I have been having a lot of fun writing the Abigail stories lately. So much fun, in fact, that I have left off the completion of the two Phillip Gold mystery stories entirely. I'll get back to them, no doubt, especially since one is just about ready to be printed and sent off to a mystery magazine or two in hopes of getting it published.

What has surprised me, however, is the fact that I am REALLY enjoying writing these stories for children. So far, I've written six — four of them are available on this website (click on "McAdam Station", then "Abigail" to find them) — and they're rolling off my fingers like magic. I sit down with a basic concept in mind (like, Abigail and the Skating Champion or Abigail finds a Puppy) and out they come, complete with a fairly decent plot, a nice escalation of tension and a fitting, appropriate climax and outcome. It's really quite amazing to me. No, I'm not saying they're classics of kid lit but I think they're pretty good.

I've always thought of myself as a mystery writer — a hard-boiled mystery writer, in fact — but I'm starting to see something of a pattern here. While the Phillip Gold material flows fairly well, I still have to plan it very carefully and I still run into blocks and barriers and have to pause for a day or more before I can get back on track. These Abigail stories, like the Shirtless Joe novella (click on "Fiction", then "Shirtless Joe") that I wrote in just three days for the infamous Three-Day-Novel contest last year, seem to write themselves.

And it's not just that I find the mystery stuff harder to write — my recent introduction to Dennis Lehane and others has started to make me wonder whether I'm capable of writing the kind of mystery that sells in today's market. I have patterned my writing after Raymond Chandler and his crowd and maybe I have to accept that I'm just not capable of writing the blood-soaked, bullet-ridden sadistic prose that is so popular today. And what I can write won't sell in the 21st century.

I tried to go a little more graphic in the Gold Prequel (click on "Gold Mysteries" and then "Gold Prequel") but it just doesn't feel right. Quite frankly, I'm not even that comfortable having it up on this website for people to read but I'd feel like a quitter if I took it down. I don't like reading about women being raped, tortured and maimed and I really hate feeling like I have to write about it. But it seems that you have to do that to get a sale in this day and age.

So what do I do? What would you do? All of your life, you've thought about yourself in one way and then, slowly but surely, you come to the realisation that you're actually something very different. Do I abandon Gold entirely and focus on lighter, happier stuff?

We'll have to see. Right now, the Abigail stories are just dancing around in my brain, aching to come out. I guess I'll have to see where it takes me.

Tags: Mystery, McAdam Station

Darkness, Take My Hand is a horrific book. It's bloody, it's nasty but it's a hell of a read.

Dennis Lehane delivers another mind-blowing story featuring detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. I'll admit it right now — I don't entirely understand what Lehane is trying to do here. There is a level of myth and self-reflexiveness to this book that I can't penetrate. The villains are driven by something deep and psychological but, even after reading the ending twice, I still can't quite figure out what it is. Maybe it's too deep for me. I have enough faith in Lehane as a writer not to doubt him, not to question whether he ever really knew the answer himself. I just can't work it out from what's given in the book.

I can't figure out the link between the villains and the two mobsters, Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy, either.

Oh well.

Kenzie and Gennaro agree to help a beautiful psychiatrist who has been receiving threats, even though they know from the beginning that the case will lead them right into the laps of the nastiest of the nasty from Boston's mob scene. When the mobsters claim innocence, however, our heroes are at a loss for where to turn next. Cruxifictions and other sorts of sadistic, ritualistic murders follow and suddenly Kenzie finds that all the leads connect to him. No, he's not a suspect, but he certainly seems to be at the centre of it all.

Kenzie, now in love with a beautiful doctor and her four-year-old daughter, struggles to protect the innocence of his new family from the violence of his chosen profession. Gennaro, finally divorced from her abusive husband, is spinning, lost. Together, they take on evil forces of the like they never in their wildest nightmares contemplated facing, aided by a flotilla of police and FBI agents.

There's blood on almost every page. And savagery. And sadism. And a little bit of sex thrown in.

