Article With Intro

My Book: the Moscow Pigeon Drop

John Vorhaus

vorhaus_moscow As the author of The California Roll, a novel about con artists, I often hear people boast that they’d never fall for the scams I describe. They are, they insist, too smart, too savvy, or just too damn pretty to get duped. Maybe. But the thing about con artists is, if they hit you when your guard is down, you might not be quite as smart, savvy, or pretty as you think.

How do I know? Because neither might I.

I’m walking through Red Square in Moscow, Russia, gawking like the tourist I am, when the guy in front of me drops his wallet. I scoop it up. I’m going to return it, right? I’m a nice guy. Plus, I notice it’s got US currency in it. Probably he’s a tourist like me. Maybe we can do Lenin’s Tomb together. But he’s no American, as he proves by thanking me effusively in broken English and trying to give me a reward. Then a second guy arrives on the scene, saying he saw the whole thing and making me out to be some kind of hero. That’s ok—I like being a hero—but now here comes a third party, drawn to the scene by all the commotion, and this guy’s a cop.

Well, I guess he’s a cop. He’s not in uniform. He’s wearing blue jeans and a scruffy leather jacket. But he has a badge, which he flashes quickly and then puts away. With his available English, he orders all of us to turn over our passports for inspection. The others immediately comply, and I’m reaching for mine, already wondering how much trouble I’ve accidentally stumbled into here. I was just trying to be a nice guy, right? But try telling that to the Russians when you don’t speak Russian. I’m starting to sweat; visions of gulags dance in my head.

Then, suddenly, I get it. I’m being pigeon dropped! Right here in Red Square! Me, the author of The California Roll! I literally wrote the book on scams, and they’re trying to hustle me in the classic manner of putting free money in my path and then using my own greed, fear, or innocence to strip-mine my wallet. Well, this just infuriates me. Cranking my dudgeon up to full high, I tell the guy with the badge, “You’re not a cop! You’re not a cop!” and quickly walk away.

Two seconds later, I look back, and all three players have vanished, scattered like dry leaves in the Moscow chill.

You’d have seen it coming, right? Maybe, but I was there, and I can tell you it happened so fast that they came this close to getting my passport. (Which of course is what they wanted, and who knows how much they would’ve charged to ransom it back.) How did they do it? By jacking up the pressure, hard and swift. It’s called rushing the mark, getting you so wound up, so agitated, that you do things reflexively. Things like coughing up your passport...

So if you think you’re too smart or savvy or pretty to get hustled, think again. If scammers catch you with your guard down, there’s almost nothing they can’t do. And I should know. I’m the guy who wrote the book…

The California Roll, John Vorhaus, Shaye Areheart, March 2019, $23.00

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #114.

Teri Duerr

2011-12-19 16:57:55

How do I know? Because neither might I.

Two seconds later, I look back, and all three players have vanished, scattered like dry leaves in the Moscow chill.

The California Roll, John Vorhaus, Shaye Areheart, March 2019, $23.00

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #114.

My Book: Blowing Off Steam

Barbara Fister

Writing helps me figure out what I think and feel, and it helps me blow off steam when I’m frustrated.

My series character is an ex-cop named Anni Koskinen. She’s my height and weight, but more of her weight is muscle and, unlike me, she’s of mixed race, is brave, and knows how to kick ass when necessary. Anni is trying to figure out what to do with her life after resigning from the Chicago Police Department. Her career ended when she was summoned to testify in a brutality case against a fellow officer. She took her oath seriously and ended up sacrificing the only job she ever wanted.

As I worked on Through the Cracks, my first book about Anni, I hoped that the plot, which concerns the US government’s chipping away of civil liberties in the name of national security, would be out of date before it was published, but sadly surveillance of dissidents and loss of privacy persist, even with a new administration. A recent report documents over 2,000 instances in which the FBI abused its power to seize telephone records illegally.

Anni took an oath to defend the Constitution; I and my fellow librarians don’t take oaths, but we take civil liberties seriously. It was a proud day for my profession when an unnamed FBI agent was quoted in the New York Times blaming “radical militant librarians” for calling attention to flaws in the so-called Patriot Act. Hey, just doing our job.

My new book, Through the Cracks, got its irritable start as I listened to defenses of the use of torture, a practice as ineffective as it is morally wrong. In Chicago, an influential police commander had for years instructed the detectives under his command to get confessions any way they could, and torture was commonly used. What bothered me was not just the violation of the rights of the accused, but the disrespect it showed the victims and their families. Why bother looking for the real offender when it’s so much easier to pick a guy off the street and force a confession out of him? I wondered how the victims felt when those innocent men were set free.

In Through the Cracks Anni tries to find out who raped her client two decades ago and may have continued assaulting women ever since. It’s also the story of the man who spent more than half of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. And it’s about a present day crime in which the arrest of an undocumented Mexican gang member has inflamed anti-immigrant feelings.

There are a few other issues tucked in to Through the Cracks, too. I have a lot of steam to blow off!

Through the Cracks, Barbara Fister, Minotaur Books, May 2010, $25.99

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #114.

My Book: Dodge City Run by the Mounties

Vicki Delany

The late Sir Peter Ustinov once said that Toronto was New York run by the Swiss. I like to say that Dawson, Yukon, in 1898, was Dodge City run by the the Mounties.

An 1898 photograph of hopeful prospectors climbing Chilkoot Pass, headed for the Klondike gold fields. Chilkoot Pass was too steep for horses so a prospector had to climb through the pass 30-40 times in order to bring in the required year's worth of supplies. Photo: Keystone View Company.

Imagine a place in the wilderness, close to the Arctic Circle, hundreds of miles from the nearest city, at the end of the 19th century. A place of no roads, no cars, no trains, no telephone, no telegraph. Accessible only by water, for just a few months a year, or by paths over mountains so steep that horses couldn’t make it. And then imagine tens of thousands of people arriving in this place within a matter of months.

What you would get in almost any other place and any other time would be bedlam. Chaos and anarchy and lawlessness.

This is the setting for my new book, Gold Fever, the second in the Klondike Gold Rush Series, following 2009’s Gold Digger, from RendezVous Crime.

Given that background, you would think that I would have a plethora of scenes of historical murder and mayhem to write about in the books.

You would be wrong.

Because what all those miners and dance hall owners, prostitutes and pimps, bartenders and adventurers, and businessmen (respectable and shady) found when they at long last arrived in the promised land, was the long arm of the law waiting for them, in the form of the North West Mounted Police (precursors of the RCMP).

