Moments in Crime
Moments in Crime
3
So far, each of the Inspector O stories has had a season and a color. These ingredients may not seem too important to a reader, but they turn out to have been critical to me. Their function was not immediately apparent, and using them did not start off as part of a grand plan. I stumbled into it, maybe the result of listening to a lot of Vivaldi years ago, when Vivaldi was on the radio quite a bit in Seoul, especially on winter afternoons. I can’t say the repetition helped me concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing -- not on paperwork, at any rate—but it apparently had an effect. This was the Seoul of another era, incidentally, a time when the city was a very different place than it is now. Walking along a deserted sidewalk next to the wall of one of the palaces on a windy day—but why is he bringing up Seoul, you may ask. What does that have to do with Pyongyang and Inspector O? Ah, well, wouldn’t you like to know!
The first Inspector O novel takes place in late summer. That was by design, though I can’t quite remember what the deciding factor was. It just seemed natural to write about North Korea in summer. Less complicated, somehow. The second novel takes place in early spring, a more difficult time of year, often rather ratty until the flowering trees have made up their minds that the risk of freezing weather is gone for good. By the time I started the second book, I realized that focusing on a particular season helped me highlight aspects of the North Korean countryside, and that these, in turn, helped define Inspector O.
The colors that mark each book are more difficult to explain and may, for all I know, have some deep Freudian significance. Why a particular color? In a story that marches to Inspector O’s cadences, too much color can be distracting, of course, but there are certain times, during certain months, that you can’t overlook a blue, or a green, when it smacks you in the face.
Season and color help set the mood. A day with a high blue sky at the far edge of summer can be insanely happy. A dead brown day of swirling dust in early spring can be terrifically unsettling. None of this goes under the heading of outstanding insight, that weather impacts mood. Even so, some readers seem nonplussed that it should be so in North Korea, and no wonder. Read almost any newspaper account by visitors to the North and you’re apt to find astonishment at things most people accept as commonplace elsewhere, as if there is a force field around the North that obstructs normal weather patterns, or human emotion, or even smarmy jokes.
A Corpse in the Koryo turns out be have been written in a minor key (to get back to music). By contrast, the second book came out, at least on the surface, sunnier, more in a major key. I didn’t set out to change the mood or the tone in quite that way. Once I was into the story, I started to fret. Readers who liked the first book might complain that Inspector O had become too chirpy, with too much bounce to his step. In fact, I've heard from some readers who didn’t like so much light flooding the background of Hidden Moon—they want their Pyongyang to be darker, more sinister.
On reflection, I realized that to some extent, the up-tempo shift reflected an effort on my part not to write the same book twice. At times, I could feel myself slipping into that trap, and had to make an effort to battle my way out of it. Changing the mood, the color, and the tone seemed to help. But most of all, the relatively sunny mood came naturally from Inspector O at that point in his development. That's who he was. I say relatively sunny because sunlight obviously didn’t make it into the room where O was interrogated. Those scenes? They are rooted in the interrogation of someone I knew rather well, and who was released to my safekeeping after the security goons, tired of watching him hang upside down, decided they’d hooked the wrong fish.
If I’d known writing a series was so difficult, I might have tried skydiving instead. It’s hard to keep everything in one’s own life straight—having to do so for another cast of characters can be confusing. Moreover, it’s difficult to keep repetition out of each subsequent book. I constantly have to go back and make sure O isn’t repeating lines just because they seemed to ring so well the first time. It’s all right if he does so on purpose, but I don’t want it to be the result of author memory failure.
Obviously, if there is to be a series, there has to be a certain familiarity carried over from one story to the next. You can’t start anew each time, though if you’ve picked up new readers in #3 (which is to be devoutly hoped for), you can’t just leave them completely at sea, either. A prequel doesn’t help as much as you might expect, because then you have to write a story as if no character knows anything about what is going to happen, and they’re all younger to boot. Moreover, you can’t add layers of experience to a character in a prequel; you have to subtract them. In the movies they just cut the main character’s hair and put him in a checked shirt to show he’s younger, throw an old car into the scene, and have a paperboy ride by on his bicycle. It’s not that easy in a book.
One good thing about a series, I discovered, was that I could employ the same troupe of actors, sort of like a summer stock ensemble. For example, Books 1, 2, and 3 all have a vamp (I haven’t checked with my lawyer, but I don’t think that should be too objectionable a term; still, should something better be needed, try on femme fatale). Every vamp is not like every other vamp, of course, but they all fill essentially the same purpose. There are four seasons, but I don't yet know whether we will necessarily end up with four vamps or just stop where we are, thus following in the footsteps of Julius Caesar.
