What's in a Name

RHYS BOWEN:

I was doing a book signing last week and someone asked me about my character names in the Royal Spyness series. Do you make up some of those really ridiculous names? She asked. “They can’t be real.”

The answer is that I do make up some of my ridiculously English names—Hortense Horze-Gorzley for example. But they are no more ridiculous than some real upper class English names I have known. I was at school with a girl called Amanda Featherstonehaugh-Skelley (pronounced Fanshaw-Skelley).  You can’t really beat that, can you? And then there are the silly nicknames that seemed to litter every aristocratic family. My husband’s family has a slew of cousins with crazy nicknames including Fig, Dudh, Podge, Toots and a distinguished elderly lady called Puff.

Names are important to me. Elmore Leonard said, ““Once I know the name, I know the character.” And I completely agree. Sometimes the name comes to me the moment a character walks into my consciousness. Other times I have to search for the right name. Sometimes I get it wrong. Things don’t go well. The story plods along slowly. And then the character turns to me and says “Why do you keep calling me Richard when my name is Ronald?” I switch the name and the story leaps forward merrily.

As you can tell in the Royal Spyness books I love having fun with my characters’ names. I have a very naughty older woman called Virginia in my latest book, Heirs and Graces. I had a French inspector in Naughty in Nice who wore squeaky shoes and whose name was LaFitte.

And I have a confession to make. Sometimes I use a name as revenge. We writers have a great way of getting back at people who have annoyed or slighted us in real life—we turn them into characters in our books. So in Heirs and Graces I have turned my really horrible headmistress at school into the butler. In real life she was overbearing so it gives me great pleasure to have reduced her to a servant. I know of other authors who have killed off real life ex-husbands on the page.

So I’m curious, Reds. How much trouble do you take over names in your books? Have you ever taken revenge on a real person in your life by making something bad happen to them in your books? Do tell all….

LUCY BURDETTE: I don't spend too much time on this Rhys. I try not to have a lot of names beginning with the same letter. And I don't mind changing a name as I need to while I'm writing along. The worst name faux pas I had was realizing I'd changed the name of a character between AN APPETITE FOR MURDER and DEATH IN FOUR COURSES. It was too late to do anything about it--they were both already published. And no one seems to have noticed--or at least no one has complained.

HALLIE EPHRON: I confess, I do not take a lot of time with names. Usually a name just comes to me, I go with it, and if I need to change it later, well that's why the good lord gave us Search and Replace. No, I would never take revenge on a real person by making something bad happen to them in my book. Really no. Never.

The challenge is when I've auctioned naming rights to a character, trying to fit someone's given name to one of my characters. Because once you give  a character a name, well, along with it come baggage. Just for example, name a character Hortense and there are certain things she simply would not do.

ROSEMARY HARRIS: I nearly made an annoying neighbor a wifebeater in one of my books - but I came to my senses. No..no revenge naming.

With five major female characters in The Bitches of Brooklyn it was challenging to make their names reveal something about them in a time when every girl seemed to be named Heather or Jennifer. So I went back further..to their parents and used some of their (doesn't show on the page) backstory  - ethnic background, socio-economic class, etc to decide on Rachel, Clare, Tina, Jane and Abigail. Hopefully they are memorable enough to keep all of there women straight!

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  Like Rhys, I do take a lot of trouble with names. I'm always making lists--I love movie and TV credits for this.  Sometimes the names for characters comes instantly, and sometimes  I struggle through an entire book to get it right. I don't think I've ever done revenge-naming (sounds like fun, though.) But I hate giving a name I like to a character I don't like.  The trick for the reader would be to figure out which names I like...

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Yep, I'm in the takes-forever-to-name-characters camp. I have a  "Name bible" spreadsheet with the names and some info on all the characters I've had in the series to date, with an index listing the first and last names in alphabetical order AND a numerical count of how many times I use a starting letter. For some reason, I seem to revert to K names. I have to watch that.