The border between Canada and the US was at that time still in dispute. The Canadian government had established a police presence in order to strengthen their claim. Prostitution and gambling were illegal in all parts of Canada, but the NWMP recognized, wisely in my opinion, that some things were going to happen whether they were legal or not, and some control was better than none. Thus prostitution was practiced openly and dance halls all had a gambling room. Police oversight was strict and they could, and did, close down any business stepping over the line. However, there were things the Mounties didn’t bend on—the use of “vile language” was an offense, and Sunday closing was strictly observed. People were jailed for chopping wood on a Sunday. Firearms were strictly banned. Every person coming into the Territory was required to have a year’s supply of goods with them: a lesson learned during the previous winter when the town nearly starved. Not only did all those adventure and gold seekers have to climb the Chilkoot Pass they had to do it about 30 or 40 times to get all their gear up. Tougher people than me I can tell you.

In 1898, the year of the height of the gold rush, when the town of Dawson had a population of 40,000, there was not one murder in town. Not one. Reports I have read say that people were comfortable leaving their doors unlocked and their possessions out in the open. In contrast to the nearby town of Skagway, Alaska, where gangsters such as Soapy Smith ruled and crime and corruption were rampant. Soapy himself was killed in a shootout on the Skagway boardwalk in July 1898.

In Dawson, a town where a one-minute dance with a dance hall girl cost a dollar, a bottle of champagne could set you back 40 bucks, and successful miners were known to drop a thousand, ten thousand dollars (all in 1898 funds!) in a night in the casino, a constable in the NWMP earned $1.25 a day (roughly the rate for a laborer in the Outside). Yet the police were largely incorruptible.

In order to create a mystery novel, I had to jettison the sterling record of the NWMP and create a murder. In the second book in the series, Gold Fever, there are two. And, despite one of the main characters in the series being a NWMP officer, the Mounties will prove unable to solve the crime and it will be left to my protagonist, dance hall owner and woman with a past, Fiona MacGillivray, to do so.

Sometimes you just can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Gold Fever, Vicki Delany, RendezVous Crime, March 2010, $18.95

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #114.

My Book: the Book of Spies

Gayle Lynds

I never thought I’d write The Book of Spies, my new espionage thriller. In fact, it made no sense to write it. I was crazy to write it.

For 20 years I told myself that.

It had all begun simply enough. On June 28, 1989, my attention was riveted by “Kremlin Tunnels: The Secret of Moscow’s Underworld,” an article in The Los Angeles Times:

In 1933 two young men found what they were searching for: the entrance to a centuries-old underground tunnel within sight of the red Kremlin walls. As they crept underground toward Moscow’s seat of power, lighting their way with a lantern, the men believed they might find Ivan the Terrible’s legendary library of gold-covered books. Instead they found five skeletons, a passageway sometimes so narrow that they had to file through singly and, within a few hundred yards of the Kremlin, a rusted steel door they could not open.

I was enthralled by this “library of gold-covered books,” which immediately became in my mind the Library of Gold. Kremlin officials stopped the young pair’s exploration and swore them to secrecy with the implied threat of death, then Stalin ordered a swimming pool built over the area, putting a conclusive end to anyone’s investigation there.

But for five centuries not only ordinary people but emperors, potentates, and even the Vatican had been searching for the library, which contained some 800 illuminated manuscripts. The books were fabulous, covered in gold and encrusted with gems, and they were priceless in knowledge, containing lost works dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. In today’s financial terms the library would sell for about $4 billion.

Naturally I found the Library of Gold fascinating. If I could figure out a way for the library to play a pivotal role in one of the modern spy thrillers I write, I’d be able to dramatize not only governments and espionage, but also books and readers—people like us.

I spent nearly 20 years in a futile attempt, periodically researching, making notes, and checking to see whether anyone had found the library. Then in 2008 I had a eureka moment. If a book club owned the library.... If it was the most dangerous book club in the world.... If this cabal of powerful men were so rich they could buy terrorists.... Then the CIA would be motivated enough to try to do something no one else had ever done—find Ivan the Terrible’s long-lost library of gold-covered books.

Next I needed exciting new characters. First Eva Blake, a rare-books curator, appeared. Her dead husband had been one of the world’s leading experts on the library. Then I found Judd Ryder, who’s just retired from military intelligence. His father was somehow involved with the library. Add a CIA black unit, political motivations, and a warlord in Afghanistan, and finally...I had a novel.

It’s called The Book of Spies. And what is The Book of Spies? One of the gorgeous old volumes in the Library of Gold.

The Book of Spies, Gayle Lynds, St. Martin’s Press, March 2010, $25.99

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #114.

My Book: Destiny Fulfilled

Kenneth Wishnia

wishnia_kenneth I was born on a hot August night back when fathers weren’t allowed in the delivery room. They were expected to spend hours pacing around the waiting room while chain-smoking cigarettes. My father found a mystery novel lying on a table and began reading, and several hours later, when the doctor returned to tell him that his wife had given birth and he could go in to see her, my father replied, “Hold on, there are only twenty pages left and I’ve got to find out whodunit.” So you see that I was destined to become a mystery writer.

I broke in back in 1998 when my first novel, 23 Shades of Black (published under the name K.j.a. Wishnia), was nominated for Edgar and Anthony awards. But after five novels and a number of short stories, I jumped off the book-a-year merry-go-round to immerse myself in an idea that I’d wanted to work on for a long time: a Jewish-themed historical novel set in the late 16th century.

The 30-second version of the plot: It’s Holy Week of the year 1592. Rudolf II is king of the Protestant land of Bohemia, where the Catholic Church has been reclaiming territory lost during the Reformation. It is also Passover Eve in the Jewish section of the imperial city of Prague, when the body of a Christian girl is found in a Jewish shop and the Jews are given three days to produce the guilty party or the whole community is threatened with annihilation. My detective, Benyamin Ben-Akiva, is a young Talmudic scholar who works as the synagogue’s shammes—a word often translated as “sexton,” which may well be the origin of the modern word shamus. He’s also well versed in Midrash (and the root of midrash means “to investigate”).

