relevant today as they were in 1929.

Man, not satisfied with the mental confusion and unhappiness to be derived from contemplating the cruelties of life and the riddle of the universe, delights to occupy his leisure moments with puzzles and bugaboos….The fact remains that if you search the second-hand book stalls for cast-off literature, you will find fewer mystery stories than any other kind of book. Theology and poetry, philosophy and numismatics, love-stories and biography, [man] discards [these books] as easily as his old razor blades. But Sherlock Holmes is cherished and read and re-read, till the covers fall off and the pages crumble to fragments.

Keep searching those second-hand book stalls. We endure, crime dogs.

влюбился = Russian for man crush

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete. –Ross MacDonald

PJ Parrish

I ran across a fascinating essay the other day written by one of my favorite writers Ross Macdonald. Its title was intriguing enough — The Writer As Hero. I mean, shoot, who doesn’t like to think of themselves as hero at one time of another?

Most of us will never be called on for true heroics. We won’t go to war. We won’t run into a burning building. Our names won’t be etched in history books like Harriet Tubman or Miep Gies. The best we can aspire to is a series of small but constant kindnesses.

Ross Macdonald was speaking of different sort of heroism, which we as writers can perhaps examine and absorb. Let me try to set this up properly.

Macdonald was having a meeting with a producer was toying with the idea of making Macdonald’s detective Lew Archer into a television series. He asked if Archer was based on a real person

“Yes,” Macdonald said. “Myself.”

The guy gave him “a semi-pitying Hollywood look.” Macdonald tried to explain that he knew some excellent detectives and had watched them work.

“Archer was created from the inside out. I wasn’t Archer, exactly, but Archer was me,” Macdonald told the producer. From the essay:

The conversation went downhill from there, as if I had made a damaging admission. But I believe most detective-story writers would give the same answer. A close paternal or fraternal relationship between writer and detective is a marked peculiarity of the form. Throughout its history, from Poe to Chandler and beyond, the detective hero has represented his creator and carried his values into action in society.

That really got my mental hamster wheel going. My series protagonist Louis Kincaid, damaged as he might have been, has a strong core of values. It, more than anything, is the connecting thread in my books. Where did this code come from? Where did his ethics, his way of seeing the world, emerge from? There was only one answer — me.

The more I thought about this, the more sense it made. Even in my stand alones — two very distinct and difference charcters — the way those characters look at the world is filtered through my moral prism. Even though their lives bear no resemblance to mine, they are me.

I’m having trouble making my point there. Let’s allow Macdonald to try, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and his detective Dupin:

Poe’s was a first-rate but guilt-haunted mind painfully at odds with the realities of pre-Civil-War America. Dupin is a declassed aristocrat, as Poe’s heroes tend to be, an obvious equivalent for the artist-intellectual who has lost his place in society and his foothold in tradition. Dupin has no social life, only one friend. He is set apart from other people by his superiority of mind.

In his creation of Dupin, Poe was surely compensating for his failure to become what his extraordinary mental powers seemed to fit him for. He had dreamed of an intellectual hierarchy governing the cultural life of the nation, himself at its head. Dupin’s outwitting of an unscrupulous politician in “The Purloined Letter,” his “solution” of an actual New York case in “Marie Roget,” his repeated trumping of the cards held by the Prefect of Police, are Poe’s vicarious demonstrations of superiority to an indifferent society and its officials.

Poe’s detective stories, Macdonald says, “gave the writer, and give the reader, something deeper than obvious satisfactions. He devised them as a means of exorcising or controlling guilt and horror.”

Macdonald then moves on to Chandler and Hammitt and their creations — Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. He says both writers were working in opposition to the old cliches and tropes. In 1944, Chandler wrote, in a dedication to the editor of Black Mask:

“For Joseph Thompson Shaw with affection and respect, and in memory of the time when we were trying to get murder away from the upper classes, the weekend house party and the vicar’s rose-garden, and back to the people who are really good at it.”

It was a revolution. As Macdonald notes, “From it emerged a new kind of detective hero, the classless, restless man of American democracy, who spoke the language of the street.”

