Conference-go-round: down & dirty crime writing

Image: Klaus Hausmann from Pixabay

I can’t think of a better way to say boo! to Halloween than with tips from Edgar Award-nominated author Kathleen Kent’s tips of crime writing, courtesy of this month’s Roanoke Writers Conference. After writing a New York Times bestselling historical novel (the equally scary topic of the Salem witch trials) and two more well-received historicals, a friend asked Kent to contribute a crime story for an anthology. She’d never written in that genre, but she told her virtual audience, “Like any good fiction writer, I said, sure.” 

 Kent expected the result, published in the volume, Dallas Noir, would be a one-off, but her agent liked her detective character and the “sort of sardonic tone” so much he asked her for a novel. The result was her Edgar Award-nominated detective story, The Dime, followed by its sequel, The Burn.

So, what does a writer of historical fiction have to say about writing crime fiction? Some things that are unique to crime fiction and others that are common to all fiction – but ramped up to the nth degree!

The difference in degree lies such elements as:

  Pacing 

 Degree of suspense

 Heightened crescendo of emotional tension 

 Narrative style 

 And, in the noir genre especially, location as an important character 

Pacing starts with what Kent termed a “bang out of the box” beginning in which characters given a mission “from the get-go. . . .The story should open with the main character standing at a precipice as something happens that interrupts their ordinary existence.”

She also recommends writing the story’s end toward the beginning of the process and rewriting the beginning if necessary when the manuscript feels finished. And then more rewriting as often as needed. “There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting!”

In the fast pacing necessary to crime fiction, sentences are often shorter, and words are more likely to be single-syllabled. A sentence may even be a single word. Kent used the term “scenus interruptus” to describe the cliffhangers than about at the end of shorter than usual scenes -- “flashcard scenes” -- and chapters designed to put readers psychologically off-balance.

Also, in crime fiction with contemporary settings, Kent noted, with perhaps a tip of the writerly hat to the late Elmore Leonard, “people often speak in shorter sentences.”

And although many writers have championed the use of suspense in fiction generally, the use of reshuffled timelines such as flashbacks and opened-ended results that characters are not aware of can be used to increase suspense exponentially. As can foreshadowing – what Kent termed, “giving away little Easter eggs to telegraph to readers that something is about to happen.”

Writers of crime and related fiction genres may also be familiar with the technique of perpetually heightening the stakes of the story, which also increases emotional tension. Ask, Kent said, “How is your character at odds with his/her world?” Then thwart that character repeatedly. “What’s interesting are the (story’s) roadblocks and how the character gets around them.”

And then there’s that narrative style. A lot of it has to do with the tips already mentioned, but given the abundance of historical mysteries and crime stories, even those set in other worlds, the style “has to be true to the time and place,” Kent said. She drew on her facility with historical writing to note, “if not using a contemporary setting, “read as much as you can from the era, especially first-person accounts – although don’t get side tracked with interesting facts. . . Imagine your plot as a train track, and the characters as the train.” This train-track metaphor also helps keep the pace going. Don’t let that train get sidetracked.

(She also drew laughs – from this viewer at least – with her attention to using language suited to the setting, including the use of period-appropriate curses.)

And then, ah, then, there was the setting – location, location, location! “The great crime writers have used cities, towns, and the countryside as a character by the way their characters respond to their settings. Do as much research as possible on the place at the time of the story.”

For researching older settings, she recommended old maps are the most helpful aids to visualizing.

Finally, she offered some general notes on crime fiction writing and resources:

 Technology (where it’s not, is where the bodies are buried.) 

 Truth is always stranger than fiction

 Talk to (retired) law enforcement officers, PI’s, Feds, etc.

 Cops & Writers (Facebook group)

 Writerswrite.com – with “50 Fabulous resources” for crime and mystery writing

 Newspapers. “Small town papers are the best (for) fantastic ideas for stories and character development.” 

Want more about crime, mystery and thriller writing? There’s still more to come from this month’s Bouchercon 2020 conference!

Review: Kent's latest heroine stomps Dallas bad guys

Review of: The Dime

Author: Kathleen Kent

Publisher: Mulholland Books

Source: Purchase, Barnes and Noble

Grade: A

It’s not every author whose first book out of the chute can score New York Times bestseller status, as Texan Kathleen Kent did with her fictionalized account of a distant ancestor hanged during the Salem witch trials. But after a string of award-winning books of historical fiction, Kent has turned to a modern version of her trademark “ferocious women” with her newest novel, The Dime, starring the police detective she first launched as the heroine of a short story in the crime anthology Dallas Noir – Detective Betty Rhyzyk.