I grew up in a secular household where the primary emblems of Jewish culture were bagels and Woody Allen movies, so I had to embark on a three-year course of self-education, reading Jewish commentary on the Bible, mysticism, philosophy, history, linguistics (how many people know that the Ashkenazic Jews pronounce Hebrew differently from the Sephardic Jews?), and extracts from the Mishnah, Talmud, and other Rabbinic writings. I visited Prague Castle and the grave of Rabbi Judah Loew (of the Golem legends), and gathered old maps and postcards to help recreate the layout of the old Prague ghetto, which was the largest Jewish community in Europe at the time.

Then I started writing. Oy vey iz mir. I spent more than three years writing and revising a novel that was so far outside my comfort zone at first that I had to stop constantly to look things up. Q: Did they have matches in 1592? A: They did not. Q: When did the word taboo enter the language? A: Captain Cook brought it back from the South Sea Islands in the 1770s (I had to use forbidden instead). Q: What about the word fossil? A: In the modern sense, it dates from the 1660s, but in the sense of “some really old stuff dug up out of the ground” it was used as early as the 1560s. Q: What kinds of handguns were available in the 1590s? A: An astonishing variety. [see photo]

I also learned something about the wisdom of the Talmud, which was compiled back in the 5th-6th centuries C.E., yet it abolishes capital punishment, protects a person on trial from self-incrimination, establishes publicly-funded education, permits birth control in certain circumstances, and declares that the rights of the working man always take precedence over those of his employer.

And to think that I owe it all to a random mystery novel whose title has been lost to the memory hole of time.

Oh, and by the way, when Mercy was giving birth to our two children, I was in the delivery room with her to see it happen.

The Fifth Servant, Kenneth Wishnia, William Morrow, January 2010, $25.99.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

Teri Duerr

2011-12-19 19:05:59

And to think that I owe it all to a random mystery novel whose title has been lost to the memory hole of time.

Oh, and by the way, when Mercy was giving birth to our two children, I was in the delivery room with her to see it happen.

The Fifth Servant, Kenneth Wishnia, William Morrow, January 2010, $25.99.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

My Book: the Copywriter Did It

Wendy Clinch

clinch_wendy_2 It was a wastewater treatment plant that finally got me.

Over my many years in advertising, I’d written about all sorts of things: pumps for oil refineries; machinery for grinding up garbage; chemicals for cleaning metal parts—in other words, things that you don’t find in the grocery store. Ugly things and unpleasant ones.

I’d gone into advertising because I liked to write. It seemed sexy and exciting, and I pictured myself working on fashion, cosmetics, resorts in the Caribbean. Instead, day after day, year after year, I worked in the down and dirty back rooms of what’s charitably called business-to-business advertising, cranking out ads that appeared in magazines with names like Modern Concrete, Pulp & Paper, Water & Waste Processing, and Iron Age. Not one ounce of glamour in it. And not much fun, either.

So when a client needed an ad for a sludge management process (we all know what sludge is in wastewater treatment, right?), I figured it was time to take a step back. Time to reconsider. Was this really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life?

clinch_wendy Definitely not.

Was there a way out?

You bet there was.

I decided to quit the 9-to-5 world and become a ski bum.

Unlike advertising, ski bumming has a long and illustrious heritage. Mostly it consists of 1) sleeping in your car in sub-zero temperatures or cramming into a low-rent, shoebox-sized room with ten of your closest friends; 2) taking a more-or-less menial job that lets you ski as much as possible and 3) surviving on ramen noodles, popcorn, and free chicken wings at bars (or mooching off friends with money).

For me, however, being a ski bum was just the ticket. More than anything other than my family, I loved to ski.

My husband took a little convincing. “Aren’t you a little old for this?” he said, then dodged my flying shoe. My 25-year-old daughter thought it was a little odd, too. “Is this a midlife crisis?” she asked.

I did have my limits. I drew the line at sleeping in cars and eating ramen noodles.

Instead, we bought a small house in a small Vermont ski town, and I got a job at a ski shop working weekends so I could ski during the week. Life was good. Why had I waited so long to do this? And what if I hadn’t waited?

Since I couldn’t very well go back in time to find out, I decided to create an alter ego to explore the life I might have lived if I’d taken a different path.

Enter Stacey Curtis, the heroine of my debut novel, Double Black. She’s young, spirited, intelligent, and an avid skier. She ditches her cheating fiancé and moves to a Vermont ski town, where she tends bar at night and skis during the day. Poverty forces her to sleep in her car, until one day she stumbles across a ring of master keys for the area’s vacation condos. Since the condos are unoccupied most of the time, she reasons, “Why not put them to good use?” So she begins going from condo to condo, spending one night here, one night there, until late one night she opens a door and discovers—a dead body.

Double Black is loaded with New England atmosphere, quirky characters, and more twists and turns than a slalom course. Though it’s fun for skiers, it’s just as much fun for people who’ve never visited the slopes. It was a pleasure to write, since it gave me the chance not only to explore what might have been, but to indulge my love of skiing during the off season.

And best of all, there’s not a single reference to sludge management in the whole thing.

Double Black, by Wendy Clinch, Minotaur, January 2010, $24.99.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

Teri Duerr

2011-12-19 19:27:39

clinch_wendy_2 It was a wastewater treatment plant that finally got me.

clinch_wendy Definitely not.

Was there a way out?

You bet there was.

I decided to quit the 9-to-5 world and become a ski bum.

For me, however, being a ski bum was just the ticket. More than anything other than my family, I loved to ski.

I did have my limits. I drew the line at sleeping in cars and eating ramen noodles.

Since I couldn’t very well go back in time to find out, I decided to create an alter ego to explore the life I might have lived if I’d taken a different path.

And best of all, there’s not a single reference to sludge management in the whole thing.

Double Black, by Wendy Clinch, Minotaur, January 2010, $24.99.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

My Book: the Serpent Pool

Martin Edwards

Books burn in the opening scene of my fourth and latest Lake District Mystery, The Serpent Pool. And the man who owns the books, an avid collector called George Saffell, watches bound and helpless as the flames race toward him.

It is a dark opening to a novel set in a beautiful part of the world. The Lake District’s landscape is fascinating at any time, and the main action of The Serpent Pool takes place at the start of a new year in the cold days of early January, when fog descends from the fell slopes, and the forecasters warn of avalanches. Researching the real-life scenes of the fictional events of my book was enthralling (at least for me—my teenage children would prefer me to research a series set on the world’s sunniest beaches…) Few areas anywhere that are as small as England’s Lake District (it is roughly 30 miles across) can boast such a rich literary tradition. William Wordsworth was the most famous of the Lake Poets, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey still have admirers. Among novelists, Hugh Walpole (whose few crime novels are well worth a look), Melvyn Bragg, and nowadays Sarah Hall, have all used the landscape of the Lakes to great effect. As an essayist, Thomas De Quincey (who lived in the lovely Dove Cottage, former home of the Wordsworths) is beyond compare.