Hammett had been a PI. Spade wasn’t a complete projection of himself but he knew him inside and out and gave him a sort of bleak compassion. But his narrow code of conduct makes him turn his murderous lover over to the police.

Chandler’s vision is disenchanted, too, but Macdonald suggests Chandler had a self-awareness and, like his hero, wore two masks — the hardboiled one concealing a poetic and satiric mind. And that our pleasure, as readers, comes from figuring out the interplay between the mind of Chandler and the voice of Marlowe. He gives as an example the marvelous opening of The Big Sleep.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Here’s the key quote from Macdonald about that opening:

“Marlowe is making fun of himself, and of Chandler in the role of brash young detective. There is pathos, too, in the idea that a man who can write like a fallen angel should be a mere private eye. The gifted writer conceals himself behind Marlowe’s cheerful mindlessness. At the same time the retiring, middle-aged, scholarly author acquires a durable mask, forever 38, which allows him to face the dangers of society high and low.”

That’s the part that really got me thinking about my own books. What am I revealing of myself when I put those thoughts about childhood in Louis Kincaid’s head? What am I mourning from my past when I make my character a failed dancer who’s struggling to find an authentic life? Who are these people I’ve created? Who am I?

I think that’s it. Yes, I write for pleasure. But it goes so much deeper than that. I write to find out things about myself, to untangle old yarn skeins, to reorient myself on the path. They say we dream to make sense out of what happens in our real lives. What is writing, if not a kind of dream state?

Like Ross Macdonald, we’re all searching for heros.

Here’s the link to the Macdonald essay in full. Be patient. It sometimes doesn’t load quickly. http://www.thestacksreader.com/the-writer-as-detective-hero/?fbclid=IwAR30zE0Fr2ci7kNRD45aAFixOp8EhvK7kTe609Dqp5xoCKwzRUfZjcXE_BE

By PJ Parrish

Whenever I travel, I read. I mean, like a starving fool. I’ve given up trying to figure out why I don’t have a solid, disciplined reading habit here at home. Maybe I’m too distracted, and as you all know, reading — even for pleasure — requires you to purposefully set aside time. Sort of like being romantic within marriage. Or exercise.

So while in Italy for two weeks recently, I read like crazy. First up, in Rome, was a riveting history of how Michelangelo came to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I’ve been fascinated by this ego-tug between artist and pope ever since I saw The Agony and the Ecstacy in 1965. Charleton Heston and Rex Harrison chewing up the scenery during the Italian Renaissance — che bello!

I never read Irving Stone’s bio-novel on which the film is based. Should have, but glad I didn’t because the book I did read, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King was unputdownable. I found the book at one of our neighborhood library boxes two days before I left for Rome. Serendipity, indeed. One passage:

The pope grew so incensed at Michelangelo’s slow progress and impudent replies that he thrashed him with a stick. Michelangelo had wished to return to Florence for a feast day, but Julius stubbornly refused him permission on the grounds the artist had made so little headway on the project.

“Well, but when will you have this chapel finished?”

“As soon as I can, Holy Father,” replied Michelangelo.

This exchange turns up in the movie thusly:

Pope Julius: When will you make an end?

Michelangelo: When I am finished.

I think the screenwriter improved the dialogue here some, no? Which brings me to my point today. It never ceases to amaze me how much a movie and its book can differ. Sometimes the movie is a sad shadow of a book. But very often, the movie surpasses its source. Not in this case because for me, as much as I love the movie, King’s non-fiction account, as one review put it, wipes away the smudges from the story.

Once out of Rome and into the countryside, I delved into my second Italian literary adventure — Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. We were in Tuscany, not Venice, yet being in tiny Italian aeries, I felt at times like I was hearing Ripley’s footsteps echoing on the wet cobblestones.

Now I really like the movie with Matt Damon and Judd Law. But I was riveted by the new Netflix series Ripley. The latter’s black and white cinematography (above) is just stunning. Chiaroscuro — a lovely Italian word that translates as “light-dark” — is a film technique wherein contrasts are sharpened to a haunting effect, often to stress a character’s moral ambiguity. Ripley reminded me of one of my favorite characters, Harry Lime in The Third Man. It’s another noir masterpiece that uses the chiaroscuro technique.

