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!

Women on writing: turning to crime for a fresh start

What in the world would make three law-abiding Texas women turn to crime – writing, that is, audiences at the 2017 Dallas Book Festival wanted to know about authors Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Lisa Sandlin.

(l-r) Sandlin, Lenhardt & Kent

In two cases, crime writing was something of a second act. Dallasite Kent hit the New York Times bestseller list as a writer of historical fiction with her debut novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, a based-on-real-life narrative about the Salem witch trials, and followed it with more historical novels before making a sharp turn with her latest, The Dime, a contemporary mystery set in Texas. Sandlin made her mark as a writer of literary short fiction (In the River Province: Stories, and others), then made the jump to crime with The Do-Right. Anomalous Lenhardt alternates her own genre of “feminist Western” (the Sawbones series) with mysteries set in contemporary Texas (the Jack McBride mystery series).

But what, besides Texas settings and strong women characters, do the books of Kent, Lenhardt and Sandlin have in common? And why did the authors choose murder and mayhem to showcase their writing?

“All of us love strong women protagonists,” Kent said. And “crime gives you a chance to push people to their limits of depravity, but also to the limits of human courage.”

Also part of the why, for the two most literary members of this deadly trio, the answer was a challenge and an unexpected brush with the noir genre.

It started, Kent said, “with someone I know calling for Dallas authors to contribute to an anthology called Dallas Noir,” from Akashic Books, publisher of noir series set across the world, and featuring authors from each city or country.

Despite being steeped in the nefarious deeds of earlier centuries, Kent has never written contemporary mysteries, but asked if she could, “like any good fiction writer, I said yes.” Her agent pronounced her short story contribution, “Coincidences Can Kill You,” as potential for a novel, and the character of Brooklyn to Dallas detective Betty Rhyzyk was born.

As Kent credits her mother with remarking about an ancestor hanged as a witch in Salem, “There are no witches, only ferocious women.

“I’ve got the same story as Kathleen,” Beaumont, Texas, born Sandlin said: another call from Akhasic Books, this time widening its net for the whole state of Texas with Lone Star Noir.

“I thought I had to have a detective (so) I came up with a private investigator who was the opposite of Sam Spade.” She soon decided that the neophyte PI’s secretary, Delpha Wade, was the stronger character of the anthology story, “Phelan’s First Case,” “and that became the core of the book.” Who needs a detective when he’s got a tough but tender secretary who’s more than decoration, and just released from a long prison stretch for killing her rapist.

Along the way, Sandlin exercises her literary talents and quirky sense of humor for a decidedly un-Spadeish crime story. “I have a gunfight with no bullets, parrots and pirates, but not in the same scene,” as well as a victim whose family is holding his artificial leg hostage.

Lenhardt’s start in crime came from an inspiration as literary as either Kent or Sandlin – with a twist. A self-proclaimed “romantic at heart,” she began her first-published novel, Stillwater, “as a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” until in walked agent Jack McBride. As a big city ex-FBI agent, McBride finds himself baffled in the small Texas town of Stillwater (which strangely resembles Lenhardt’s hometown of Winnsboro, Texas) until local Ellie Martin takes him under her wing, and into her bed.

Far from ending with a kiss and a fadeout, to Lenhardt’s mind, the conflict only starts once the relationship has begun, and continues with Jack and Ellie’s second fling at crime, The Fisher King.

And although Stillwater was her first book to be published, she had already written the first volume of her Western series, Sawbones, with two more historicals due out later this year. “But no, I’m not through with Jack McBride.”

(Next: writing craft, agent tips, and results of the dreaded gong show, from the upcoming DFW Writers 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 -- On the president's Secret Service

It’s the second week of November and every writer knows what that means – we’re a quarter of the way through NaNoWriMo! That’s National (although now international) Novel Writing Month.

Oh, you thought I meant the election. . . Well, there’s nothing more we can do for that except stand in the rain waiting to vote if we were as foolish as I am and waited until the last day. No, today I want to write about something we can do something about – writing. And while we’ve got presidents on our mind how about the men and women who protect presidents (and presidential candidates) – the U.S. Secret Service? How about someone like ex-Secret Service agent turned Texas writer, Larry Enmon?

Larry Enmon at Mystery Writers

Enmon’s career in law enforcement has ranged from work as a patrol officer with the Houston, Texas, police department, to special agent with the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigation, to the U.S. Secret Service, where he also worked as liaison agent to the FBI and on counterterrorism investigations. Now also a member of the DFW Writers Workshop, he boiled down his five favorite tips for writing crime stories like an insider for the recent meeting of the Dallas chapter of Mystery Writers of America. 