Lehane starts with the briefest of chapters, a Prologue that serves as something of a frame for the story. It takes place after the story is over, as Kenzie sits alone on his balcony, watching the snow fall on a cold Christmas Eve. In this three-page passage, Lehane dials up the tension and suspense and, over the following 330 pages, he never lets up. Here are the key paragraphs from that Prologue:

The office — Kenzie/Gennaro Investigations — is closed, gathering dust, I assume, maybe the first stray cobweb in a corner behind my desk, maybe one behind Angie's too. Angie's been gone since the end of November, and I try not to think about her. Or Grace Cole. Or Grace's daughter, Mae. Or anything at all.

And later:

Sometimes Bubba or Richie or Devin or Oscar drop by... We don't talk about this past autumn or Grace and Mae. We don't talk about Angie. And we never talk about him. He's done his damage, and there's nothing left to say.

The words seem mild, simply gentle declarations of loss, of pain. But they haunt the entire book. We as readers carry Kenzie's loss with us as we read the story that led to that scene on the balcony and we know: nothing can't happen in this book. We know that Kenzie survives (as do the more minor characters Bubba, Richie, Devin and Oscar) but we can't be certain of just about anything else.

And the book throws so much at us that it's hard to catch our breath. We bounce from one horrific scene to the next, from one terrifying character to another. Lehane succeeds in creating a claustrophobic climate dominated by the unknown, unseen villains. They are everywhere yet nowhere.

To their credit, Kenzie and Gennaro are smart enough and human enough to be afraid. Very afraid.

Darkness, Take My Hand is a dense, suspenseful, gripping book that engulfs its reader. It picks us up and tosses us around and overwhelms our senses.

My brother-in-law Gavin tells me Lehane's books get better and better — this, his second novel, is so good I'm not sure that's possible.

Tags: Lehane, Mystery, Darkness, Take My Hand

Robert B. Parker rebounds with Stranger in Paradise, the best of the three novels I picked up for a buck at the library sale. After turning off my filters, I sat back and enjoyed a good read, a happy reminder of the kind of panache Parker used to produce in his heyday. Yes, it's still merely a novella and, yes, all of the objections I've recited in relation to earlier Parker novellas still apply, but this book has a sort of happy elan to it, a strong pace and a commitment to action that the other two distinctly lacked.

Published this year (2008), Stranger in Paradise features our friend, small-town police chief Jesse Stone, as the protagonist and, thankfully, there is absolutely no sign of Sunny Randall in the book, other than a single brief mention along the way. When an old friend, cold-blooded killer Wilson Cromartie ("Crow"), comes to town with a mysterious mission to perform, Stone and his force go on immediate alert. They tangled with Crow ten years ago, you see, and, before the self-described Apache warrior left town the last time, a lot of people died, including two of the town's boys in blue. Forced by circumstances and their own personality parallels, Stone and Crow soon find themselves working together toward a common goal: saving a rebellious 14-year-old girl from her gangster father and her gangbanger boyfriend while keeping as many other people alive as possible.

Woven into the fabric of this violent storyline are two interesting subplots: a wealthy white neighbourhood's desperate battle to stop a school for underprivileged Hispanic kids from opening in their midsts and Stone's own on-going effort to work out his relationship with his ex-wife Jenn, a beautiful TV investigative reporter who moves back in with him as part of the attempt to take care of the 14-year-old.

This is a violent book — Crow guns down a gangbanger early on in order to prove his own machismo, then picks off two gangster types in cold blood later in the novella while the gangbanger executes the 14-year-old's mother in a brutal development that Stone and his crew treat as a minor inconvenience — but Parker ultimately chickens out when push comes to shove. The climax, once again, is a disappointment, a well-plotted set up where Stone and his force sweep in to arrest all (and I mean ALL) of the perps and their comrades before anything too nasty happens. Even the enigmatic Crow, who loves nothing better than a gun battle, simply fades away into the background during that epic scene, uncharacteristically using the confusion of the developing fire fight between the gangbangers and the gangsters to disappear, rather than to indulge himself in some gratuitous killing.

It's as if Parker got to that point in the writing process and thought: well, I've almost reached my 40,000-word limit and I really don't think I can handle writing such a complicated scene so maybe I won't bother; I'll make it clean and easy, even if it doesn't suit the personalities of the characters I've so carefully created.

