Clay Stafford talks with Thomas Perry “On Crafting Unforgettable Characters”

Thomas Perry interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I was curious to talk with bestselling author Thomas Perry to explore the inner architecture of his characters—smart, flawed, fiercely independent—and how writers can create protagonists like his who feel as real as the people we know. I got the opportunity to speak with him from Southern California. “Thomas, let’s talk about characters. All is a strong word, as my wife always tells my children, but all your protagonists are strongly self-reliant and emotionally layered. How do you write those so honestly without them appearing forced or contrived?”

“There are certain things for each character. For example, Jane Whitefield is a character that I’ve written in nine novels, and she was probably most in danger of being a superhero.”

“She knows an awful lot.”

“She does. Part of the fun is that she knows things that we know how she knows, how she learned them, who told her or showed her, or what experience caused it. When I first started writing, I wrote one, and then at Random House, my editor was Joe Fox, and he called me up—as editors sometimes do—and they say, ‘Working on anything?’ and you say, ‘No, I don’t like to eat anymore. It’s okay.’ No, I said, ‘You know, I’m working on this Jane Whitefield character again. I finished with that first story, but I’m not finished with that character. I feel like I know more about her, having written her, thought about it, and read a lot of background information, anthropological books, and so on. I’m doing it, and it’s going well so far.’  And he said, ‘Okay, well, talk to you later.’ And then about fifteen minutes later, he called and said, ‘How’d you like to make it five?’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to do a series.’ And then he mentioned a number and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ High principle. After I’d written five of them, I wrote many other books that were standalone novels because I had been thinking of them over the five years I was writing those other books. At a certain point, I started getting letters from people and then emails. I finally got one that said, ‘You haven’t written a Jane Whitefield book in a couple of years. Are you dead, or have you retired?’”

“What did you reply?”

“No, the best reply is no reply. They think you’re dead.”

“How do you develop these character backstories and make your protagonists intriguing and deeply grounded without boring? How do you avoid that info dump we often want to put into our stories?”

“That’s where you must learn to cross out. Do I need this? Is this information that everybody must have to understand, or to move the story along? Get rid of it. It’s great to write it. You understand it, and it helps you with everything else about that character you’re writing, but you don’t have to lay it all out on the table and make everybody read it. As Elmore Leonard said famously, ‘Cross out the things that people are gonna skip over.’ I think that’s probably still true.”

“I love the way that you introduce characters. On the first pages of any book, your characters come fully formed. They’re not developing. How do you introduce them like that? Is there a trick that instantly signals they’re competent and deep, without over-explaining? It seems like we turned our private camera into their living room, and they are real people right there from the start.”

“I’m glad they seem that way. I don’t know. I like to start by acquiring the reader’s attention, trying to get the reader to pay attention to what I’m doing. There are a lot of ways of doing that. One of them is to slowly build up over a couple of pages to see what’s about to happen, and then you see them in action. That’s ideal. But the craziest beginning I think I ever wrote was—I can’t remember which book it was; it’s probably Pursuit, so you may remember—very first thing, ‘He looked down on the thirteenth body.’ He’s a cop. He’s the expert, and he’s going through this crime scene. At that point, you realize that the action has started, and you must sort of scramble to catch up and find out what’s happening as he finds out. He doesn’t know yet, either. He knows he has his skills and this experience, but we don’t. We’ll try to hitchhike with him to find out what this is.”

“Your characters—whether it’s Jane Whitefield, or in recent Pro Bono—have a kind of intelligence and resourcefulness, where I wish I were that intelligent and resourceful. Your books are full of moments where characters outthink or outmaneuver dangerous situations and have the believable skills to do that. How do you show that without creating a caricature of sorts?”

“It’s fine-tuning. It has to do with whether I have gone too far. Is this sublime or ridiculous? You must be your worst critic because harsher ones will be along shortly.”

“Does that tie into the character’s philosophy or code of ethics? You put it in there, but you don’t preach it. You know enough to make it work.”

“It’s all about characters. Who is this person? One of the ways we find out who this person is, is what the furniture of their mind is. What’s their feeling about life and human beings? You must know who he is to have a character you want to follow through a book. Not all at once, ever. It’s always as you go, you come to know them better. You see them in action, the things that they worry about or think about, how they treat others, and so on.”

“You reference the furniture of life. Your protagonists rarely wait for someone else to move the couch. They do not want to wait for someone else to solve their problems. How do you ensure that growth and change come from within the characters rather than external forces?”

“I sometimes feel it’s necessary to have a situation where, for one reason or another—sometimes complicated and sometimes simple—if this character doesn’t step up, nobody will. He’s the only one with experience and knowledge about something or another, or he’s a person who does things that don’t involve the law. Like Jane Whitefield, everything she does is illegal. Everything. Since I started writing about her, it became more illegal, and they hired hundreds of thousands of people to make sure it doesn’t happen. Jane must change and trim back what she does, which is an interesting thing to play with, and introduce a character who is on the run and figure out how that person will survive if someone’s after them wanting to kill him.”

“You’re talking about Jane, and she’s one of my favorites regarding dialogue. You write dialogue very well. How do you use dialogue to reflect the characters’ self-reliance and hint at their backstory without making it that info dump?”

“Small doses. They’re the doses relevant at that moment. It’s something she knows, and we know how she knows, which is a helper. That makes it less crazy. Also, she must invent things on the spot. It’s like providing evidence. You’re trying to present a character you know can do these things and that others will accept can do these things.”

“Your protagonists aren’t superheroes. They make mistakes, they carry burdens, and they have flaws. How do you include those flaws that enhance rather than undermine a character’s strength and credibility? Because the flaws certainly add reality to things, yet you don’t want to do something disparaging to the character.”

“The flaws in Jane Whitefield, for instance, have often to do with the difficulty of what she does and still being somebody’s wife in Amherst, New York. You can’t be going off and having these fantastic adventures and expect your husband to wait for you and say that’s fine. There’s the constant where she’s trying to handle that, trying not to lie to him, but she can’t tell him many things that are going on, because if you tell somebody something, there’s a chance they’ll let it slip. If you don’t tell somebody something, there’s no chance. She has left home several times and is returning a few weeks later.”

“In your extensive experience, what separates a character that readers admire from one they never forget, like Jane?”

“Dumb luck. You know, we try. We do our best. Sometimes it works.”

“Dumb luck? Do you really think so?”

“I think you learn more as you go along. It’s a tough thing to do. Part of it is sincerity. I admire her. Therefore, there are probably subtle clues in there somehow that she’s someone to admire, because I don’t say anything bad about her—just stuff that’s a problem because of what she does. It’s odd to be doing, but it has a background in the Northeastern Indians’ history. It was a situation where people were brought into the group and adopted, particularly by the Haudenosaunee. The Iroquois were big adopters, partly because they were fighting a lot. They lost a lot of people. In the 1630s, a Dutch explorer came into western New York and noticed in an Oneida village that people from thirty-two other groups lived there. It’s a lot of people.”

“In some part of our schizophrenic brain, do you view a strong, memorable character like Jane as real?”

“Real to me. Yeah. I miss her when I haven’t written about her for a while. I miss that attitude, that self-reliance, and at the same time, that great concern for other group members.”

“She would be pleased to hear you say that. Is there any advice we haven’t discussed on building characters that would help writers build their own memorable and self-reliant characters?”

“If you’ve ever read it before, don’t do it. That includes things like occasionally, there’ll be an homage to somebody or other, and I think it’s a waste of time because the other person did it better—the one who wrote it first.”

“In all things, be original.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, The Balanced Writer, and Killer Nashville Magazine. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Thomas Perry is the bestselling author of over twenty novels, including Pro Bono, Hero, Murder Book, the critically acclaimed Jane Whitefield series, The Old Man, and The Butcher’s Boy, which won the Edgar Award. He lives in Southern California.

https://www.thomasperryauthor.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Heather Graham on “The Business of Writing”

Heather Graham interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Author Heather Graham is incredible in many ways: her prolific and stellar writing style and habits, her support and encouragement of other authors, and her inspiration and support of many beyond the writing field. I know of few authors who view writing and attention to their readers, as does Heather Graham. It was a pleasure catching up with Heather when she was in New York City during one of her busy tour schedules. Since she is so prolific, I thought I’d ask her about business, a subject that many writers view through a fog. “So, Heather, let’s jump right in and ask, what’s the biggest financial mistake you see new writers making early in their careers, and how can they avoid that?”

