Who is the Sleuth?

From Merriam-Webster:

Sleuth: Detective; someone who looks for information to solve a crime

Synonyms: dick, gumshoe, investigator, operative, private detective, private eye, private investigator, Sherlock, sleuthhound

Must there be a sleuth in mystery novels? This is something I didn't consider when starting to write mysteries. In fact, I wrote quite a few until I came across a writing group that discussed elderly female sleuths. And suddenly, I realized I didn't have any sleuths at all.

In Who’ll Kill Agnes? Police Chief Donovan is a blithering idiot and his assistant Metson isn’t much better. But Donovan is hell bent in his ways and never follows through on anything. He thinks he knows who the guilty party is and never lets up on it. His wife, however, is the most intelligent character in the novel and has a different take on the title character. 

   In The Groundhog Lounge, Book Three of The Zoo Trilogy, Avery and Pam are sleuths of a sort who try to figure out who the killer is but that’s all they do—just conjecture. In the first two books of the trilogy (The Pig Farm and The Pool Lizards), Avery narrates what he sees going on and misses a lot.

But in my standalone mystery novels, The Chameleon Chase and Death by Salsa, the reader goes along with the story and may (or may not) figure out the plots and whodunits. The private detective in The Chameleon Chase is rather a shady character himself determined to win a big fee. But does he solve the mystery?

 And, should a sleuth always be the main character?

“You should write about…”

These four words can drive a writer crazy or at least, that’s the way I feel about them but I know that the speaker means well and has no idea where/how an author gets ideas. Sometimes the author doesn’t know either.

Stephen King said it best, “…good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

I have so many ideas already jotted down that I couldn’t possibly live long enough to write them all. And more come to me daily and, truth to be told, nightly—as in the middle of the night. I seldom get up to write them down and I usually forget them by morning. Great literature prizes dissipate with my dreams.

My partial solution to this dilemma is to write as many short stories as I can. Then I must find a theme that links them together in groups and put them in a book. I have started such a theme with my Twisted Tales by one of my alter egos, Lea Chan. I wrote four short stories from ideas I had and discovered that in each of them, I had a scene beginning with the words, “The doorbell rang.” So, I used that as the title of the first of my Twisted Tales. And since I have many more twisted ideas, I will add them but with a different title.

At the moment I am writing romantic short stories from ideas I once had for novels and will put them in one book. All of the stories have connections to the three romance novels I wrote as Tricia Lee, another of my alter egos.

And so it goes. I have plans for many more series such as time travel, the world’s richest person, culinary romances, and on and on. Will I finish them? As I once told my art students, “There’s no such thing as finished.” But alas, I won’t live forever.

A Late Bloomer

Recently the show CBS Sunday Morning presented a segment on late bloomers and the things they achieved after the midway point of their lives. Suddenly, I realized I was a late bloomer also!

Although I had always wanted to be a writer, I was discouraged in my early twenties when someone read a rough draft I had written about my college experiences. She said, “This sounds like something a young person would write.” And then she tossed it aside. Now there is nothing wrong about how a young person writes and I shouldn’t have let that comment bother me. But it did. And life itself got in the way. Or at least that’s my excuse. The desire to write was always there but I had to make a living and raise my son.

Then something happened one summer while my son and I were staying in my mother and stepfather’s home on Lake Texoma. Every day I passed a house being built as I drove to college in Denton, Texas where I was studying for certification as an elementary teacher. I was now in my late thirties and had been teaching secondary Spanish and art but I thought having elementary certification would help me get a new job. (It didn’t—I immediately got another position as a Spanish and art teacher in a small town in Texas.)

But when the house was finished, I couldn’t believe how elegant it looked and it must have stayed in my subconscious because I dreamed about it one night a couple of years later.

In that dream I drove up to the porch and rang the doorbell. A very handsome, elegant but sardonic man opened the door. A mysterious woman lurked in the background. And that was all there was to the dream or all that I remembered when I woke up. And then a story about the man and the woman began to form in my mind and I started to write a very rough draft. My son graduated from high school when I was in my mid-forties and I went back to that first draft about the mysterious house and changed the names of the characters to coincide with a second story I had written about Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

I spent all of my fifties as a substitute teacher or part-time teacher writing drafts for six books, including reworking the first one. And finally when I was sixty-three, my first novel was published! Oh, it wasn’t that first one I started about the mysterious house. I didn’t publish it until I was 73 after I had already published 12 books!

So surely that qualifies me as a late bloomer! 