2 Perspective is destiny. If you choose to tell the story in the first person, you have given up a rare chance to soar with the gods. As a matter of fact, you have simply exchanged skins with someone else, and must suffer their anxieties and complexities in addition to your own. That has obvious drawbacks, but it is also a solution of sorts. By this I mean you will have again dodged the bullet of having to deal with certainty about what is The Truth. Since there isn’t an omnipotent narrator, the whole scene unfolds from a single, personal perspective. There is no truth but that processed through the eyes, the ears, and the brain of one character. Since that is how we live our lives anyway, it grants the author a certain dispensation from knowing more than he actually does. There is a second tier to the perspective problem I found to be more difficult, especially because it wasn’t immediately apparent. Where to place the center of gravity? The stories could be inside looking out, that is, from the perspective of a North Korean looking out at the world. Although that is actually the guise the Inspector O stories take, I decided not to use it as any more than a comfortable cloak, because, obviously, James Church isn’t North Korean. That decision, in fact, has led to some criticism by readers who think the books—and certainly Inspector O—should be more “Korean,” although some Koreans who have read the books are perfectly content with O as he is. Another possible perch for the story was outside looking in. That is a common approach for thrillers with an espionage angle, especially those that find North Korea a useful foil. These days, if you need an evil character or a bad place, you can always throw North Korea into the pot. Some good stories have emerged from that approach, but using that angle would, I decided, be boring for me and might be numbing for readers already up to here * with stereotypical North Korean villains. Was there a third option? After marching into a few chapters, I decided there was. The perspective that I could write from best was the one where I had operated for many years—i.e., somewhere along that margin where the internal reality of North Korea meets the “reality” of the outside world. This infinitely thin edge has been for me a domain of constant, revealing clashes. Like a particle accelerator, it has created new, short-lived flashes (note to copy editor: if you have rhyming words in neighboring sentences, do you change one of them?) of insight. There were moments when slivers of common ground appeared out of nowhere, then disappeared again. Each of the Inspector O books plays on this phenomenon, using a character or a setting in which O’s reality collides with—or sometimes rubs raw—the parallel reality of our own self satisfied universe. The influence of perspective goes a long way, all the way to plot line. Theoretically, it probably shouldn’t. A plot is a plot, and if you’re a mystery writer, you’d better draw a pretty clear plot line through the story, and figure out a way to wrap things up at the end. A very good investigative reporter once said to me, “You have the plot figured out before you start writing, of course” and seemed horrified when I said no, I did not. For better or for worse (and many readers are very uneasy with plots that do not resolve themselves and leave threads--some might say “hawsers”--that dangle when the last page is turned), I am convinced that a story about North Korea shouldn’t be neatly tied up, especially one written from the viewpoint of a character treading water at Inspector O’s place in the piranha pond. A good friend and long-time colleague observed that the O stories read like the process of discovery in intelligence work on North Korea—and that’s exactly right. People like to think that intelligence analysis is the same as working with a jigsaw puzzle, and that it is largely a matter of having the patience to put the pieces together. Yes, certainly that’s true, with a few qualifications: You are working with four and a half 1,000 piece puzzles jumbled in a barrel. And you have been told by a source you really don’t trust that three of these puzzles depict that night sky in the southern hemisphere during, oh, say, 1067, 1649, and 1926. And another source has said that the other one and a half puzzles depict various types of clouds during an eclipse of the sun. Meanwhile, you have no clear instructions about which puzzle you really have to complete in order to find the solution to a problem you are not absolutely sure exists. And oh, by the way, the barrel was dropped from 5,000 meters into the South Pacific and unfortunately broke on impact (sorry, but these things happen), meaning sharks have swallowed most of the edge pieces because they looked like baby tuna seen from below. Tea, anyone? My editor wanted the plot for one of the Inspector O books—never mind which-- laid out in advance. I obliged, but when I began to write, it was with the feeling of a dog on a leash. Every character knew where things were headed. Twists in the road were deliberate, false trails were contrived; characters shut their eyes and followed along glumly, saying “Ooo,” or “Ahhh,” at the proper points of discovery. Some authors do not have this problem, and are much the better for it. Well in advance, they can lay out in their own minds, and even on little pieces of paper, the entire storyline. But that isn’t how James Church or Inspector O have experienced reality, or at least that part of reality concerned with creating these particular novels. As a result, we find ourselves with certain types of endings—and we’ll do our best to take up endings in another blog later in the week.
1 To those who already know
Inspector O, welcome. To those who do not, pull up a chair and stay
awhile. The third of Inspector O's stories, Bamboo and Blood, has finally entered the fray, having rested comfortably for several weeks in a
queue at the printers, along with numerous other presumptive books. This
is a curious time, little known to the general public, when characters from
stories of all types mingle and trade hyperbole from their last reviews.
It is a way of relieving tension before being thrown into the public arena;
authors might benefit from similar time in dark, quiet places.
Once the Inspector emerged from the printer’s, we had a free
moment to sit on a bench at the top of a small rise near my
home. I took the opportunity to
mention that it was time we tried our hand at a blog. O grunted. “Ever wonder why some oak leaves won’t let go,
even in late autumn?” He waved
vaguely at a stand of trees in the distance. “Never mind oaks,” I said. “We’re discussing blogs. Who stays up nights typing, who paralyzed two fingers on his
left hand recording your so-called exploits? Are you going to help me with this, or not?” “Paralyzed?" O stood up and reached into his pocket. “This is birch, “ he said,
holding small piece of wood for me to see. “Nice, quiet tree.
Very soothing, if you like that sort of thing. Good for aching fingers.” He looked thoughtfully at me, smiled,
and strolled away down the path. With your
permission, that pretty much defines the subject of this first blog--the
relationship between what is laughingly called the author to the main
character. Readers sometimes ask if O is a real person, that is to say,
does he exist in North Korea? If
he did, and if I wrote about him as I have, then he likely would no longer be a
policeman. He might even no longer
be. So, no, I will tell you he
isn’t any particular person, or at least, not anyone you’d recognize if you
bumped into him in the street. Actually, I don’t claim to know entirely who O is, though the
more I write, the more I find out.
Much as I have tried to create a coherent biography for him, it turns
out there is always something I’ve overlooked. Until he mentioned it to the Russian stocking salesman
in Hidden Moon, for example, I didn’t
know that O had been employed forging passports early in his career. This is not literary hoo-ha. I honestly wasn’t aware of that fact. Here we have a question: Does O have a mind of his own?
Flatly impossible. After
all, I am his creator. Am I not? He dances to my tune--except at 2:00 in
the morning, after five or six hours at the word processor, when it is no
longer clear who the fiddle player and who the dancer. O opens doors I didn't know existed, runs
across characters I never planned, effortlessly comes up with wisecracks
that in real life I could only manufacture long after the fact. True enough, O may not be a complete
person, but then, who is? It is easy enough to get O to talk, though not necessarily
in long sentences. On the other
hand, it is difficult to get him to take action, of any type. The hardest thing is to move him out
the door into a fistfight, or a shootout, or even an afternoon walk around his sector. “Enough,” I say, “get up, go outside, mix it up a little,
detective-like.” “Right." But he doesn’t move and after a few more attempts, I literally have no
choice but to end the scene and start a new one, putting him out on the street. “Now move,” I say.
