Real mystery stories from the folks who make them up

HALLIE EPHRON: I thought it was brilliant the moment I heard it: a collection of stories by mystery writers writing about real mysteries in their lives. When its editor Victoria Zackheim, approached me to contribute a piece, I knew exactly what real mystery I  wanted to write about. For decades I'd been puzzling over a dear friend's experience communicating with her beloved brother who'd tragically been killed months earlier. Writing about it was my own journey of discovery. Rhys wrote an essay for the collection as well, a fascinating piece about why she was destined to write about World War II. We're joined by an amazing roster of mystery writers.

I was especially thrilled to get a chance to work with Victoria, who's edited numerous wonderful anthologies.

The result, "PRIVATE INVESTIGATONS: Mystery writers on the secrets, riddles, and wonders in their lives" is just out this week and Victoria joins us.

Exciting news: the book is an Amazon BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH!

VICTORIA ZACKHEIM:  Dear Reds, I hope you and yours are safe, healthy, and out of harm’s way. And thank you, Hallie, for inviting me!

I’m just back from a 7am market run—love that one-hour, Seniors Only time slot—and was keenly aware when the guy at the meat counter wrapped my order…and he wasn’t wearing a mask. What to do? Cooking kills the virus, yes? When I arrived at the check-out area, I returned the package. Too careful? Is there such a thing?

This brings me to life’s mysteries, which we’re all quickly learning can…and will…appear at the most unexpected times. 

And, not so coincidentally, is a nifty segue into…

When I create an anthology and begin the process of editing the essays, no matter what their focus, I’m always driven into my own process of introspection. Whether the subject is body image or how we use humor to soften the pain after losing a loved one, the explorations of the authors launch me into my own journey.

Such was the case with Private Investigations: Mystery Writers on the Secrets, Riddles, and Wonders in Their Lives. I waited for the essays to arrive, expecting they would be fascinating. What I did not expect was that they would become a foot firmly placed in the small of my back, nudging and shoving until I was willing to look at my own life-changing mysteries. But…were they mysteries? Did these events shape me into the woman I am today?

The writers in this book have lived, are living, dramatic and life-altering experiences. Can I say the same? And honestly, what constitutes a mystery? Something that surprises? What about something that is the source of despair or joy? Falling in love, surviving illness, basking in the warmth of friendship. The expected and the serendipitous. Holding a newborn for the first time. For me, these are mysteries!

I remember sitting with my mother when she took her last breath. Nearly ninety, she had become increasingly angry that her final years were so difficult. An artist who could no longer paint, a political activist whose voice had been stilled, she felt locked within the walls of her home and her failing body. And then, finally, she was at peace. And still I struggled with the why of it. Oh, my complicated, brilliant mother. Who she was will always remain a mystery in my life.

In this collection, twenty exceptional mystery writers share their own personal secrets, riddles and wonders. Their…mysteries.

Let me offer a few examples. Hallie Ephron visits a spiritualist in the hope of understanding her friend’s claims to have spoken with her murdered brother. Sulari Gentill discovers an uncle in Sri Lanka whose existence was kept a secret, until she stumbles upon a family photograph. Rachel Howzell Hall is living her life balancing writing, family, and career, until a new word joins her lexicon: cancer. We often experience confusion and mystery when there’s violence in our lives. Connie May Fowler recalls her abuse at the hands of her mother, the social pressures she felt as a childless woman, and a recent illness that was frightening, yet reminded her of the kindness of strangers. Difficult experiences for all? Yes, but they persevered and thrived.

Life teaches us such varied lessons, some of which are cloaked in mystery, such as our quest for truth and how we respond to love and loss. This pandemic has certainly unearthed emotions—fears, questions about mortality, a new look at what matters in life—and is leaving many of us confused and on edge. Living in a time of war is frighteningly similar. And yet, at the same time, both pandemic and war remind us of our resilience and courage, even when we’re facing the unknown. 

As Rhys Bowen says in her essay about the human spirit in wartime, My world was filled with wonder, but also with change and uncertainty.

We often see mystery as we work to adjust to our place in the world. Ausma Zehanat Khan, an international human rights attorney, explores the mystery of her origins and her family’s long and complicated journey that brought her to America.

