Sometimes, on panels or at book club visits, I’m asked, “Why mysteries?” Other than that I love to read them, that I grew up spending hours in the company of yet another Agatha Christie or Dick Francis, I like to reply that mysteries, and crime fiction in general, provide the satisfaction of structure. Crime fiction demands a beginning, middle, and […]
“Ripped from the headlines!” “Inspired by a real story.” “Some of what follows is true…” These are all familiar phrases that many mystery authors – including myself – have used to describe the murderous plots we write about in our books. On the face of it, this sure seems like a pretty nifty concept. Find a sensational crime in the
Like most writers I know, I write because I have to. Not the kind of have to where you’re going to die if you don’t. Or even the kind of have to because if you don’t you can’t pay the bills and you’ll starve to death and so will your family and then you’ll be thrown out on the street
One question I get asked frequently as a mystery author is whether I spend a great deal of time doing research before writing my novels. The answer is yes. I’ve done a heckuva lot of research for my books. Just not the kind you might think. I’m a longtime New York City journalist (New York Post, New York Daily News,
My reading habit was mostly self-inflicted, though heavily influenced by my father’s collection of boyhood books, notably the works of Edgar Rice Boroughs, Zane Grey, Tom Swift and lots of other popular action writers of the early 20th century now lost in obscurity. But the mystery addiction is all my mother’s fault. She didn’t know the term, but she was
Never end a sentence with a preposition? That is the sort of pedantry up with which I shall not put. (Winston Churchill) Sometimes it’s okay to savagely split an infinitive. (Me) And if it sometimes seems right to start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but,’ do it. Subject, predicate, object is almost always the right order. Until it gets boring.
I always want to be writing anything other than the thing I’m supposed to be writing. This is the impulse that drives my productivity. It’s why I have so many irons in the fire, because there’s nothing like a fresh iron to take your mind off the ones already in the forge. The problem with working on the thing I’m
When I tell people that I’ve never written a query that didn’t result in a request for pages, they can’t believe it. When I tell them I only ever sent out three (or six if you count the random assignments I was given to pitch to at conferences) queries, they are shocked. But here’s the thing: I researched before I
This month’s MWA meeting was about conferences. I personally think that if you can afford conferences, you should go, because nothing else works quite so well to get your name out there and allow you to meet people you might want to work with in the future. That said, I have a few thoughts on the topic of things that
When I got a two-book contract after having written only a single book in my romantic suspense series, I found myself presented with several problems. First: a deadline. After all, I’d taken forever to write the first book, and I couldn’t do that with the second. And second, I had to remember everything from the first book so that I
