Some people can’t, or choose not to, get published through traditional channels. The conventional wisdom is that most of these stories could not, and should not, be published simply because they’re bad. While finding a publisher can be hard, if you have a good story, well-written, then you’ll eventually be published. Anyone stooping to self-publishing is either too impatient or too egotistical to go through the process, and they don’t do themselves any favors, because they’re putting out unedited work that will never be distributed to readers.

Well, is it really that bad? I’ve dipped my toe into the pool of self-publishing. For the best possible results, I’ve selected stories in one of the sub-genres I love: the locked-room mystery.

First up is “The Cruise Ship Murder” by Jean Marie Stine, a short story in audiobook form. It’s described as follows:

Classic Locked-Room Mystery and Romance! In this widely reprinted romantic mystery short story by Jean Marie Stine, Dr. Devlin Blake thinks the life of a doctor on a cruise ship will be exciting and romantic. But at first he finds his duties aboard the Pacific Princess dull and monotonous. Then he is called on to solve an “impossible” locked-room murder!

This downloadable audio file contains both the short story and “the author’s homage to John Dickson Carr, the legendary mystery novelist who helped define the “locked room” mystery and the Golden Age of detection.

The homage to Carr actually comes in three ways: the locked room plot, the cabin number, and a post-story summary of Carr’s career.

First: the locked room. A man is found dead on a ship in Cabin A-13, locked from the inside, a knife in his back. His wife is in the cabin with him, but the reader knows she is innocent. So how was the man killed?

It’s a version of the situation in Carr’s (writing as Carter Dickson) The Judas Window, certainly one of the top 5 locked rooms ever. But nothing new is brought to it here, so I’m not sure Carr is getting a tribute so much as Stine is getting a free plot. And the clue that theoretically “proves” who the murderer is has a hole you could navigate a cruise ship through.

Second: the Cabin number. Carr became well-known for his novels, but during World War II embarked on a second career writing radio plays. One of his most famous was The Mystery of Cabin B-13, a brilliant and practical variation on the Paris Exposition story. Here Stine has the action take place in Cabin A-13, but otherwise there is no connection.

Third: the summary of Carr’s career at the end. This is a by-the-numbers overview of Carr which could be useful to readers (listeners) who’ve never heard of him. Sadly, the narrator reads the wrong title for The Judas Window, the novel on which this short story is based.

All in all, this story gave me little faith in self-published works.

My second expedition took me to the book Alias: Simon Hawkes: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in New York, by Phillip Carraher. These are stories supposedly taken from Watson’s notes about what Holmes did after the struggle with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls and before his reappearance in The Empty House. Apparently he took the alias Simon Hawkes and lived in Manhattan.

Holmes later told Watson of these adventures, but Watson never wrote stories based on them. So Carraher is free to write about Holmes (Hawkes) without trying to duplicate Doyle’s writing style.

The plots are terrific! Carraher has two locked room mysteries here, and both are clever. In “The Adventure of the Magic Alibi” the killer is locked in a room at the time the murder occurs outside the room, and in “The Adventure of the Glass Room” two victims are found dead inside a glass room, which is inside a second locked room! Both are well worth reading.

The problems? Well, I believe this is a case where the author would have been better served by traditional publishing. The text is riddled with typos, including the misspelling of the detective’s name, which really leaps out at you. “Magic Alibi” is actually a novella, but should have been a short story. An editor would likely have removed the tedious middle section which is so long that you figure out the solution to the mystery before it’s over. And if we hadn’t been told that these were Holmes stories, we would have no idea, since there is no indication of it from the detective’s methods or manner. 

Of course traditional publishing is no guarantee of quality either, and I’ve read many stories published in national magazines and major anthologies that are worse than Carraher’s—minus the typos. I have no idea if he’s submitting his stories to traditional publishers, but he should be.

So that’s a look at two self-published works. Hardly a comprehensive or fair overview, so I’ll do some more in the future.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Plain Old Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.