As you read these stories—I resist calling them essays, because the label suggests something impersonal, perhaps even cold, whereas these narratives are rich with warmth and intimacy, sharing and trust—you will hear each author’s voice, share each story. You might frown, sigh, laugh out loud. That’s the magic of personal essays: they’re so damn personal!

If a mystery is an enigma that we must unravel, then I have experienced many. As, I am sure, you have as well.

What are your personal mysteries? What have you seen, survived, and experienced that has made you who you are today? Perhaps the writers in this anthology will churn up old memories that make you smile, even weep. The point is, you will feel. And as you discover elements of yourself, you might also begin to understand how important all of us are…and the essential part everyone plays in this mysterious theater we call life.

Please share your mysteries! And above all, be safe and well!

HALLIE: What are your personal mysteries? Something that disappeared or was unexpectedly found? Something that happened that shouldn't have. Something you couldn't explain...

PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS edited by Victoria Zackheim,  published by Seal Press
In this thrilling anthology, bestselling mystery writers abandon the cloak of fiction to investigate the suspenseful secrets in their own lives. Contributors include Tasha Alexender, Cara Black, Rhys Bowen, Lynn Cahoon, Steph Cha, Jeffrey Deaver, Carole Nelson Douglas, Robert Dugoni, Hallie Ephron, Connie May Fowler, Sulari Gentill, Rachel Howzell Hall, Ausma Khan, William Kent Kreuger, Caroline Leavitt, Kristen Lepionka, Martin Limón, Anne Perry, Charles Todd, and Jacqueline Winspear.

Read this. Because Rachel Howzell Hall!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: One of MY favorite writerly things?  I could list them, and will. But topping my list? Rachel Howzell Hall. (Although she’s less a “thing” and more a “force of nature.”) (And see below--you could win her book!)

A Few of My Favorite (Writerly) Things

By Rachel Howzell Hall

It’s so easy to be negative. And really, I like negative—I’m a crime writer living in Los Angeles Can’t get more ‘abandon hope all ye enter’ than that. And also, 2016 will go down as a year that has sucked in so many ways. From politics (talk about abandoning hope) to untimely deaths (Prince and Bowie? Take your drunk behind home, 2016, cuz we’re done with you running over our heroes), from cataclysmic storms to the helium shortage, there’s so many opportunities to be an Eeyore.

Books, though? Books remain bright spots for me. And so, I shall switch things up and look for the positive.  Herewith are a few of my favorite writing things:

Someone to Root For

The world loves a square-jawed hero and a beautiful heroine who knows the Pythagorean Theorem, rescues poodles and orphans while saving the world from fascist sea-otter killers. But if you’re like me and have more than 27 pages of book titles on your Kindle alone, do you want to read about their perfection every day? I don’t. Nor do I want to always read about the lone detective who always goes off the grid, always gets the girl, always drinks whiskey and always listens to jazz.

When I developed LAPD Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton, I wanted her to win and to lose, to be adept and clumsy, to follow the rules and still get in trouble. I wanted to see me in the story, and I wanted to wonder what I would do in that situation?

Right now, I’m reading Road Out of Hell by Anthony Flacco about serial killer Gordon Stewart Northcott murdering people at his chicken ranch outside of Los Angeles while also holding his nephew Sanford Clark captive. It is one of the most horrific… Every page, I hold my breath and will Sanford to run away, I want him, need him to survive. I want the happy ending—and I normally hate happy endings. That’s because the Flacco makes me care so much about Sanford.

In TRAIL OF ECHOES, I want you to root for Lou, to root for the girls, in such hopeless conditions. During Chanita Lords’ investigation, Lou visits her old middle school:

Tori had been missing during my time at this school, and now, standing here, my hands cramped from remembering the journaling, the crying and the not crying, the numbness . . . I didn’t want to be at Madison. And as Colin and I walked those corridors, grief crushed my heart like it had so many years ago.

New Places within the Old

New York is a great city. But Manhattan can’t be the only place in the world for mystery, can it? Los Angeles is a great city—more than Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Almost four million people populate the city alone. That means almost four million different stories spread out over 503 square miles. Attica Locke gave me Houston in Pleasantville and Black Water Rising. M.P. Cooley took me to upstate New York in her June Lyons series.