“I am horrible with finances, so I don't know if I'm the one to ask.”

I laugh aloud. “Okay, with that build-up, you crack me up. Can you speak from experience, then?”

“People come at writing from so many different venues. Some are keeping day jobs and writing on the side. They have their day job, so they don't have to worry about finances too much. And, of course, publishing is ever-changing. But always ensure you have your next project ready to go, and then don't be as bad with money as I am. I don't know what to say because you never know. Do you want to go traditional? Are you going to get a multi-book contract? Are they buying a one-off project? Are you collaborating with Amazon? It depends so much on what you're doing. One of the main things you must learn—that I'm still working on—is that when you're on contract, you'll get so much and then so much later on publication. And then the problem is, of course, it's never guaranteed income. You have to learn to watch the future more than anything else.”

“There are writers I speak with who have things they want to write, but frankly, we know that some of those are not commercial. How do you balance your creative freedom with what the market wants?”

“That's one thing I tell people to be careful about. If you are putting up on Amazon, you can be fast. You can catch the trend. But if you're writing for one of the traditional publishers or a small press, it's usually going to be a year before your work comes out. You want to be careful about writing to trends because that trend could be gone by the time something comes out. My thought is, if it's something you love, do it. Otherwise, be careful. You always have to write what you love. What makes you happy, too, because your excitement comes out on the page.”

“What are some of the common pitfalls that you might see that writers don't think about and should have been aware of, even with representation—things that could lead to mistakes?”

“First of all, you need to do your homework. Doing your research for beginning writers is one of the most important things you can do. Find out what agents enjoy what you're doing. Find out what houses are buying what you're doing. I think that's one of the best things. Somebody just spoke at World Fantasy who is an editor, but her husband is an agent. He has out there that he does not handle young adult, and he'll get a million young adult things anyway. The most important thing, I think, is to be savvy about what's going on. I didn't know any agents or editors when I started, but I can't recommend groups and conventions enough because you meet others. You're always going to hear more stories. You're going to hear what's happened. You're going to be introduced to editors and agents, and you're going to hear from friends, ‘Oh, my gosh, yes, that's exactly what they're looking for.’ Because I have covered my bases, I belong to HWA, MWA, International Thrillers, and RWA, and I have never met such a nice group of people. It's like nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine out of a thousand are great, and everybody shares. The good majority are supportive.”

“Because time is finite and money is finite, for a beginning author, where should authors focus their promotional and marketing strategies? And where should they not because they should be writing instead of doing that?”

“I'll tell you something I'm not very good at, but I have learned that TikTok and BookTok are some of the biggest ways you can do things now. Social media is free. When you're on a budget, using social media is great. I have been traditionally published for a long time, and they have publicity departments and marketing departments. More so today, even in the traditional houses, they want you to do a lot of your own promotions. I think for many of us, it is hard because the concentration is more on what I'm writing. It's a good thing to try to get out there and learn. And I am still working on this: learning how to be good on social media.”

“And technology changes.”

“Yes. Constantly.”

“New opportunities open up.”

“Yeah, that's just it. You have to be ready for change.”

“What are some red flags to look out for when you're getting an agent or signing a contract with a publisher?”

“Again, I've been lucky. I didn't start out with an agent and really had no idea what I was doing, but I sold a short horror story to Twilight Zone, and then Dell opened a category line, and I sold to Dell. But they were contemporary, and I had always wanted to write historical novels, and I had a couple in a drawer. I always remember when I sold because I stopped working with my third child and had my first contract with my fourth child. There’s just that year and a half, or whatever was in there, but when I had the historicals, and nobody wanted to see them, there was a woman in the romance community who had a magazine called Romantic Times, and she came to Florida with one of her early magazines. It had an ad that said Liza Dawson at Pinnacle Books was looking for historical novels, and I'm like, ‘Let me try. Let me try, please.’ They did buy the historical, but at the time, everybody was very proprietary about names, so Shannon Drake came into it. I was doing historicals under Shannon Drake, but the vampire series wound up coming under that name, too. It just depends on what you're doing. There are two lines of thought. One is that you need to brand yourself. You need to be mystery, paranormal mystery, sci-fi. You need to brand yourself as something. That’s one idea that can be very good, but I also loved reading everything. There are many, many different things that I have always wanted to write. I have been lucky; I have done it. Whether it was a smart thing or not, I don't know. I can very gratefully say that I have kept a career, and I have been able to do a lot of the things I've wanted to do.”

“When the boilerplate comes, it says they want all rights for everything. What rights should a writer retain?”

“When this whole thing happened where I was selling to a second company, that's when I got an agent. And again, we're looking at the same thing. Study what the agents are handling, what they're doing, and who they have. When we’ve done negotiations, I've usually been asked to leave because I am not a good negotiator. You need to listen to your agent and the agent's advice. Now the agent, a lot of the time is going to know, ‘No, no, no, we have to keep the film rights. They never do anything with them,’ or ‘No, let them have them because they just might use it.’ An agent is going to know these things better because they do it on a daily basis. And then the other thing is, your agent gets you paid. Instead of you having to use your editorial time talking to somebody saying like, ‘Could you please send that check?’ the agent will do that for you.”

“Let's go back a minute. You talked about social media. What kind of mistakes do you see writers making on social media? I can think of a few, but what are your thoughts?”

“I'll tell you what gets me, and this is purely as a reader, and I will be a reader till the day I die. I love books. I want people to read, too. As a reader, though, when I'm on social media, don't, don't, don't put out there, ‘Oh, you've got to read…’ or ‘This is the best book ever,’ because to me that means no. It's going to be my decision as a reader whether it's the best book ever. Just say, ‘I hope you'll enjoy this,’ or ‘This is about…’ or ‘I'm very excited about…’ or whatever. You don't want to say, ‘Gee! This may be pure crap, but buy it anyway.’ You can tell people what something is about, why you're excited about it, and you hope they'll enjoy it. But this is more my opinion as a reader than as a writer. Don't tell me, ‘It's the best thing ever. You're going to love it.’ Let me make that decision.”

“You talked about conferences and networking. What are some common mistakes that writers make when it comes to their professional development? Where are they lacking? What do you see value in?”

“Again, I think conferences and conventions are some of the most important things you can do. It helps if you want to volunteer and help get people going. That way, you meet more people, and you can interact more with those running the conferences, who have probably been around for a while and have some good advice. One of the worst things you can do is spend a lot of time whining or complaining about things that can't be helped. Things do happen sometimes. Books don't arrive, or the seller didn't come through. Don't make life miserable for other people. I'm not saying you shouldn't fix something if you can, but sometimes things can't be fixed, and then you have to let it go. And there are different types of conventions. You have Thriller Writers, Bouchercon, Killer Nashville. You have the Bram Stoker Awards, which are relatively big. We have something down in Florida called Sleuthfest. I love Sleuthfest, and it's very easy. It's good to get involved. It's an investment in your future. I know I was looking for money to pay the Chinese restaurant when I first started out, so sometimes you just don't have it when you're beginning your career. And that's why you try to do the things that are closest to you. Just become involved with a group that maybe meets at a library. Anything like that. There are online groups these days. The very best perk we get out of it is our communities.”

“What advice would you give people? Maybe, ‘I wish I had known this when I started out…’”

“I wish I had known what an amazing community the writing community was and to get involved, and therefore, I would have learned so many things I didn't know. I have two lines of advice. One, sit down and do it. Be dedicated to yourself. Be dedicated to your craft. And then, get involved. Find like-minded people because they will be wonderfully helpful and encouraging.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Heather Graham is the NYT and USA Today bestselling author of over two hundred novels, including suspense, paranormal, historical, and mainstream Christmas fare. She is also the CEO of Slush Pile Productions, a recording company and production house for various charity events. Look her up at https://www.theoriginalheathergraham.com/.