Sometimes, I wind up using the name of a friend or family member as a place-holder, only to find that it's become THE name of the character in my head. That's how my friend Ben Beagle, editor of the Livingston County News, became investigative reporter Ben Beagle of the Glens Falls Post Star. I had written about half of I SHALL NOT WANT when I realized I couldn't come up with a better name for a "dogged" newshound...

RHYS: So dear readers, please confess... do character names matter to you? Does it spoil your enjoyment of a book when a character is given a name that doesn't go with her personality--a sexy heroine called Mildred, for example?

   

Get this party started!

ROSEMARY HARRIS: Truth be told this party has been warming up since last Tuesday at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York where the launch party for MWA's latest anthology was held. Vengeance, edited by Lee Child, features stories by Michael Connelly, Karin Slaughter, Dennis Lehane, Zoe Sharp, Alafair Burke and a dozen others.

Next up was the Edgars Agents and editors party on Wednesday where Reds Lucy and Ro helped celebrate Hallie's second Mary Higgins Clark nomination. Thursday Edgar Judge Ro got to strut her stuff in a Mad Men style dress at the annual Edgars banquet (that's me with Meredith Cole, Erin Weston and Raven winner Molly Weston waiting for our limo!)- a list of all of the Edgar winners here http://theedgars.com/nominees.html
...and on Friday a trio of JRs headed south for Malice Domestic.

LUCY BURDETTE: We are delighted to report that our own Red, Rhys Bowen, won the Agatha teapot for best historical mystery, Naughty in Nice, Lucy (aka Roberta Isleib) did not come home with a teapot but was thrilled to be nominated for best short story!


HANK PHLLIPPI RYAN: Yay, Rhys! And Roberta, too--that's fantastic! (Oooh, and I'm nominated for three Emmys! For investigative reporting.) Party on!

ROSEMARY: Are you in party mode yet? Well, if you didn't make any of those events, this week on JR we're continuing the celebration by sharing our swag from those parties and hosting our own virtual Cinco de Mayo party on Saturday. Every day this week three lucky commenters will win books and bags from this season's mystery parties.

What's up this week?Tuesday - My trip to Highclere Castle, the real Downton Abbey
Wednesday - a visit from novelist Daniel Judson, who will share information on his latest cutting edge publishing venture with Amazon
Thursday - The Return of Kale (you know how the JRs love food!)
Friday - your official invitation to the Cinco de Mayo party
Saturday - Party On! Best outfit wins a bag of books
Sunday - Do we still love Don Draper?

So in honor of the release of Vengeance - tell us what you'd do - big, small, real or (hopefully) fiction - to get back at someone who did you wrong!

Three winners will receive copies of the book.

(Monday through Friday winners announced on Saturday, Saturday's winners announced on Sunday.)

It's an Honor to be Nominated by Steve Ulfelder

 LUCY BURDETTE: We writers have some really special moments and one of them is getting nominated for an award. (Right now, Hallie's book COME AND FIND ME is nominated for the Mary HIggins Clark award, and Rhy's NAUGHTY IN NICE is nominated for a Malice Domestic's Agatha award for best historical novel, and my story "The Itinerary" is nominated for an Agatha for best short story.) One of our good New England friends has a book nominated for an Edgar best first novel--as you've heard in other blog posts, we'd all kill for to land an Edgar. Instead of wallowing in envy, we're so thrilled for Steve. And as he's going to tell us, there's nothing better than the days and weeks before the winner is announced.

STEVE ULFELDER: While waiting for a panel at Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis, I struck up a conversation with a guy who looked even more overwhelmed than I was by the
massive conference. (No mean feat, that - I'm easily overwhelmed. It's my
natural state.)

We had a lot in common. Like me, the guy was from Massachusetts. Like me, he'd recently seen his debut novel published. And like me, he was - I remember this great line - "waiting for the parade to come by my house." Unspoken follow-up: It would be unwise to hold your breath waiting for that particular parade.

