By PJ Parrish

Well, I didn’t purposefully piggyback on Sue’s post yesterday What Do Ringtones Say About Your Character.  We’re not that cleverly organized here at TKZ. But the beat goes on. Today I’d like to talk about our musical muses.

Several years ago, on the publication eve of our stand alone She’s Not There, Thomas & Mercer sent us a lengthy and provocative questionaire about ourselves and our book. The purpose was to pinpoint marketing campaigns and help with the book’s design design.

They asked what who we thought our audience was. (Answer: thriller readers who like character-driven stories) What we believed the “tone” of our book was (Medium dark but ultimately hopeful). They asked us what “color” our story was. (Midnight blue). They asked us for images that might inspire a cover design. (We sent them photos of women drowning like the one below left. The second one is the actual cover.)

They also asked us what music, if any, had inspired us during the writing. That last question hit the target with me. The idea for our book came as I was jogging and “She’s Not There” by the Zombies came on. I started really listening to the lyrics:

Well, no one told me about her, the way she lied
Well, no one told me about her, how many people cried
But it’s too late to say you’re sorry
How would I know, why should I care?
Please don’t bother tryin’ to find her
She’s not there
Well, let me tell you ’bout the way she looked
The way she’d act and the colour of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool
Her eyes were clear and bright
But she’s not there

The story is about Amelia, a woman who early in life lost her way on the path to living an authentic life and finds herself trying to be someone else for her rich ambitious husband. She’s living a lie. Until an accident makes her lose her memory, and she begins a journey to reclaim her life and maybe find a truer version of herself. All this while someone is hunting her down to kill her — maybe her husband.

I was struck by the woman in the Zombies song — outwardly beautiful but not there inside. The story almost wrote itself, one of the few times this has happened to me, mainly because I knew Amelia and the sotto voce song she was singing to me.

Music is often in the back of my brain when I write. I don’t mean literally because I can’t write while music is playing; it really distracts me. Writing habits is not what I am talking about here today. That’s another topic.

The point I’m trying to make is that I believe every good book has a soundtrack, a melodic mood, if you will. Now, I’m not talking here about a character’s musical taste (ie Harry Bosch famously loves jazz). Although, as Sue pointed out yesterday, knowing what music rocks your character’s soul is part of that dossier you need to be creating. I’m trying to articulate something about the mood-currents and rhythms that propel your story itself.

Only once do I remember having a hard time hearing anything as I wrote. Ironically, it was a book about music: The Killing Song, wherein a serial killer in Paris who is a professional cellist leaves behind musical clues with each victim. The clues were easy because they were all popular music (ie Elvis Costello’s “Crimes of Paris.”) But I couldn’t come up with anything that captured the black heart of the killer. I asked a cellist friend and she suggested a piece called Tout un Monde Lointain. Rough translation: All the world, distant. Which is exactly how my villain feels — alone, cut off, every question unanswered, every cry unheard.

As I listened to the piece, I began to understand him. The piece opens with a shiver of cymbals. Then the cello begins a slow meditative solo but it keeps shapeshifting from balanced to intense, almost chaotic plucking. It feels like two souls struggling. Here’s the opening minute.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m judging manuscripts for a writers conference right now. I am struck by how few of the writers seem to have given any thought to what “color” their stories are or what music is playing in the background. The few that do “sing” have a defined mood that really makes me want to read on. I can see — and hear — the worlds the writers are conjuring for me.

Also, I was thinking about this subject after I watched the film Tár, wherein Cate Blanchette plays a mentally tormented orchestra conductor. The soundtrack, heavy with Mahler and Elgar with doses of Count Basie and Cole Porter, was done by Hildur Guðnadóttir, who calls the movie “an ambient tone poem.”

The score gives the film its undertone of dread.  Guðnadóttir said in one interview: “There is a lot of music in the film that’s working on a very delicate, subconscious level, and if you took it out, it would be a completely different animal.”

That got me to thinking about other scores that amplified the tones of movies. Listen to this piece of music that was used behind the arrival of Eleanor (Katherine Hepburn) on parole from prison, in The Lion of Winter.

Regal, ethereal voices — but undercut with death-tolling bells, and discordant horns that signal a darkness beneath the pageantry.

Another score I think supports its story is in Master And Commander, much of it original, but also brilliant choices from classics. I love this piece for the way the background pulse mimics the rhythm of a sailing ship bouncing over waves as the human bustle goes on above board.

There are endless examples of scores that deepened a movie’s emotional impact. Hitchcock had his Bernard Herrmann. Sergio Leone had his Ennio Morricone. Coppola had his Nino Rota. John Williams played two tuba notes for Steven Spielberg and no one wanted to ever go into the water again.

So, what can we book people glean from this? Well, I’m often harping here on the need for tone. Every successful story has its own particular rhythm, mood, and ambience. You may not be always conscious of this, but the way you, as a writer, choose to put your words and sentences together creates a type of music. This soundtrack, be it butterfly-flit-light or chiaroscuro shadowy dark, must support your plot and characters. It must be true and unique to them. To your story. To you.

I can see you out there scratching your heads. Well, let’s try this experiment. Your book has just been bought by some bigly big director at Lionsgate. They have brought you on for extra money as a consultant (Stop that laughing!) They ask you what music is playing as the movie opens, and what music is playing as the credits roll. Do you sit there dumb as a stump? Or do you know, deep in your writer bones, what needs to be heard.