Clay Stafford talks with Author Tom Mead on “Writing Locked Room Mysteries”

Tom Mead interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I stumbled upon Tom Mead’s latest locked-room mystery from my friend Otto Penzler and immediately loved it. I knew I had to talk to Tom about it, as it was probably one of the best I’ve read in a long while. Tom and I got together electronically, me from Tennessee, U.S., and him from Derbyshire, U.K. The modern age of technology is not just fantastic for meetings such as this, but it also fosters a sense of global community, allowing us to get to know others face-to-face across continents. I was curious to know how, in the modern age, technology has affected what is known as the locked room mystery simply because these types of mysteries are fascinating intellectual puzzles, and modern forensics are straightforward (and often more quickly derived) facts. This interview ran long. Part of it has previously appeared in my monthly Writer’s Digest column, but the full interview, about four times the length of the Writer’s Digest version, constitutes our entire conversation. I learned so much from Tom that I felt other mystery writers might gain the same things I did by hearing Tom’s conversation in full. “Tom, for those unfamiliar with a locked room mystery, can you explain that to us?”

“Yes, absolutely. The term refers to a sub-genre of the classic puzzle mystery, or the whodunnit, emphasizing a seemingly impossible crime. So, in other words, a crime that physically could not have taken place. Hence, the imagery of the locked room. Locked room mysteries are a rarefied sub-genre because, by their nature, they are complex and convoluted creations. They’re structured like a puzzle, but there’s also an emphasis on the atmosphere and a kind of eeriness about them because there’s the appearance of something supernatural having taken place. But, of course, the solution is always rational and earthly. The locked room mystery became popular during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the World Wars. Many great authors tackled the genre, but my favorite is John Dickson Carr, the acknowledged master of the locked room mystery. I started writing locked rooms as a kind of tribute to him, and I look at them as a kind of literary magic trick, if you like. It’s all about misdirection and creating the appearance of the impossible.”

“Well, you had me trying to beat you at this mystery, and I have to say I did not.”

“Well, that’s good. That’s part of the fun, of course. A great thing about Golden Age detective fiction—something that appeals to me as a reader—is this idea of the intellectual game and the challenge to the reader. Ellery Queen was particularly good at that sort of thing and would often include a literal challenge to the reader, wherein the author would sort of step in, address the reader directly, and say, “All the clues are there. They’ve been hidden throughout the text for you to spot. Can you solve the mystery before the detective?” And so, I thought it would be fun to incorporate a literal challenge to the reader into my Spector mysteries. So again, it’s all part of the tribute to the Golden Age, but also having a bit of fun with the reader, and just playing up that puzzle aspect of the mystery.”

“Well, my wife said, ‘How is it?’ because I read a lot of books, and I said, ‘This is very good, but I am not sure how he’s going to pull this off,’ and I’m not giving anything away, because we’ve got a picture on the cover here, how did this person get in this boat? And that was the one that kept throwing me. And you don’t reveal until the very end, almost, how that happened. And so, I’m going, ‘Is he going to play fair? Is he going to answer how this boat shows up in here?’ So anyway, you did well in wrapping everything up.”

“Thank you very much. And yes, thank you for saying that about the boat puzzle. That was the one that I had the most fun with. It’s the most elaborate. In that respect, it’s a tribute to the Japanese locked room mystery or traditional Japanese mystery because there’s been a recent glut of translations of classic Japanese mysteries. I’ve had great fun delving into them. They are remarkably complex, even by the standards of Golden Age detective fiction, and some of the clever devices, techniques, tricks, and gimmicks that writers like Seishi Yokomizo have come up with are great and help to stimulate my imagination as a writer as well as a reader. I think that’s also partially a tribute to the Japanese mystery tradition.”

“You’ve been citing different cultures and countries. Locked room is global in every type of culture.”

“Yeah, I mean, the appeal of mystery fiction generally is universal, I think, and there have been numerous anthologies and collections of stories from all over the world that deal with this idea of the impossible crime. But there’s a concentration within Japan. The Japanese traditional mystery is known as Honkaku, which is a term that means Orthodox Mystery. So, in other words, a mystery with a fair puzzle that plays by the rules. And these days, there’s been a kind of resurgence in Honkaku mysteries, known as Shin Honkaku, or the New Orthodox. The popularity in Japan is massive, and several of these books are being translated into English. As someone who loves puzzle mysteries, I’ve enjoyed delving into the past and reading the classic Golden Age authors. My favorites are Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Frederic Brown, Helen McCloy, names like that, and people from the ‘30s to about the ‘50s. Also, alongside those authors, I’ve been reading classic Japanese and contemporary Japanese mysteries, which play by the same rule book where the focus is on a puzzle. It’s on identifying whodunnit, but also howdunnit. How could this impossible thing have occurred? As a writer, I think it’s all grist to the mill. I like to seek out these more diverse, perhaps unorthodox, or obscure, titles, and it’s a real joy to me as a reader and a writer.”

“You’re going to roll your eyes at this, but how in the world does one write a locked-room mystery? I don’t think I have the intelligence for it. Where do you start? Is it the ending, and you go backward? How does it work?”

“Now, that is a great question. To me, there’s no specific technique that I’ve hit upon. I’ve tried various approaches. But the idea is that you want every problem and every solution to be different. I should go about it differently each time. But I am a big fan of stage magic that I will come across in reading the book, hopefully, because my detective character—who’s very much a Golden Age pastiche of an amateur sleuth—is an old vaudevillian. I suppose he’s a retired conjurer from the London stage who has now turned his knack for unraveling impossible puzzles into the world of crime and detection. I grew up fascinated by stage magic, and I read a lot about magicians, how tricks are done, and the principles behind stage magic. So how, for instance, does a certain type of magic trick work on the brain, the part of the brain that is misdirected by a certain sleight of hand, and how does that sleight of hand work? I’ve read a few nonfiction works on that subject, and to be honest, the principles are very similar to mystery writing. I often liken writing mysteries to performing a magic show because, in both instances, you’ve got a performer guiding an audience's attention in a certain direction. In both instances, the trick's workings are in plain sight the whole time. But it’s about how you conceal them and ensure the audience doesn’t perceive them. In terms of plotting and writing, I suppose my general approach is the same as a magician’s. I will usually look at the effect that I want to achieve. It may be the case of coming up with an impossibility or a scenario that I think would be effective for the plot structure that I’ve got. Then, in some cases, it’s a question of working backward: how that trick can be pulled off via earthly practical means. This is an old stage illusionist’s principle of creating a gimmick that will achieve this effect. Then, at the other end of the scale, sometimes I will stumble across something, whether it be a trick or an illusion, an optical illusion, a misheard quotation, or a line of dialogue from something. It will stimulate something that I will then decide to try and develop into an impossibility. I’ve approached it from different angles, I suppose. Sometimes, I start with the trick itself, and I think about how I can incorporate that into my plot, and other times, I will have an unanswered question that I’ll need to devise my answer to.”

“Is there a specific type of sleuth that works well with locked room mysteries?”

“I suppose locked room mysteries are heightened by their nature. They’re non-naturalistic. They’re surreal. And there’s an emphasis on atmosphere. And I’ve already mentioned a sense of the eerie, the uncanny. I think the detective needs to be suitably larger than life, flamboyant, you might say, and theatrical, and these are the elements that I’ve distilled into my detective character, Joseph Spector. I think the amateur sleuth is a classic trope of the Golden Age. And a decidedly unrealistic, non-naturalistic one. I think the detective needs to reflect on the puzzle that you’ve set. With an elaborate and ornately contrived locked room mystery, you need a detective capable of these great flights of fancy and an air of performance about them. John Dickson Carr’s great detective was Gideon Fell, a boisterous kind of Falstaffian figure based on the author G.K. Chesterton. Then his other great detective was Sir Henry Merrivale, who was, if anything, even more flamboyant than Fell with a distinctive white suit and a penchant for practical jokes and the like. So, it is an almost cartoonish figure, but a figure that suited the puzzle framework that Carr created. A match made in heaven, I suppose.”