He nods. “How
about we find a cup of tea?” In Bamboo and Blood,
I seriously wanted him to slip into a disco in Geneva. He wouldn’t, and ended up doing something else--more
interesting as it turns out. Inspector O emerged rather quickly, as soon as I began to
write the first in what has turned out to be (but was not planned as) the
Inspector O series. That he showed
up so confidently has made me suspect that I’d known him for quite a while, that
during my time in intelligence work he was always nearby. In retrospect, I have no doubt that
when I was in Macau many years ago, O was there as well, which may be why I
could hear his laughter when I started, earlier this year, thinking about the
fourth book in the series and realized some of it would necessarily be set in
Macau. When a friend had made that same
suggestion, I’d laid it aside as too difficult. But O is hard to refuse. The Inspector is certainly not Philip Marlowe, yet he has probably read
Chandler (not a few North Koreans l’ve known have liked detective
stories). In fact, when I first
got the idea for A Corpse in the Koryo,
the thought that immediately popped into my mind was “Raymond Chandler meets
Kim Jong Il.” That is to
say, I knew wanted to write a detective story, not a political tract about
North Korea. I wanted to take the
familiar conventions of the police procedural and plop them into a North Korean
setting to see how they fared. It
was an experiment, and anyway, I couldn’t just leave that title rattling around
in my head. As a result, O is not, at least in the first instance,
a symbol of anything, even though that is what many readers want him to
be. In fact, if any of my
characters turn into political symbols, I make every effort to boot them from the story. Still, as I’ve learned, many readers
get out of a book pretty much what they bring to it—and a few take out of it things
I hadn't realized were there. Some
readers even find themselves lost in North Korea with Inspector O. That, to my mind, is the best of all
outcomes, because being lost can prove useful now and again. Leave the GPS at home, for heaven’s
sake! It’s when you don’t know
where you are that you frequently discover the most important things, or have
the most interesting experiences. That’s one reason I deliberately stripped out
of the Inspector O stories many familiar markers and stereotyped guideposts
about North Korea. It’s unnerving
for some readers, but invigorating for others, not to know all the time where
they’re going, where they’ve been, or even where they have ended up in a
book. This is connected to a
complicated problem for an author—and one on which agents, editors, and critics
also often hit their shins.
If the main character doesn’t know and can never fully learn what is
happening to him, how can (and should) the reader be any more informed? "A good question," O often says to me. "A very good question."
Blogging this week is JAMES CHURCH, a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia. He has wandered through Korea for years. No matter what hat he wore, Church says, he ran across Inspector O many times.
The critically acclaimed Inspector O returns....
It’s the late 1990s, and a younger Inspector O is working in Pyongyang as the North’s nuclear missile program—and international relations—are heating up. In Pakistan, the wife of a North Korean diplomat is found dead under suspicious circumstances. Inspector O is assigned to the investigation with strict instructions to stay away from anything to do with the missile program. That proves impossible, though, when O realizes the woman’s death provides him an entry point into a larger conspiracy. O follows the trail to Pakistan, Berlin, and eventually Geneva as he uncovers the truth about the rocket operation..
In October 2007, my family took the trip of a lifetime. My mother, brother, my husband, and I went on a tour of China. We went to Beijing, Guelin, Shanghai, and Xian. It was my second time in China. The first time was in 1978. China has changed dramatically during those years. Back in 1978, it was all Mao suits and old buildings. This time, it was so modern I thought I was in Tokyo. Here's a picture of us on a cruise on the River Li in Guelin.
Writing stories wasn't the first love of my life.
My first love was art--as in drawing, painting, and wasting tons of pencils, paints, sketchpads, and canvases. I've taken more art classes than fiction-writing classes. I've even worked as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer. I quit all that when I started writing mystery lovels (my latest is The Fire Kimono), but I've recently rediscovered my love of art. For the past few years I've been a student at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art. The instructors there are the best I've ever had. It also has a wonderful community of artists. I've learned so much. Here's an oil painting I did, of an antique blouse. If you're looking for a place to study art, I highly recommend The New Orleans Academy of Fine Art. Check out their website at noafa.com.
Mul Bop (Korean Burned Rice Soup)
In a heavy pot, cook 1 cup plain white rice in 2 cups water. When done, turn the heat to high and cook until a crust forms and turns brown. Turn off heat. Add enough room-temperature water to cover the rice. Stand back while it sizzles madly. Scrape rice away from the sides of the pot and stir. Done! (Makes 2 servings.)
This is my favorite comfort food. It soothes upset stomachs and emotional stress. If it seems too minimal by itself, you can eat it with a scrambled egg and some steamed spinach or sliced raw cucumber marinated in a little vinegar and sesame oil.
Note: Eating like this has helped me stay skinny for my entire life.
So Far Away, Yet So Close to Home
by Laura Joh Rowland
I set my mystery series in historic Japan
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot said it better than I can, but I won’t let that stop me from describing how my own life keeps cropping up in my novels about a samurai detective named Sano Ichiro. He lives in Edo, the biggest city in 17th century Japan New Orleans Louisiana
When I was researching the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, the licensed brothel district that appears in many of my books, what I found struck a familiar note. I knew those narrow streets filled with music, taverns, noisy revelers, and parades. That “nightless city” where the party never ends and the very air breathes forbidden thrills. It was New Orleans New Orleans
Sometimes major events taking place in my time intrude on Sano’s. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, I heard about authors who’d had to rewrite their books because life in New York Iraq
war began, I thought of my books as a haven insulated from the violence.
