Crime Plus Music

LUCY BURDETTE: If you love music, and you love the dark side of crime fiction, you will love today's post from Red friend Naomi Rand. She's introducing a new anthology called CRIME PLUS MUSIC. I'll let her tell it...welcome Naomi!

 NAOMI RAND: People love to say that modern life comes complete with its own soundtrack.  The same goes for the twenty stories in a new collection, CRIME PLUS MUSIC out this week from Three Rooms Press. The book, edited by mystery writer and Wall Street Journal music reviewer Jim Fusilli has gotten great pre-pub reviews. We talked to Jim and four of the twenty contributors, David Liss, Naomi Rand, Alison Gaylin and Gary Phillips.

Why the mix of music and crime, Jim? 

JIM FUSILLI: I had been thinking about doing a short-story collection of my own on the theme.  I’ve done a few stories for other anthologies, and I had the sections on the “Sinatra” character in my novel “Narrows Gate,” which was set in the war years, so I thought I could cover a lot of ground and a lot of different kinds of music.  But I realized it would be a fun project if I asked writers who I knew loved music to participate.  I knew it would be a more diverse collection than if I did it on my own.  It would be more fun for readers.

LUCY: Naomi, your story is about sexual assault. Is there a reason you chose this theme?   

NAOMI: Growing up in New York City when I did, you had to learn pretty early to deal with the way strange men interacted with you. Catcalls were really the least of it. I developed a definite attitude in order to defend myself from harassment. Not that it always worked. It’s a theme that resonates with me. So much so, in fact, that it’s central to my new stand-alone mystery, Girl Out of Time. As for the story I wrote, The Misfits, when Jim asked me to be part of the collection I thought of an excellent piece by Jason Cherkis that was written for HuffPost. It’s about Jackie Fox who was in the Runaways. She was sexually assaulted by their manager, raped in public and then had to leave the band. There were all sorts of stories told about it at the time, but now the truth has finally come out. I took that as the jumping off point. I will say that the beauty of writing it as fiction is that I got to write the ending my way.

NAOMI: David, your main character gains surprising strength from listening to music. It’s a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde story. Is that what you see music doing, changing the listener in some basic way?

DAVID LISS: I'd say that our identification with music can sharpen our emotions or resolve.  I think this is especially true for younger people, who often feel like songs are directly "speaking" to them, but to some degree, that capacity to identify with a song or songs never really goes away.  Of course, you can argue that the same can be said for books, film, the visual arts, but unlike other media, music is both external and deeply personal.   The ambiguity of lyrics and the unquantifiable emotional impact of tune and instrumentation and arrangement all allow for much more interpretation.  So, in my story, I don't think that the music pushes my character in any direction, so much as he draws strength and determination from a song that he feels mirrors his psychological state.

NAOMI: Gary, your story is a surreal trip down memory lane that features a reckoning with your main character’s past. You chose to write from the point of view of a musician, can you talk about that, and what led you to take him on that particular journey? 

GARY PHILLIPS: The musician in my story, Church Gibson, is inspired by the late Rick James, the King of Funk. Here was a cat who started out to be the next Hendrix and had finger-popping songs topping the charts and headlining arenas. As is too often the case in such lives, he couldn’t escape his demons, his excesses.  Not only did he have a stroke, not helped by the copious amounts of cocaine he abused, but he’d also done time for, a la Misery, imprisoning and beating a woman in his Hollywood Hills pad.  Who better then to model a very flawed individual with regrets and this soundtrack he’s been hired to compose is a way for him to redeem himself?

NAOMI: Allison, your story features the punk scene, specifically the band X which was/is fronted by a strong woman lead singer. Considering the theme of the story, it definitely resonates. Tell us a little more about that.

ALISON GAYLIN: I've been a fan of X ever since I was a teenager, and one of the big things that resonated with me about the band back then was Exene Cervenka -- she was so tough and cool in a way that many female 80s pop stars weren't. She had this wonderful brassy voice and I loved the way she harmonized with John Doe, and they both were such great writers. Their lyrics are incredible. The song mentioned in my short story, Johnny Hit and Run Paulene, is about a man who begins attacking women after taking a drug that makes him need to have sex every hour on the hour. It's an incredibly disturbing and upsetting song and, I thought, a great basis for a female revenge story.

NAOMI: Music is a big part of many people’s lives. How about you? Do you have your own personal playlist? Has music ever led you to discover something unexpected in yourself?

Crime Plus Music’s  line-up includes a stellar cast of mystery writers, among them Val McDermid, Peter Blauner, and Erica Wright. And there are contributors who have deep roots in the world of pop music, Galadrielle Allman, (Duane’s daughter), and Willy Vlautin (who fronts the band Richmond Fontaine.)