“Do certain types of plots lend themselves to locked room mysteries?”

“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I generally talk about the Golden Age mystery. The Golden Age usually refers to the decades between the World Wars, such as the ‘20s and ‘30s, when writers like Agatha Christie rose to prominence, and I’ve also talked about Ellery Queen. So, novels featuring a closed circle of suspects are often set in high society. So again, it’s quite a lofty scenario, not necessarily one that would be relatable to the average reader. Often with a country house setting like the one in Cabaret Macabre. The most important components would be the cast of suspects, the so-called closed circle of suspects. In other words, a set cast of characters whose identities are known from the outset so that you know that the murderer is lurking somewhere among that cast of characters. The setting is typically isolated. In Cabaret Macabre, it’s the House March Banks, which is a highly conventional English country seat. But if you think of Agatha Christie, for instance, you have the Orient Express, you have that kind of idea of a cast of characters in that single location, or Death on the Nile, of course, you have them on that river cruise. I think those kinds of scenarios are particularly appealing for creating locked room mysteries. My second book, The Murder Wheel, was set mainly in the backstage corridors of a fictional London theatre. For a locked room mystery, it’s fun to have it set within the constraints of a specific location for an impossibility. I think these are the kinds of ingredients that I like to employ.”

“When you’re talking about your study of conjuring, you tend to be the type who likes to look behind the scenes. How do you explain the popularity of locked-room mysteries? Is it the puzzle? Is it like the people who love crossword puzzles or someone trying to figure that out? You’ve got that specific demographic.”

“I think it is. Exactly as you say. The appeal lies within the puzzle first and foremost, but the Golden Age has an irresistible charm. I started trying to write Golden Age style, pastiche whodunnits as an exercise in escapism at the height of the Covid lockdowns here in the U.K. in 2020 and into 2021. So that was when I wrote Death in the Conjurer in draft, again, purely to keep myself entertained and amused by playing with the tropes and the conventions of the Golden Age mystery. However, regarding the puzzle and the locked room, I think the great writers of locked room mysteries had a great insight into human nature and human psychology, allowing them to play with the readers’ perceptions and expectations. As a reader, I appreciate an author who doesn’t dumb down the plot and who doesn’t simplify the plot. I like a very labyrinthine plot, which encourages you to play along and sets you an intellectual challenge. These are the things that I enjoy as a reader. I think, generally speaking, when I’m talking to people who are reading my books, and when I’m generally talking about locked rooms, it’s that sense of the writer having fun with you, the reader, and addressing ‘you, the reader’ directly and engaging you in this kind of elaborate performance.”

“Okay, let me ask you this. And no modesty here, okay? Why do more writers not write these? I have my suspicion, and I think I disclosed it at the beginning of this interview.”

“Locked room mysteries are, by their nature, complex undertakings. It would be best if you had a passion for the genre as a reader as well as a writer because it would be easy to set out and try and create a locked room mystery by numbers, but it wouldn’t have the same impact as a locked room that was constructed by somebody who knows the genre in and out. I think I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had access to so many of the great titles from the past, and like I say, this influx of Japanese titles, translations of the French novels of Paul Halter—who’s another living legend of the locked room mystery. He’s a terrific writer and incredibly prolific. Speaking for myself, I’ve been able to read and distill all of that, generate my ideas from that, and combine it with the world of magic, which also fascinates me. But as to why more people don’t write the legitimate, locked room mystery style, I think other genres are perhaps less sophisticated in their construction and more commercially appealing—things like the conventional cozy mystery. Not to disparage the cozy mystery genre, but many titles are out there. There is a sheer glut of cozy mystery titles out there, and there are many recycled ideas out there. From a commercial perspective, selling a cozy mystery is easier because people know what to expect. They know how it will play out, whereas you are deliberately defying the genre's conventions with a mystery of the locked room. You are taking the established principles of the mystery, and you’re deliberately subverting them. And you’re making the work as unpredictable as possible because that’s the nature of it. I suppose that it’s more of a risk. It’s more of a balancing act because it can be a real disaster when it goes wrong. In a badly written locked room mystery, there’s much more to lose, whereas with cozy mysteries, there are many familiar elements for readers to latch onto. And there are so many long-running series out there that it’s perhaps easier to sell commercially. But again, not to disparage the cozy mystery because there are many cozy mysteries that incorporate locked room mystery elements. From a commercial point of view, I think the word cozy is a much easier sell than the locked room.”

“You’ve got to admit that writing and reading a locked room mystery take much more work because it’s not like you’re going to sit back in your leather chair and read this pleasurably. It’s like, okay, game on. Let’s go.”

“Exactly. I suppose it is perhaps more demanding, and therefore, the readers it will attract are those who love puzzles and trying to stay one step ahead of the detective or the author. The kinds of people who, like me, are fascinated by how tricks are done, who are, I suppose, as fascinated by that as they are by the tricks themselves. I mentioned a balancing act with locked room mysteries. It would be best if you had the reveal of the howdunnit to have a sense of satisfaction. You don’t want it to feel anti-climactic compared to the atmosphere and mystery you’ve constructed throughout the work. I suppose that’s what I mean when I say there’s more of a risk involved because you are essentially relying on this one gimmick to hold together the whole structure of the piece. You have to have faith that it will pay off, which is why I like to try different approaches within the same framework. I like to incorporate multiple puzzles, try to come up with puzzles that will complement each other and fit together rather like a kind of jigsaw, and try different types of illusions as well. You mentioned the boat illusion in Cabaret Macabre. There are conventional locked room mystery tricks, but then there are also identity tricks and things like that. There are tricks to do with alibis and what have you. I like to try to combine different types of things to maximize the satisfaction for the reader when all these tricks are unraveled. That’s the idea behind it.”

“As Spector would say, you’re building a house of cards.”

“Exactly.”

“For better or worse, it may turn out very well, or it may just completely collapse upon itself. You talked about the Golden Age quite a bit. Are locked-room mysteries era-dependent? Is it possible to write a locked-room mystery in today’s time with today’s forensic technology and law enforcement prowess?”

“Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t think they’re dependent at all. There are many great examples of the locked room mystery throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, such as the post-Golden Age. But again, you must be more innovative and inventive to pull it off because information is so much easier today. With the Golden Age—which is what I love—you can rely on eyewitness accounts of events and things like that. These days, you’ve got CCTV. You’ve got an individual’s digital footprint to consider, and there are so many ways that the truth can be traced. In contrast, in the era that I write about, you were relying, I suppose, more on individual perception of an event or of an individual’s appearance—that kind of thing. To me, it’s closer to the principles of stage magic in that respect because when you’re in the audience at a magic show, you must rely on your own eyes and your perception of what’s happening around you. So that’s why I focus on that era. I’ve read many great works set far in the future, also some set in ancient Egypt or medieval times. Adam Roberts is an author who’s written some fascinating science fiction locked-room mysteries. They are fair playroom mysteries but set within this futuristic world he created. They’re quite a remarkable achievement, I would say. Likewise, I recently finished reading a Paul Doherty title. Paul Doherty writes historical mysteries, and he’s got a fantastic series set in the reign of King Richard II here in England. I think the principles are the same across the board, but I think if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the most fun and entertaining titles are the ones that are not afraid to break the rules or reinvent the rules of the genre.”

“As a wonderful writer of locked-room mysteries, what advice do you have for readers who wish to follow in your footsteps?”

“From my own experience, it was something that I did purely for my entertainment, and at the time I started writing, I was my audience, so I wasn’t writing for anybody else. If people want to write locked room mysteries, the same advice goes across the board. It’s to write the type of novel you enjoy reading, write the genre you like, write the period that most appeals to you, and create characters you enjoy reading and writing about. Those are the guiding principles that I’ve learned to live by. I think if people are looking to write murder mysteries, the best thing is to read a lot of murder mysteries, to focus on the type of mystery they love, to look at what makes it work, and to try and adapt those principles themselves.”

“Do what you love.”

