Sean Chercover is the author of Big City, Bad Blood and Trigger City (out next week), but is relatively new to writing novels. We asked him to talk about starting out (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here): I know writers who can tell you inspiring stories about how they queried hundreds of agents and kept submitting and never gave up until their walls were papered with rejections and their persistence finally paid off. I wish I could inspire you with a similar story. But the truth is, getting published wasn’t that hard.

Truth is, I got lucky. Timing is a big part of getting noticed. Your manuscript has to land on the right agent’s desk at a time when said agent is in a relatively positive frame of mind and in the mood to read the kind of thing you’ve written. That happened for me after only 23 rejections. And a few short months later, we had a two-book deal with HarperCollins.

I was also lucky because I met some very supportive people along the way. People who showed me the ropes, encouraged me, and made introductions. Two in particular, Jon and Ruth Jordan, opened a lot of doors.

Now, as the second of those two books hits stores, I look back and realize how very lucky I was, and I am grateful. If the universe had been configured slightly differently, I could just as easily been a guy with his mattress stuffed full of rejection letters.

Yes, getting published was easy; the hard part was writing the book…

Continue reading "Sean Chercover on the first time" »

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So, readers, I’m driving down the turnpike to come to Bouchercon on Thursday. I have fond personal memories of Baltimore. For six years I worked in Columbia, Maryland as president of HEAD Sportswear, makers of ski, tennis and golfwear, and spent a lot of time here in town. This is my first time back.

It’s a good meditation on the vagaries of life to think back on that time. Then, I was a 24/7 guy who was pushing with everything he had to restore luster to a tarnished tennis and ski brand. I had an MBA from Columbia, a lot of chutzpah and ambition, traveled two hundred days a year, and my final thoughts before falling asleep each night were generally how to rebuild the brand. Writing crime thrillers then was about as far from my reality as conversing in Chinese. In 1989, when HEAD became #1 again in both tennis and ski, (and we celebrated with a massive party in Las Vegas,) I felt a sense of personal triumph I doubted would ever be equaled in my life.

Flash forward 20 years. A couple of turnaround opportunities didn’t quite turn around. All the chutzpah and ambition in the world couldn’t fight a market declining 15 percent a year. One day I found myself out. Desperate, I gave myself over to this nagging whim I had carried since college, more outright fancy than thought-out.

I had this cool idea for a thriller.

Continue reading "Andrew Gross on changing careers" »

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Elizabeth Zelvin, author of Death Will Get You Sober, is a psychotherapist who has directed alcohol treatment programs, including one on the Bowery. So she's the perfect person to discuss the role of alcohol in crime novels. Her view: 

Ever since I first learned of Bouchercon, I’ve heard that for a writer, the best place to network is the bar. This is slightly awkward for me, since I’m an alcoholism treatment professional whose first mystery, Death Will Get You Sober, is about people in recovery. ("Don’t drink, go to meetings, and investigate a murder.") The fear that I’m marching to a different drummer in the great army of crime fiction writers became acute when I was invited by this year’s Bouchercon organizers to be part of what’s being called "the booze panel."

I’m certainly not the first mystery author to explore the theme of recovery. The great Lawrence Block’s tough-guy protagonist Matt Scudder got sober more than twenty years ago. In recent books, he’s maintained his sobriety and attended an occasional AA meeting. Scudder’s sobriety has the ring of authenticity. Yet Block still takes readers for a walk on the dark side. Far from finding a new family in AA or a spiritual path through the Twelve Steps, Matt still meets his best friend, a career criminal, in a bar. Another fine writer, James Lee Burke, presents New Orleans homicide detective Dave Robichaux in novels frequently described as "brooding," "dark," and "gritty." I suspect that Robichaux is depressed.

Alcoholic fictional cops and private eyes still outnumber their recovering counterparts. And the possibilities are far from exhausted. I conceived my protagonist, Bruce Kohler, as an amateur sleuth mostly because I didn’t know any cops or private eyes when I started writing the book more than ten years ago. (That has changed, thanks to the mystery community, my clinical work, and the Internet. I’ve talked to a thousand cops about post-traumatic stress and even hugged a few, in addition to tapping their expertise on guns and police procedure.)

Continue reading "Elizabeth Zelvin on sobriety" »

Posted by Dave Rosenthal at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

One had his character bricked up in a cellar, another injected a seven percent solution, and a third chased down a Maltese falcon. These great moments from revered mystery writers (I’ll assume you know who they are) inspired the latest group of authors that are descending on Baltimore for the Bouchercon conference. I’ve just joined the ranks of them, having sold my debut thriller a few months ago, but my novel won’t launch until May, so I get to wander around the halls dropping in on the panels that I find interesting.

And if there is one thing I’ve learned this past year, hanging with this crowd beats anything you could do otherwise. Granted, I’m a trial lawyer, and while trial lawyers can be fun, they are most often simply too exhausted from their killer schedules to be entertaining after hours. Especially in these past two weeks, when we all have watched a parade of similarly white-faced people stumbling out of late night meetings regarding the economic crisis. I don’t know about you, but I need a break, and a conference addressing my favorite genre of all time, mysteries, is just the ticket.