De Quincey’s dark shadow falls over The Serpent Pool. Apart from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a masterpiece of hallucinatory writing, he was most famous for “On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” and this inspires Daniel Kind to study his work while writing a book about the history of murder. In so doing, Daniel encounters a range of characters with something to hide, including the secret behind the violent death of George Saffell. I hadn’t read De Quincey before working on this novel, and I came to admire his writing, even if I remain deeply unconvinced about the benefits of opium to the creative process.

While Daniel focuses on De Quincey, Detective Chief Inspector Hannah Scarlett, who heads the Cold Case Review Team, investigates the unexplained death, six years ago, of a woman called Bethany Friend, who was drowned in an isolated patch of water known as the Serpent Pool. Hannah’s relationship with rare book dealer Marc Amos is on the skids, and as the winter weather worsens, the tension builds to a climax at the Serpent Pool. There Hannah comes to learn the truth. And when I wrote the final scene, I couldn’t help remembering that famous remark of Sherlock Holmes in The Copper Beeches: “It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

I can only hope the Lake District tourist authorities forgive me for introducing murder and mayhem into this most gorgeous of locations!

The Serpent Pool, Martin Edwards, Poisoned Pen Press, February 2010, $24.95/$14.95.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

My Book: Revenge for Old Times' Sake

Kris Neri

One of my fantasies has always been to inherit an old wreck of a house stuffed to the rafters with what others might describe as “junk,” but which I’d consider “treasures.”

Since nobody in my family ever owned such a place, the odds of one falling into my hands seem slim. But like all writers, I can live out my fantasies through my characters. My mysteries featuring Tracy Eaton, the daughter of eccentric Hollywood stars Martha Collins and Alec Grainger, provided the perfect vehicles.

I knew just where to place my dream home. Rimming the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles is a picturesque sandstone mountain range called the Simi Hills. Today that rocky area is mostly filled with suburban homes. But back in what would have been Martha and Alec’s heyday, it was all vast vistas and horse ranches, and a popular location setting for westerns. Some of the Hollywood crowd even built country homes there. I felt sure that Martha would have built a doozy of a house in that locale. The house contains more styles than a first year architectural textbook—it has a round room perched on one side of the second story and turret trim that looks as if it had been swiped from a castle—and I first used it in Dem Bones’ Revenge.

But in the third book, Revenge for Old Times’ Sake, when it becomes home to her and her husband, Drew, the house comes into its own to such an extent it’s like a character in the book.

First we meet the “angels” room, which is decorated in a fairly conventional manner—if you can overlook the small angels painted across its walls. Only with closer scrutiny does it become apparent they all resemble Martha’s film contemporaries, the people who actually occupied that room when they visited. Even knowing they were real people, Tracy might have found the sight of those angels peaceful—if one celestial spirit, who looked suspiciously like a leading man with whom her mother reportedly carried on a torrid dalliance, hadn’t been flashing her.

And then there’s the “chalkboard” room, with its blackboard walls. Martha always gave that guest room to artists and provided them with pastel chalk, encouraging them to create their own surroundings. Now, Tracy uses it to house her fastidious mother-in-law, Charlotte. While Tracy savors the sight of Charlotte anxiously rubbing at invisible spots, she amuses herself with the fantasy that her prissy mother-in-law has the D.T.’s.

But the book’s action centers around the home’s gaudy Art Deco pool, where only hours after Tracy’s sweetie, Drew, bops his boorish boss, Ian Dragger, in the nose—Ian is found floating face down in the Eaton’s pool, deader than disco. And when the bodies in the pool start stacking up like logs in a lumber camp, it’s only because of the unusual resources in that crazy house that they’re able to hide one of the murders until Tracy can do a little of her unconventional sleuthing.

While writing Revenge for Old Times’ Sake, that house became so real to me, it was almost as if I could hear my own footsteps tapping against its Spanish tile floors, as if I could sit at the dining table built to resemble Stonehenge, as if I could actually work the trick carpet staircase runner that, when flicked just right, hurls someone down the steps. No real designer would think to offer a feature like that, but the runner comes in handy in Revenge for Old Times’ Sake.

I no longer live in the area where I set that book, but when I did, I would exit from the freeway, detouring through the winding roads in those hills hoping for a glimpse of some real old monstrosity perched on one of those rocky knolls that approximated the house I saw in my mind’s eye. I did spot some special homes, but none with the flair that I felt sure Tracy’s reality-challenged mother would bring to hers.

I may never get to live out my secret house fantasy in real life, but I got to experience it through Tracy, in the writing of this book. And now, so will my readers.

Revenge for Old Times’ Sake, Kris Neri, Cherokee McGhee, March 2010, $16.95.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

My Book: Slaying the Dragon

Kelli Stanley

"It was raw, it was lovely, it was monstrous and frightening and made you catch your breath when you looked at it. It was San Francisco in 1940."

A San Francisco grocery store on December 8, 1942, the day after Pearl Harbor. The store was closed and the owner, who was of Japanese descent, was sent to an internment camp. Photo: Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress.

In his introduction to the Simple Art of Murder, Chandler wrote that the possibilities of the mystery form were not yet exhausted; a classic ideal not yet reached. Which is one reason, he asserts, that “otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.”

More than half a century later, Chandler is, of course, a classic himself, though still not in the ideal sense he meant. Writers keep coming up with new spins on the old ways of murder, fooling us and delighting us and beguiling us with reinventions of the familiar crime scene. I am constantly amazed by my colleagues’ ingenuity, inventiveness, and creativity…and marvel at how it all seems new again.

This partly explains my own windmill tilting. City Of Dragons is set in 1940 San Francisco, smack-dab in an iconic age in an iconic town. I sought to meet what is now “classic” noir head-on, in a reincarnation of both a film noir feel and an ode to my chief influences as a writer…but to do so without gloves on, without the censorship of the era, and without a blanket of nostalgia to keep it all safe and warm.