That’s what I thought, until I noticed a strange thing about my recent work. The political strife between two rivals, Chamberlain Yanagisawa and Lord Matsudaira, had escalated from covert attacks in The Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria and The Dragon King’s Palace to outright war in The Perfumed Sleeve. The Edo portrayed in The Assassin’s Touch bears an uncanny resemblance to Baghdad
Sometimes my books are eerily prophetic. In The Assassin’s Touch, I described a bad rainy season that flooded E do New Orleans Michigan
Like everyone else from New Orleans Michigan New Orleans Michigan New Orleans
To take my mind off my troubles (and because I needed to earn money to pay the contractors), I began writing the twelfth book in my series, titled The Snow Empress. In it, Sano and his wife Reiko and some friends head up north in the winter, to the island Ezogashima Hokkaido
I went back to New Orleans, with Sano and company. By the time The Snow Empress was finished, so was most of the work on my house. New Orleans was heaped with trash, mortally wounded, and struggling to rise again. I thought I’d finished writing about my Hurricane Katrina experience . . . until I began my new book, The Fire Kimono.
This episode in Sano’s adventures involves a murder that took place during the Great Fire of 1657. Over 100,000 people died in that fire, and almost the whole city of Edo was destroyed. It makes Hurricane Katrina look like a picnic in the park. But the two disasters had much in common, such as flaws in city planning and infrastructure that worsened the problems, and the heroics and crimes that occurred during and afterward.
I’ve gotten used to the fact that Sano and I live in parallel universes. Never the two shall meet, but what happens in mine reflects in his. With each new book I set out to explore 17th century Japan
Laura Joh Rowland, the granddaughter of Chinese and Korean immigrants, was educated at the
University of Michigan and now lives in New Orleans with her husband. The Fire Kimono is the thirteenth novel in her acclaimed series of thrillers featuring Sano Ichiro. Visit her on the Web at www.LauraJohRowland.com.
Japan, March 1700. Near a Shinto shrine in the hills, a windstorm knocks down a tree to uncover a human skeleton, long buried and forgotten. Meanwhile, in the nearby city of Edo, troops ambush and attack Lady Reiko, the wife of Sano Ichiro, the samurai detective who has risen to power and influence in
the shogun’s court. The troops who attacked Reiko appear to belong to Sano’s fiercest enemy, Lord Matsudaira, who denies all responsibility. But if the rivals are not to blame for each other’s misfortune, who is?
Just as Sano’s strife with Matsudaira begins to escalate to the brink of war, the shogun orders Sano to investigate the origins of the mysterious skeleton, buried with swords that identify it as belonging to the shogun’s cousin, who disappeared forty years earlier on the night that a cursed kimono touched off a fire that nearly destroyed the city.
Suddenly, Sano and Reiko are forced to confront dangerous, long-buried secrets that expose Sano’s own mother as the possible culprit. The shogun gives Sano and Reiko just three days to clear her name—or risk losing not only their position at court but their families’ lives.
One last thing. Sarah Frank, who will reach her seventeenth year in the Autumn 2009 installment of the Charlie Moon/Shaman mystery series, first appeared in The Shaman’s Bones as a toddler. Provo Frank, Sarah’s Southern Ute father was a good friend of Charlie Moon. Sarah’s mother was a member of the Papago tribe in Southern Arizona, now known as the Tohono O'otam. Was is the operative word here; due to unfortunate events described in The Shaman’s Bones, Sarah is an orphan.
Along with her spotted cat (Mr. Zig-Zag), Sara reappears in several of the later tales in this series, such as The Night Visitor and Grandmother Spider and she is the “star” of Stone Butterfly, a story which begins in Tonapah Flats, Utah.
Dear readers – I am very grateful for your interest in the Charlie Moon/Shaman mystery series, and hope that something in these postings has been of interest to you.
Good-bye for now.
May God bless and keep you.
For those tourists who might find themselves in southern Colorado during the summertime, I recommend a visit to the awe-inspiring Chimney Rock Archaeological Site, which inspired White Shell Woman. Please take
note – this group of Anasazi ruins, which is situated on the eastern section of the Southern Ute reservation, is not to be confused with any of the several ‘Chimney Rocks’ in Colorado, such as the well-known geographical feature on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation, which is located in the SW corner of CO, and borders the Southern Ute res.
The CR Rock Archaeological Site described in White Shell Woman is located between Durango and Pagosa Springs, a few miles south of the junction of Routes 160 and 151, and just west of 151.
You probably won’t realize how special this site is until you visit the “temple”, an isolated ruin which is situated on a rather narrow mesa – and view the Twin War Gods.
For those who enjoy the challenge of solving a difficult mystery, I recommend Grandmother Spider.
A number of readers have told me that until they got to the final few pages, they believed this one was either science-fiction or fantasy.
It is neither.
The inspirations for this odd story were very real, and close to home. The first event happened at about 2 AM at my cabin, during the first winter I spent here. I didn’t get back to sleep for quite some time. The other event, which is not at all startling, occurs on a regular basis.
Sorry. There I go again – giving too much away.
As mentioned yesterday, Charlie Moon appeared in the first mystery of the series which now carries his name.
In The Shaman Sings, the tall Ute (then a uniformed SUPD tribal cop) showed up at the end of the story. Charlie’s life has undergone a number of changes since the series began. While he still has a connection to tribal law enforcement (as a part-time investigator reporting to the tribal chairman), Mr. Moon’s two biggest jobs are managing his vast Columbine cattle ranch and trying to keep Aunt Daisy out of trouble. On top of that, he is being pursued intensely by seventeen-year-old Sarah Frank, whose goal is matrimony. Good luck, Charlie.
Charlie Moon’s chief enjoyments in life are fishing for trout with his friend Scott Parris, and picking his five-string banjo with a talented group of amateurs who call themselves the Columbine Grass.