“Precisely. It’s as simple as that.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference.
https://claystafford.com/

Tom Mead is a UK-based crime fiction author, including the Joseph Spector mystery series and numerous short stories. His debut novel, Death and the Conjuror, was selected as one of the top ten best mysteries of the year by Publishers Weekly. He lives in Derbyshire.
https://tommeadauthor.com/

Clay Stafford Interviews Cindy Dees: “You Can Write Espionage”

Cindy Dees interviewed by Clay Stafford

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As a fan of Cindy Dees' espionage novels, I've always been drawn to their realism, pace, and relatable characters. So, when the opportunity to discuss her work arose, I eagerly seized it. A former spy, Cindy brings unique and unparalleled authenticity to her espionage novels. Her firsthand experiences in the field make her one of the best in the genre. “Cindy, let’s delve into the art of writing espionage thrillers.”

“Yay, I love those. I love a good spy thriller. Always have.”

“Tell us a little bit about your background.”

“I was a Russian and East European studies major in college. I came to that because I had studied several languages in elementary school, junior high, and high school, and I needed to take a language class at my university. I didn't want to study languages I was already familiar with, so I decided to try a new language. I randomly picked Russian because it doesn't seem to be a language many Americans study. My teacher was a spy who had gotten caught, and he had to leave the business. For lack of anything else to do, he became an instructor of Russian at a university. He could manage to get through grammar for about three-quarters of a class, and then he would get so bored he couldn't stand it anymore because he wasn't a teacher at heart. He would turn a chair around backward, sit it down in front of the class, and tell us war stories about being a spy in the Eastern Bloc. It was a fascinatingly different culture. And I just got interested. And so, hence my degree. Once I left college, I went to pilot training in the Air Force and showed up at my first base of assignment after pilot training. After pilot training, I flew a business jet that flew generals to their business meetings. One of the other pilots in my squadron was a native-born Russian speaker, and he introduced me to a program that the United States had at that time where U.S. pilots escorted, at the time, it was Soviet flights, then later became Russian flights into and out of U.S. airspace. He recruited me for the program, and I was eligible because I was both a pilot and a Russian speaker. We figured out very quickly that the Russian crews I flew with didn't think I was a pilot. I was a, you know, 23-year-old blonde, and they didn't take me terribly seriously. If I acted dumb enough and blonde enough, they would tell me anything I wanted to know. I could walk right up to them and ask them about information that they no-way-no-how should have told me, and they didn't think I would understand it, and not only did they think I didn’t have the Russian language for it, but they didn't think I had the technical understanding. I became a very effective gatherer of information. Most of my intelligence career boiled down to me walking up to Russians and going, ‘Oh! Look at all those dials! I can’t remember what they all do. How can you possibly remember all these dials and switches?’ And then they would go, ‘Oh, well, I remember all of them.’ ‘Really, what does that one do?’ And I could point at something that I knew very well to be something classified, and they would go. ‘Oh, well, it does this,’ and then, ‘What does that do?’ ‘Oh, it does that.’ And they would tell me everything I wanted to know. It was insane. And so, I laugh about how my job was to be the dumbest spy on the planet and then come home and write reports and tell people what I heard.”

“It's incredible how the pretty girl thing will work for you. Philip Marlowe found that often.”

“I don't know how pretty I was. I was just young and blonde, and they were old and grizzled, and it works. But yes.”

“You’ve started writing a nonfiction series on tropes. What are the tropes associated with the espionage thriller?”

“I would have to pull up the whole list to give you all of them.”

“But just in general.”

“The nuclear threat, the spy defects, the piece of information that is fake, like fake intelligence. In a book like Gorky Park, which is an old espionage classic, the low-level spies must save the world from the high-level politicians. The search for the mole. The double agent. I could go on and on. I mean, there will be dozens of traditional espionage-style stories.”

“And for someone such as myself who has never interacted with any Russian dignitary or anything, how would I ever go about researching to write this? Or is it even possible for me to write this realistically?”

“There are any number of terrific books written by former spies, some of which will have terrific war stories. And it depends on the time you want to write about. What's fascinating to me is what's old is new again. Right now, we're in a period of heavy Russian espionage so that you can go back to the espionage of the war stories and the ex-spies like the Seventies, the Eighties, and the early Nineties. And a lot of those stories are going to apply to today. There's then a whole other class of manuals and books that are how-tos of tradecraft, and government agencies put some of them out. Former spies themselves put some of them out. Some are put out by wannabes and aren't all that good. But if you read enough of them, you'll get a relatively good overview of what the actual tradecraft would look like. If you're reading a book by a spy, and it reads as if about 90% of the job is tedium and silent stress while nothing happens, and about 10% of it is running for your life and maybe being interrogated and having to dodge questions and fearing for your life, that's about the right percentage of it. That's probably somebody who did the job because the vast majority of the job is stressing over getting caught, not getting caught, and very tedious, very time-consuming collection of mostly useless information, mostly just trying to get to know sources trying to gain their trust, doing nothing of great value for a very long time punctuated by individual moments of a single critical piece of information coming across your feed, or getting a tidbit of information from somebody that's incredibly important, or then having some unpleasant run-in with a foreign government. So those are the people that when I read a book, and it reads like that, I'm like, ‘Okay, this person is real. I'm going to pay attention to how they described it.’”

“I don't think I'm doing a Barbara Walters or Geraldo Rivera reveal like I'm outing you here. Is there any danger in the fact that you go around saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I was a former spy’?”

“No. So there’s kind of a code, a gentleman's code in the community that people who are out of the business, they and their families are left to their old age and their retirement and, you know, whatever guilt they have for whatever bad things they might have done during their life. It's not unusual for people who are retired from the business to mention that they were in the business at some point. And yes, there are some things that I was involved with that I don't feel at liberty to talk about: individual situations or individual pieces of information I might have brought back. There might still be people in the business that might be put in danger, so sure, I stay away from that stuff. But in general, it was known that their guys would try to collect information because they had pilots on our diplomatic flights. It was a known thing that we would try to get information from them. So, it's not anybody's big secret. What would be secretive is some of the information I managed to get that I'm a bit stingy about talking about. But the fact that I was running around with Russian air crews, the Russian government knew that. That was not secret to them. In fact, and again, I won't tell you a lengthy war story, but I did have a flight where the Russians did not think the Americans had time to get pilots to the airplane. It was a very last-minute flight that was ginned up. We had about an hour's notice. It just so happened that I lived close to the airport that plane came into, and you know, my people were able to call me and say, ‘Hey, are you home today? Can you get to that airport fast and jump on that plane?’ And so, when we landed in Moscow, the Russians didn't expect there to be an American on the plane, and the KGB detained me. I was hauled over to KGB headquarters, and it was very pleasant. They generally knew about the pilots; they didn't realize I was there, and I didn't have a visa to come to Moscow because there hadn't been time to generate one. They let me call the American Embassy, and the American Embassy was going to drive somebody over to pick me up, and it was all pretty pleasant. But while we sat there—because it was rush hour—for the hour plus waiting for somebody to come pick me up, the officer minding me got bored. He'd already given me a cup of tea, and he asked me if I'd like to see my KGB file. I, of course, said yes, so I got to see my KGB file, and there was a lot of wrong information in it. There was some information in it that led to somebody inside the U.S. having some problems with the U.S. government because there was some information in the file that could have only come from one source, and that source got tracked down. It turned out to be very interesting. But, you know, they were casual about me, and again, within the business, it's understood. I think that code may be changing some. I believe that is something that has happened in the last decade. I think gentlemanly understanding is becoming less the case and becoming more violent and dangerous to be human intelligence. They call it HUMINT, which is human intelligence, human gathered intelligence. That's becoming much more dangerous, and because of that, the intelligence services rely a lot more heavily on technology now—spy satellites and listening devices and hacking computers—to get information than they would from people. The problem is people are incredibly valuable sources of intelligence. It's becoming more and more challenging to do human intelligence, but that is where you get just that ineffable: somebody has a Spidey sense that something isn't right, or somebody has a Spidey sense that something might be about to happen, or that you know, for example, right now, if there were human intelligence, if I were in the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, I would be very interested in which high-level generals inside the Russian military are acting nervous. Because just about a week ago now, the number two guy in the Russian army was abruptly arrested and charged with an $11,000 bribe. In terms of corruption in Russia, that's pennies on the dollar of what they do on a day-in and day-out basis in corruption. It was a warning shot across the bow by somebody to people inside the Russian military to stop doing something. If I were in Russia right now, I would want to know what my human sources are saying about the high-level people inside the Russian military, their thinking and feelings, and how nervous they are. And have they gone into a bunker? Have they quit talking to anybody? Who are they talking to in private? That would all be incredibly important, and the only way to gather it would be with human intelligence.”