The guy turned out to be Leonard Rosen. His debut was the brilliant All Cry Chaos. And half a year after that Bouchercon meeting, the two of us are up for the Best First Novel Edgar.

Small world.

Funny thing, publishing your debut. It's the biggest moment of your life. People tell you you're pretty great. You are queen or king for precisely 24 hours (release day) plus the duration of your launch party.

And then.

The wheel keeps rolling. The machine grinds on. The next batch of writers, debut and otherwise, get their turn. Their reviews are (at least) as good as yours, their blurbs (at least) as impressive.

So you take one last glance out front just in case there is a parade going past (there isn't), then do what writers do: plop yourself in the chair and work on another book. A better book.

As it turns out, Len Rosen and I have become friends. We bump into each other at panels, conferences, and festivals, and I'm always happy to see him. Len, who has the right perspective on life in general, is quick to point out the true value of an Edgar nomination: It serves as validation
from folks you very much admire that your book is good, that it does stand out.

And boy, do this year's Best First nominees - my competition, I guess, though I (naively?) don't view them that way - stand out. I read them all, starting with All Cry Chaos, and damn are they fine books. Edward Conlon's Red on Red, David Duffy's Last to Fold, and Lori Roy's Bent Road are utterly different from one another. And they're all ridiculously strong.

I'm honored that Purgatory Chasm is among them.

Here's the part where you roll your eyes while I insist I truly mean it: I  feel like I've won by being nominated. This week's Edgar Awards in New York will be a blast, icing on somebody's cake, but it's the nomination that made my year.

Knock it off with the eyes. I mean it! Truly!

After all, I got a nice bump in sales. I've received congrats from writers I admire. I'll benefit from the Edgar Finalist Author tag for the duration of my career.

Which, when you think about it, means I got a parade after all.


Steve Ulfelder is an amateur race driver and co-owner of Flatout Motorsports Inc., a company that builds race cars. In addition to being nominated for MWA's Best First Novel Edgar, his debut, Purgatory Chasm, has been named Best First Mystery of 2011 by RT Book Reviews. His second novel, The Whole Lie, comes out May 8.

Our own Hank Phillippi Ryan will be moderating a panel of the Edgar best first nominees this Wednesday--including Steve!

Traveler's Tales

RHYS BOWEN: I had planned to devote this week to travel because I'm about to embark on a book tour with Cara Black, who writes the fabulous Parisian mysteries and will be my guest on Wednesday.

Then fellow JRW Rosemary Harris announced that she was just popping off to Dar Es Salaam to visit the library in Tanzania that she created with her husband and I was reminded what a terribly peripatetic group we are. (See I know long words even if I can't spell them) Deb spends half her time in London, Hallie and Rosemary are outdoor nuts, Jan goes to civilized places like Provence, Lucy to Key West, (Julia is chained to child rearing at the moment and Hank is perpetually busy but does zoom around the country to writers events.)

I had the travel gene in me from birth, from the time I wandered into the sea wearing only my sun hat and would have kept on going if I hadn't been rescued when it came up to my neck. At twelve I went from London to Vienna alone. More trips across Europe followed. I left England to go to Australia at 24--a place that had always haunted my dreams. Luckily I met a man who worked for an airline so we've traveled all our lives. When I've been at home for about a month I find myself staring up at a passing airplane and thinking "I wonder where that is heading?"

I've cris-crossed most of the world but I find the trips that stay with me are not those that go smoothly. My travel memories are more about things that go wrong. It's the adventure of the thing. So I'm asking Jungle Reds and our visitors today to share their most memorable travel experiences:

My own: I vividly remember every detail of going by jeep into Ladakh when there was no real road and we had a maniac driver who tried to switch off the engine to save gas while going down an unpaved 15,000 foot pass. I remember an overnight in a first class sleeper with my daughter and a disgusting old man who drank red wine from a big coke bottle, made noises and asked to borrow my comb for his long greasy hair. My daughter, the sweetest natured of all my kids, whispered to me, "When he's not looking stab him with the fruit knife."

