Category: Mysteries

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On Starting a New Novel

The Merry Family by Jan Steen Source: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

It’s been almost a year since I last worked on a novel. That’s quite a long time for me. For most of the past eight years, I’ve always had a novel in the works.

Since finishing the manuscript for Calamity Lake in December 2021, I’ve waited to hear back from agents. In the meantime I didn’t want to begin a new project. It’s not that I don’t feel committed to Rock Hudson as a protagonist. It’s more a sense that he offered limited possibilities for a series. How many crimes can a consulting geologist solve?

I wrote a couple of stories, spend time revising a few old ones that lay dormant on my cloud. Between those editing ventures, I read reports and analyses released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Continue reading “On Starting a New Novel”

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The World as Inspiration

Where do you get your ideas? That’s a perennial question, authors of crime fiction face. And the answer is different for every one of us. So let me tell you how I get my ideas. The path is a little circuitous, but bear with me.

For the past thirty-odd years before I retired from academia, I’ve had the following conversation innumerable times.

Person at a party: “What do you do?”
Me: “I teach.”
“What do you teach?”
“World Politics.”
“Oh, that must be really interesting right now.”

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Money Laundering 101

Euro bills hanging out to dry. Public Domain Image

Say you just made a cool million dollars. Except, it wasn’t by legal means. Also say you’re the careful sort. You know that buying a big car, or blowing it on $1,000 bottles of Crystal is going to attract attention of the sort you can’t afford.

How can you enjoy your ill-gotten gains without running afoul the authorities? You’ll need to launder it first. That means make your newfound wealth appear to come from perfectly legal sources.

The traditional way, expertly portrayed in the Netflix series Ozark, involves mingling the illegal cash with legal income to hide its provenance. That’s why Marty Byrd is to eager to buy businesses around the Lake of the Ozarks. The marina, the funeral home, and, eventually the casino are all cash based businesses. They provide a perfect way to get the illegal money into legal accounts. But even then, a sudden spike in income would arouse suspicion.

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Everybody Is A Spy Now

The scene is a trope in many spy novels and movies. The undercover agent moves through a foreign city, she is nervous. She looks at each passerby, is that man an opposing agent? Is the old woman by the vegetable stand really selling potatoes or is she a watcher? That man with the newspaper, is he on the lookout for her? The couple with the dog, innocent pedestrians or counter-intelligence operatives?

Going for a walk in the age of COVID-19 feels a lot like that. Every person on the street is a potential carrier. That old man without a mask, what is wrong with him? That woman sneezing, are those allergies or is she symptomatic? That guy with the water bottle, is that a dry cough or did a swallow go down the wrong pipe.

This is my city, but it is foreign all the same.

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A Usable Past

Angelus Novus —Paul Klee. Labelled “The Angel of History” by Walter Benjamin

In her book Future Histories, Lizzie O’Shea credits Van Wyck Brooks with coining the term usable past. Brooks wrote, “The present is a void and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.”

O’Shea goes on to point out that, for young people in particular, the past can feel like a dead weight, there to hold us back from creating our future. But she warns us not to ignore the past. If we do, it survives “…as a default genealogy, a mere reflection of the status quo, fixed and irrelevant.”

That term default genealogy struck me as much as the concept of a usable past.

Default means our choice is already filled in for us. That’s why the vast majority of documents generated on MS Word all look alike, Calibri font, 1 inch margins, single spaced. Default also means failure to fulfill an obligation or a debt. By choosing the default history, we are defaulting on our obligation to create and harness a usable past.

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