Flying By Five Pairs of Pants

RHYS BOWEN: I have always thought it would be rather fun to be part of a serial novel (how about it, fellow Jungle Reds??) so when my friends Lise McClendon and Taffy Cannon told me about their project to write a mystery with Katy Munger, Gary Phillips and Kate Flora, I was dying to see the finished product and to know how they survived without murdering each other--I mean, Gary Phillips and Taffy Cannon writing the same book? Was that even possible?

But they did it and now BEAT, SLAY, LOVE is out and available (under the pen name of Thalia Gilbert) and an awful lot of fun.  So they stopped by Jungle Red today to tell us about it.

*****

Taffy Cannon: One thing that amazed me about this project is that almost everything was conducted via email. The five of us live all over the country: San Diego, LA, Montana, North Carolina and Maine.

Kate Flora: I didn’t know everyone well, just in passing, and frankly Gary has always terrified me a bit.

Gary Phillips: Me, terrifying? It’s just what I write … those characters scare me, too.

Lise McClendon:  We know you’re just a big teddy bear, Gary.

Katy Munger: Yeah, he’s a teddy bear until you play poker with him … and then he turns into a shark.

***

Kate: Any smart and seasoned writer knows that taking chances is the best way to grow, and that embracing fun is a great antidote to the swirling pot of anxiety we mostly simmer in. So of course when the suggestion went around that we write a group novel, I said, “YES!”  We’d already done a dress rehearsal in our short story collection, Dead of Winter.

Gary: We’d worked out bare bones aspects of the plot via emails and some in-person discussions so jumping into the story wasn’t that daunting. We knew were going to do a black comedy of sorts, gallows humor -- thrills and chills but with a wink to the reader. 

Taffy: Bare bones is putting it mildly. At the beginning, all we knew was that chefs were being killed by a youngish woman with weight and vengeance issues. No outline, no character sketches, nothing but an intention to let ‘er rip. We were flying by the seats of five different pairs of pants.

Katy: To me the experience was akin to that of being a playwright. I would write the bones of the story, but then the actors would bring so much more insight and value to the body of work that it astonished me. That’s exactly what happened here.

Kate: I’ve been thinking that it was like being in a TV show’s writing room, where everyone is bouncing ideas off each other. Except we did it on paper instead of talking it out.

Lise:  Our characters evolved as we wrote, over many months. At the end I had a moment where I thought I might have been the writer who did this scene or that, who even introduced one of them. But was I? Hmmm. It was all so meshed together I couldn’t actually tell.

Katy: I’m not sure this process would work with any group of writers – had there been a control freak among us, we would have been doomed – but it sure did work with this group. By the end, we had somehow divined what each other were thinking.

Taffy: In some ways, I think Katy had the biggest challenge in pulling everything together at the end. There were – how shall I put this? – a few unresolved questions, characters, issues, and problems. Okay, more than a few.

Katy: As I read and reread what everybody wrote, I realized that there were common threads that ran through all of our contributions. After that, everything fell into place.

Lise: It didn’t matter in the end. Not one bit. Because the whole really is bigger than its parts.

Gary: I think that knowing we wanted to have fun really comes through to the reader.

Taffy: The element of fun was probably the single most important part of this project for me. I had been working on some fairly grim nonfiction, and Beat Slay Love was a lovely change of pace.

Katy: There was a sort of anonymity in the process that I think freed us up to write things we would not write under our own name alone.

Taffy:  I very carefully toned down an early sex scene that I wrote, even though we knew from the outset that this was definitely not a cozy. Others sex scenes followed that left me in their dust. We won’t name names, but at least one remarkably raunchy scene ended up on the cutting room floor.

Lise: That was the point of collaboration. Our writing styles differed, sure. Some smoothing out was necessary at the end. But each of us contributed to building these characters. So much so, that it became impossible to figure out what I wrote, what she wrote, what he wrote.

Gary: I’ve written other stories with female protagonists and I do have to pause now and then when writing from a woman’s perspective, mostly checking myself on dialogue. Snippets of certain female characters in print and on screen flash in my mind or I’ll summon up conversations between my wife and our grown daughter as a kind of reality check.

Kate: That lovely moment when it was each of our turns, and the novel arrived again with new chapters, new adventures, new twists and turns, new food, and a new region of the country. It was like simultaneously reading and writing a good book.

Taffy: We called this a mystery in the beginning, but about two-thirds of the way through I realized that structurally we were actually working within a thriller format. The killer was revealed fairly early on and we knew much of what she planned. There were multiple points of view and far flung locations. And we picked up the pacing as the story progressed, moving to shorter chapters, scenes, and paragraphs.  Without even realizing it, we had invented a new subgenre: the culinary thriller.

Lise: Beat Slay Love is one big whole that I am so proud of. What a kick-ass ride it’s been!