Of course I have lovely memories too, but I'm going to be discussing my 5 most beautiful places on Earth later in the week, so start thinking of yours.

LUCY BURDETTE: Stab him with the fruit knife? that's priceless Rhys! I'd hate to tangle with your other kids:). Probably my most adventurous trip was a church mission trip to La Romana, in the Dominican Republic. We stayed in a dorm-like arrangement with one bathroom for about 20 women. For some reason, we had to spit our toothbrushing liquid into a giant garbage can. But compared to the folks who actually lived there, we had it made. I'd never seen such poverty in my life--we were helping to build a hospital for Haitian immigrants, who were not allowed to use the regular hospital. The building conditions were primitive--no elevators to move supplies up to higher levels so we had to shovel gravel up, several stages at a time. It was utterly exhausting and humbling and I don't believe I slept a minute the entire week.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Most-memorable-bad, you mean? I suppose it was all in the line of duty, and I try to think of it as being a team player. I was assigned to cover the Super Bowl when the Patriots played the Bears, in New Orleans. It was all fine for the beginning of the week, even though we worked around the clock, editing all night, shooting all day, and appeared on every newscast. Still, it was fun and exciting. At first, we stayed at the Intercontinental. It was gorgeously luxurious, the whole place smelled fabulous, it had millions of high thread count pillows and sheets, there was such lovely soap, I still remember, I was hoarding it like mad.

But. Our station had failed to plan on so many of us staying thought the weekend, so at the last minute, we had to move out of our lovely hotel. You can imagine that New Orleans was fully booked for Super Bowl weekend, so we would up billeted on a river boat that was in the process of being renovated into a hotel.

Note I said in the process.Can you imagine staying someplace that is under construction? On a BOAT, that is UNDER CONSTRUCTION? It was a horror. Dark, only the dimmest of lights, freezing, no heat, clammy, no rugs, no hangers, no drawers, no curtains, no towels--only some thin pitiful little gray washcloths. It didn't matter, because there was no hot water. The beds were cots. There was no food, at all. I kept a coat on all the time, and never took off my shoes, because I'm sure the floor was crawling with whatever. It was as bleak as bleak could be. It was January, and SO COLD even in NO, and we were on the river so it was windy, too.
We were EXHAUSTED, working every minute, and to come back to that prison of a pseudo-hotel, tired and starving and oh, I just remember almost bursting into tears.

HALLIE EPHRON: Oh, what a shame! How to spoil New Orleans.

My husband and I are amateur birders, and one of our best trips ever was to Costa Rica where we stayed at a biological reserve in the Corcovado National Park. Our "room" was a tent platform - electricity after 8, no hot water. Very basic meals. We saw the MOST AMAZING wildlife. Toucans and scarlet macaws and howler monkeys and and and... ants. Lots of them. Parading into our tent, under the mosquito netting to get at my husband's breath mints. They bite.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Back in the 80's and early 90's, Ross's father made a sort of avocation of going to time-share presentations (this was in the glory days of the time share condo) and picking up free vacations, which he would frequently donate to us, the young married couple. As a result, we went on quite a few four-day, three-night holidays to sunny spots.

One year, he gave us a more extended trip to Manzanillo, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Overall a good time, it was a trip with many memorable moments: We got picked up at the airport by the resort shuttlebus. We were the only passengers. We drove and drove and DROVE and drove through what seemed, to our Maine-trained eyes, dense jungle. Ross was convinced we had been kidnapped. We finally arrived at a fairly luxurious resort - but we were the ONLY people there.