Again, I liked this book but with many reservations. I think the plot is stronger and more interesting than the last two Parker novellas I've read but it still plays out as a series of superior, independent men moving effortlessly through a world where no-one else matters. Crow, though interesting in some respects, ultimately fails as nothing more than a negative version of Stone himself. Parker indulges in numerous explications of how and why these two strong, self-contained men can know, understand and respect each other without ever having to spend any time together. They know each other because they are cut from the same cloth; they are each other. Violent, witty, uber-capable, utterly independent, sharing a strong moral code that says, while men are for killin', women are for protectin' and lovin'.

Every woman in the book swoons over Crow, in ways that they wish they could swoon over Stone. Even Molly Crane, the Catholic, mother-of-four, devoted wife who serves as Jesse's right hand on the police force, ends up sleeping with the cold-blooded assassin and convincing herself that this little indulgence of her primal female urges is acceptable since it apparently hurt no one and won't change her relationship with her family. It's a not-too-subtle way for Parker to consummate the erotically charged relationship between Molly and Jesse (Crow's positive alter-ego) without sullying Stone's moral standing.

As in the other Parker books, all characters speak with one voice, in one style, with a similar wit and morality. In fact, Parker appears so incapable of creating anything new in the way of character that the parallels between Stone and Spenser (the protagonist in Parker's earlier books) are blatantly and painfully obvious. Add in Crow, the ultra-capable, cold-blooded, member of a racialised community and Parker has recreated the Spenser/Hawk relationship to the point of idiocy. The one major difference — Spenser was a private eye and Stone is a police officer — actually represents one of the major weaknesses of this new series: whereas Spenser could credibly flout the law when his personal morality required it, Stone either cannot (since he is a cop) or must go to extreme lengths to get around it, leaving the reader shaking her head in disbelief.

Sex is, again, a game to be played and not to be confused with love or intimacy or commitment. Women are objects, littered around the city so that men can either protect them as fragile things of beauty, have sex with them in the on-going game or ignore them and their lives and deaths as unimportant.

it is ironic that, at the centre of this tale is the 14-year-old, Amber, who has already been molested by her father's posse, ignored by her obese, alcohol-abusing mother and forced to have sex with every member of her boyfriend's gang, which boyfriend is then ready and willing to sell her back to her father for $10,000. Stone goes through all this rigamarole to save her from that terrible life and escape into... into... what? A world where women are nothing more than the possessions and sexual playthings of powerful men.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, Stranger In Paradise

I had an epiphany as I read High Profile, Robert B. Parker's 2007 Jesse Stone "novel".

The first inkling I had came when I got confused as to who was speaking in a long passage of dialogue between two characters. This shouldn't be so confusing, I thought to myself. It's just two characters. So I started trying to figure out why. I read the passage over again, then a third time. I got confused each time. And then it hit me. It's the paragraphing that is throwing me off. Parker starts a new paragraph every line. Here's what I mean (and I'm making up this passage since I can't be bothered to track down a real example).

Sunny smiled.

"Why do you say that?"

"I don't know."

"You've got to have a reason."

Jesse looked over her shoulder at the lake.

"I don't have a reason."

"But you have to. People don't do things for no reason."

Sunny checked over her shoulder in case a bird was about to land on her.

"I guess I had a reason."

Jesse nodded.

"But I don't know what it is."

Did you see it? Parker puts the line of dialogue in a separate paragraph from the speaking character's physical action. Whereas most writers would, as my friend John would say, do an SPSP (same person, same paragraph), Parker separates action from dialogue. And it's confusing.

Why does he do it?

I didn't know. But then I registered how little text there is on each page. And how short his chapters are. And how little exposition there is as opposed to dialogue.

And it hit me. Parker's writing short stories —novellas at best —and passing them off to his unsuspecting readers as real life novels. I mean, the book is 290 pages long. That's fairly substantial, you would think.

So, my curiosity piqued, I decided to do a little test. First, I chose a similar book to which to compare Parker's tome: Dick Francis' Break In, a 272-page novel of which I have a hard-cover copy. The books seem to be about the same size. In fact, once I measured them (yes, I'm that anal), I realised that they are exactly the same size and that Francis' book has just 18 fewer pages than Parker's.

A good set to compare.