It was a dark night in a still-untenanted Houston development. The call: body in the street. Confessing that he may have driving a tad fast on the unlit streets, Enmon suddenly saw the body in headlights, too late to stop. And ran over it. Already horrified, he glanced in his side mirror. The victim’s head was now severed from the body! Gamely, perhaps shakily, he stepped out of the cruiser to examine the body with his flashlight and found it was – a mannequin – illustrating his first point for authentic crime stories:

1.      The “oh-sh*t” moment.

“Things don’t always go as expected,” he said. “As writers, if you don’t have one of those moments, you’re not doing it right. It’s not a plot twist – it just happens and it takes everybody by complete surprise.”

Of course, every insider has some bone to pick with the way their profession is portrayed in books, movies, television. Enmon’s isn’t just the wildly improbable, it’s also the portrayal of members of his profession as dour.

“Police are a lot more humorous and funny than people give them credit for. And it’s all emergency responders, including medical personnel. They got to have a sense of humor to survive. And yeah, sometimes it’s dark humor. They just can’t show it to the public. Leading to his second point:

2.      Give them a sense of humor. Or at least some quirkiness.

Another of Enmon’s stories: during one of President Ronald Reagan’s motorcades, startled officers in the hovering “huntsman” – code name for the motorcade’s accompanying helicopter – reported that “Rawhide” – the code name for Reagan – was out on the street. Furthermore, the two motorcycle officers leading the motorcade had suddenly fallen from their motorcycles and were lying stunned, possibly dead or wounded, in the street. As horrifying possibilities flashed through the minds of all onlookers, Reagan approached the fallen cops and asked whether they were OK. And they admitted sheepishly that they had misjudged the distance between their cycles and crashed into each other. 

Not that there isn’t plenty of darkness in the lives of people who routinely have to worry about being killed. Or of killing someone else. And taking it home with them. “There’s a lot of alcoholism, a lot of depression, a lot of suicides among cops,” Enmon noted. “And the tension is felt by the family too.” His third point:

3.      Everybody has an outside life beyond the job. And sometimes it’s not a happy one.

Leading immediately to point number four:

4.      Police have emotions like everyone else. They just can’t show them.

“It’s like being in combat too long,” Enmon said. “Sometimes you talk it out with each other.”

Or perhaps you can get them to buy you a drink. Flying to Paris on an assignment, Enmon and his partner only learned as they boarded their plane that they would need visas for the trip. They called the Secret Service’s headquarters. No problem, HQ said. Our man in Paris (yes, there are liaisons for most U.S. law enforcement agencies at embassies) will have them waiting for you. Except that he didn’t. And French immigrations officials were not amused, locking up the Americans until the courier showed up with the missing visas. His penalty – buying the drinks that night on the Champs-Élysées. Which leads to Enmon’s final point:

5.      Don’t make things too easy.

An apt reminder for writers in any genre.

For more about Enmon, his career and his work and whether he’s willing to tell you that your crime story scene (no manuscripts, please) is totally off the rails, see his site or contact him at larry@larry-enmon.com. 

Wordcraft – Writings with prison settings, part I

Although the title of this portion of my blog is “Wordcraft,” occasionally I use this format to provide information about characters, settings and procedures of interest to writers. Today I’m exerpting a recent presentation at the Southwest chapter of Mystery Writers of America by a group member who served several years as a guard in the Texas state prison system. Because he left the Texas state prison system after receiving threats against his family, I refer to him only by the initials SB.

image: wikimedia commons

When choosing a prison setting for a story, it’s important to remember that state and federal laws apply to different types of crimes, and therefore to different kinds of prisoners. With certain exceptions, most violent crimes – rape, kidnapping, robbery, and murder – come under the jurisdiction of state law, and these vary from state to state.

Texas, and probably other states, also has two systems of incarceration – prison and jail. In addition to holding prisoners awaiting trial, jails typically hold less violent criminals serving shorter sentences, typically two years or less.

Prisoners in Texas state jails are housed in dormitories with approximately 50 beds per room. State prisons hold more violent offenders serving longer terms, classified in order of perceived risk: general population, administrative segregation; and close custody.