I daydream about this often. I have songs all ready to go when Hollywood calls. At the beginning of Dark of the Moon, as Louis Kincaid is tramping through the Mississippi swamps and sees a skeleton with a noose, “Strange Fruit” is playing but only in instrumental because I want it subtle.

At the end of the movie, Louis gets in his old Mustang and drives away from Blackpool Mississippi, heading home. Case is solved but Louis’s heart is not. Credits roll. There’s a long birds-eye pull-away shot of a small white car heading north through a huge close expanse of green trees. And this is what we hear:

Hey, it’s what’s playing in my head. Now, what’s in yours?

My good friends, bestselling authors Michael and Kathleen Gear, recently posted a photo on Twitter of their 32,000-volume home library. At the time of this writing on February 1, it was trending to the tune of 4.1 million views and thousands of retweets.

Sparked by people’s fascination with such a massive personal library, comments came fast and furious, to the point that digital fistfights broke out and trolls attacked the couple for a variety of bizarre reasons including, “why do you have so many that you can’t possibly read all of them?”

I’ll answer that one for the Gears. “Because they wanted them.”

But thousands were envious and climbed upon their own ramparts of books to repel the attacks and support the couple and their collection.

I’m a reader and collector as well. We moved into our new house four years ago and I contracted with a master cabinetmaker to build bookcases in my office. The polished cherry built-ins reach twelve feet high, wrap around two walls, and the builder constructed a ladder and rail system to reach the upper shelves. He said it was the tallest cabinetry he’d ever designed to hold the weight of so many books.

It is a dream library, though I fall far short of the Gear’s 32,000 mark. Conservatively, I’d estimate my book collection might reach upwards of 5,000, mostly hardback volumes. Lacking enough shelf space even now, some are still packed away in an old quilt box built by my great granddaddy. They’re also scattered throughout the house on bookshelves, barrister bookcases, on other shelves and cabinets.

And yes, I’ve read them all except for those on my TBR stack. I’ve even written a few that are properly alphabetized, that take up almost an entire shelf.

The first paperback books that started my first adult collection came from a married couple, Don and Sally, who lived around the corner when I was in high school. Of course I had a library card, and I’d like to think I was one of the most prolific readers who ever checked books out of the Pleasant Grove Public Library, but I wanted my own.

Don loved westerns and gave me my first Louis L’Amour novels. He bought them for a few cents off a rack at the Rexall, read them, and passed them on to me, after Sally first made sure there wasn’t anything in them that high schoolers shouldn’t read.

But for high school boys, hope springs eternal to find some of those words and scenes Sally worried about. In my case, however, they didn’t show up in anything that came from that generous couple. I had to read The Dirty Dozen (1965) to finally see the “F” word in print, the word “whore” in Drums Along the Mohawk, (1936) and the mild sex scenes in Harold Robbins’ novels (1960s and 70s), that made me go “humm.”

Today there’s a huge push here in the Lone Star State to remove such books from school library shelves, and that kind of book burning nonsense is starting to worry me, because books have been a source of information and entertainment since I was a little critter. Honestly, I don’t need low-level politicians tell me or anyone else what to read.

My first real salaried position was working as a page in the Dallas Casa View Branch library, and shelving books was the best job I ever had. Reporting for work after school, then college, was never tedious, and at least once a week I told myself that someday I’d have my own personal library. Many of those books with bad words in them.

I’ve collected ever since, and prefer physical books over eBooks. For a while there, as Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, and a host of other mom and pop outlets closed their doors to the behemoth Barnes and Noble, I thought bookstores might be a thing of the past.

When B&N bulldozed whole sections in their stores and filled them with big empty tables holding a few tablets, the end seemed inevitable. Physical books might be going the way of the dinosaurs. Good lord, my personal library might be a museum piece before long.

But now stores are coming back, and the market has steadied between eReaders and books. Now the Twitter comments on the Gear library make me wonder. Why is that people can’t believe some of us have our own libraries. And why not? Amazon will sometimes deliver them right to your door only hours after you order them.

It pleases me to look up at the books I’ve collected for the past fifty-plus years. No, I won’t read most of them again, but the familiar titles and covers are my security blanket full of memories filled with the pleasant recollections of the stories between those covers.

There are collections by Robert Ruark, Donald Westlake, William C. Anderson, Douglas Jones, Edward Abbey, and Bill Bryson that I’ve gone back and re-read. Other authors who’ve become friends are there, as well as a collection of first editions by the King himself. I still read his old stuff now and then.

I have books by Owen West, Brian Coffey and Leigh Nicols that make me grin, for those are the early pen names of Mr. Dean Koontz.

Other single titles have sustained me through the years when things looked to be spinning out of control. Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis by Howell Raines was a gift from the Bride who knows all things. My Health is Better in November, by Havilah Babcock and anything by Mr. Gene Hill were there when things became bleak.

I still go back and read The Old Man and the Boy by Robert C. Ruark. Talk about comfort food (books) for the soul.

This personal library is a close friends= my kids will have to deal with when the Bride and I are gone, but with one daughter who is a high school librarian, and another who understands personal belongings that are important to us, they’ll know what to do.

So with that said, here are some questions for the hive mind.

Why the big hubbub about the Gear’s personal library?

How big is your personal library?

Are there authors whose works have been instrumental to your personal career or well-being?

And finally, which authors were the foundations of your own writing or reading world?

So with that, happy reading!