But it also brought to mind The Godfather. Though shot in color, the movie’s contrasts of light and dark symbolize the battle of good and evil waging not just in the Corleone clan but in all men. Cinematographer Gordon Willis was renowned for this style. Director Coppola said of Willis: “Like a Renaissance painter, his images are bold, striking.”

Chiaroscura is a Renaissance concept, of course. Da Vinci used it to turn Lisa del Giocondo into a cheshire cat. Caravaggio, who Ripley is obsessed with, used it to bathe his religious figures in holy light in contrast to lowly humans. But I digress…

I am still finishing Patricia Highsmith’s novel. This is from her book, just after Tom has bashed in Dickie’s head and scuttled the boat in an isolated cove:

At sundown, just the hour when the Italians and everybody else in the village had gathered at the sidewalk tables or the cafe, freshly showered and dressed, staring at everybody and everything that passed by, eager for whatever entertainment the town could offer, Tom walked into the village wearing only his swimming shorts and sandals and Dickie’s corduroy jacket, and carrying his blood-stained trousers and jacket under his arm.

Has there ever been a more captivating sociopath? I am loving this book, just as I have loved all three Ripley movies. Yes, there is a third — Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in the 1960 French thriller Plein soleil (Full Sun). No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, behind blue eyes.

Highsmith’s book is one example, I can attest, where the movies equal the book. And the book does not disappoint.

Whew. Just re-read this post. A little winded and wandering again. Hope you don’t mind. But I had a great time in Italy with Michelangelo and Tom. I leave you all with an open-eneded but related question:

What books have made for really bad movies? Or more intriguing, what movies turned out better than their books? I’ll start: The Bridges of Madison County. Which is a long long ways from Rome.

_________________

Postscript: Archie the condo-bound chihuahua, having a field day in the hills of Tuscany.

Dear Readers: I am still in Italy and out of touch. Our Wifi here is almost non-existent! So I hope you don’t mind a re-post. This is one of my favorites. See you soon. — PJ

Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences. — Joyce Carol Oates.

By PJ Parrish

Yesterday, Sue posted her critique of a First Page submission. On first read, I thought it was pretty good but something about it was bugging me. Then I just looked at it instead of reading it. It hit me that the paragraphing wasn’t quite right.

Paragraphing? Who cares about paragraphing? You just hit enter when it feels right, right? Nope. Proper paragraphing is one of the most underrated tools in your writer’s box. So allow me to wander into the weeds today and talk a little inside baseball. (I worked hard on that mixed metaphor, by the way)

Two main problems with the submission yesterday: The writer had made the common mistake of burying thoughts and dialogue within narrative.

Second problem: All the paragraphs are about the same length. Why is that a problem? Because it goes to pacing and rhythm. No variation in paragraphs is boring to the eye and that translates to boring for the reader’s imagination. But if you learn to master the fine but subtle art of judicious paragraphing, you can inject interest and even tension into your story.

Let’s address problem one first. This opening paragraph is essentially narrative. But inserted within that is both dialogue and thoughts. Here’s the paragraph:

Arizona Powers slammed her palm into the office wall, ignoring the stinging sensation. Unbelievable. “Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. I’m a federal agent, not a babysitter.” Her boss had clearly lost his mind. She spun on her hiking shoe, locking eyes with Senior Special Agent Matt Updike. Her fingers fidgeted with a button on her shirt. I deserve a second chance.

Dialogue and thoughts are ACTION. They deserve to be lifted out of narrative and given lines of their own so the reader can emotionally latch onto them, and by extension, your character. This opening paragraph would be more effective (and more interesting to the eye) if it were deconstructed with better paragraphing:

Arizona Powers slammed her palm into the office wall, ignoring the stinging sensation, and stared hard at her boss.

“Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. I’m a federal agent, not a babysitter.”

Matt Updike shoved his chair backward, rose and closed the distance between them in two strides.

“I’m not kidding. You are doing this,” he said. “You don’t have a choice.”

She could smell his stale coffee breath and see a vein bulging in his neck, but she resisted the urge to step back. Her boss had clearly lost his mind. But she wasn’t going to take this. She deserved a second chance.