So then I opened High Profile at a random page — page 146, in fact — and counted the words on the page. Page 146 of the hard cover version of High Profile in my possession has 213 words on it. Then I counted the words on the next 9 pages in order to establish a reasonable sample from which to draw an average. 76, 66, 176, 185, 188, 182, 66, 94 and 166. The total over 10 pages was 1412, for an average per page of 141.2 words. Multiply that by 290 pages and the book contains 40,948 words in total. Yikes. I've been taught that a novel MUST be at least 60,000 words to be considered for publication and that 80,000 or more is a much safer bet. But Robert B. Parker's High Stakes is only 40,948 words long. No wonder I could read it so fast!

What about my comparison book, Break In? In order to be as fair as possible, I counted the words on the same ten pages —146 to 155 — to get my average and total. 307, 363, 394, 388, 372, 157, 254, 374, 356, and 370, for a total of 3335. That's an average of 333.5 words per page. Multiply by 272 pages and the Francis book includes 90,712 words in total.

Aha.

I can't help but feel that Parker and/or his publisher is/are playing fast and loose with his readers' money. They're charging us regular book prices for half a book and using every trick in the... ahem, book to fool us into thinking we're getting a full-length novel: breaking single paragraphs in two to create more lines, putting more space between lines of type, breaking the book into more chapters so that more pages are half empty, and such like.

And, of course, in counting Francis' words, I couldn't help but read them as well. And I realised that Parker couldn't hold a candle to "Dick Francis" (whether it's actually Dick who did the writing or his wife or somebody else) as a writer, no matter how much I seem to enjoy Parker's novellas. Francis' plots are more intricate and creative, his villains more complex and his action sequences much more breathtaking. I still have one more Parker on my Bed-Side Table but I swear, when that's done, I'm going to go back and enjoy Francis' entire run of novels again.

After all that, how was High Profile, you ask. Witty writing. All the characters are the same (as in other books and as each other) and the portrayal of women is just as bad as in the last book. The plot is paper thin and you can't even bank on Parker for riveting action sequences any more. In this book, there is no action. Sure, Stone attacks one man and beats him senseless. But it's not much of a fight. The man had just opened the door when Stone attacked him. And the climax of the book comes when Stone shoots the villain three times in the chest in what he rightly refers to as a "suicide by cop". All in the last 27 pages. The rest of the book is talk, talk, talk and half the time you have no idea who's doing the talking.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, High Profile

A couple of weeks ago, I finished the first draft of a Phillip Gold short story under the working title "Violet". As is my wont, I circulated this draft among my writing colleagues and asked for feedback. Well, I'll be darned if I didn't get feedback — in large portions.

So what do I do now? It's easy when the feedback is consistent from all or most of the readers. You just adopt their suggestions. But what about where one says, "do A", another says, "under no circumstances do A", and a third says, "do A but with the following twist"? Or what do you do when the readers offer consistent suggestions on a particular point but you feel that the suggestions would change the story from being your own to someone else's, that the suggestions conflict with your own personal writing style.

I find the latter two situations very hard but I have developed some strategies. In the first case, I generally try to consider all of the options, think about them in terms of their contribution to the story, their consistency with the tone I've established and whether or not they seem appropriate to me from a character standpoint (would my character do or say this?). I usually go with the option that feels "right" to me and often that means I leave it more or less as I originally wrote it.

In the second case, on the other hand, I have to get into a much more philosophical examination. It usually revolves around my goals in writing the story in the first place. I like and respect my readers and know they are making comments with what they consider to be the best interests of the work in mind. I also know that, in general, they make comments with a view to helping me get my work published. So I have to decide: do I choose what feels most comfortable to me or what creates the best chance for the story to be published?

I'd like to think that the two were always in line with each other. But they're not.

And I have to accept that I want to be published. So sometimes I have to sacrifice.

It's a tough life.

Tags: Phillip Gold, Mystery

I blew through Blue Screen in less than two days, a credit to the readability of Robert B. Parker’s prose. This man is a very good writer. His plots are clean and compelling, his characters reasonably fully realized, his writing clear and inviting.

And, amazingly enough, this book is as much a love story (or perhaps the better phrase would be “story about love”) as it is a mystery.

I enjoyed Blue Screen a lot. Unfortunately, in order to do so, I had to force myself to turn off a couple of my built-in filters and just accept that it is what it is.