Beat Slay Love is the world’s first culinary thriller, credited to “Thalia Filbert” but written by Lise McClendon, Katy Munger, Gary Phillips, Kate Flora, and Taffy Cannon. All are members of the Thalia Press Author Coop (TPAC). Somebody is killing the celebrity chefs of television all around the country, and a food blogger teams with an FBI agent to solve the crimes.

RHYS: And they'd love to give away a copy to someone who comments today! So don't be shy.

Too Many Cooks? (Never!) Kate Flora on BEAT, SLAY, LOVE

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I'm delighted to introduce the lovely Kate Flora. She's one of the five ( ! ) authors from the blog Views from the Muse, who together wrote the culinary thriller BEAT, SLAY LOVE: One Chef's Hunger for Delicious Revenge together. New York Times-bestselling author Charlaine Harris says:  "For anyone who’s ever watched CHOPPED or even stopped in at Williams Sonoma, “Beat Slay Love” is the perfect read. An incredibly sly mystery, it has everything you’d want when you bite into a dish: suspense, spice, and a new take on an old classic." 

Take it away, Kate!

KATE FLORA: When a group of the authors who blog together at Views from the Muse https://thaliapressauthors.wordpress.com decided to write a novel together, anything could have happened. How could five people who live in different parts of the country, don’t know each other well, and write wildly different types of books possibly do it? How would the process work? How would we even figure out what we’d write about?

There’s an old expression that goes “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” Definitely not true in this case. With over a hundred years of writing and publishing experience, and more than 75 books among us, we might be taking on something entirely new, but we all knew how to write, edit, discuss, and collaborate. We quickly agreed on our theme: a serial killer who was knocking off famous TV chefs. Without much more of a plan than that, we embarked on what came to be called, Beat, Slay, Love, a send-up of the journey toward self-discovery, and Americans’ obsessions with celebrity culture and food, by the imaginary Thalia Filbert.

The writers:

Gary Phillips writes hardboiled tales of flawed characters and their pursuit of hollow dreams.  In addition to being part of the Beat, Slay, Love crew, he is co-editor of Occupied Earth, an anthology of life and resistance under the boot heels of the alien Mahk-Ra. http://gdphillips.com

Katy Munger has written fifteen crime fiction novels, including series in the cozy, private eye, and modern noir genres. She was a co-founder of Tart Noir. http://katymunger.com

Lise McClendon writes mystery and suspense, celebrating 20 years in print last year. Her series include an art dealer in Jackson Hole, a private eye in Kansas City, and a lawyer with five sisters in France. She also writes thrillers as Rory Tate (PLAN X) and co-owns Thalia Press with Katy Munger. http://lisemcclendon.com

Taffy Cannon has written a mainstream novel, thirteen mysteries, an Academy Award-nominated short film, and The Baby Boomer's Guide to SibCare. http://taffycannon.com

Kate Flora writes two series—strong, amateur, female PI in her Thea Kozak series and cops in her Joe Burgess police procedurals. She’s published more than fifteen crime stories. She’s been a publisher at Level Best Books and teaches writing at Grub Street in Boston. http://kateflora.com

The process was simple: each of us would write a section, then pass the book along to the next author. Sometimes there was a pause while extra chapters were added in, or a discussion about the order of various events. Barbecue in Texas before or after lobsters in Maine? 

Sometimes different writer’s versions of the same character needed to be discussed and revised—was Jason Bainbridge a schlump or a hipster? Would he ever get together with the icy FBI agent? Or might she thaw? How hefty was our protagonist? Was it possible so many had done her wrong, and how had they done it? 

Still, even though it took a couple years, and involved a lot of work at the end to smooth it out and find just the right ending, it proved, as one writer observed, to be a lot more fun than we’d imagined.

The result? A book we’re all proud of. Read an excerpt here: http://wp.me/P2PnOF-2j

To celebrate we’ve put together a cookbook of party recipes called Thalia Filbert’s Killer Cocktail Party. To get a copy, send a quick note to Thalia (our pseudonymous five-person author) at thaliapress@gmail.com.

Beat Slay Love: One Chef’s Hunger for Delicious Revenge

by Thalia Filbert

Thalia Press     October 1, 2015

•    To order the book for Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015BQUZCK

•    To add it to your Goodreads shelf: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26258450-beat-slay-love

•    To request a paperback at your local independent bookstore: ask for ISBN: 978-0-9819442-1-0

•    To buy a paperback online: https://www.createspace.com/5737186

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you so much, Kate! Reds and lovely readers, do you think you could write a novel in collaboration with others? (I keep thinking of the phrase, "Plays well with others".... ) Do you do best solo or as part of a team? Please tell us in the comments!