See the difference? The drama of the scene is enhanced by allowing the thoughts and dialogue to stand out — all by simple paragraphing. Here’s something interesting: The rewrite is LONGER but it reads FASTER. Why? Because the reader doesn’t need to ferret out the important thoughts and dialogue. It’s your job, as the writer, to mine out the nuggets for them.

Now let’s consider the basic question of length of paragraphs and how that affects your reader. How long should your paragraphs be? Sounds like a dumb question, but it’s not. You need to consider it deeply.

Let me re-quote this from Ronald Tobias’s The Elements of Fiction Writing: Theme & Strategy,

The rhythm of action and character is controlled by the rhythm of your sentences. You can alter mood, increase or decrease tension, and pace the action by the number of words you put in a sentence. And because sentences create patterns, the cumulative effect of your sentences has a larger overall effect on the work itself. Short sentences are more dramatic; long sentences are calmer by nature and tend to be more explanatory or descriptive. If your writing a tense scene and use long sentences [me here: or long paragraphs], you may be working against yourself.

I often liken writing to music. Composers use punctuation to speed up or slow down pace and musicians use types of “articulation” to enhance whatever mood they are going for — intense? dangerous? romantic? thoughtful?

Good writers use similar tools — punctuation, length of sentences and paragraphs (short and choppy or longer and measured?) to create an emotional response in their readers. The best writers understand this not only creates emotion, it provides variety on each page and over the whole book.

Pacing is not just aural, it’s visual. How your writing LOOKS on the page is important. Which brings us back to the paragraph. How many you use per page, and how long or short your paragraphs are should be conscious choices you make. Here is the same thought, expressed two different ways:

Fragments, the length of sentences, punctuation, and how often you paragraph can all work to give a particular pace. If you really think about, you’ll realize that you can use sentence and paragraph structure to create a feeling of speed or slowness, depending on what kind of emotional response you want to induce in your reader.

Okay, that gets my point across, right? But what if I structured the same thought this way:

Think of it! You can move a reader through a story fast. Their hearts will race!

Or you can slow them down and make them use their heads.

It’s all in how your sentences look on the page.

The first is measured, more academic in pace, meant to make you slow down and digest the thought. The second is lively and urgent, making you anticipate an important climax-point. Neither is correct. They are just two different styles of pacing, word choice, sentence length and paragraphing to different affect.

I think most of us here, being in the crime business, know we shouldn’t write a lot of long paragraphs. You can get away with some, especially in description. But these days, too many long paragraphs per page looks “old-fashioned” or worse, “textbook.” It worked for Dickens and even for a stylist like Delillo. Not so much for the rest of us today.

Are any of you out there art folks or designers? Then you understand the value of “white space” or “negative space.” Simply put, negative space is the area around and between a subject. It appears in all drawings, paintings and photographs. The “subject” below is enhanced by the negative space surroudning him. (Notice, too, the crop lines that make for an even more compelling negative/positive composition!)

Paragraphing provides white space. Don’t believe me? Go read Elmore Leonard.

Ray Bradbury said that each paragraph is a mini-scene and when you hit ENTER you are helping your reader enter a new scene, thought or action. I’ll leave you with one more example. It’s from one of my favorite opening pages from a novel.

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.

That’s the opening to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I love the way the first line sits there all alone, like a roadside sign that you’re entering hell. Then he gives us this amazing loooong graph with gorgeous imagery and the nonchalance of the unnamed man. And then, a third paragraph — BAM! — he gives us our arsonist-star by name.

Bradbury could have made this all one graph. But no, he chose three. Your turn. Choose wisely when to hit enter.

Val d’Orcia in Tuscany, where the homecoming scene in “Gladiator” was filmed

By PJ Parrish

Buongiorno, cani del crimine!

Okay, fair warning. This post is going to be full of digressions. Because I am of a wandering mood today.

As you read this, I am probably having dinner somewhere in Tuscany. Am writing this ahead of departure, however, so I don’t have a clue where I will actually be. I travel with my husband Daniel, my best friend Linda and another old-friend-couple Roon and Athena. We’ve had great luck traveling together so we’re off again – The Traveling Wilburys.

First digression: Most of you have probably heard of the real Traveling Wilburys. They were a super-group composed of George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison. You had to be special to be a Wilbury. Not everyone had the creds and soul to be a Wilbury.