Which leads me to another reason I wrote the book. I’ve always been drawn to this era emotionally. As a little kid I listened to old radio shows on records, and my favorite magazine was Nostalgia Illustrated. I felt the pull, the yearning to go home to a time I couldn’t know, and one that my parents—who were born in ’39—barely remembered.

I am still captivated by the sweet swinging sounds of big band and gasp at the streamlined Chrysler Building. But I also know that amidst the beauty, the slow tempo, the innocence of two World’s Fairs and a man-made island on San Francisco Bay, there were other things going on there. Hate. Racism. Violence and degradation. San Francisco—that glorious, bustling, middle-class jewel of a city—the town of Herb Caen and Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, of Italian cioppino on Fisherman’s Wharf and cable cars on Powell Street—San Francisco was beautiful. But also segregated, corrupt, and on some levels as ugly as a later generation’s vision of apocalypse.

So I confronted my own dragon…how to show both sides of the time and place; how to pay tribute to a simpler era, but not excuse it or bowdlerize it or castrate it. It was raw, it was lovely, it was monstrous and frightening and made you catch your breath when you looked at it. It was San Francisco in 1940.

The book is set mostly in Chinatown…one city of dragons within another. Chinese-Americans raised money for war relief against Japan, boycotted Japanese businesses. Yet Japanese families lived in Chinatown, too; Japanese stores and hotels lined Grant Avenue. And when a young Japanese-American numbers runner is gunned down during a festival for war relief—no one wants to know why. No one, of course, except Miranda Corbie.

Miranda is what I think a real femme fatale might have been like. She was a nurse in the Spanish Civil War and an escort when she came back home. Now she’s a private eye, a bad girl wearing the shamus suit. And like her predecessors, she’s willing to walk down some mean streets in pursuit of justice.

I hope you’ll take the journey back to 1940 with me, and with Miranda as your guide.

And don’t be afraid of the dragons.

City of Dragons, Kelli Stanley, Minotaur Books, February 2010, $24.99.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

My Book: Laser Accuracy

Thomas Kaufman

kaufman_thomas When I was writing Drink the Tea, my debut novel about a scam artist turned PI, I was fortunate to have shot and directed episodes of The Prosecutors for the Discovery Channel. By working on this series, as well as The New Detectives and The FBI Files, I spent lots of time with cops and heard some great stories. I used a lot of this material in Drink the Tea. I also heard stories that I haven’t been able to find a place for—yet. This story is one of them.

One of the prosecuting attorneys I filmed—let’s call him Frank—told me about a case that involved a 60-something man who lived alone.

One night the man looked out his living room window to see a young man trying to pry a pair of fancy headlights from a car. The older man grabbed a gun and shot the young guy dead. When the cops came they entered the older man’s house and found he had a regular arsenal—handguns, automatic weapons. An assortment of illegal and deadly pieces. He also had racist posters on the walls, like a silhouette of a black man running, with arrows pointing to different body parts and how many points given for each part.

Now the prosecutors prepare for trial. The defense attorney, who Frank says is a total jerk, claims the old guy was only trying to wound the kid, not kill him. This lawyer pays $5,000 to have a firearms expert examine the gun.

“Why?” I ask.

Frank shrugs. “I don’t know, what can they find out? We’ve done the ballistics, we know that’s the gun he used to kill the kid. But we say, “Sure, you wanna spend five grand and see the gun? Fine. As long as we can be there, too.”

So the cops bring in the gun, and Frank sticks around to watch.

The expert takes the gun in his hands and asks if he can dismantle it. Frank looks at the cops. The cops say okay. As the expert starts to take the barrel off, the spring snaps out of the gun and pieces fly across the room and batteries hit the floor.

“Batteries?” I ask.

“Yeah, batteries.” Seems the gun had a laser sight that the cops were unaware of—up ‘til that moment. Thanks to the expert, now the cops know. When the batteries spill out, the defense attorney asks the expert, “What’re those for?”

“I’ll tell you later,” the expert says, trying to cover his gaffe. But it’s too late, the cops know. The laser sight is the kind that’s built into the handgun, placed just below the barrel and easy to miss.

From that moment, the laser sight becomes a focal point of the prosecution. During the trial, Frank tells the jury, not only did this man kill this kid, but he took the time to point a laser sight at the kid’s head before he pulled the trigger. Then the cops show the jury the laser sight in action—it projects a beam of light 35 feet. The jury is impressed, and they convict the guy and he does time.

“So the laser made it a done deal,” I say.

Frank smiles. “Yeah. What we didn’t say is that particular laser sight was totally worthless—it was never calibrated. See, a bullet travels in an arc, while a laser goes in a straight line. So after you buy the piece, you’d have to have it calibrated for the laser sight to be accurate.”

“But didn’t the defense attorney mention that?” I ask.

“Nope. Maybe it didn’t occur to the ‘expert,’” he says, making quote signs in the air. “But it wasn’t our job to talk about calibration. We kept that information to ourselves. I guess five grand doesn’t get you much of an expert, does it?”

As I packed up my camera gear, I made a mental note never to commit a crime in Frank’s jurisdiction. Now all I have to do for my next book is think up a character with a laser-sighted gun. How hard can that be?

Drink the Tea, Thomas Kaufman, Minotaur Books, March 2010, $24.99.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

Teri Duerr

2011-12-19 22:46:34

One of the prosecuting attorneys I filmed—let’s call him Frank—told me about a case that involved a 60-something man who lived alone.

“Why?” I ask.

So the cops bring in the gun, and Frank sticks around to watch.

“Batteries?” I ask.

“So the laser made it a done deal,” I say.

“But didn’t the defense attorney mention that?” I ask.

Drink the Tea, Thomas Kaufman, Minotaur Books, March 2010, $24.99.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

My Book: Is Someone Watching Me?

Sarah Wisseman

wisseman_sarah My husband Charlie, a retired pathologist, is a ghoul. On an airplane from Luxor to Cairo, Egypt, I told him I had a new plot for an archaeological mystery, The House of the Sphinx. He listened to my ideas for skullduggery set in the Temple of Luxor and the fabulous site of Karnak. “Fine,” he said. “But what about adding a little bioterrorism?”

This sparked an interesting discussion about which diseases could be used as bioweapons. Instead of reliving our wonderful visit to the Valley of the Kings, I grilled my husband on the symptoms and treatment for smallpox and how Europeans transmitted the disease to Native Americans using contaminated blankets.