General population prisoners are house in dormitories holding up to 50 beds. (The image embedded in this text is of general population prisoners at a federal prison.) Inmates too violent for general population (or needing to be segregated for other reasons) are held in administrative segregation in single cells. Those deemed especially dangerous to prison personnel or other inmates are held in close custody, which includes hand, foot and waist shackles. They may also wear spit guards. (Because of the possibility of HIV infection, spitting on guards is considered a form of assault.)

So, writers, choose the legal system – state or federal, prison or jail – that best meets your story’s needs.

The first thing to remember, SB told his audience, is that there is no sense of honor in prison. Expect the guards to be corrupt. SB estimated a typical salary during his tenure to be about $23,000. (See the state’s website for current salary, which is slightly higher, with additional pay for someone like SB with a college degree and previous experience.) 

Given the relatively low pay and often horrendous working conditions, he found it hard to blame guards for being tempted to accept $2,000 for providing prisoners with banned cell phones, or looking the other way when friends or family members of prisoners smuggle in cash, phones, drugs or other contraband.

Body cavities are favorite smuggling routes, but at least one woman was known to have attempted to smuggle a cell phone to her boyfriend by concealing it in her bouffant hairdo.

 How bad is it to be in prison? Try this story: during the absence of a guard, a minister counseling death row inmates in Huntsville, Texas, accepted a prisoner’s request to hold his hand while praying. The minister put his hand through the cell door’s narrow “bean slot” used to pass food to inmates in such high security conditions, only to have his hand bound by the inmate with strips of cloth, and the other end of the cloth secured around the cell’s toilet.

The inmate then began to cut off the minister’s arm using a makeshift weapon. The man’s screams and those of the other inmates soon brought guards running and the minister’s arm was saved – although with some loss of function. Amazingly, he continued to minister to inmates, although probably not with any more hand holding.

It’s not possible to say exactly what makes a person, even one already facing a death sentence, commit such an act, but prisons typically house unusually high percentages of inmates with serious personality disorders such as psychopathy as well as many with mental illnesses. (Texas has two institutions reserved for violent inmates with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, but space is at a premium, and the waiting lists for beds is long.)

(Next Tuesday, Wordcraft continues with a discussion of what writers need to know about prison)

Wordcraft -- Bringing crime fiction into the 21st century

If there’s one thing writers of fiction, bred in the bone liars that we are, can’t live without, it’s reality. Sometimes it’s a reality we know from our own experience. Often it’s reality whose experience we have to borrow from others. Which is why the local Mystery Writers of America chapter welcomes visits from Hutchins Chief of Police Frank McElligott. His decades of experience in undercover investigation of drug deals and money laundering give our crime writing the illusion of truth without requiring us to go through what he did.

Did he ever wish he’d gone into another line of work, an audience member at the MWA meeting Saturday asked.

“Well, there was the time when somebody was shooting at me and I was trying to be even smaller than I am,” said McElligott, who's on the wiry side, “and I wondered why I hadn’t just taken the fireman’s exam.”

Instead, he survived to make these suggestions on how to bring fictional detectives into the twenty-first century.

-- Think outside the box. Make that inside the box, of tampons that is. Who knew the absorbent little things could be a nark’s best friend? As McElligott described it, a supposed meth dealer was wearing a long-sleeved shirt (which he assured us meth users wear to hide the open sores on their arms). A seller demanded that the nark inject himself with the drug. Having prepared by taping a tampon to his arm at the cuff opening of his shirt, the nark obligingly injected the drug into the tampon. No career-killing on the job drug use and, McElligott said gleefully, “he had a sample” of the meth. (If our fictional detectives feel unmanly carrying tampons through their local store’s checkout line, maybe they should consider another line of work. Or bum them from their wives or girlfriends.)

-- Bling it if you got it. When our detectives move from entry level street narcotics work into collaring mid- to upper-level dealers, they’ve got to look prosperous to instill confidence in their victims. “The better the props, the better your case,” McElligott said, speaking nostalgically about the Rolexes, diamond rings, and miles and miles of gold chains, confiscated from criminals that he wore when working cases. (“It belongs to the city, not to me, but I get to play with it.”) When the City of Plano sold some of it confiscated jewelry, McElligott was able to buy back his favorite ring from the jeweler who bought it at auction. The cost of the ring would have been beyond his means as a police officer, except that the jeweler had removed the diamonds and replaced them with cubic zirconium look-alikes.

-- Bling isn’t just for wearing. Another of McElligott’s prized props for convincing buyers he was big-time was “a huge 45, chrome-plated, with a black pearl handle. Cops use Glocks. This wasn’t a cop gun.”