Interview with Ibby Taylor Greer

              My guest this week is writer, editor and artist Ibby Taylor Greer.  I have read three of Ibby's books and have found them to be entertaining, informative and incredibly creative. Welcome, Ibby, and thank you for your insights to reading and writing.

                  1) What kinds of books do you like to read and is there one special book that is your favorite overall? 

I read classic fiction (American, British, European novels, and some poetry, mostly) and contemporary mysteries and thrillers mostly, anymore. As for one favorite, probably a book I always own or have around and read and reread, “Smiley’s People” by John LeCarre. A masterpiece of story, characterization, narrative techniques, and suspense.


2) Who are your favorite authors, past and present?

As for favorite(s), too many to list but here are some I tend to own and reread the most: two of the John Le Carre books, “Smiley’s People” and “Tinker, Tailor,” as being near perfect, well-written spy thrillers. I love the early P.D. James novels, like “Death of an Expert Witness.” I reread DuMaurier for ambiance (“Jamaica Inn”), all the Dick (and now Felix) Francis books because of their independent main characters and how the stories evolve with suspense; I love Rumer Godden’s “An Episode of Sparrows.” I enjoy books set in Britain, and Ireland. Biy I have a few favorite Scandinavian, German, and French novels and memoirs, as well, including Sigfried Lenz’s “The German Lesson,” the Dutch-setting stories for children of Meindert (sp) DeJong; “Eugenie Grandet” by Balzac, all Irish short stories by the whole cast of Irish writers, most of Ann Tyler’s novels. I read everything.

3) Are there any authors who have inspired you to write and, if so, who are they?

            Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickiinson, Mary Stewart, Ann Tyler, Jane Austen, Daphne Du Maurier,          P.D. James, “Carolyn Keene”, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Yeats. Yep, classically educated. 
         
          I identify especially with Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier and P.D. James. I wonder if anyone still reads Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

           4) How do you choose your characters’ names?

Each name has another meaning; once the reader gets into the book(s) they start to see what a name can mean. Example, my character Ann C. Bow, in “Moving Day, A Season of Letters,” is a name that, in French, is ‘an si beau,’ or, “such a beautiful year.” Deliberate. In “Moonshine Corner,” Lacey Brew connects things and stirs up the past and present, “brews” something new; other characters named Glass, See, and Hill all have names that fit their roles in the novel. If “every detail counts” in writing, why not let names count?

5) Are you a plotter or a “pantser”?

                ?  Do not know what that is. I plan a novel out in a loose outline, of events, and then let it      happen.   
              Then I would say you are a little bit of both. Outlining is plotting and a "pantser" is someone who lets the story or characters lead the author.

6) What kind of writing schedule do you have?

When working on my own novel, I write mostly all day. When I edit, I do it from about ten a.m. to 3 p.m. and stop. I am at my best in the mid-morning and early evening. But “life interferes

7) How do you choose your titles? Do you have a title in mind before you start writing or does something occur after you have begun to write or after you have finished?       

               
               Choose the title first.

8) Do you base your characters on real people or are they completely from your imagination?

Both. In “Moving Day,” Ann C. Bow was very loosely based on a delightful neighbor in the apartment building. But she never saw the novel, alas, as she died in 1983 and I wrote it in 1999. In “Moonshine Corner,” I had some character types based on friends, with their permission (partly as a gimmick for selling books!), but all the characters were fictitious.

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9) Have you used real life experiences in your fiction or is everything from your imagination?

                  Both, especially relationships. But most of it is pure fiction.

10) When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer ?

                 When I read my first books as a little child, of maybe 5. Beatrix Potter was read to me when I was very young; I still have the books (first editions from early 1900s, and figurines, fairy tales of all kinds, and select Little Golden Books (which I also still have)

           11) What books have you published and where can readers find them?

All my books are available on amazon.com  or directly from me. Check either Ibby Greer, Elizabeth T. Greer, or Ibby Taylor Greer. Address: P.O. Box 4687, Roanoke, VA 24015. etgreer@cox.net. And www.moonshinewidow.com

1. “Moving Day, A Season of Letters,” Brunswick Pub., 1999, an epistolary novel set in Boulder, CO.

2. “Paper Faces, Babyboomer Memoir,” Brunswick Pub. Free verse and photos. 2000.

3. “Moonshine Corner, Keys to Rocky Mount,” time-warp historical novel, ghost novel, and love story. Epilogue of family genealogy and history,  2014.