Not sure how to pronounce her name? Just call her "Riz". 

She isn't thrilled to relocate from her home in Brooklyn to Dallas, Texas. But when her domestic partner Jackie returns to Big D to be near her aging mother, Betty’s not about to give up the love of her life by staying behind. She’s bested the toughest criminals and most sexist fellow police officers in New York. How much worse can Texas dish out?

Well, there’s the blatant bigotry over her sexual orientation, shared both by Jackie’s family members and the law enforcement officials of Betty’s new department. And the incessant heat, “a monster wrapped around my head, all bristling mirrored scales, sliding tongues of sweat into my ears and down my neck.” And the vicious turf battles between Mexican and biker drug cartels.  

Still it isn’t until one sunny Texas Sunday that things really fall apart. It starts when a perfectly ordinary drug stakeout goes south, leaving three dead, including another cop, and one of her own team wounded, a “bat-shit-weird sequence of connecting circumstances (that) oozes into the world seemingly from an alternative universe. . . so dangerous you don’t even want to think about it.”

Little does Betty know there’s far, far worse to come, as Kent takes her readers on a ride wilder than any bucking bull, following the trail of a gang of drug dealers who scatter the body parts of their murdered victims across the Lone Star State. Although Kent’s language is still as gorgeous as anything in her historical fiction, after The Dime, she makes every other mystery seem like a cozy.

Fortunately, Betty can call upon years of law enforcement experience in the Big Apple to call upon for help. Not to mention her ever-present medallion of St. Michael, patron saint of police, and the wisdom of her Uncle Benny, wise in the ways of “Reaping the Grim,” as he termed his exorcism of the angst and rage that can eat the souls of those who witness the effects of bloody violence in the course of their duties.

A Texas native who spent decades working in New York, Kent demonstrates her knowledge of both NYC and all things bizarrely Texan: living in the city that killed JFK. Or lining up for tacos at a gas station turned zoo.

But is it only in Rhyzyk’s universe that Civil War re-enactors battle drug dealers with 19^th-century muskets and cannon? Or that a professional rodeo rider turns cop. Or drug dealers quote scripture to justify murder and mayhem? It's all in a day's work for Detective Betty.

Kent's fast-paced writing reaches a climax satisfying enough for a stand-alone novel, including a delightful explanation of its title. Luckily for readers in love with Detective Betty, she leaves enough threads hanging to justify the hope we'll see more of her indomitable heroine.

Wordcraft -- New genre for ‘ferocious’ women

What does a writer with three award winning historical novels do for her next project? If she’s Dallas writer Kathleen Kent the answer is: something completely different. She spoke this weekend to the Southwest Chapter of Mystery Writers of America to say she’s one of us, a crime writer.

Not that she doesn’t still love the historical fiction of her first two novels, The Heretic’s Daughter and The Traitor’s Wife. Telling a fictionalized version of several times great-grandmother, Martha Carrier, one of the women hanged as witches during the seventeenth century Salem witch trials, The Heretic’s Daughter became a New York Times bestseller. The Traitor’s Wife (first published in the U.S. as The Wolves of Andover) told the story of Martha Carrier’s husband, Thomas, rumored by family legend to be one of the executioners of King Charles I.

For her third book, Kent fast forwarded a couple of centuries, basing her most recent novel, The Outcasts, in post-Civil War Texas. “My dad used to say, out of earshot of my mother, of course, that all the witches were on my mother’s side of the family, but all the horse thieves were on his side,” Kent told her MWA audience.

Then, last fall, she got an assignment from a local editor she never expected. Would she like to write a crime story for an anthology set in the Dallas area? Why not? The result was her short story, “Coincidences Can Kill You,” starring Dallasite by way of Brooklyn detective Elizabeth Ryczek, aka, Detective Betty. Betty made her debut in the Akashic Books anthology Dallas Noir last October, alongside stories from such other Dallas writers as Matt Bondurant, Ben Fountain, David Haynes and Suzanne Frank.

“What do a Civil War general, an antique sword, and an AK-47 have in common?” Betty asks. “Nothing. Unless they all converge during one of my cases.”