Back home, I researched the terrifying saga of smallpox in books, articles, and on the Internet. Because it is a virus that is easy to transmit during the early and unrecognizable stages of the disease, smallpox is difficult to contain and treat. Over thirty percent of people who get sick die, and survivors are often blinded or otherwise disfigured. Officially, smallpox was eradicated worldwide in 1979, but the virus stocks in select research facilities were never destroyed...

“What if,” I asked myself, “my archaeologist heroine stumbled upon a plot to infect Western tourists with smallpox? What if there really was a stash of smallpox virus somewhere that terrorists could obtain and weaponize?” Not a new idea, I discovered, as I read Richard Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer. Although nonfiction, it read like a thriller, and scared me silly. Preston’s descriptions of smallpox laboratories and frozen virus stashes in the former Soviet Union and Iraq provided me with plenty of fodder for further research, including how to manage a modern smallpox epidemic.

Many writers now say, “write want you want to know,” instead of “write what you know.” I say, use what you know as a jumping off point for new research, no matter how grisly. I’m an archaeologist, not a physician or medical historian, but being married to a doctor has taught me just enough about medicine to be dangerous, to want to learn more. And perhaps I was getting a little tired of killing my villains with priceless Greek vases and Roman statues—it was time for a change.

A little research can make you paranoid. As I happily Googled how to turn frozen smallpox virus into a stable, disease-transmitting powder, I wondered if anyone was tracking my Internet use. Would someone show up on my doorstep to investigate me as a terrorist, and would being a mystery writer be a good enough excuse to get me off the hook? That didn’t happen, but I did discover my own ghoulish tendencies in my fascination with the story behind of one of the deadliest diseases in human history.

The House of the Sphinx, Sarah Wisseman, Hilliard and Harris, December 2009, $17.95.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

Teri Duerr

2011-12-19 23:57:10

The House of the Sphinx, Sarah Wisseman, Hilliard and Harris, December 2009, $17.95.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #113.

Killer Covers

J. Kingston Pierce

Eleven Great Crime Novel Covers

When many people think of top-quality book jackets in the crime-fiction field, their minds turn immediately to the provocatively illustrated fronts of the mid-20th century. You know, the ones by artists such as Robert McGinnis, Norman Saunders, Ernest Chiriaka, and Victor Kalin. The ones that showed men with devilry blazing in their eyes and pistols in their paws, alleyways crawling with bent-nosed thugs, and curvaceous women with impossibly long legs. The sorts of covers that novelist Max Allan Collins once said represented “a wonderful golden age where utter sleaze meets genuine artistry.”

But crime novels didn’t shed all of their cleverness and captivation with the shift from painted covers to photographic ones in the late 1960s.

Typographical innovations, graphics-editing programs, and advances in printing technology give today’s designers tools that their forerunners of 50 years ago didn’t have. Those tools alone cannot turn mediocre concepts into brilliant ones, and they don’t alter the fundamental value of these jackets. As Peter Mendelsund, the associate art director for publisher Alfred A. Knopf, puts it: “Our job is still to take a book...and make it look attractive enough that you won’t be embarrassed to be seen enjoying it on a subway.” However, with the right mix of creative knack, eye for commercial appeal, and talent for pushing extraordinary ideas past dubious marketing departments, designers can still deliver eye-catching covers.

Glenn O’Neill, the deputy art director at Random House UK, isn’t pleased with the modern tendency of publishers to offer books that resemble one another, right down to their use of stock agency photos and shadowy, running figures. “When the exact same images duplicate on books,” he says, “it may well suggest the writing is also inter- changeable, [it’s] therefore a bad thing.”

It’s unlikely O’Neill would be accused of wielding a cookie cutter in his cover scheme for the hardback edition of Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection (2009). With its illustration of a human eye (evoking the classic Pinkerton National Detective Agency logo), surrounded by graphical elements (clocks, old-fashioned keys, fingerprints, etc.) that he says were “inspired by American noir but with a surreal twist,” Manual was among a flurry of recent books to have its artwork printed directly on the board binding, rather on a slick dust jacket. Such a “naked cover” gave Berry’s otherworldly story—about a reluctant detective pursuing his inaugural investigation with help from a highly flawed handbook—a distinctive character in both appearance and feel.

“The intention behind the design,” O’Neill explains, “particularly the scraperboard eye motif [commissioned from the illustrator Bill Sanderson], was to imply mystery but also a disquieting sense that ‘something is wrong here.’... It would be disingenuous, however, not to acknowledge that the jacket is meant to suggest the actual green detective manual referred to within the book; but it’s been developed into, I hope, a more desirable object, with gold and black foil to embellish.”

Of course, a crime novel front doesn’t require such intricate details to be arresting. Consider Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind (2005), which finds a frail 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes living in post-World War II Sussex, keeping bees and struggling with his declining faculties, as he reminisces about the long-ago case of an oft-disappearing wife. That book’s face, created for Doubleday by Michael J. Windsor, featured rather delicate title type and below that, what looked like the crumbling edges of old paper. But it was the central image that caught one’s eye: the close-up of a bee’s posterior, hinting at Holmes’ apiarian pastime.

Similarly, it was the pronounced imagery on the cover of Tom Rob Smith’s first novel, Child 44 (2008)—conceived for Grand Central Publishing by Anne Twomey—that made it so striking. The sharp contrast between the red field at the top, the embossed and white-shadowed title, and the black-and-white composite image at the bottom of a man following silent railroad tracks combined in an elegant reflection of Smith’s bleak and startling thriller, set in the Soviet Union during the mid-20th century.

And Will Staehle’s design for Twelve/Hatchette of The Sherlockian (2010), a debut work by Graham Moore, spoke boldly in the genre’s most iconic language. To introduce this yarn about a modern search for Arthur Conan Doyle’s missing diary and a parallel probe, by Holmes’ creator himself, into the deaths of three suffragettes in 1900, Staehle gave us an immediate reference to Holmes in the use of a pipe, upended like a question mark, with a splotch of blood for the dot. That spot was actually a cut-out in the jacket, exposing part of a scarlet profile of Holmes on the board behind.

Inventive employment of typefaces exert their own power and appeal. When she was looking for typographical solutions to the front of George Dawes Green’s Ravens (2009), Diane Luger, executive art director at Grand Central Publishing, says she “noticed that the ‘V’ letterform [in the book’s title] took on the shape of a raven in flight, and we moved forward from there. We looked at overlaying the title treatment over a photograph of a suburban street scene, to tell more of a story—but it lost its impact, proving that less is more.” The severe black-and-white result serves well Green’s chilling, twisted tale about drifters hoping to bilk a rural Georgia family of their lottery winnings.

Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich’s design for the hardcover jacket of Delacorte’s The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (2010), by UK-born Belgian author Helen Grant, could easily have slipped from clever to gimmicky, but it did not. The silhouette of a cat, filled with heavily vertical title type, nicely embodied this haunting story about an 11-year-old girl whose classmate vanishes from a Grimm’s fairy tale-themed parade float, provoking talk of the supernatural and witches assuming feline form.

One couldn’t help being drawn, as well, to the wrapper on Viking’s Faithful Place (2010), Irish author Tana French’s third novel. Designed by Jen Wang, with artwork by Viktor Koen, this front combined the likeness of an old, overgrown building wall with lettering broken and obscured by peeling paint. The results seemed almost too soothing to represent this mystery about forbidden love, sibling rivalries, and sins of the fathers being visited upon the next generation. Yet the neglect shown toward that wall echoed the familial fractures teased open in French’s narrative.

With so many crime novels demanding reader attention in bookstores, it’s not enough anymore for covers to simply be different; they have to look “wicked cool and awesome,” as Knopf art director Mendelsund jokes. He has a reputation for delivering such work. Mendelsund created the swirling fronts for the first two US releases of Stieg Larsson’s thrillers, as well as the less-subtle, silver-metalized jacket for the third book—all great departures from the European covers with their sexy women and dragon-shaped tattoos. He was also responsible for the eerie skull-in-dots jacket on Adam Ross’ Mr. Peanut (2010), the poignant story of a man obsessed with his wife’s demise.

However, Mendelsund’s predilection for novelty may have been demonstrated best in his work on Joe R. Lansdale’s Leather Maiden (2008). Lansdale’s tale focuses on a scandalized journalist who returns to his small Texas hometown and cracks a bad can of worms by digging into a cold-case murder. “That book has almost a horror kind of feel to it,” says Mendelsund, so he developed a black-and-white photo cover showing a woman’s upreaching hand and a small title card stapled to her palm. The only color is a bit of crimson around that staple. Although Mendelsund expected resistance to his concept from Knopf’s marketing minions, “the only feedback I got was that we should give the image a manicure,” which he accomplished with Photoshop.

“Different” would also describe the wraparound on Japanese author Shuichi Yoshida’s Villain (2010). To attract readers to this gritty story about a young insurance saleswoman’s strangulation, Mendelsund’s colleague at Knopf, Chip Kidd, gave us the illustration of a handgun shaped from the major bones of the human body—an image that looks like something from a voodoo ceremony, something taboo. Again, there’s minimal color, and the understated headline type lets this “bone gun” take center stage.

Curiously, some of the most distinctive covers on shelves these days don’t look new at all. The seductive woman that Richie Fahey painted for the front of Megan Abbott’s 2007 Simon & Schuster release, The Song Is You, based on a true-life missing person case from Los Angeles in 1949, could have fit just as well on a Gold Medal paperback crime novel from the Eisenhower era.

Back then, though, the illustration would also have featured a gun. And you would have seen the woman’s legs. They would have been spectacular.

J. Kingston Pierce is the editor of The Rap Sheet and the senior editor of January Magazine.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #118.

Eyewitness: Kalinda Sharma on the Good Wife

Kevin Burton Smith

The best damn private eye on television?

Archie Panjabi as Kalinda Sharma, the enigmatic private investigator on The Good Wife. Courtesy CBS.

No, CBS’ The Good Wife is not a private-eye show. It’s really more of a legal thriller. Created by husband-and-wife writing team Michelle and Robert King, it stars Julianna Margulies (formerly of ER) as Alicia, the beleaguered wife of Peter Florrick, a prominent state’s attorney (played by Law and Order’s Chris Noth). When Peter’s busted and sent to the hoosegow amidst charges of corruption and a sex scandal, Alicia stands by her man.

Suddenly the sole breadwinner for her family, she throws herself back into the work force as a junior defense attorney at a high-priced Chicago firm. Alicia’s steely resolve to take the high road gives the show an unexpected moral underpinning. It’s all very noble and inspiring and sharply written, timely and provocative, placing demands on an adult audience that isn’t afraid to be occasionally shaken. Perfect bait for critics and awards.

The real hook, though, lies in its twisty, turny tumble of hidden agendas, backroom politics, lies, and conspiracies. The show’s a tsunami of secrets. Just when you think you have a character, a plot, a motive pinned down, the writers yank the rug out. Everyone, it seems, has something to hide, and nothing is ever black and white.

But nobody has more secrets—or prowls those murky gray areas better—than Kalinda Sharma, the firm’s savvy, leather wrapped private investigator. For my money, she’s not just the most interesting character on the show—she’s the best private eye on the tube these days. And in a long time.

Despite her thoroughly modern modus operandi (database diving, computer hacking, etc.) and the fact she’s female (never mind of East Indian descent, a true rarity on American television), Kalinda is actually, in many ways, a throwback to the genre’s roots.

As played by Archie Panjabi, Kalinda presents a tightly wound professionalism rarely seen in the PI genre these days. The leather she sports is not the shimmery come-hither stuff of adolescent fantasy—rather, she wears it like armor to keep the world at bay. Her antecedents aren’t amiable guys like Rockford or Magnum, cuddly losers like Monk, poor wet puppies like Terriers’ Hank or Charlie’s jiggly Angels—nope, her roots go back much further, back to a time when private eyes weren’t necessarily likable. Back to the very roots of the genre, to the pages of the hardboiled pulps of the 1920s, when hardbitten gumshoes like Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams boasted in the pages of Black Mask, “I ain’t afraid of nothing...providing there’s enough jack in it.”

That’s the sort of sangfroid Kalinda has in spades. Professionally she’s not just cold— she’s Dashiell Hammett-cold. Hard and tough as a pair of brass knuckles. Hell, the way she dispassionately works her cases, facing down her enemies without flinching and standing up to violence, she could be The Continental Op’s illegitimate daughter.

But she’s no one-note Susie, either.

In a video landscape that too often serves up even major characters as shallow stick figures, she’s a real feast. The more we’re told about Kalinda, it turns out, the less we actually know. While there’s no doubt about her professionalism, her ethics, allegiances and motives are steeped in ambivalence—and her personal life is also somewhere in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” area.