On a Sirius XM Tom Petty channel, Petty talked about how they used to sit around and muse about who could be a Wilbury and who could not. Jack Nicholson = Wilbury. Richard Dreyfuss = great actor but never a Wilbury.

This is how we feel about our little travel group. You have to have the right stuff. Our Wilburys like the countryside, not big cities. We seek out eateries discovered on the wing, not Michelin-mandated must-tries. We love to sit in cafes and watch the world go by, not face the selfie-hoards around the Mona Lisa. I am convinced conflicting travel vibes is behind the failure of many marriages.

But I digress.

I have been trying to learn some Italian before this trip. I do it because I think it’s necessary to have good manners as a visitor and because I found it so darn frustrating on my first trip to France in 1985 that I couldn’t talk to folks.

After much agony and decades, I can speak enough French to get by. As David Sedaris wrote of his own sad attempts to learn French: Me talk pretty one day. From his essay of the same name:

Learning French is a lot like joining a gang in that it involves a long and intensive period of hazing. And it wasn’t just my teacher; the entire population seemed to be in on it. Following brutal encounters with my local butcher and the concierge of my building, I’d head off to class, where the teacher would hold my corrected paperwork high above her head, shouting, “Here’s proof that David is an ignorant and uninspired ensigiejsokhjx.”

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the smoky hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps.

“Sometimes me cry alone at night.” “That is common for me also, but be more strong, you. Much work, and someday you talk pretty. People stop hate you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay?”

But I digress.

Learning a new language isn’t just for the benefit of the foreigners you might meet. It’s good for you. Like at a cellular level.

Everyone’s brain is made up of neurons, and things called dendrites, which are the connections between neurons. This is what we call “grey matter.” Bilingual folks have more of these neurons and dendrites compared to the rest of us. This means that their grey matter is even greyer.

Bilingualism also has an impact your brain’s white matter. This is the system of nerve fibres which connect all four lobes of the brain. This system coordinates communication between the different brain regions. This helps you learn new stuff. Bilinguals have a lot of white stuff.

Yeah, but it’s hard, darn it. Kids, well, they tend to pick up languages pretty easily. We old farts really struggle. But it’s worth it. Just the process of trying to learn Italian gives my brain a workout and protects me from dementia. So I can say with great confidence that after six months suffering through Babbel Italian, I can now say “Where are the car keys?” (Dove sono le chiavi della macchina?). But I still have trouble finding my car in the lot at Home Depot.

Scientific studies have shown that learning a language also helps you stay awake. Just one week studying a new language helps students’ levels of alertness and focus. This improvement was maintained with continuous language study of at least five hours a week.  And get this: Improvement in attention span was noted across all age groups up to 80. This gives me great hope because napping is my new hobby.

But I digress.

Okay, so learning Italian is good for:

1. Polite manners
2. Finding a bathroom in Cortona
3. Helping your memory
4. Keeping you awake

But what does all this have to do with writing novels? (And you thought I didn’t have a point today). Well, turns out that according to studies, learning a foreign language helps you communicate better in your native language. It also boosts your powers of empathy. And maybe the best benefit: It increases your ability to see things from a different perspective. To put it another way, foreign language study:

1. Enhances your command of English
2. Makes you understand human nature
3. Allows you to walk in another person’s shoes. Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

Don’t we novelists need all three of those in spades?

In trying to learn French, I had to respect the structure of the language (if you put an adjective in the wrong place, it can change its meaning completely). I had to learn the nuances of the accent and subjunctive tense (One neglected subjunctive and a kiss is not a kiss, it’s a shag). In trying to learn Italian, the biggest lesson I learned was that sometimes you just have to go with the flow.

Italian is a very quirky language. I’m a tad anal and I drove myself crazy trying to analyze the whys behind it. I was always looking for the theory and sense behind its structure. I finally gave up and just tried to speak. I hear that the Italians are a very forgiving people.

I love idioms and my favorite in Italian so far is this one:

Non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco.

This translates literally as “not all donuts come out with holes.” It means, roughly, that things aren’t going according to plan but, hey, don’t sweat it. Que sera. It’s a verbal shrug. Which is pretty good advice in any language for any situation, right?