In the Lou Norton series, I offer you Los Angeles south of the 10 freeway, south of Hollywood. A world of never-ending fish-fry and barbecue joints, churches and barber shops, beauty supply and liquor stores. Black wealth and black poverty within a mile of each other. In TRAIL OF ECHOES, a Second Line jazz funeral takes place in the middle of this part of this city.  

After five minutes of weaving in and out for nearly three blocks, and with Angeles Funeral Home now in sight, I worked my way to the sidewalk. Almost every face was partially hidden by hats, umbrellas, and handkerchiefs. People crowding the street. Brass band playing. Mourners singing and shouting. Brass bells tinkling from push- cart ice- cream vendors.

This random thing really happened in Los Angeles. Seriously: You can’t pin this city down.

Great Language

Style: not everyone has it. Some writers consider style to be lists—descriptions of clothes that go on and on and your eyes blur and you start skipping around the page because you just don’t care and then, you die.

And then some writers use words that make you want to read over and over again, and you wish that you had written that. You say, “She had fun performing that trick. Sat back and nodded, said, yeah, that’s it.’” In TRAIL OF ECHOES, one of my favorite passages to write was:

Optimism. For cutters like Brooks and murder police like me, optimism was a condition as rare as hens’ teeth. Happy endings? What were those? If I was standing anywhere near you that meant shit had just gone left, your life had changed forever, and there’d be no happy ending.

I loved writing (then re-writing) that passage. See, there’s a contract between me (the reader) and the author. You, Author, will tell me a story. It will be a good story. It will make me laugh. It will make me cry. I will shout, ‘Amen’ and ‘Gurl, don’t open that door cuz HE’S IN THE HOUSE!’ At the end, I will sigh and say, “That was good for me, was that good for you?” And then, I will buy your next book. I want to buy your next book. Help me buy your next book. Talk pretty to me.

A Mission

I’m not saying that good books must preach. In my opinion, good books present a problem and enlist me [the reader] to journey beside the heroine to solve the problem. In Gone Girl, we considered domestic abuse and false reporting. In All the Light We Cannot See, we had to reconcile the goodness of a young boy on the wrong side of World War II. Tell me what you believe, what’s bothering you, what you want me to reconsider. Everyone’s a hero in her own story. Everyone’s a villain in someone else’s story. Make me pick the side I thought I hated.

In TRAIL OF ECHOES, Lou deals with the sexualization of girls, missing fathers, bullies, gentrification and much more. At the start of the investigation, her partner Colin Taggert mentions that a girl had been found murdered in the park. Lou’s response:

Just last week, over in Inglewood, a teen girl had been abducted from her driveway; and in Gardena, another teen had been kidnapped by her stepfather. And then there was Trina Porter, the fourteen- year- old stolen earlier this month from a bookstore near my old neighborhood. We had no clue where Trina was or if she was even alive. So again: which girl?

Her mission: winnow down the list of possible dead teenaged Jane Does. And wonder why so many dead teenaged Jane Does. Throw in race and class, and she now has a problem bigger than this one case.

I like caring about the people in books. I enjoy language that makes me forget that I’m reading. I appreciate new settings and reasons to care. These are a few of my favorite things.

What are yours? (Rachel will award TRAIL OF ECHOES to one lucky commenter!)

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:   I have to go back and read this again. It's SUCH a treat. Okay, yeah. All this. And when something isn't what it seems. When you find exactly the right word. When the metaphor creates itself. (Oh--that's META!)  When you have the bad guy there all the time--and even you, the author, doesn't see him. (or her.) When you read something and think--oh, I NEVER would have thought of that. Or--when you think of it first.

How about you, Reds?

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Trail of Echoes is the third novel in the acclaimed Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton series by Rachel Howzell Hall

RACHEL HOWZELL HALL is the author of the Detective Elouise Norton series. The third novel in the series, Trail of Echoes, will be published this May.  Land of Shadows and Skies of Ash (Forge) were included on the Los Angeles Times’ “Books to Read This Summer” for 2014 and 2015, and the New York Times called Lou Norton “a formidable fighter—someone you want on your side.” A featured writer on NPR’s acclaimed ‘Crime in the City’ series, Rachel also served as a mentor in AWP’s Writer to Writer Program and is currently a member of the Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

What I Know for Sure

Hank Phillippi Ryan:  Lee Child said Rachel Howzell Hall’s “Detective Elouise Norton is the best new character you'll meet this year.”  Publishers Weekly raved:

“Dead-on dialogue and atmospheric details help propel a tale full of tormenting moral issues.”