Like her nephew Charlie Moon, Southern Ute tribal elder Daisy Perika appeared in The Sham
an Sings (available from St. Martin’s press in paperback) as a secondary character. Early in the series she lives by
herself in a small travel trailer at the mouth of Cañon del Espiritu on the west side of the S. Ute reservation. Well, not entirely by herself. Daisy claims to have a rather small neighbor, whose home is an abandoned badger hole in the canyon. Charlie Moon believes the dwarf to be a figment of his aunt’s fertile imagination.
I did not expect the shaman, who was already quite old in 1994, to become (for some readers) the favorite character of the series, much less to survive until 2008 and beyond. But here she is and still going strong. Perhaps the primary reason for Daisy’s longevity is that despite her crotchety disposition, lack of prudence, and often difficult circumstances, she manages not only to survive – but to have a grand time.
Like Charlie Moon and Daisy Perika, Granite Creek Chief of Police Scott Parris appeared in the first of the Charlie Moon/Shaman mysteries, and the ex-Chicago cop has been present ever since as Moon’s best friend.
A warning: In The Shaman Sings, Parris was confronted by a murder so horrific than at least one reader put the book down when she encountered the description of the crime. As it happened, this was not gratuitous violence. A critical clue to the motive of the killing – and the identity of the killer – was to be found in the apparently unnecessary brutality. Enough said. Happily, most of the rest of the series contain nothing quite so awful.
Over the next few days, as I tell you more about some of the rowdy characters and fascinating places in the Charlie Moon/Shaman mysteries, it will be necessary to refer to various titles – which appear below in chronological order:
The Shaman Sings, Feb. 1994
The Shaman Laughs, Dec. 1995
The Shaman’s Bones, Sept. 1997
The Shaman’s Game, Sept. 1998
The Night Visitor, Sept., 1999
Grandmother Spider, Feb. 2000
White Shell Woman, Jan. 2002
Dead Soul, Sept. 2003
The Witch’s Tongue, Sept. 2004
Shadow Man, Oct. 2005
The Stone Butterfly, Sept. 2006
Three Sisters, Nov. 2007
Snake Dreams, Nov. 2008
All
Untitled mystery-in-progress for Autumn 2009
-----------------
I hope that readers will enjoy this thirteenth installment of the Charlie Moon/Shaman mysteries. At this time of year, I am so deeply involved in the current adventures of long, lean Charlie M, his cantankerous Aunt Daisy and sweet little Sarah Frank (it’s hard to believe she is already seventeen!) that Snake Dreams is already history. I must pause for a moment to recall what it was about.
Perhaps a sip of strong coffee will help.
Ah, yes. It is coming back to me.
Snake Dreams begins with a brutal dual murder in the arid West-Texas desert.
Two or three years later, while searching for her favorite Campbell’s soup (Chicken Noodle) on a Durango supermarket shelf, Daisy Perika experiences a lurid vision of one of the victims. Moments after the Ute shaman deals harshly with the unwelcome spirit, Sarah encounters a terrifying vegetable among the fresh produce. A few days after these unsettling events, Daisy is arrested, handcuffed and charged with assaulting a police officer. The aged woman is unfazed by this development. Before her day is over, Charlie Moon’s aunt will end up dancing with a–
No. That would be giving too much away.
Please excuse me. The sun has just come over the mountain and bright, warm light floods through the cabin windows. It is time to warm up some tasty leftovers for lunch.
I wish you all good reading.
May God bless us, every one.
--------
James D. Doss is the author of twelve previous Charlie Moon mysteries, two of which were named one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Doss was born in Kentucky, and now divides his time between Los Alamos and Taos, New Mexico.
With his Southwestern series, bestselling author James D. Doss and his dryly humorous, no-nonsense Native American sleuth, Charlie Moon, have brought law and what’s going to have to pass for order to Charlie’s Columbine Ranch and the nearby Ute reservation. 
Now the seven-foot rancher and part-time tribal investigator wants to carve out a little more
space for himself alongside FBI Special Agent Lila Mae McTeague. That’s right: Charlie has it in his head that he’s going to get hitched. That is, unless Charlie’s irascible aunt, her sixteen-year-old niece, and their visions of a dead woman—her throat slit from ear to ear—have anything to say about it.
With a bit of romance and full measure of murder, Snake Dreams, the thirteenth in James D. Doss’s widely loved Charlie Moon series, is a haunting tale best told under a full moon and beside a crackling fire.
I never used to be much of a photographer. Never much appealed to me. For one thing, my glasses and the viewfinder never seemed to play well together. For another, the whole process seemed complicated-- buying film, managing to get it into the camera without exposing it, then having to finish a certain number of pictures before you could take the film in to be developed. I can recall time after time when I picked up a set of prints only to find that ninety percent of them were either badly composed or fuzzy—and yet here I had a whole set of ugly, fuzzy prints that I had a hard time throwing away because, after all, I’d taken them.
And then there was protecting your film from the X-ray machines when you flew, and figuring out what to do with the negatives and . . . you get the idea.
But maybe the biggest barrier to my enjoying photography was that I never seemed to get any better. By the time I got my many badly composed, badly focused pictures and my few relative masterpieces, I had no idea what I’d done wrong on the bad pictures or right on the good ones. Maybe I should have taken a class or two, but why, when I seemed to have absolutely no aptitude whatsoever for camera work.
Then digital cameras came along, and I got one, just to play around with, and now I’m hooked. And I’ve finally realized . . . I wasn’t a bad photographer. I just hadn’t found the right equipment yet.
And along with my digital camera, I discovered a new creative outlet. Taking pictures is so completely nonverbal that it makes the perfect balance for a work life spent, for the most part, hunched over a computer, courting backache, eyestrain and carpal tunnel and pushing all the verbal centers of the brain as hard as they can go.