“So, if you're sitting there drinking tea and see these inaccuracies in your dossier, do you correct them?”

“Oh, oh, no, I'm the world's best dumb blonde, like, ‘Oh, look at that! That's so cool!’ You know, give them a little giggle, and you move on. I've had a couple of situations more recently in my life since I left the military, where I had an opportunity not to do any intelligence work, but I was in a situation where I was around some security people, and I needed not to acknowledge their presence. After the situation ended, the only debrief I got was they could not believe how good I was at looking one of them right in the eye, acting as if I had no recognition of them whatsoever and had no idea they were there, and just went on, you know, with my dingbat life. I was like welcome to the dumb blonde act. I refined it over many decades.”

“For the readers, do you think someone can write a plausible espionage if they do the research?”

“Absolutely. You know I was not—well, I was chased a few times—but it was not the norm in my career to be running around making deaddrops and assassinating people because I've never killed anybody. I’ve never dropped sarin poison in somebody's coffee. I didn't do any of that, but I can certainly write about it just as a function of the widely available research materials. And yes, I have the advantage of there being a few people I could maybe pick up the phone and ask for a little bit further information, but I try not to bother those contacts with stuff that I can find out by doing my own research.”

“And there does seem to be a good bit of material going on right now in our present-day society from which you can pull things.”

“Yes, I'm a little cautious of Reddit feeds and the internet, just in general. Try to go to a primary source. I want to get a book published by somebody or an interview where I know the interviewer and who was interviewed. Occasionally, somebody will be on YouTube, someone I know is a reputable source. But honestly, the vast majority of it you can get in print. I will look for other primary sources if I find something interesting online. I may look for footnotes or citations and look those up to verify something. I try to be cautious in verifying if I hear something that doesn't sound logical or reasonable.”

“And between your experience and research methods, that’s why your espionage tales ring so true. You’ve inspired me. I might even give it a try. Do you think there is hope?”

She laughs. “I think there is hope.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

NYT and USA Today bestselling author Cindy Dees is the author of 100+ novels. A former U. S. Air Force pilot and part-time spy, she writes thrillers, military romance, and bestselling non-fiction, writing how-to series using tropes. www.cindydees.com

Clay Stafford Interviews Reviewer Maureen Corrigan: “I Want Good Books”

Maureen Corrigan interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Maureen Corrigan, the esteemed reviewing voice for NPR’s Fresh Air, is a figure whose influence I’ve admired for years. It was a true honor to present her with the John Seigenthaler Legends Award at the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Her book-lined office in Washington, D.C., where we had the privilege of conversing, is a testament to her influence. She receives over two hundred books per week for review, a staggering number that underscores the weight of her opinions and influence.

“Maureen, all of us would like more reviews. I think like a writer. I think like a storyteller. I think the way that my brain works. But how can a writer step out of themselves and start thinking like a reviewer to get more of their books covered?”

“I don’t think a writer should think like a reviewer. I don’t think a writer should be thinking about reception.”

“Not at all?”

“I think a writer’s job is to be as loyal to the work at hand as possible, and that is where your focus should be. And thinking about reception is, in my mind, a killer. When I’m having trouble with a review—just writing because reviewing is writing—I don’t think, ‘Oh, I’d better write it this way because I know that’s gotten a good response,’ like jokes or some witticisms from Fresh Air audiences, or whatever. What I say to myself is, ‘Pretend you’re writing this for the Village Voice.’ That’s where I started out as a reviewer. Voice was the greatest independent newspaper ever in America. There’s a new anthology out of Village Voice writing that I’m very excited about. The Voice would let you do anything, and be as outrageous, or even offensive, or funny, or heartfelt, as you wanted it to be. If they felt like you were writing from an authentic place, if you had something interesting to say, let it rip. I need to give myself permission to really think about what I think of a work and write in the way that I think is appropriate to my sensibility. I cannot think about whoever is hearing it, or reading it, or how they may feel about what I’m writing.”

“This leads to my next question. You are a professor as well as a reviewer, and what do you think a writer should do to have a writer’s education?”

“For me, it’s still the traditional wisdom: read, read, read, read, read, read.”

“And read what?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes. Read popular fiction. Absolutely read the canonical stuff. I mean, there’s a reason why we’re still talking about Hemingway, even though some of my students might roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh, you know, the deadest of the whitest, malest writers.’ Read him. Look at those Nick Adams stories. Hear that voice! Look at what he’s doing with those omissions, those spaces in his writing, and how he draws us in. You try to do it. See if you can do something like that. And, as a reviewer, to have a sense of the canon of Western civilization, you know, I wish I had absorbed more of it. I’m always trying to be able to make those connections to contemporary literature, or to even sometimes use an apt quote that opens out what a book might be trying to do. I’ve got some of that at my fingertips. So, I think being informed about the craft and the art that you’re working in is crucial. And I’ll tell you one other thing. I think the greatest advice is, ass in the chair. I am a little fed up with pre-writing. I think that the academy writing programs are way too invested in pre-writing exercises.”

“Can you define that?”

“I have an honor student right now who’s working on a thesis. And what that means at Georgetown is that she will have been in a yearlong class. All fall semester, she and her cohort were just talking about what they thought they wanted to do. That’s four months of talk, and then she would meet with me, and she’d say, ‘I think I want to do this and that.’ Being the sour puss that I am, I would say, ‘Well, I think I want to write a book about a whale and a ship. What do you think of that?’ But it’s not gonna be Moby Dick. Put it down on paper and see what it really is, and then we can work with this. I think that all these pre-writing exercises where students—they don’t even do drafts. They do outlines finally, but they’re theorizing their subject. And you know it’s just endless talking about what they think they might want to write. I think it amps up the anxiety of writing. Just sit down and write—as Anne Lamott says—the shitty first draft, and then the next one, and then the next one, and the next one. It is not fun. It’s hard to write. Keep doing it, keep at it, and maybe something will come of it. That’s the only way.”

“So, if a writer wanted to transcend just the normal, what would they do? How would they go about it?”

“They’d have to look inside themselves. They’d have to look inside themselves armed with all of that other language in those great books that I’m talking about, and they’d have to look inside themselves and say, ‘What’s my worldview? What’s the thing that when I think about it—an incident, a person, a situation—I get that charge of, ‘I want to get it down. I want I want to nail that.’ I think they have to start with wherever their creative spark is. That’s what they have to do.”

“Okay, last question. In your classes, teaching, and being around authors, your whole life, basically, even before you started a career, you were around authors your whole life. What do you wish that writers really knew? If you took a writer aside and said, ‘I just wish you knew this,’ what would that be?”

“Well, I hope they know that writing really changes people’s lives. I hear from listeners of Fresh Air who say, ‘I read this book or that book on your say so. It really touched me profoundly.’ My students still come in with Catcher in the Rye, and they want to talk about it. They feel such a strong connection with Holden. For many of us, those characters, those worlds that we meet on the pages of a book, they’re as real as anything that’s out there. I really do feel like there is a kind of sacred aspect to writing. So even if you’re writing—you know I love mysteries—even if you’re writing mysteries, my God! Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, that whole crew. I’m rereading the Spencer novels now, Robert B. Parker. I love those novels and I’m seeing the magic in them again—I haven’t read them in a long time—from back in the Seventies. Parker was writing from an authentic place. I think, late in the series he began to repeat himself and quote himself, but what a joy it is to read those novels and to enter that world! And I feel like you can feel that he’s having a blast himself being in that world. So, I don’t know. I think writers should know we’re all rooting for them. We want the magic to happen, too.”