      We bonded first over our shared editor—then in person, each of us talking a mile a minute, at Bouchercon. Her new book SKIES OF ASH is just out, and it is amazing. May I just say—her voice is like nothing you’ve ever read.   Here’s a snippet from an earlier book:

             "Resentments are quiet, evil things--snails in a vegetable garden. They chew away at your heart and you never realize that you’re the mean old lady who never smiles and yells at kids to stay off her lawn.”

Ah.

Rachel’s on book tour now—check her website to find where to meet her in person. But over the past few years, she’s had some realizations. And, happily for Jungle Reds, is letting us all in on them.

What I Know For Sure… About Writing

By Rachel Howzell Hall

Skies of Ash is my fifth novel, and the second of my Detective Elouise Norton series. In addition to being a novelist, I work as a fundraising writer for City of Hope, a national leader in cancer research and treatment. So, I know some things about writing. Not everything – I’m still learning -- but enough to create a list. Here’s what I’ve discovered since picking up a pen to write as a professional so many (many) years ago.

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.        1. Books (and blog posts and articles) don’t write themselves. I know, right? You can have a laptop filled to capacity with Word, Scrivener, Dramatica and Page Four; you can have diagrams and tables, generators and prompts, but none of it matters if you don’t string ‘em together into sentences, chapters, pages of coherent story.

2    2. It’s all gravy. No one has to read anything you write. No one has to buy any of your books. It’s not law. No one goes to jail for ignoring you and choosing A Shore Thing. Celebrate each time someone buys something you wrote. It can always be worse.

3     3. Cops don’t outline dead bodies with chalk. Keep up with the advances in your field—be it crime, techno-thriller, even romance. It’s your job. Even if it’s fiction, readers still want to learn. So: no chalk outlines. No smell of gunpowder in the room, pistols don’t use magazines. STDs are real, yo. Russia is no longer the Soviet Union. In Skies of Ash, I turned to friends and family to learn about fire, insurance and bad marriages (heh). Take some time to learn.

4    4. Writing will make you sad. Sometimes, folks just don’t give a fuck about your writing. Sometimes, you don’t give a fuck about your writing. Sometimes, characters die because they have to. In Skies of Ash, it broke my heart to write about dead kids. It’s okay to be sad. But then, snap out of it. Write. Don’t make the good fairy take your gift away and give it to that guy over there. That guy sucks and he doesn’t deserve it.

5    5. Writing will make you happy. Sometimes, the words will roll off your mind, gush from your fingertips onto the computer keys and onto the blank white screen. Sometimes, your characters do as you ask and you fall in love with them again. Sometimes, you’ll get a great review. Maybe you’ll even win an award. That sentence? You wrote that sentence. And yes, you are da bomb.

6        6. Taxes are a bitch. Unless you’re rolling in James Patterson money, you’ll make enough in advances or royalties to piss you off. Keep receipts. Try and pay estimated taxes. 

7    7. You are a bitch. See #4. Everything sucks, huh, Cranky Mc Crankypants? How much did that guy get for his ‘book’? Who gets to be on the panel at the Times Book Festival?

8     8.  Writers are weird. Embrace your strangeness—how you write down names you like, or use Evernote to save all the weird ways people die. Our Google searches are obscene, and our libraries are filled with How To [insert weird thing here]. You think normal people sit down and write 100,000+ words about a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury? You think normal people write about human sweetbreads consumed with fava beans and a nice Chianti? I think not.

            9. There is a difference between a cheap pen and a Uniball. See #8 Artists use tools-don’t  be ashamed of that. Wide- or college-ruled legal pads. Yellow stickie notes or lined stickie notes. Highlighters with see-through barrels or those gel ones that seemed kinda cool but are a little strange and leave crayon-like wax on your manuscript? For Valentine’s Day, my husband gave me a $60 gift card to Office Depot because he knows.