4. “Thomas Keister Greer: Youth, WWII Marine, Early Legal Career,” written by my late husband and edited and published by me. 2014. Memoir, photos, annotations by me.

5. “Old-Fashioned Stories and Poems, For Children and Everyone.”  2014. Small lyrical poems and art, several stories, including, “The Gingerbread Angel, An After-Christmas Story.”

Questions for fun:

12) What is your favorite color?

            Blue

13) Favorite flavor of ice cream?

            Peppermint Stick

14) Favorite cookie and/or candy bar?

            Homemade chocolate-chip, Snickers

15) Favorite movie?

            “Dr. Zhivago” and “Brideshead Revisited” (the BBC series with Jeremy Irons) and "Shakespeare in Love"

16) Favorite TV show?

            “Honeymooners” for dialogue and comedy; “Who Do You Think You Are?” because I am a genealogist

17)  Favorite place to write: a coffee shop; favorite place to read: a library

Thank you, Pat!

And thank you, Ibby, for a most intriguing, interesting and entertaining interview!

Exciting New (to Me) Authors I discovered in 2014

In 2014 I discovered several new authors and I decided I wanted to share my experiences with their books. Not all are new authors just coming out. Some have been around for quite a while but I had never encountered their books before. The following is not a list beginning with the best. It's a list beginning in the order I read these books. Some are books that were recommended by Amazon Kindle Daily Specials or offered as specials by sites such as Bargain Booksy or posted on the Facebook site Saturday Self Promotion Extravaganza for Suspense/Thriller Writers. And one was given to me. But I loved each and everyone.

 

1. Let Us Prey by Jamie Lee Scott. This is the first novel in the Gotcha Detective Agency series featuring P.I. Mimi Capurro. The story begins with a bang: A headless corpse is found sitting at a table belonging to a world famous novelist. I don't want to give anything away but I will say that there are twists and turns plus a hunky policeman.

 

2. Just Add Salt by Jinx Schwartz. It's true that I did read the first novel in this series the previous year but this is the one that blew me out of the water. It's a Hetta Coffey adventure with Hetta and her friend Jan heading for Cabo San Lucas in her yacht piloted by a handsome captain named Fabio. I won't give more of the plot except to add that a lonesome whale falls in love with the yacht. For me, the novel was exciting, hilarious and riveting.

 

3. Death Turns a Trick by Julie Smith. This is a rip-roaring, entertaining Rebecca Schwartz mystery. Rebecca, a lawyer, is friends with a lady named Elena who runs a bordello in San Francisco. As Rebecca tries to help Elena, she herself becomes embroiled in shenanigans at the bordello. When she goes home, she finds a dead prostitute in her apartment. This is a fast-paced story that keeps the reader engrossed as Rebecca races to solve the murder.

 

4. The Mojito Coast by Richard Helm. This is a thriller set in Cuba just before the revolution led by Castro and Che Guevara. I learned more from this book about that revolution and the evil Batista than I ever did from news sources. Cormac Loame, the hero of the story, returns to Havana to bring back a kidnapped girl. In the process he encounters gangsters, jai-alai players, a world famous author and the woman he loves whom he left behind several years ago. Considering that we are finally beginning to restore ties to Cuba, this was a very timely (and exciting) read.

 

5. Return of the French Blue by Pamela Boles Eglinski. This is a Cat (short for Catalina) and Bonhomme suspense thriller. Cat, once a CIA agent, is on a mission to redeem her family's priceless blue diamond necklace. French Directorate spy, Nicholas Bonhomme sets up a sting operation using the necklace to catch a terrorist. This is a thrilling, heart pounding, nonstop action thriller with a Mediterranean setting--plus a sexy romantic ending!

 

6. This next novel (a gift from a relative) is so strange and different I felt I had to mention it: The Bishop of Mars by Steven Charleston. It's a futuristic science fiction novel with religious (but humorous) undertones. Sometime in the faraway future, Earth has deteriorated and is ruled by a criminal class know as The Vegas. Mars is being developed as a new social order run by various religions from the old Earth. Bishop Anthony is sent from Earth to be the Bishop of Mars. The Vegas have other plans as they want to take over the planet. This book has great humor and insights to Earth's major religions.

Tributes: Mary Stewart and P.D. James

Two of my favorite novelists left us this year: Mary Stewart, age 97, and P.D. James, age 94. 