“You’re talking about characters. You’re still not over Gatsby.”

“Oh, how could you ever get over Gatsby? I was just in New York. I had the privilege of meeting with some of the folks involved in one of the two Gatsby musicals that are about to open. It was so much fun talking to creative people who were not, you know, academics. Yeah, who were musicians, who were producers, directors. What’s Gatsby about? What’s this about? People who are just as obsessed as I am with that novel. It has a hold on many of us, and it’s so wonderful to have Gatsby regarded that way, but also to think about why, what is the magic here? You know it hasn’t gone away in 100 years.”

“Was Fitzgerald telling an inward story, or was he trying to change a life, or what?”

“He was telling an inward story. He did both. He was also telling a story about America and the dream of American meritocracy, and how it lets us down. In that 185-page little novel, he managed to vacuum-pack his own story—a lot of it is about class anxiety and that’s Fitzgerald’s story—and it’s also the story about America and the promise of America.”

“So, it’s personal and bigger.”

“That’s right. And it’s hard to do that. And he managed to pull it off.”

“But that’s what we all should strive for. Thank you.”

“I’m flattered and honored that you want to talk to me. You’ve probably heard enough of my spiel about Gatsby and writing and everything else, but I really do believe all this stuff. I want the good books. I want the books that surprise me.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2019, Corrigan was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle; in 2023, she received the John Seigenthaler Legends Award from The Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Her book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures, was published in 2014. https://maureencorrigan.com/

Paying it Forward

An Interview with Writer, Editor and Publisher Judy Penz Sheluk By Charlie Kondek

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If the name Judy Penz Sheluk keeps popping up in your reading, that shouldn’t be a surprise. She’s published two series of mystery novels, the Glass Dolphin and the Marketville books, in addition to numerous short stories and articles. Her books on publishing—Finding Your Path to Publication: A Step-by-Step Guide and Self-publishing: The Ins & Outs of Going Indie— are valuable resources for the emerging or experienced writer navigating the ups and downs, about which Penz Sheluk knows a great deal. Based on those experiences, she runs her own label, Superior Shores Press, which has released its fourth anthology of crime and mystery stories, Larceny & Last Chances. The anthology features 22 stories from some of today’s most engaging writers (including me, the author of this interview, who is bursting with gratitude at being in their company). 

Penz Sheluk is a member of Sisters in Crime International, Sisters in Crime – Guppies, Sisters in Crime – Toronto, International Thriller Writers, Inc., the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and Crime Writers of Canada, where she served on the Board of Directors, most recently as Chair (whew!). While putting the finishing touches on Larceny & Last Chances and working to promote it, she took some time to let me pepper her with questions about the new book and her wide range of experiences across her various roles. As always, the advice she can give a writer was ample, as is the excitement over the work. Here’s what she had to say.   

CK: You had a long career in journalism before you started publishing fiction. What got you started on fiction? What keeps you writing it?

JPS: I’ve been writing stories “in my head” since I started walking to and from school as a young kid. Sometimes those stories would be short and take up one leg of the journey (about 20 minutes). Other times I’d keep them going for a few days. I honestly thought everyone did that until I mentioned it to my husband one day after a frustrating traffic-jammed commute. Something like, “Thank heavens I had that story going in my head.” I can still remember the stunned look on his face when he said, “You write stories in your head?” To his credit, he registered me in a 10-week creative writing course as a birthday present. My first publication (in THEMA Literary Journal) was a result of that course. I’ve never looked back. 

CK: You’re a novelist as well as a story writer. Which came first? What’s it like for you, working in both formats? 

JPS: I started with short fiction, but if I have a preference, it’s writing novels. I’m a complete pantser and, while that works well when you have 70,000 words to play with, it becomes problematic when you’re trying to tell a tale in 5,000 words or less. ‘The Last Chance Coalition,’ my story in Larceny & Last Chances (2,500 words) took me about two weeks to write! That’s the equivalent of two or three chapters, and when I’m working on a novel, my goal is a chapter a day. I have tremendous respect for short story writers.

CK: Then there are the anthologies. I don’t need to tell you how excited I am about Larceny & Last Chances. All the stories are so good. What got you into assembling anthologies, and how do you generate the theme for each? 

JPS: I got my start in short stories. I mentioned THEMA earlier, a theme-based literary journal, and that inspired the theme-based anthology idea. But it wasn’t until I had two published mystery stories in 2014 that I really thought, “Hey, I can do this.” When I decided to start Superior Shores Press in 2018 (following the closure of both small presses I’d been published with), I knew I had to give the press some legitimacy. It seemed like a win-win. Pay forward my own success, and establish SSP as the real deal.

As for themes, the first was called The Best Laid Plans (because it really was a risk and I had no idea what I was doing). After that I got into alliteration! Heartbreaks & Half-truths, Moonlight & Misadventure, and now, Larceny & Last Chances. I try not to make the theme too restrictive—e.g. no mention of murder—so that writers can explore their inner muse. 

CK: What are the top two things you look for in an anthology submission? 

JPS: 1) It must meet the theme, but not in an obvious way. Surprise me and you’ll surprise the reader. 2) A great ending. When I’m reading a story, sometimes I’ll be on the fence, and then the end will just blow me away. And so, I’ll reread the story, thinking, “How can I make this better, so I’m not on the fence?” And if the ideas pop at me, rapid fire, I know it’s a yes. Usually it’s stuff like too much backstory, or too many characters. Both are easily corrected if the author is amenable. In my experience, most authors only want to improve their work, and so they are largely receptive to any suggested edits. 

CK: What are reasons you might reject a submission? 

JPS: 1) Sloppy writing, and by that I mean not just missing commas or spelling/grammatical errors, but a lack of attention to detail. 2) For Larceny, I received a few submissions that had clearly been rejected for a recent location-themed anthology. I understand that good stories get rejected for any number of reasons, but as an author, you should make the effort to improve (and change the locale, if need be) before submitting to the next market. 3) The premise is unimaginative. I want you to be on theme, but it can’t be obvious and the ending should surprise or satisfy (and hopefully, both). 4) Werewolves. I really do not get werewolves.

CK:  I’m sure a lot of people ask you about publishing, based on your experiences, your articles, and your books on the topic. What are the most important pieces of advice you find yourself giving people?

JPS: Publishing is a business like any other. Rejection isn’t personal. And while there are exceptions, it’s the big names that will get the big bucks. I remember a writing instructor telling me: “If you want a six-figure publishing deal, become a celebrity. If you want to learn to write well, start with this class.”

CK: Thanks so much for taking the time for this, Judy!

JPS: My pleasure, Charlie. I’ve registered for Killer Nashville (my first time!) and can’t wait to meet Clay Stafford and the many writers and readers who will be attending this year’s conference. 

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Larceny & Last Chances: 22 Stories of Mystery & Suspense

Edited by Judy Penz Sheluk

Publication Date: June 18, 2024

Sometimes it’s about doing the right thing. Sometimes it’s about getting even. Sometimes it’s about taking what you think you deserve. And sometimes, it’s your last, best, hope. Edited by Judy Penz Sheluk and featuring stories by Christina Boufis, John Bukowski, Brenda Chapman, Susan Daly, Wil A. Emerson, Tracy Falenwolfe, Kate Fellowes, Molly Wills Fraser, Gina X. Grant, Karen Grose, Wendy Harrison, Julie Hastrup, Larry M. Keeton, Charlie Kondek, Edward Lodi, Bethany Maines, Gregory Meece, Cate Moyle, Judy Penz Sheluk, KM Rockwood, Kevin R. Tipple, and Robert Weibezahl.

Buy Link: www.books2read.com/larceny

“Robert Mangeot: Short Stories and the Big Honking Moment”

Robert Mangeot interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Since the inception of Killer Nashville, the name of Robert Mangeot has been a constant presence, a beacon of inspiration for aspiring short story authors. His literary prowess has been recognized in various anthologies and journals, including the prestigious Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, Lowestoft Chronicle, Mystery Magazine, The Oddville Press, and in the print anthologies Die Laughing, Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War, Not So Fast, and the Anthony-winning Murder Under the Oaks. His work has been honored with the Claymore Award, and he is a three-time finalist for the Derringer Awards. He’s also emerged victorious in contests sponsored by the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild, On the Premises, and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. His pedigree in the realm of short stories is truly unparalleled.