One great fringe benefit of spending time with my camera is that even though the verbal part of my brain can shut down and rest while I’m taking pictures, some part of my consciousness continues to gnaw on any creative dilemmas I’ve been struggling with. And more often than not, when I get back to the computer, either I’ve solved whatever writing problem had me beating my head against the wall—or at least I’ve returned with new energy and a new sense of optimism that it can be solved.
So in celebration of the part of my creative brain that doesn’t get out in public as often as my writing does, I’ve posted a few of my favorite recent photos.
One year at Mayhem in the Midlands, Kent Krueger moderated a fascinating panel called "The Me You Never Knew." And among other things, I seem to recall, he asked his panelists—Margaret Maron, Nancy Pickard, Sharan Newman, Ellen Hart, and me—to 'fess up to something we’d never before revealed about ourselves. I can’t remember what I confessed there, but I know what I should have blurted out.
I’m a recreational reader of books on organizing and time management.
There. I’ve said it. I’m a productivity geek.
I have a whole shelf of these books in my bedroom, where they’re convenient for whiling away attacks of insomnia with a little self-improvement. Since I bought one or two of them from Amazon, back in the days before I realized that my friendly local indies would gladly feed my habit, I get an email from Amazon every time a new book on the subject comes out. Occasionally I do a little surfing to find out if anyone’s done a killer site on organizing.
Ironically, people who know me through my books seem to think I’ve got this whole organizing thing down pat, because Meg is so organized. And even friends who only know me online sometimes think I’m organized because I often mention organizing projects or ideas in my posts. I hate to disillusion anyone, but the reason I’m so interested in the subject is that I have so much to learn.
But a couple of years ago I ran into a book that is actually starting to make a difference in my ability to get and stay organized—Getting Things Done, by David Allen.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, Allen contends that a main source of stress and unproductivity is trying to keep everything in our heads, instead of in some system. He recommends that you:
• Capture everything that has your attention.
• Process it all to see what you need to do with it.
• Organize the resulting information into a trusted system that includes a list of your projects, a list of the next actions you could take on those projects, and a "someday/maybe" list—things you can’t tacklenow but might eventually.
• Review your system regularly.
• And get stuff done . . . because moving all this stuff out of your head and into a trusted system can free up an enormous amount of mental bandwidth.
Long before I read Getting Things Done, I noticed both the benefits and shortcomings of to do lists. I suffer often from insomnia of the "can't turn my brain off" kind. I learned that by doing a brain dump--grabbing a pad of paper and writing down everything that was in my head--everything I had to do or wanted to do or didn’t want to do, everything that was nagging at me--it helped the insomnia. Especially if I committed to start working through the list in the morning. And if I did that regularly most nights, life got a lot less chaotic. Especially if I kept each night’s list and updated it instead of starting from scratch. So I started typing my list into the computer as a Word document, and . . . you get the idea. I’d created a rudimentary version of Allen’s trusted system. Far from perfect, but still a giant leap forward from any of my previous organizational schemes.
At the same time, I was writing about Meg, who is superbly organized, though bad at saying no to her family. In Murder with Peacocks, she is rarely without her "notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe," as she calls her organizer. In Murder with Puffins, she notes "For some reason, people interpret my attachment to my organizer as a sign that I am unnaturally organized. I’m not, really; just the opposite. I long ago accepted the fact that if I write something down, I’ll probably get it done, and if I don’t, all bets are off." And in Owls Well That Ends Well, she is juggling far too many projects, and reports that "the only thing that kept me from panicking was that they were all neatly jotted down in the notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, as I called my giant to-do list. Once they were in the notebook, I could manage not to think of them all the time."
In other words, she’d figured out how to keep all the stuff she had to do out of her head by putting it into a system. Perhaps, unbeknownst to me, Meg had read Getting Things Done—even though at the time I wrote that, I hadn’t. Maybe I should sit down and figure out what else she’s doing that I could learn from.
I’m definitely going to keep working on implementing the GTD system, because—big insight I managed all by myself, without Meg’s help—it solves one of the biggest stumbling blocks I have to overcome in my writing—the desire to achieve a clean slate before I start. I’ve seen a lot of people sabotage themselves by not feeling able to sit down and write if they have anything else hanging over them. An upcoming appointment, a meeting, an undone project, a messy desk—it’s all too easy to say, "I’ll just finish these few things and then I’ll be able to concentrate better on my writing." Maybe. But maybe, when those few things are gone, you’ll think of another few things that are equally pressing, equally urgent . . . and before you know it, your writing time is gone, eaten up by things that could have waited until after you did your day’s writing.
I’ve learned, most of the time, to ignore the siren calls of competing projects—learned not so much how to put them out of my mind as how to shove them aside and write anyway. But the more I work this GTD thing, the better luck I have achieving what Allen calls "mind like water'’—a mind that’s clear, empty of distractions, and ready to focus fully on the task at hand.
That’s definitely worth working on.
And as a side benefit, since discovering GTD, I’m sort of sneaking up on the idea of dumping all those other books on organization and time management. Maybe I won’t be needing them quite so much any more.
My first goal for tomorrow will be to recapture the territory I liberated today, territory that I expect will fall to the enemy overnight. And then, when I’ve secured my borders, I’ll see if I can’t extend them a little.
No, I’m not moonlighting as a mercenary, and I’m not embroiled in another absorbing computer game. I’m raking leaves.
I live far out of D.C., on a mostly wooded lot. The only open area in my yard is the croquet field—or septic field, if you want to use the term the county would recognize. The croquet field is about a quarter of an acre, and surrounded by towering, majestic oaks and tulip poplars, along with a fair scattering of other, smaller trees, like maples and hollies, that would put on airs and pretend to tower if the oaks weren’t around to keep them in line. Most of the time, I adore my trees. I love the deep, cooling shade they cast, the rich vibrant green I see when I look out my windows, and the sighing sounds the leaves make when a breeze rustles through them.