The novel offers two plots: the murder plot and the love story. In the murder plot, Sunny Randall is hired first to protect movie star Erin Flint, and then, when Erin’s personal assistant, Misty, is found dead of a broken neck, to investigate her murder. This latter investigation introduces Sunny to Jesse Stone, handsome Chief of the local police force (and sometime protagonist in another line of Parker novels), creating fertile ground for the love story to spring to life.

Parker spends approximately equal time on each plot, which might please some readers more than others. With little in the way of physical evidence, Sunny and Jesse follow the people trail to Hollywood, where they discover that Erin has a sordid secret past, that Misty has a closer relationship to Erin than was at first disclosed and that criminal figures in both Los Angeles and Boston all seem to have a hand in the situation.

Meanwhile, Sunny and Jesse discover they share an intense mutual attraction, far too many personal and emotional similarities and matching attitudes towards sex. By the end of it all, these two intensely defensive and careful individuals admit that they “might love” each other. They also discover who killed Misty but, as too often happens in mystery novels these days, decide not to push the matter and let the perpetrators go free.

It’s a decent story. It’s told with wit and humour and a fair dose of tension, both of the character-in-physical- and character-in-emotional-danger kinds. I smiled a lot at Parker’s clever turns of phrase and the snappy dialogue. I even laughed out loud on two occasions. And I finished the book in a very brief period of time.

All good.

But what about those nagging built-in filters? You remember, the ones I had to turn off?

To be frank, my problems almost all revolve around Parker’s portrayal of women. Most women in Parker’s books are cast in a negative light: they are either irrational man-haters, brainless eye-candy, helpless victims or ambitious graspers who don’t understand their place in the world and need to be reminded.

Erin Flint, this book's "client" is the perfect example. She is, in Blue Screen, all of the above. Early in the novel, she is branded a “feminist”, which in Parker’s world means “man-hater”. Stunningly beautiful and remarkably athletic, she even went to college, yet she is consistently portrayed as stupid and self-centred, unable to follow even the simplest concepts discussed by the other characters. Despite all of that, she is also completely dependent on the two major male characters in her life – a glorified pimp in LA, who turned her and Misty into prostitutes when they were just teenage orphans, and her megalomaniac boyfriend in Boston, who is using her to enhance his own power and prestige and also to indulge in his personal sexual perversions. If that’s not enough, Erin also plays the role of the over-ambitious grasper: encouraged by the Boston boyfriend, she actually believes she might be able to become the first woman to play baseball in the major leagues. A significant part of the plot recounts the effort by all parties (except the boyfriend) to show her that her baseball ambitions are ridiculous, that as a woman she is incapable of competing.

The women who are portrayed in a positive light – most especially Sunny, herself, and Susan, Sunny’s psychiatrist (borrowed from the Spenser series) – are merely what a man like Parker would consider to be the ideal woman. These are women who share common characteristics:
• While intelligent, they are still willing to recognize that the men in their lives have a natural leadership role;
• While physically capable, they still depend entirely on the men in their lives for their physical safety;
• Their attitudes toward sex and love are remarkably close to the masculine stereotype: sex is a physical activity to be enjoyed with anyone who is attractive, available and willing; sex is something that should be enjoyed without emotional or psychological implications; sex should always be in the forefront of your mind, even if it interferes with more serious commitments; all members of the opposite sex should first be assessed in sexual terms before anything else; love is something to be feared, to be hidden – it is a sign of weakness;
• Their social interactions with others are indistinguishable from those of Parker’s male characters;
• They love dogs.

Other than the fact that she defers to men in all things, that she never takes on a physical challenge herself and that she has breasts, Sunny Randall IS Jesse Stone (who is, of course, Spenser). If you took a page of dialogue between Sunny and Jesse and took out the tags, you would have no idea who said what. Their ideas, beliefs, attitudes, approaches, even their language and speaking style, are exactly the same.

I don’t know if Parker hates women or simply has no clue. I also don’t know what it says about me that I can actually turn off the filters and enjoy his books. Next up on my bedside table is High Profile, a Jesse Stone novel, so we’ll see if that provides any further clues.