-- Take it to the cloud. Got overtime case research to do? Carrying stacks of books and paperwork is so last century, not to mention the potential for having evidence lost or stolen. Instead, while working on recent fraud cases, McElligott put his paperwork on flash drives or sent it to cloud online storage systems.

-- Or at least, to Google Earth. Part of the recent case involved the unglamorous-sounding practice of metal scrapping, including the dismantling of an entire functional bus for scrap. The loss of the bus, parked supposedly for repairs, might have gone unnoticed for a long time if Google Earth’s historical data hadn't documented the disappearance from its purported location. McElligott also recommends GoogleEarth for surveillance work. Not sure what booby traps may lie on the other side of that privacy fence around a suspected meth lab? The lifesaving answer may be at a detective’s fingertips.

After McElligott’s talk, cameras flashed. Everybody wanted a picture of him, or themselves with him. How much more dangerous is a detective’s work now that everybody and her brother has camera phones? Lots and lots. But if we’re trying to get our fictional detectives into lots and lots of trouble, remember that privacy is a thing of the past.

McElligott has spoken previously to the local MWA chapter. For information about their programs, see http://dallasmysterywriters.com/.


(Next Monday, making “find and replace” our writing’s best friend, with a list of the words and phrases you’ll most want to replace.)

Adventure classics -- Texas in her rear view mirror

The Talented Mr. Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

#

With no language lab or foreign language movies in our small town high school, our French teacher must have been truly desperate to introduce a class of surly teenagers to some remnants of spoken French. So one day she loaded us onto a bus -- our town didn’t even have an English language movie theater at the time -- and drove us to a nearby town where she had persuaded a theater owner to give us a private showing of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Or so she thought.

What actually appeared on the screen, instead of the gentle Umbrellas, was a tale of murder from the criminal’s point of view starring heartbreakingly beautiful young Alain Delon, a movie with the bizarre English title Purple Noon. Although our embarrassed teacher asked whether we’d rather go back to class, what teens would? We settled into our seats to watch the French adaptation of Texas native Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The movie had launched Delon’s career. Highsmith liked it. Or perhaps she liked Delon in it -- she dabbled in both men and women. But she quibbled over the ending, which implied that that Delon, as Highsmith character Thomas Phelps Ripley, was about to be arrested for his crime.

In fact, consummate con and sexually ambivalent murderer Ripley would go on to become one of Highsmith’s favorite characters, the protagonist of several more novels and movie adaptations.

Tom Ripley’s story opens with the request by wealthy businessman Richard Greenleaf to travel to Italy to bring his dilettante son Dickie back to New York. Although Dickie Greenleaf was little more than a casual acquaintance, out of work con artist Ripley can’t refuse, especially when Greenleaf offers to pay for Ripley’s ticket and expenses.

Ripley’s talents don’t include persuading Dickie to come home. But before the money runs out, Ripley insinuates himself into Dickie’s life too deeply to be eradicated. Raising the question of which of the two young men really is Dickie Greenleaf, and whether he has murdered Tom Ripley or Ripley has murdered him.

And of how many more people will have to die to preserve the multiple layers of secrets.

Not that I’m looking to murder anybody, but why don’t I ever get job offers like Ripley’s? Is it because I’ve been in Texas too long? Although born in Fort Worth, Highsmith moved with her mother and stepfather to New York the year she was six and never willingly returned.

Right back at you, Texas said. As biographer Joan Schenkar writes in The Talented Miss Highsmith, “when (Highsmith) offered her archives to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, she received a letter . . . suggesting the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars for her papers. ‘The price of a used car,’ Pat said bitterly, and refused to let Texas have her literary bones.”

The University of Texas may have been as squeamish about Highsmith’s talent as the respectable magazines she had applied to after graduating from Barnard College. Unable to get a job at what were considered respectable publications, she accepted an offer to write scripts for Cinema Comics.

In the early 1940‘s, “the entire comics milieu -- authors, illustrators, publishers and the improbable characters they were creating,” Schenkar writes, “was alive with the same collection of crooks and cons, artists with secret identities and heroes with Alter Egos, with which the talented Miss Highsmith would later populate so much of her fiction.

“. . . when (she) gave her ‘criminal-hero’ Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi. . . she was doing just what her fellow comic book artist were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment.”

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics turns from mystery to historical fiction with a book that bridges both genres, Elliot Peters’ A Morbid Taste for Bones.)