At first glance, Betty couldn’t seem further removed from either the accused witch of The Heretic’s Daughter, or the unrepentant epileptic prostitute of The Outcasts. But Kent brought up another nugget of family history that links all the women. “When I asked if Martha Carrier was really a witch,” she was told, “‘there are no such things as witches, just ferocious women.’”

Then came another call. “My publisher, Little Brown, who published all three novels, said, we love Detective Betty. How about writing a full length novel about her?”

Following Betty’s appearance, Kent had returned to work on a sequel for The Outcasts. But given the research she’d already done on previous centuries’ crimes and legal processes, Kent felt able to tackle a case of merely modern detection.

Her biggest challenge had been finding the authentic tonality for each period. “I had to get my tonality, voice and pacing different. What remained the same in writing about all her ferocious women, Kent said, is the method of character development.

“To get me thinking out of the box right away, I set up a character with challenges, who are contrary to expectations, who have difficulties. It makes (the writer) draw on resources you didn‘t know you had. (And) the characters are developed not by what you say about them, but by what other characters say about them.”

Detective Betty’s novel is still untitled. For more about her progress, stay tuned to Kent’s website, www.kathleenkent.com/. Or hear her this Thursday, October 8, when she’ll discuss The Outcasts for Read Across McKinney. For tickets and additional information, see www.readacrossmckinney.org/.

***

Last fall, Kent inaugurated Dallas Heritage Village/Dallas Historical Society’s Farina Lecture Series. The speaker for this year’s lecture is Victoria Wilcox, author of Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday (Book Two). Doors open at the DHV, 1515 Harwood, at 6 p.m. October 21. Register for the free event through the events calendar at www.dallasheritagevillage.org/.

Wordcraft -- Dallas and a little noir music

When you live in a city with a “black scar on its history that will never be erased,” as literary agent turned editor David Hale Smith writes in his introduction to Dallas Noir, what can you do but write stories that match the city’s dangerous paradoxes?

At least, so Smith thought after rock musician turned publisher Johnny Temple told him he wanted to add a volume of Dallas noir to the city by city series of dark tales his “reverse gentrification” independent press, Akashic Books, has published over the past decade.

Beginning with stories set in Akashic’s home neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, the line has expanded to mud flinging romps across all five New York City boroughs, the United States and abroad. (Addis Ababa noir, anyone? Helsinki or Trinidad or Zagreb, Croatia? No place on Earth, it seems, is without its dark and deadly underside.)

And what, exactly, is noir? Not exactly crime fiction, not exactly mysteries, noir consists basically of “existential, pessimistic tales of deeply flawed characters on a downward spiral,” Smith told the overflow audience at last week’s launch of Dallas Noir, in Dallas, of course, at HalfPrice Books on Northwest Highway. “A happy ending is the antithesis of noir, because these characters are inherently corrupt.”

Despite the ban on happy endings, seventeen Dallas writers gleefully exhibited the dark sides of Dallas neighborhoods and suburbs for the book. Matt Bondurant (The Wettest County in the World) drew on his experience with the city’s latest plague--West Nile virus. A cop in a story by historical writer Kathleen Kent (The Outcasts) finds her drug investigation complicated by the only hours-dead body of a Civil War general--or at least of his reenacting counterpart. Harry Hunsicker (The Contractors, coming 2014) traces the descent of a family business--armed robbery--from Depression-era outlaw and ancestress Bonnie Parker. And if you’re tempted to impersonate a stripper, don’t--unless you have a skillet handy and you’re being written by J. Suzanne Frank (Laws of Migration).
Even home buying, estate planning and dog walking prove become unnerving activities in the hands of Dallas writers with murder and mayhem on their minds.

And although the characters in this collection don’t get do-overs, readers can. Those who missed Dallas Noir’s launch can meet the cast of writers at Barnes & Noble bookstores in Lincoln Park (November 5) and SMU ( November 9), where students can interrogate their favorite teachers, Frank and David Haynes (A Star in the Face of the Sky.) Next week, Dallas Noir and company hit the road, with signings in Fort Worth, metroplex suburbs, and Austin and Houston.  For more details, see 
www.akashicbooks.com/.

And for the rest of you out there with trigger fingers itching to hit the keyboard, check out Akashic’s list of short story interests. But don’t look back, Jack. This is no place to linger over long goodbyes. The limit’s 750 words.