Tags: Parker, Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone, Mystery, Blue Screen

Now that I'm finally finished with Engel's book, I am launching myself into three by Robert B. Parker. The first, Blue Screen, hit the bookstore shelves in 2006 and features his female protagonist, Sunny Randall. This is the first of the Randall books that I've read — it is apparently the fifth Parker's written (by the way, have you seen how many books this guy's published? holy cow!) — and I am enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. It makes for a nice break from painting my office, my other weekend task.

As I think I've mentioned in an earlier blog, I am a big fan of Parker's original series, featuring Spenser and his buddy Hawk. At least, I'm a big fan of the early books in the series; I started to lose interest about five years ago when Parker felt his detective had to start tackling international issues and not just good ol' Boston crimes. So I wasn't sure I'd like Blue Screen, even though it introduces me to a new detective. What I had forgotten is how good a writer Parker is when he is on. And in this book, he is definitely on. No, it's not a classic of the detective genre; it's just a well-written story that clicks right along, sweeping you up into it.

I'm more than a third of the way through after only one real sitting and I'm looking forward to getting back to it soon. The writing is so smooth, so polished, you just can't resist it.

The depiction of women, on the other hand? Well, I'll have more on that issue when I post my review.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, Blue Screen

I've finally finished reading Howard Engel's 1990 Cooperman novel, Dead and Buried. I promised everyone a review but now I'm not sure what to say. No, I don't believe in that old adage: If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything. I'm just at a loss for what to say.

I didn't enjoy this book. It was a tough slog for me every page of the way. I literally had to force myself to sit down to read it and it was a relief when I finally turned the last page.

I'm wondering if I've missed something, if Engel (a writer whom I admire) is up to something that I'm not quite catching. For a while, I tried to convince myself this book is a parody of the genre, that Engel deliberately builds towards hard-boiled standards, then goes in other (often, sorry Howard, silly) directions. If that's what he was trying to do, it didn't work for me. If he was writing this as another serious entry in the Cooperman series, that didn't work for me either.

The stage is set for the story when Cooperman receives a visit from a prospective new client, the wife of a truck driver who died in an "accident" on the job. The wife is unsympathetic and uninteresting and Cooper doesn't trust her from the start. He makes the usual references to his empty bank account to explain why he accepts the job in spite of his own reservations, then finds out very quickly the wife had lied to him about a key fact. What follows is a bizarre ramble through environmental issues, corporate realities and the lives of a warped leading local family. The original client all but disappears from the story and the resolution of her husband's death is both incomplete and an afterthought.

Despite Engel's best efforts, there is practically no tension in the book. At one point, an attempted kidnapping of our hero is spoiled when the three gun-toting nasties inexplicably choose the parking lot of a local restaurant to unload their terrified human cargo and run into, of all people, Cooperman's parents and their best friends. Five pages of build-up lead to a quick, "Hey Benny, are you going to join us for dinner?" and the tension disappears.

The "climax" of the story occurs when Cooperman is, yet again, dragged unwillingly into a mysterious car and driven off. This time, however, the kidnapping is merely a friend's "fun" way to get Cooperman to attend a wake for another friend.

Parody? I'm not sure.

The mystery is solved while Cooperman, his new girlfriend and two cops sit eating a feast at an all-night local spot. Our hero spins out for the mesmerised group (and for the reader) what actually happened and who killed whom. The police are convinced of the amazing outcome even though we, the readers, aren't.

Again, I'm at a loss. This book is a complete surprise for me. Engel is usually a sure-handed, effective mystery writer and Cooperman a grumblingly attractive, enjoyable hero. This book is a mess, to be honest (unless I'm really missing something), filled with sloppy writing that would have benefited from a very strong editor.

The plot makes no sense and Cooperman's motivations grow more questionable with each passing page. There is little suspense and what does come into play is undermined even further by the fact that we don't get to know the client, the victim nor any of the other people whose lives are trashed along the way. In other words, we don't care. And Cooperman comes across as such a slug in this book that we really don't care about him either.

As a result, I would urge you to read any one of Engel's excellent Cooperman novels, except this one.

Unless I'm missing something.

Tags: Engel, cooperman, Mystery

I'm experimenting. I'm working on a Phillip Gold short story and I'm writing it in the third-person format — you know, "Gold stood there, looking at his toes" — rather than in first person: "I stood there, looking at my toes". This is the first time I've tried such a thing. It seems foreign to me, odd and different. So yesterday, when I found a half hour to work on the story, I had to fight the inclination to rewrite what I have into the more familiar first-person approach.