1    10. If you really want to write, you’ll find time to do it. A pox on that, ‘I really want to write but I can’t find the time.’ Malarkey. Balderdash. Did you watch the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones? Did you eat that entire pint of Chunky Monkey? Wanna know why? Cuz you wanted to. An hour and three minutes—every episode of GOT. An hour and three minutes—how long it takes to eat a pint Chunky Monkey. An hour and three minutes—how long it takes to write a decent chapter. If you wanna do something, you’ll do it.

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I     11. It’s never enough. I landed a book contract. Now, I want another book contract. I have ten book reviews, I want fifty more. I want to win a Rotary Club Certificate of Excellence, an Edgar, a National Book Prize, a Pulitzer, a Nobel Prize, and… and… God. I want to be God. Or Stephen King.

1    12. Books rule. Digital or hardcover, you don’t give an effin’ eff. Cuz words: writers dig ‘em, like for real. A sentence like Junot Diaz’s ‘The half life of love is forever,’ and you just keep reading it and reading it and whistling like it’s some amalgamation of Neil Tyson Degrasse’s mind, Derek Jeter’s body, Warren Buffet’s wealth, Richard Simmons’s spirit, Angelina Jolie’s cheekbones and sea-salt caramel bacon potato chips. Because wow… words. And to those ‘writers’ who don’t actively read? We’ll know you by your flat description, your trite and clichéd sentences and your ‘dark and stormy nights.’

1    13. Nothing beats the journey. As Dickens wrote, ‘Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on!’ In this life, we lose, we win, we celebrate and mourn. Health. Jobs. Relationships. The lottery. Bankruptcy. All of this, even the bad, enriches a writer, colors every page she’ll ever write. But look up from the page sometimes. Look up and look around—and marvel and wince and laugh. Because the best writing? Comes from people who live.

HANK:  Oh, Rachel, you make me cry. And that is a good thing.  So Reds, tell us one thing YOU’VE learned about life. I’ll start, with something I said to Jonathan the other day as we were sitting in traffic.  “Enjoy this!” I said.  “It’s life, it’s hilarious.” And about writing? What I say to myself:  “The next fabulous idea is just around the corner. I promise, it is.   

(Now I want some of those sea salt caramel bacon potato chips. If they don’t exist, let’s make some!)

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RACHELHOWZELL HALL is the author of Skies of Ash (Forge), the second in her new mystery series featuring LAPD Homicide Detective Elouise Norton. The first, Land of Shadows, received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, and was included on the Los Angeles Times’ “143 Books to Read This Summer” and the U.K Telegraph’s “Top Ten Crime Books for Summer.” Rachel was also a featured novelist on NPR’s acclaimed ‘Crime in the City’ series. Her first novel, A Quiet Storm, was a featured selection of Borders’ Original Voices program, as well as an alternate selection of the Black Expressions book club. She is a writer/assistant development director at City of Hope, a national leader in cancer research and treatment.  Rachel lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Welcome to our new neighbors!

HANK: So exciting to have new neighbors! And by neighbors, I mean here on the internet, in mystery blog world. 

Dee-lighted to introduce you to THE LIFE SENTENCE, a fabulous new opportunity and meeting place and community and resource for mystery lovers!  It’s the brainchild of…well, let Lisa Levy, editor in chief (who, from her editor "photo" keeps a low profile)  tell you.

Because she admits:

I Was a Secret Mystery Reader!

        by Lisa Levy

Figuring out what to do with your life is a tricky business. After college, I decided to go to grad school in English Literature. It seemed obvious: I was a good student. I liked to read and write. Why not sign myself up for a profession where I got to do both? Spoiler alert: I did not end up becoming a professor, but launching a crime and mystery website called The Life Sentence. This story is how I got from there to here.

At the time I was applying, I was obsessed with the literature of Puritans in America. I have always been prone to a kind of literary hyperfocus, where I suddenly have to read everything about a topic or by an author, but my love for the Puritans went beyond my usual dalliances. John Winthrop (he of the “city on a hill” speech), Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards and his spider dangling over the fire —  I devoured all of it. I was especially enthralled with the conversion narratives they wrote, recasting their lives as reckonings with original sin and salvation. And I loved the captivity narratives too, especially Mary Rowlandson’s, in which she wrote of her life among the Native Americans who kidnapped her from her Massachusetts home. 