WonderCon! (Part Two): a guest blog by Dana Cameron

Catriona McPherson is the winner of Hallie Ephron's There Was An Old Woman and Terri Ponce is the winner of S.J. Bolton's Dead Scared! Ladies, please send your contact information to me, Julia, at juliaspencerfleming - you guess the rest - dot com.

  JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: You know what we like here at JRW? Mysteries. Sexy archeologists. Tough, smart heroines. Werewolves. And, of course, our friend Dana Cameron, who combines all of the above and more into her new FANGBORN series. Here she is with the second half of her love letter to all things geekish: 

 

WonderCon! (Part Two)

Last weekend I was in southern California promoting my new book, SevenKinds of Hell. I did an event at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, then trained it to Anaheim to participate on a panel and signing at WonderCon. WonderCon has been described as the baby brother of Comic-Con and is a long weekend devoted to celebrating science fiction, fantasy, horror, comics, movies, TV, etc. (you can get a good idea about the event by checking out my Femmes Fatales blog here, where I show some of the awesome costumes. Here you can see the Mysterious Galaxy RB crew dressed a la The Night Circus. 

While you could just spend the day people-watching, playing character bingo: Dr. Who characters are very big this year, and Star Wars remains popular (I wish I'd gotten a picture of the guy with the middle-aged paunch walking around in a Boba Fett  helmet, bathrobe, pajama bottoms, and slippers—a bounty-hunter with a mug of coffee before work). The costumes range from masks to professional-quality make-up and props. Like this bug monster, who went around on stilts. That's dedication! 

 

There are also panels. People line up for hours to get to see a panel on the Joss Whedon “Much Ado about Nothing.” But there are a wide variety of discussions about writing comics (and suspense and SF/F and horror), what it's like to work with a famous character like Superman, writing movies and TV shows. There are panels discussing how to make the best Star Trek costumes and how soundtrack music is created. And there are panels on social topics, such as women geeks forming networks to meet other geeks and have fun with crafting, fandoms, and politics. 

 

I didn't have time to see many panels, but in addition to my panel, “Criminally Entertaining” with Gary Phillips and Stephen Blackmoore,  I went to a panel on writing fantasy for YA, with the wonderful Nancy Holder (the bestselling, prize-winning Sherlockian who, among so many things, writes dark young adult dark fantasy series and books based on such shows as Highlander, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and a raft of others; you can see her here with me and Sherlockian and literary historian Les Klinger. The panel that I was very excited about, however, was the one on the Buffy comics. That featured writer Jane Espenson, about whom I am simply crazy. Not only did she work on Buffy and Angel and Torchwood. She worked on two of my all-time favorite shows, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Hearing her talk about the difference between writing for TV and writing for comics almost blew my mind. And, when I just happened to be looking for a comic that she'd worked on (I picked up the one based on Husbands), the guy making the sale said, “Oh, she's signing up front now.” 

 

“WHERE UP FRONT?”

“Um, the table right there?”

“SHE'S THERE NOW?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Holy—!” I grabbed my book and ran.

As I got to the table, I tried to play it, well, not cool—polite. Tried to be. WonderCon is a huge event, and Ms. Espenson been doing panels and signings non-stop. So I just said, “I've loved your work forever. Thank you. I'm looking forward to reading this.”

“And would you like me to inscribe it to—oh,” she said, noticing my ID tag, which has my name on it. “You have a name!” 

 

See, not every attendee's tag has a name. “Professionals” do. I was there as a “Professional.”

I just caught myself before I said, “Yes, I'm a professional! Like you! Well, not like you, but...well, I'm Dana, and I write, too! And my new book just came out, and I'm wicked excited, and I'm so excited to meet you, and omigod, I LOOOOOOOVED BSG so much, and Buffy was a huge influence, and I LOOOOOOVE Joss Whedon and what was it like—?”

Because if I went down that road, I would have gone into a full fan-girl melt-down. Which I would have been happy to do; I own my geekitude. But a line was forming behind me, so I just said: “Yes. 'To Dana,' please. And thank you for everything.”

I made sure I said hello and thank-you-for-signing to her co-author, Brad Bell, asked for a picture, then left. Five feet off the ground. 

 

And that's what a large part about WonderCon is about—what any convention is about. Getting to share an enthusiasm, pick up a few new ones, and sometimes getting to say “thank you” to someone who made an impact your life.

Do you geek, dear readers? (Or, if you're the same generation as Dana and the Reds, were you a nerd?) Tell us of your fannish enthusiasms, and one lucky commenter will win a copy of SEVEN KINDS OF HELL!

You can find out more about Dana and read excerpts from her books at her website. Dana blogs at Dana's Notebook as well as at Femmes Fatales, and you can also also find her at Facebook and on Twitter as @danacrmn.