What worries me most is that I'm not sure that my inclination to change it is coming from a good place — this is what's best for the story — and not from a bad place: this is what's most comfortable for me.

And I'm also worried that I'm going to continue to use this ridiculous em-dash, em-dash, colon construction throughout this piece. That would be truly tragic.

The third-person approach gives me options, variety, the ability to move out of the main character's mind and into the world. I can even, if I'm really clever, create a personality for my third-person narrative voice and have him/her commenting (either subtly or not so subtly) on the action and the characters. I can describe scenes at which Gold is not present, thus, perhaps, bringing the antagonist to life more effectively or building higher levels of tension. And, let's face it, even Raymond Chandler started running out of ideas on how his first-person narrator (Philip Marlowe) could describe being knocked unconscious: "I heard a bang and a curtain fell."

The first-person approach, on the other hand, lends immediacy to the action. If done well, it can heighten the suspense and bring the reader closer to the protagonist. It also tends to simplify things from a structural standpoint: the reader experiences what the main character experiences. Sometimes it means the reader is solving the mystery alongside (on the shoulder of, in the pocket of) our hero.

So I'm not sure what to do. In reviewing what I've written, I have found that I've included a fairly long scene of dialogue between Gold and his client in order to fill in the background information. I think it's fairly well written but I am also conscious of the fact that, in first person, I could simply have Gold tell us everything in the space of a single paragraph.

And that's another problem. I'm not a big fan of third-person exposition, where the narrator provides the background information to the reader. You've read it: "Gold had heard it all before. She'd grown up on a farm and gotten to know a lot about crops and livestock. When she was sixteen, she left home to open her own grain shop in the city."

I even considered writing it both ways and then letting my writing friends decide. I don't know. I'll have to give it some more thought.

But that's the beauty of writing. You have the time to think things through. Okay, okay, that's the beauty, and the tragedy, of being an unpublished writer. No one's waiting on your manuscript.

Tags: Phillip Gold, Mystery

I'm currently working on two short stories and two novels featuring my hero, Phillip Gold. It's an interesting process. I created Mr. Gold about a decade ago while attending writing classes at a Canadian University. He's an homage to the great hard-boiled detectives of the past, like Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, but with the legal twist. Early in his career, Gold is finding the law thing isn't going so well but that he seems to have a knack for investigations. He solves a couple of cases and things start to snowball to the point where people seek him out as a PI rather than as a lawyer (see Sharon Kyle in The Gold Figure). Gold resists the shift but ends up having to accept the inevitable.

My plan is that, at some point, Gold will investigate and then represent in court, finally taking the first steps towards establishing his skills as a lawyer too. We'll see how that goes.

I made a major push last year to find an agent to represent me and Mr. Gold but to no avail. Although I got little feedback, I realised that the two first novels (Fleck and Glisters) don't start with enough punch. I need a flashier opening (since that's the only part most agents you approach will see) and then a more consistent tone. I'm getting contradictory feedback, however: many readers really like the sarcastic, witty, metaphor-filled style while others would like to see it go away entirely. We'll see, I guess.

In the meantime, I've decided to try to write a couple Gold short stories to see if I could get them published in a mystery magazine of some kind. It's always easier to sell your work once you've sold your work. Writing short stories is very different, however, from writing novels. The plots have to be more simple, the characters less fully developed and you have to keep the pace going throughout — no time for a reflective pause. Well, at least not much time. So it's a battle.

But I'm getting very helpful feedback from my old writing buddies, Ross and John, and my partner is amazingly good at spotting "inconsistencies" of both a minor and a major nature (like when a character sits down on a couch and gets up from a chair or when a character is shot in the side of the head and fall forward). I'll keep working. The first story is complete but in the revision stage while the second one is still being written.

Revision is something I really need to focus on. I tend toward verbosity and I often don't have the patience to set something aside, wait for a month or so, then go back and revise and edit it. That's what you have to do to end up with really polished writing. It's something I have to learn to do.

So now I've spent the last ten minutes reviewing and revising this blog. Can't start practicing too soon!

Tags: Phillip Gold, Writing, Mystery