So I went to graduate school, only to find, in the way academic fashions go, that the Puritans were decidedly out. I was pushed into the later works of American literature, and ended up doing a section of my comprehensive exams on Edgar Allan Poe. Now, this would be an obvious segue to me editing a website about crime and mysteries, but it wasn’t that simple.

Rather, I started reading a lot of noir in particular and mysteries in general because I missed the Puritans. I missed their questions about how to live in a world where good coincides with evil. I missed their quest to build communities where righteousness is rewarded. I missed the way they framed their lives as a struggle to live morally in an unjust universe. And I found all of that in Chandler, in Cain, in Woolrich, in Willeford, and in Hammett. The noir universe made sense to me; what’s more, it attracted me in a way that the works I was studying in grad school didn’t anymore. 

If all of this sounds awfully serious, well, I do take crime fiction rather seriously. I was trained as a literary critic, and even though I left before I got my Ph.D. (“went off to pursue ephemera,” as one of my advisors put it after I turned in my first book review to Entertainment Weekly) I can’t turn that critical faculty off, nor do I want to. 

I think crime fiction reflects our concerns about our world and how to live in it, as much as the Puritans’ literature did about theirs. The questions are not all that different, even without God in the equation. We still have to reckon with good and evil, with trying to be righteous, with building our cities on the hill. In fact, I think that crime fiction addresses these issues with a lot of nuance and complexity.

I spent a good many years cranking out ephemera, mainly in the form of book reviews, and have also written a few essays that I daresay will stand up to time and trends. Eventually, though, I started to dream a little bigger: I saw a need for a venue that reflected my thoughts about mystery and crime fiction (as well as true crime, TV, movies, etc.). In looking at the way the genre was covered, I became convinced I could build something better. Maybe it’s my own city on a hill.

Thus with a lot of work and the help of some excellent editors, contributors, and advisors (including a couple of Jungle Reds!) The Life Sentence launched in April 2015. We cover as wide a range of crime and mystery-related topics as we can, and we do so with a rigor and enthusiasm which sets us apart from other venues. I do like to think that we are critics first, and fans second, though we don’t let our fandom color what we cover or how we cover it.

Just a screen shot! But here's how it looks!

What will you see on The Life Sentence? Well, we do interviews (which we call Interrogations) with people like Joyce Carol Oates, Laura Lippman, and Bill Loefhelm. We have a series called 101, where a writer runs down his favorites among the Nero Wolfe books, or Thomas Perry’s thrillers. 

We publish pieces on issues affecting the crime fiction community (and beyond), like Rachel Howzell Hall’s call for diversity. 

We have an amazing Editorial Board of writers (including Hank and Hallie!) who will be keeping us up-to-date about what they are reading, thinking about, and doing. 

And we review books (and give you suggestions about whether you might like them by suggesting other authors in the same vein). Recent reviews include books by well-known writers like Philip Kerr as well as bright new talents like Jake Hinkson.  We are also committed to reviving the reputations of authors lost to thrift stores and library sales, like Don Carpenter and Ted Lewis. And we have lots more planned, including giveaways, TV and movie coverage, and a series on cybercrime and Internet hoaxes.

So my secret mystery reading is now integral to my job, though my job is a lot more than just reading and writing. It’s looking at the whole universe of crime and mystery and deciding what’s worth covering, and how to present this material in a way that’s thoughtful and entertaining.

 I do hope you agree!

HANK: So Reds, welcome to  The Life Sentence! (You can click on any of the links above!)  Reds, what would YOU like to see on the site? Who would you like to read about? And what do you think of the site?

And to all at TLS--congratulations!

You Know it When You Hear It

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  How often have you discussed it with your fellow writers--at dinner, or at a convention, or (maybe more likely) at the bar after a day of panels and interviews and classes? “Voice,” someone says. "What is that, exactly?" And everyone looks at each other and then someone says:

“Well you know it when you read it.”

Right? 