Then fall comes, and I wonder whether I have a few too many trees.
Right now I often alternate between leaf-raking and writing. Write till I run out of mental steam. Wander out into the back yard and rake leaves till I run out of physical energy. Repeat until my quota is done, or until I run out of leaves. So far the latter hasn’t happened. I usually start the day’s raking by cleaning up the areas I raked yesterday, getting them back into perfect shape before clearing new territory. More often, by the time I’ve finished one end of the cleaned up space, the other end is already disappearing under the slow, steady, inexorable rain of more leaves.
Days like today, I feel inclined to stand in the middle of the croquet field, tap the handle of my rake on the ground to get the trees’ attention and shout, "Get it over with already! Can’t you just drop all the damn leaves at once instead of this gradual trickling down?" But the trees rarely respond to questions like this, unless you call shaking down a few more leaves a response. Looking up at them, I can see that what I’ve raked so far probably isn’t even half of what they will eventually be showering on my yard. Occasionally I wonder why I bother.
I know why I bother. Last year, I was too busy to rake leaves all fall, and told myself it would be more efficient to wait until they were all down and then rake. Bad idea. My busy times didn’t end when the leaves stopped falling; and the vast expanse of lawn choked in several inches of leaves was so intimidating that I didn’t really get up the energy to tackle it until late winter—by which time the sodden mass of leaves had killed much of what little grass my lawn actually contains.
No, this year I’m applying the same techniques to the leaves that I do to my writing. Writing a novel is even more intimidating to contemplate than raking a ton of leaves. So I break it up. I set myself a daily quota of a certain number of words, and when I finish that day’s task, I’m allowed to call that day a success, even if I haven’t done another thing all day. And that means that in addition to a big celebration when I finish the book, I also get dozens of little celebrations all along the way.
But I try not to have too many of those days that begin and end at the keyboard. I did too much of that a few books ago—crawled into the deadline cave for a few weeks and ignored everything other than my book. When I crawled out again, I realized that the entire rest of my life—house, yard, filing, volunteer work, friend and family connections—was a shambles. Took a long time to put out the fires and clean up the damage. And it dawned on me that if in addition to my quota I’d just done a little every day on those seemingly unimportant nonwriting chores, not only would life after deadline be less hellacious, life during deadline would work a lot better. "It’s easier to keep up than catch up" became my mantra.
So even though I’m on deadline again, I’m not ignoring the leaves. Or the laundry, or the dishes, or the filing, or paying bills, or any of the other million and one nonwriting things that fill our days—but right now, my mind, clearly, is on the leaves. By bedtime tomorrow, I hope to have written another 1500 words and cleared off another six or eight square feet of lawn. If I succeed, I’ll not only be on track toward meeting my deadline, but I’ll be keeping my life on an even keel while doing so.
And if I don’t succeed, I’ll try again the next day. The leaves aren’t going anywhere.
Since Six Geese a-Slaying, my most recent book, is a Christmas mystery, while I was writing it I spent a lot of time thinking about my own Christmas memories. (Translation: "Help! I need Christmas stuff, quick! Let’s cannibalize everything I can think of from my own past holidays.")
I used the memory of my worst Christmas experience ever—sadist that I am, I inflicted it on Meg’s nephew, Eric. You’ll have to read the book to hear that one. But most of my Christmas memories didn’t fit into the book at all, so I thought I’d share a couple of them here.
Take the Christmas when I didn’t get a Barbie. All of my friends either had Barbies or were getting them for Christmas. I put in my request for a Barbie and approached the presents on Christmas morning, secure in the knowledge that Santa would come through.
Santa blew it. Instead of a Barbie, I got some off-brand fashion doll. She didn’t have the rather sultry, pouty look of the early Barbie dolls—I seem to recall that she had more of a baby face. She certainly didn’t have Barbie’s figure—she was shorter and plumper, with a larger head than Barbie. Heck, she probably had a more realistic figure, one less prone to inspiring anorexia. Presumably she had a wardrobe, but the only outfit I remember her wearing was a bridal gown, which had limited appeal to a tomboy like me.
In fact, apart from peer pressure, it’s hard to imagine why I wanted a Barbie doll to begin with. I don’t recall playing that much with doll. But once I finally had a Barbie doll—probably the following Christmas—I quickly found ways to have fun with her and her ever-growing family of friends and relatives—Skipper, Midge, Ken, a new Barbie with bendable legs—the whole Barbie clan.
I just never seemed to be doing what Mattel expected little girls to be doing with Barbie. No fashion shows, no school dances, no dates. My Barbies led a much more adventurous life. Mounted on Breyer horses they conducted adventurous guerilla warfare across the floor of my room, battling an evil oppressor—I’d been watching "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh" and "The Swamp Fox" on Disney. "Swiss Family Robinson" inspired me to shipwreck them on a desert island in the middle of my room, where they built tree houses, raised crops, and made all their tools and household implements out of twigs. They put in their time as slightly oversized Borrowers after I read the books by Mary Norton. Sometimes they roamed about in a paper towel box converted into a gypsy caravan—pulled, of course, by the Breyer horses. They often gave plays—usually Shakespearean comedies, though I was greatly hampered by the fact that I only had the one Ken doll, and Shakespeare didn’t write many female parts.
And more often than anything else, they were detectives and solved mysteries. The mysteries were more inspired by the Hardy Boys than Agatha Christie, and often featured buried treasures and sinister prowlers. And in my scenarios, Barbie had her nemesis . . . her arch-enemy . . . indeed, her Moriarty.
Remember the off-brand fashion doll I found under the tree on that unfortunate Christmas? Apparently I never forgave her for not being Barbie, so once I did have a Barbie, I cast not-Barbie in the recurring role of a villainess called the Lady in White. Clad in her increasingly tattered white wedding gown, she haunted the edges of my Barbie games like some odd amalgam of Miss Haversham and the Wicked Witch of the West.