 

I discovered Mary Stewart during the last semester of my senior year in college. I had already signed a contract to teach Spanish in Las Vegas, Nevada and was eagerly awaiting to graduate and head west. One weekend when most of the students had gone home, I found myself bored and needing something to do. Another girl tossed me a couple of books and said, "Here, read these." I glanced at them and thought they didn't look like my type of reading. After all, I was used to reading "the classics". One looked like it might be a tawdry romance novel but the back cover blurb (at that time I didn't know what a blurb was nor had I ever read a tawdry romance novel) appeared intriguing nonetheless. So, I read My Brother Michael that weekend. And my life changed forever.

 

A decade or two later, I became familiar with P.D. James through the PBS series featuring her sleuth Adam Dalgleish. Then while visiting my mother and stepfather at their home on Lake Texoma, I discovered the Adam Dalgleish books. Because I had seen a few of the TV programs, the actor Roy Marsden who portrayed Dalgleish formed the fictional character in my mind. But my stepfather insisted the casting had been wrong. The actor, according to him, was nothing like the fictional character. Apparently Ms. James had similar thoughts of the casting. It didn't matter to me. I began to read the books and the actor's portrayal stayed in my mind. There are only two or three left that I haven't read and I look forward to them. Her last published novel was in 2011.

 

But I digress. I went to Las Vegas and discovered a world completely different from the Oklahoma small town where I grew up. My teaching load was very easy. I had four high school Spanish 1 classes and 2 study halls. And I started to read pop fiction. I bought all kinds of paperbacks but when I saw a book titled Decision at Delphi I bought it because the setting of My Brother Michael took place near Delphi. And thanks to Mary Stewart I fell in love with the books of Helen MacInnes, which lead to my love of Robert Ludlum and I could go on and on with each new favorite author. I also skipped school a lot. We were given 13 sick days that year--something unheard of in Oklahoma back then. Every time I discovered a new Mary Stewart novel, I took a sick day and stayed home to read. And because her novels of romantic suspense took place in "faraway places", I headed for Mexico soon after school was out. Mexico wasn't really a faraway place but it was different and exciting and tropical. A few years later I spent four exciting years in Puerto Rico. Spain, Portugal and England loomed in the distant future.

 

My first published novel, The Pig Farm, was inspired by my adventures in Puerto Rico, which also inspired me to write my first romance novel, A Caribbean Summer. And many more books followed. My short story Margarita (from The Doorbell Rang, Four Twisted Tales) was inspired by my adventures in Mexico. Would I have written these books if I hadn't read My Brother Michael? I have no idea. The irony is that not long ago I reread that book and was astonished at how low key it was and how the romance, if there was one, barely appeared. But the suspense was there and the locale was intriguing.

 

I hope the "magic of Mary Stewart" and the mysteries of P.D. James live on forever. 

 

Mary Stewart obituary | Books | The Guardian  P. D. James - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Writing Humor

First of all, let me explain. I haven't the foggiest idea of how to write humor. And, of course, what's funny to one person may not be funny to another. Although many of my books are called humorous, I don't start them out that way. And if they do produce laughs or a grin, some kind of subconscious thinking on my part took over. Who'll Kill Agnes? is considered to be quite funny according to many of the reviews it has garnered. But when I started writing it, my intention was the opposite. I had intended to write a serious little mystery with the two policemen as intelligent and thoughtful but as I started writing, I realized I couldn't create characters smarter than I. Also, for reasons I don't understand, their characters just sort of took over and the words that came out of their mouths surprised even me.

The husbands in Death by Salsa were inspired by real friends. The scene in the book where they compare each other's salsa and say something like, "My salsa is hotter than yours." and the reply is, "No, mine is hotter," was part of a real conversation. When I started writing the book, I again planned a serious murder mystery with different adventures for the two husbands. But when they started an adventure without their wives and turned off the main highway going in a different direction, their fictional personalities apparently had a different perspective than my original one. Many readers have told me how much they enjoyed the antics of the husbands and could identify with the wives. I'm glad these fictional personalities were able to entertain.

In my novel The Pool Lizards, which is a satire of middle aged people trying to stay young, I created the characters from many years of living in apartments, particularly Las Vegas, Nevada, Colorado, Texas and Florida. The crazy antics of apartment dwellers provided no end of stories and entertainment. The story and characters are fictional but are typical of the experiences I observed. Also, I was an assistant manager of one apartment complex and had an inside view of a lot of craziness.

But don't get me wrong--I love all of these characters, even the ones who commit fictional murder. But not every reader finds them funny. Many fail to see the humor and I understand that but for those who do get a laugh once in a while, the writing is worth it whether I intended it or not.