Turned out it was off-season. Way off-season. In fact, it was the rainy season, which we found out when we took our complimentary topless VW bug into town to sightsee...and had to bail it out before driving back to the resort. We spent the week feeling rather like secluded drug lords, walking through beautifully decorated empty rooms, sunbathing by the empty pool (which would get covered in leaves after every passing rain storm) eating, alone, in the Palapa restaurant, while rain dripped off the palm thatching. One thing I'll say - we had EXCELLENT SERVICE.

RHYS: Julia, that is so weird because exactly the same happened to my daughter on her honeymoon. Also out of Manzanillo, miles of jungle. When they arrived there was nobody to greet them except for a Dachshund who escorted them to the reception area. They signed in then found a palapa and went to sleep. All week they were the only guests and food and margaritas miraculously appeared. They said it was lovely but creepy at the same time. I wonder if it was the same place?

JAN BROGAN - The year was 1978 and I was in school in Aix-in-Provence traveling through Italy with a friend who did not know enough to NOT TALK TO MEN WHO FOLLOW YOU FROM THE TRAIN STATION. So this guy followed us all the way to our pensionne, up three flights of stairs. Here, he finally caught on that I was telling my friend to ignore him, and as punishment, he grabbed my crotch. Reflexively, I pushed him away and he tumbled down the stairs. We rang the doorbell of the pensionne and banged on the door, hoping like hell, they door would open before the guy at the base of the stairs, furious now, could recover. Door opened in the knick of time and we scrambled inside.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Traveling all over England and Scotland on a coach (bus) pass on my own a year or so after I graduated from college. I'd worked for a year to save up for the trip, but still, the money didn't go very far. B&Bs with nasty nylon sheets and the only heat came from coin-metered electric heaters. These were the sort of places that rationed hot water, too--the boiler was only on an hour or two morning and evening. I was always wet and cold. The food was generally horrible, and nobody talked to me. One night on a coach layover in Birmingham, I ate in an Indian restaurant near the coach station. A rat ran over my table. I must say that put me off Indian food for many a year...

Obviously, the entire experience didn't put me off Britain, and I can now look back on it with a tiny bit of nostalgic gloss. But I like my hot water and down comforters these days.


RHYS: Your turn, friends. Share your most memorable experience. The best comment will win a signed copy of NAUGHTY IN NICE.

The Depressing Nature of True Crime

RHYS BOWEN:On Tuesdays we usually focus on true crime, and one thing that always strikes me about real crimes is how mindless, violent and random they are. We work hard to come up with clever crimes, devious motives when we know that in real life most criminals are stupid and most crimes are committed in panic and without much planning. And recently no crime was more stupid or random than the riots that swept England. As an expatriot Brit I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the images on my TV—gangs of young people randomly torching vehicles and homes, smashing windows, looting from small stores—essentially turning on their neighbors. The media says they are frustrated and bored and jobless, so don’t they realized they have damaged the very businesses that might have employed them?
And the killing blow for me in all this—the one business that was not looted? Waterstones book store. Nobody apparently thought that books are worth stealing. They’ve probably never read a book in their lives.
I find this horribly depressing and a good example of a school system where the only aim is to make students feel good, never reprimand, certainly never fail them. So they grow up feeling entitled to everything and are angry when everything is not handed to them on a plate.
End of rant. I’m supposed to be feeling full of joy today because my new book, Naughty in Nice, is in stores and I set out on tour on Friday. One thing I’d like to share is how real life stories are often the basis for our fictional crimes. This book takes place on the Riviera in 1933. During my research I wanted to find out who had really been on the Riviera that winter and found one of the people was Coco Chanel. What’s more around that time she gave a fashion show blending the masculine and feminine. Her models wore tweed jackets borrowed from her lover, the Duke of Westminster, coupled with silk and lace and jewelry borrowed from Queen Mary. When I read that it was too good not to include in my story. The connection with Queen Mary came through Chanel’s business partner, Vera Bate Lombardi, who was the queen’s illegitimate (but acknowledged) niece. Sometimes in our research we come upon a plum. And I’ll make sure my crimes remain clever and elegant and not at all true to life.