“Voice” (just thinking out loud here) is not only the voice of the characters and the words in their dialogue. We can all demonstrate Eeyore, of course. And Holden Caulfield. Scarlett O’Hara. Kinsey Millhone. Amy in Gone Girl. Andy in Defending Jacob. But “voice” is in every cell of the writer’s words. You can tell a Julia book from a Hank book, Hallie’s from Roberta’s,  Rhys from Debs and Susan. It’s how the book IS, how the sentences come out, the vocabulary choice, and tone and the rhythm and the music.

And now I’m thinking, well, you know it when you read it.

Which brings up Rachel Howzell Hall.  See if you agree.

Mad Writing

   by Rachel Howzell Hall

It takes balls to write a crime novel – a different set, though, from the ones needed by real heroes, like cops and firemen, soldiers and teachers. Ninety-thousand words all dedicated to a make-believe world with characters who don’t exist saying things that come from nowhere and it’s all so clean and funny and la-la-la.

Except, for me, sometimes it’s not so clean and so funny. For me, it’s more, ‘What the hell?’ than la-la-la.

That’s because I write mad.

Sometimes, on days when I don’t feel like heavy lifting, I wish I could pick a topic, any topic, to write about. A story about X meets Y and then they Q. Fin.

But I want to persuade you. Convince you. Get you mad, too —at the characters, at the situation, at the similarities between real and imagined. And in order to convince you, I need to believe. I need to feel.

Ninety-thousand words. That’s a lot. And it takes nine months for me to finish a story. That’s a lot of time. And because of this ridiculous commitment, I need to push into the light those issues that tick me off so that Lou Norton, my LAPD homicide detective, can confront them. Right those wrongs. Point out the elephant in the room and hang curtains on its trunk.

So how do I find wrongs to right and elephants to decorate? Just by taking a look around. Unfortunately. Violence against women will, alas, propel me through at least 600 books because it never seems to abate. More women are murdered each year. More women are raped. More girls are snatched off the streets. Girls can’t walk on the sidewalk without cars slowly rolling past them. Girls don’t go off alone and must always travel in groups when vacationing in Aruba or Cancun or the cantina around the corner.

More. Don’t. Can’t. More. Don’t. Can’t.

 

It breaks me sometimes to see ‘more women…’ and ‘women can’t…’ especially as a mom to a ten-year old daughter. But I, too, indoctrinate her. Don’t talk to strangers. You can’t wear that skirt without shorts underneath. Don’t wander off on field trips.

Grrrr.  

Enter Lou Norton, my heroine in LAND OF SHADOWS. In this story, she’s confronted with the disappearance of her missing sister and dealing with the murder of a girl who mirrors that missing sister. Identity, sexuality, loss—a lot there that moves me to write. Who are girls and women supposed to be? What is expected of us? What happens when we ‘stray’ from the so-called virtuous path? Even as a law enforcement officer, Lou is Woman and therefore, subject to the “More. Don’t. Can’t.” rules in life. And she sees first-hand what happens to girls and young women when they don’t heed “More. Don’t. Can’t.” She tries to right wrongs but in a city of 9.9 million, there are so many wrongs.

What propels you to the end of a story? 

HANK:  See? Voice. So do you write mad? Or happy? Or suspicious? And what voice would you always recognize? LAND OF SHADOWS to one lucky commenter!   (And does she have a terrific website, or what?)

  

RACHEL HOWZELL HALL is a writer/assistant development director at City of Hope, a national leader in cancer research and treatment. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. 

LAND OF SHADOWS

Along the ever changing border of gentrifying Los Angeles, seventeen year old Monique Darson is found dead at a condominium construction site, hanging in the closet of an unfinished unit. Homicide detective Elouise "Lou" Norton's new partner, Colin Taggert, fresh from the comparatively bucolic Colorado Springs police department, assumes it's a teenage suicide. Lou isn't buying the easy explanation.

For one thing, the condo site is owned by Napoleon Crase, a self made millionaire. . .and the man who may have murdered Lou's missing sister, Tori, thirty years ago. As Lou investigates the death of Monique Darson, she uncovers undeniable links between the two cases. But her department is skeptical. Lou is convinced that when she solves Monique's case she will finally bring her lost sister home. But as she gets closer to the truth, she also gets closer to a violent killer. After all this time, can he be brought to justice... before Lou becomes his next victim?