But I digress.

A presto, amici!

By PJ Parrish

Morning folks. I am probably somewhere over Lake Erie right now, heading to New York for my annual gig as Edgar banquet chairman. So forgive me if I can’t engage in the usual dialogue here. In my place, here’s a gallery of this year’s Edgar nominees book covers.

Normally, I show you these to spotlight any trends in cover design. But I don’t see any clear direction in how book art is moving. Maybe there are no solid trends anymore. There used to be. Back in my salad days, BIG serif typefaces were the rage, usually with a small graphic that was supposed to somehow signify the book’s theme or such. Such as in my early Louis Kincaid books:

This was defnitely an attempt at branding, very uber-Patterson. Many, many other mysteries had the same look back in the early 2000s. But today, it seems to my eye at least, there is much more variety and less follow-the-leadering. Perhaps it is because the writing/subject matter in crime fiction is more small-c catholic these days?

Take a look at the covers for this year’s Best Novel:

To my eye, the designs are very diverse — everything from the “traditional” lyrical design of Burke and Krueger to the hyper-graphic neon of Knoll and Whitehead. Koryta’s and Cosby’s covers look similar — bold san-serif type with that “old-fashioned” graphic element. And Edstein’s red cover seems out there on its own island, an attempt perhaps to suggest a more literary upmarket tilt? (Yeah, I hate the term upmarket too, but that does seem to be a trend of late).

Compare that group with the Lilian Jackson Braun nominees. (Caveat: This, like the Mary Higgins Clark Award and Sue Grafton Award, are not Edgars, but special auxiliary awards). The Braun nominees:

No way can a reader mistake these books for hardboiled, right? They clearly reflect Braun’s legacy. Mystery Writers of America is very clear on what qualifies for this award: “The book must be a contemporary cozy mystery with a current-day setting and the story emphasis on solving a crime, usually a murder. Historical mysteries, even if cozy in tone, do not qualify. However, the book may contain some historical elements (flashbacks, journal entries, etc.) as long as the emphasis is on the contemporary investigation of the mystery.” (There’s more VERY specific criteria if you want to read it — link here.)

Likewise, the Best Juvenile nominees this year are all of a sort. These covers convey a child-like exhuberance and, like an ice cream triple-scooper, invite you to taste. It’s easy to identify the intended age audience:

Compare that with the very dark mood seen among most the Best Young Adult nominees. Any of these covers could be comfortable among Best Novel category:

Just curious: What do you all think about that last blue cover Just Do This One Thing For Me? When I first saw it, I thought it was cropped wrong. But no, this is the full cover, intended to mimic an iphone, of course. I dunno…I find it hard to read. But then again, I’m not thirteen. At Staples yesterday, I had to get Brian’s help to find a lousy printer cord. (I had bought a modem cable by mistake).

One last category before I go. I was struck by the variety among the Paperback Original nominees this year. Usually, they tend to look alike, or at least as if they are from the same family. Maybe this is because PBO’s, being smaller, have to scan faster for the readers’ eyes. This year, they seem all over the place, mood-wise.

I like the creepy Cape Fear look of Boomtown. The cover defnitely conveys a sense of place and mood. I don’t think the cover of Hide is as successful because its geographic image is so generic.  The Taken Ones has a certain tension, thanks to that ragged type face. Lowdown Road gets the signature Hard Case Crime treatment — you know you’re in neo-noir land. I’m not crazy about the Vera Wong cover. It feels like it belongs with the Braun entries, although the old peeking lady image is kind of cool. One reviewer called it perfect for readers looking for “more humor than angst.” I haven’t read the book, so what do I know?

There you go….covers for every taste. Your own takeaway here — if you are doing your own covers or hiring someone to do so — is just be very aware of what audience you’re aiming for (age group, traditional vs noir, light vs dark, humor vs deadly serious). Respect your sub-genre if necessary (ie Braun). Make sure your cover captivates possible readers AND that it captures the mood and theme of your story.

Oh, and pay attention to how it looks when it’s reduced down to a tiny thumbnail on Amazon. But that’s a blog for another day. See you when I get back.