“So, Bob, how are short stories different from novels other than the length?”

“They are entirely different organisms. Novels, done right, are interesting explorations of something: theme, a place, a premise. The novel will view things from multiple angles. Short stories may, too, but novels will explore connected subplots. They might have many points of view on the same crime or the same big event, or whatever the core thing of the story is so that you get an intense picture of the idea of what this author is trying to convey, even if it's just to have a good time. Novels are an exploration. And they will take their time. I'm not saying they're low on conflict, but they will take their time to develop the clues, develop characters, and introduce subplots. Potentially, none of that is in a short story, right? The short story is not a single-cell organism but a much smaller one in that everything is all part of the same idea.”

“How do you get it all in but make it shorter?”

“There aren't subplots. There are as few characters as you can get away with. Once you get those baseline things down, it’s about compression. No signs, no subplots. Just keep on that straight line between the beginning and ending. Once you've mastered that, there's a bazillion ways to go about it, but you must meet those baselines. Everything connects to the whole, and—I know I overuse this—but the construct that I always go back to is Edgar Allen Poe. He called it unity of effect. He often talked about emotion, so he wanted to create a sense of dread. Everything in the story was to build that up.”

“And that’s your basis?”

“For me, the whole unity is what the story tries to convey. It can be heavy-handed. It can be lighthearted. But the characters should reflect that idea by who they are, where they live, how old they are, whether they have family or not, what's the story's tone, what's the crime in the story, and what the murder weapon of the crime is. Everything connects to the whole. I can assess that in my own stories, if I introduce something—an object, a character, a place— I don't just use it once; I use it twice. And if I can't use it twice seamlessly, it's either not important, and thus I don't need to play it up, or it is important because now there's something to that, right? Then, you can begin to explore that. Some editing is for flow, but some ensure this whole thing comes together. Because, you know, readers are going to notice. Clay, you're a fast reader, but you won't read an 80,000-word novel in a night, right?”

“Not unless I have an interview or a story meeting the next day.”

“Right! You'll read that over several days, a week, or something like that.”

“Yes.”

“A short story is something you'll read in twenty minutes or fifteen minutes, and you’ll know if something is off about that story. That's part of the magic of the short story. You’re going to pull off that trick for the reader. You’ve got to grab them. You're not going to have to hold them for long, but any little slip and the magic is gone, and they're out of the story.”

“What unifies the short story? Is it a theme, or what?”

“I tend to think it would be thematic. It would almost have to be. It could be a place, but it must still be about something. Why did you pick the place?”

“Which seems thematic.”

“Yeah, right. You asked the question earlier about how I get started on a story. It’s not some abstract idea. It's not that I want to write about love or family. I think some of that comes out.”

“So what is it?”

“Voice. Voice means two different things. One of them is personal, and one is technical. In terms of your sense of voice, what choices do you make? What do you naturally write about even if you're unaware you're writing about it? What comes up repeatedly in my stories, and I don't intend to do it, is families. Even in stories when it's not necessarily a biological family. I don't know what that says about me. I have great parents. But that tends to be what it is. So, if people can step back in the story and say, ‘Oh, well, this was about love and the price of it,’ then I think I did it.”

“Do you have room in a short story for character arcs?”

“The characters must grow. They must be tested. The structure that I use in most of my stories—I hope it's not obvious, but probably is for people who understand structure—is the three-act structure. So, someone has a problem. That problem has changed their world. And then you get to try to solve the problem, and it gets worse, and it gets worse, and it gets worse. In short stories, it will be a problem you can resolve in 3,000 words, 5,000 words, or 1,000 words if you're writing short. There's going to be moments of conflict. And that's where characterization comes in. Of course, they can't win unless it's a happy story where they win. But how do those setbacks and their trials to set things right—even if it's the wrong decision—go back to the way things were, to embrace a change, and how do they think about that? That's what I like about writing. I think that's where the conflict comes from short stories. That's the story's core: how they will confront it. How does it change them? Does it leave them for the better or worse? And typically, in most of my stories, it’s for the better. Either way, throwing them more problems is the same arc, which'll keep making it more complicated.”

“It keeps building?”

“You can't let the reader rest in a short story, but you can give moments where the character has a little time to reflect. A paragraph, right? ‘Oh, my God, this has happened. Now, what am I going to do?’ So the readers can catch their breath there along with the character, and then back to a million miles an hour. I'll go back to voice. There's the personal side of voice. The words you choose, the topics you choose, even when unaware of those choices. That's your voice. And then there's what I would call narrative voice, which I think is underappreciated as a tool in the short story. The great writers all know how to do it, even if they don't know they're doing it that way. However, one way to achieve compression in a story is not by any of the events you have or don't have; it's how the narrator tells the story. Suppose the narrative voice carries a certain tone, a certain slant, and a certain kind of characterization. In that case, that's going to superpower compression throughout the whole story because people will get the angle that the story is coming from, and then you don't have to explain so much.”

“Easier said than done, of course. So, what are the advantages, if any, of writing short stories over longer forms?”

“They are a wonderful place to experiment. I've written a couple of novels. I would never try to sell them now because I wrote them when I first started writing, and they're not any good. I would have to rewrite them. If I dedicated all my writing to a novel, it’d take me a couple of years to write one. There's no guarantee it would be any good. If my goal is publication, there'd be no guarantee an agent would like it. Then there's no guarantee a publisher would take it or it would sell well; all of those have no guarantees, right? And so, you could get into this thing and have a lot of heartbreak. And then you say, well, I will try it again.”

“And maybe the same thing happens. Trunk novels.”

“With short stories, you can just try it. It's going to take you a few days to write it. I put a lot of angst into the editing bit. A lot of people are better at that than I am. And if it doesn't work, so what? You've talked to yourself a lot about writing. I’ve learned this sort of story isn’t for me, but I'm getting better at it, getting better at it, getting better at it. There's not a lot of money in this stuff. So why not have some fun? Why not experiment?”

“Do you think that writers of short stories have more flexibility in the types of things they can do? And I'm asking this because one of the things I've lamented about the literary industry is that you get known for a certain thing. However, a filmmaker, for example, can make any number of styles of movies, and nobody ever pays attention to the fact. They are usually just attracted to the stars or whoever is in the movie. However, the filmmaker and the writer can be diverse in whatever interests them. Do you think there's more flexibility in being a short story writer?”

“There is. A great example is Jeffrey Deaver.”

“My songwriting buddy.”

“Yes. When he's writing novels, he's Jeffrey Deaver, right? He's the brand and has to deliver a very certain thing. But read some of the short stories. They're terrific. And they're not some of these same characters.”

“Do you think it's difficult for a novelist to write a short story and a short story writer to write a novel? If somebody is used to writing long, can they cut it short? Or can they fill it in after writing short to make it long?”

“You know, people can't be great at everything. Some people are naturally better at short. I suspect I'm one of them. Some people are naturally better at long. But I would also say that if you know how to write, you’ll figure out either form. You can figure out poetry. You can figure out creative nonfiction. If you're a writer, you can write.”

“What’s the most important thing, the most important element, in a short story?”

“Endings are the most important at any length, but short stories are all they are. They exist to give you a big moment of catharsis, release, insight, whatever it is, that you get at the end of a perfect story. Anyone who's a big reader knows what I’m talking about. You get that thing at the end of the story. That's really all short stories are at the end of the day. That's what they're there to do. To produce that moment. And so, I always call it the big honking moment. You light the rocket right at the beginning, and that big honking moment is when the fireworks go off. And it exists to do that and to do it quickly. That's what the payoff and all this planning is about. And people do it in wonderful ways.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Robert Mangeot’s short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, Lowestoft Chronicle, Mystery Magazine, the MWA anthology Ice Cold, and Murder Under the Oaks. His work has been nominated three times for a Derringer Award and, in 2023, received a Killer Nashville Claymore Award. https://robertmangeot.com/