So in the end, even my Barbieless Christmas turned out okay. You can’t have an adventure without a villain, right?
More recently, we had the Christmas when we decorated the tree fifteen or twenty times. The whole family came to my house that year, and before my nephews, then two, arrived, I made sure to have the tree all decorated for their delight. I’d gone to a great deal of trouble to get enough plastic decorations to make sure the tree was safe, largely by buying lots of vintage metallic-colored plastic ornaments on eBay.
The boys were dazzled, all right. They both made a beeline for the tree and began quickly and methodically undecorating it. Within an hour, the tree was naked as far up as they could reach. When they went down for their naps, we redecorated the tree, thinking perhaps they’d exhausted their undecorating energy. As soon as they woke up, they began the enthralling project of denuding the tree again.
We went through this routine twice a day the whole time they were there. We’re a little short on impressive tree pictures from that year, but everyone had a lot of fun.
Okay, the year of not-Barbie probably won’t fit into Meg’s world, but maybe I can use that undecorating thing one of these years.
When you’re writing a humorous mystery, one of your challenges is to find a way to knock someone off and still allow the rest of your characters—and your reader—to regain their senses of humor in relatively short order. For me, the best way to accomplish this is to choose a victim who needs killing. That’s a wonderful old Southern expression. When someone who has made life hell for everyone around them finally gets his or her comeuppance, there’s a good chance someone will remark, philosophically, "Well, he needed killing."
I don’t generally kill off nuns, pregnant women, small children, hard-working do-gooders, or (of course) dogs. I look for someone who has ticked off a whole lot of people—at least one of them so badly that that someone will decide the offender needs killing.
Sometimes I look in my own life. For example, when I was starting to plot Owls Well That Ends Well, I remembered something that had happened a couple of decades ago.
Like so many fans of Sherlock Holmes, I turned the final page of "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" and sighed with dismay because it was, alas, the last Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle ever wrote. Though at least in 1927, when the story was published, readers could hope that he would write more adventures. By the time I got my copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle had been dead for decades, and clearly wasn’t going to weigh in from the afterlife with new work.
In the seventies, the BBC TV series "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" introduced me to authors whose stories might satisfy my craving for more mysteries in the Holmesian vein. I became particularly fond of R. Austin Freeman’s John Evelyn Thorndyke. Dr. Thorndyke is both a doctor and a lawyer and solves his cases using then-current scientific knowledge, making him one of the first forensic scientists in detective fiction. And since between 1907 and 1942 Freeman wrote, by my count, twenty-one Thorndyke novels and thirty-eight short stories, there was a lot of good reading out there . . . if only I could get my hands on the books.
They were all out of print by that time. Today, of course, I could search online for them—and for that matter many of them are being brought back into print in new trade paperback editions. But Alibris and ABEBooks and their ilk came into being in the 90s. When I first began hunting for Freeman, I had to haunt used bookstores to get my Thorndyke fix. One used book store in particular was a goldmine, as long as I didn’t mind the prices—which seemed to be escalating rapidly as my interest in Freeman continued. Maybe I began with the cheap, relatively easy to find volumes and was now hitting the pricier ones. Maybe I wasn’t the only reader suddenly interested in Freeman and the books’ value was escalating because of increased demand. Or maybe, just maybe, the owner was hiking the prices to take advantage of my interest. I’ll never know.
I do know that one day, at a used book sale, I ran into the owner. "I found something on the dollar table that you’re going to want when you see it in the store," he said.
And when I visited the store, I found he was right. I did want that faded volume—but not at $150. I had the presence of mind to glance over it and shrug, murmuring, "Already got that one."
Of course, I didn’t have it. I’ve blocked out what the book was, so I have no idea if I ever found and read it. And it wasn’t really the price that threw me—it was the fact that he’d told me he’d found it on the dollar table. If he just hadn’t said anything, maybe I’d have bought it. I certainly didn’t begrudge the man the expertise that allowed him to recognize on the dollar table a book worth $150. But did he have to tell me?
It rankled. After all those years, it still rankled—until I finally decided to kill him off. Fictionally, of course. I gave my love of Freeman to one of my characters. I had another character snag a sought-after volume of Dr. Thorndyke’s adventures off the dollar table at a yard sale. And then I had my book-snatcher do a few other nasty things to ensure that, when he was found dead, there would be no shortage of suspects.
I have no idea if the real book dealer was (or is) anything like my fictional character—I didn’t know him that well and haven’t run into him in years. Maybe I was the only person he ever annoyed. More than likely he didn’t even come close to "needing killing." And it doesn’t matter, because I didn’t base my character on him. I used that one incident—ascribed the worst possible motives to its perpetrator—and in that way, created someone who did need killing.
And not only did it work in the book, but it exorcized the resentment I’d been feeling for so long. These days, if I ran into the bookseller, I’d probably greet him as a friend. Maybe I’d even tell him about the character he accidentally inspired.
Or maybe not. We mystery writers can kill people on paper and get all sorts of things out of our systems, making us among the mildest and mellowest of souls. I don’t know if used booksellers have any similar form of catharsis. Maybe I should fall back on the well-known phrase that appears at the beginning of so many novels: "This is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental."
I’m writing this the way Jane Austen wrote.
Well, sort of.
I am, at least, writing by hand, my pen making faint scratching noises as it skitters across the blank surface of the page, leaving words in its wake. I have retreated to my library, opened up the handkerchief table, and am sitting in front of the two tall windows that form the only bookless wall in the room. When I pause to think, I can look out and see leaves drifting down from hundreds of trees outside.
This is amazing, I tell myself. What a wonderful way to feel connected to all those generations of writers who lived and wrote before the advent of the computer or even the typewriter. What a refreshing break from my usual stressful, plugged-in work habits. Wha