Is she a prickly ice queen who only lives for the job? A femme fatale more than willing to use sex as a weapon? Is she a lesbian? Bisexual? Straight? Asexual?

It’s hard to tell.

In the first season, for which Panjabi nabbed a well-deserved Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, we learned that she used to work for Peter, but that she’s willing to sell him out to his political enemies. Or is she?

In the second season, however, Kalinda has really come into her own, even as the veneer of her personal life has oh-so-slowly started to slip. A merger brings fellow investigator Blake, an unwanted (and possibly unscrupulous) professional rival, into the firm, but it’s soon clear these two are not going to play nice. And matters are exacerbated when Blake begins threatening to reveal secrets from her past.

Suffice it to say Kalinda does not take it well. Given her buttoned-down aloofness and chilly pragmatism, her attack on Blake’s unprotected car with an aluminum baseball bat is deliciously unsettling. Even better, she gets in the face of a witness who inadvertently interrupts her rampage. “What the hell are you looking at?” she snaps. “Call the police!”

As the bewildered citizen scurries off, she continues to methodically destroy the car.

Now that’s cold.

Later in this season a former lover, brilliantly played by Lili Taylor, shows up, picking at old wounds, something to do with Kalinda not being “domestic” enough—whatever that means.

Whether the writers can keep the mysteries of Kalinda spinning just out of viewers’ reach indefinitely is hard to tell, but frankly, I hope so. I don’t want her to become just another soggy-edged weenie PI carting around more baggage than a bus station redcap. We’ve had enough of those in the last few years.

Kalinda’s absolutely riveting just as she is. Imagine! An old fashioned gumshoe, actually working cases on behalf of a client. No psychic baloney, no CSI voodoo, no mental disorders played for laughs, no angsty fashion-plate burned spies, no personal agendas on every single case—just a hardboiled jane who gets hired to investigate and actually works her cases.

How long has it been since we’ve seen that? I tell you, if they ever pull the plug on The Good Wife, they ought to spin Kalinda off into her own show.

Hell, I’d watch that.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #118.

What’s Happening With...Bill Pomidor

Brian Skupin

pomidor_bill “Calista Marley has been pregnant for 12 years,” says Bill Pomidor.

The last book by Pomidor, 1998’s Mind Over Murder, ended with Plato and Calista Marley expecting their first child.

It was a tantalizing end to the five-book series about two happily married doctors solving mysteries as they practiced medicine.

Dr. Calista Marley, a pathologist, and Dr. Plato Marley, a geriatrician, did their detecting in and around the Cleveland area, while they developed their relationship and their careers, and were repeatedly stymied in their attempts to go on their honeymoon. The murder methods, based on little-known medical facts, were diabolical.

“I had the inside edge on how to bump people off,” says Pomidor, who along with his wife Alice, is a doctor himself.

Pomidor graduated with an MD in 1986, taking, as he puts it, “the Doogie Howser route,” and worked in family practice in Cleveland for a brief time. But he wasn’t sure medicine was for him.

“The director of my practice, Dr. Jon Schlemmer, was a wise old mentor. He told me to do what was best for me, and that I couldn’t be a doctor and not be in it 1000%.” So Pomidor took a sabbatical to pursue a writing career, a move some might consider risky, but Pomidor was covered. “It helps to have a wife who’s a physician and has a steady job.”

Pomidor attempted several different things in this period, taking writing classes and workshops, contributing nonfiction to medical journals and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and writing literary fiction.

“I had this vision that I was an undiscovered talent, and that I would write great literature,” says Pomidor. “But it doesn’t take long for that vision to fade when you’re submitting to literary magazines and getting little form letters back.”

So when he tried writing a mystery short story and received a two-page, point-by-point rejection letter from Cathleen Jordan, editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, he was encouraged. “At that time I appreciated any sign that a human being had participated in my rejection. So that was like gold to me.”

Shortly thereafter Pomidor published his first short story, and then obtained a book deal for the Marley series, which began with Murder by Prescription in 1995. The series was going great guns until Pomidor’s publisher, Penguin, merged with Putnam Berkley in the late ’90s, a time when many mystery writers lost their book deals.

“It was a stunning setback,” admits Pomidor. He had been critically well-received and nominated for the Edgar and Shamus awards. “Writing a book, as opposed to a short story, takes a great deal of confidence. Going back to writing on spec was difficult.”

His agent asked him to write something scarier, a medical thriller, but that turned into a disappointment too.

Several publishers were interested in the resulting manuscript, and Pomidor’s agent arranged an auction. But surprisingly no one submitted a bid in the final round of the auction, and the book died on the vine.

Since that time Pomidor has been extremely busy. He teaches humanities courses to medical students both in Florida, where he and his wife now live, and back in Ohio via the Internet.

“When you think about doctors, like me, who graduated very young, they’re 23 or 24 years old, going on the wards and trying to help people cope with terrible grief. But most of them have never witnessed or experienced any terrible diseases or tragedy. Reading literature allows them to vicariously experience emotions they couldn’t otherwise tap into, and makes them better doctors.”

In addition to teaching Pomidor has become a video game designer. He collaborated with fellow Battlezone enthusiasts whom he met online to create a sequel, Battlezone 2, and learned the basics of video game design along the way. Since then he’s developed ElderQuest 3D. He extended this experience into another venture as well: interactive 3D home design so that builders and buyers can view houses and refine the design before breaking ground.

Pomidor has now combined his three passions—writing, medicine, and video game design—into a new book which he’s hoping to complete early next year. It’s about a video game designer married to a doctor. Together they discover a vast conspiracy, the secrets to which have been hidden in an online virtual world.

“I haven’t decided whether to self-publish this in conjunction with a video game, or to try for traditional publication. It could work well either way.”

Does he have any plans to continue the Marley series?

“It would be fun to continue that series. The characters have become very real to me, and I still get asked about them. I do have about one-third of the sixth book written. Plato and Calista finally get to go on their honeymoon—but they go to Antigua in the middle of a hurricane....And that’s where Calista finally gets to deliver her baby.”

A BILL POMIDOR READING LIST

Cal and Plato Marley Mysteries
Murder by Prescription (1995)
The Anatomy of Murder (1996)
Skeletons in the Closet (1997)
Ten Little Medicine Men (1998)
Mind Over Murder (1998)

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Holiday Issue #117.

Teri Duerr

2011-12-29 19:02:13