Continue reading "Jamie Freveletti on Bouchercon" »

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With all the amazing guest bloggers we've had, my posting schedule has been a little scattershot this week. But I wanted to make sure to highlight a few events happening this week, since so many fantastic authors will be in the area.

Tomorrow at noon you'll have a chance to meet Laura Lippman and Denis Lehane at the Charles Commons Conference Center signing their latest works, Hardly Knew Her and The Given Day, respectively.

 The Southeast Anchor branch of the Pratt library is hosting a mystery and romance discussion with Heather Graham and Alexandra Sokoloff. I had the pleasure of hearing Graham's views on the convergence of the mystery and horror at a panel earlier today, and she was a lot of fun. Make sure to ask her about the Lalaurie House in New Orleans; talk about horrific.

 Later that day, Read Street's guest blogger Austin Camacho will be at the Canton branch of the library to discuss his craft. And author Laurie King will moderate a mystery panel at the Orleans Street branch, featuring Frankie Bailey, Charlaine Harris, Gary Phillips and Cara Black.

For those of you who don't live and breathe mystery, breathe books will host Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin's Lament, on Wednesday.

Posted by Nancy Johnston at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

When I walked into the middle of Bouchercon 2008 at the Sheraton City Center, I was greeted with smiles and books. It was heavenly. Co-chair Judy Bobalik told me that they had roughly 1300 registered attendees, and every one that I talked to was friendly, helpful and very, very talkative.

A typical exchange at the mystery convention sounded like lines you'd hear at a family reunion -- "I haven't seen you in a while," "Yes, I was so sorry to miss the last one," "You look beautiful! Even better than last year!" -- these people clearly relish each Bouchercon and the friends they make at them.

Even an interloper like me was welcomed.

I noticed that the attendees were mostly authors themselves. At the horror mystery panel, I sat next to an aspiring legal thriller author from Florida. Afterward, Leigh from Orlando, Fla., explained his motivation for attending.

As a new writer, "I've learned how much I still have to learn," he said. "This is a great place to come to to pick up hints on my writing." He then pointed to his friend, James, from Los Angeles, who he said introduced him to this world of mystery.

James has attended Bouchercon events for the past 10 years, and he says there's no better place for comraderie. "Essentially, we only have one type of plot: Someone dies, and then you have to figure out who did it," he said. "So we help each other out with the details."

Local author Charles Colley, whose novel Sister Baby's Monkey was recently released, summed up the appeal of Bouchercon nicely: "Writers here are very accessible. You'lll be sitting next to someone, they're chatting with you ... and then it turns out they're a best-selling author."

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Robin Burcell, author of Face of a Killer (out in November), has had experience as a police officer and forensic artist. Does that help her as a mystery writer? Here's what she says: 

I've been a cop for at least a couple decades, and still work in law enforcement. Along the way I've dabbled in various cop-like duties, such as working patrol, detective, hostage negotiator, and FBI-trained forensic artist. It's that forensic artist skill that I decided to explore — coupled with murder and government conspiracy — in  Face of a Killer (If you're really curious, visit my website for a sneak-peak at the first chapter, as well as books from my SFPD Kate Gillespie series.)

But back to those cop-like duties. In many ways, my job makes it easier to write authentic police procedurals. Obviously the forensic art stuff I can write about. I've drawn everything from murder suspects to dead people in hopes of coming up with an identification. I did CSI work before TV made it seem glamorous (trust me, it so isn't). And unlike the majority of average citizens, I know what it's like to pull a gun on someone, feel my heart pounding, wondering if I'm going to have to kill this person I'm facing. There have been a number of times my finger has pulled the trigger, only to release it at the last second before that final click. While I've never killed anyone, I've witnessed an officer being killed. And high speed chases? Been there done that. Even crashed in a couple. So, yeah, the adrenalin-rush-stuff I get and try to include in my books. Short answer, talking and walking like a cop is easier to write about.

Continue reading "Robin Burcell on cop work" »

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William Lashner, author of Blood and Bone, has also worked as a prosecutor. Here he talks about the space between guilt and innocence (for all Bouchercon author posts, click here): When I write about lawyers and the law, or talk about writing legal thrillers as I will be doing with a brilliant group of lawyer-writers at a Bouchercon panel on Saturday morning, I always think back on the sad case of Caleb Fairley.

Twenty-one year old Caleb Fairley’s life was a flat out mess. This is all true, by the way. His younger brother had accidentally killed himself which left a huge hole in his life, Caleb had been ridiculed at school for his weight, and his mother was a nightmare of blame and recriminations. Not to mention that Fairley was avid a collector of pornography and one of those guys who lived to get lost in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. On the night of September 10, 1995, a fateful night in a number of lives, Caleb attended the concert of a gothic rock band and asked the keyboardist if he could help Caleb establish a more personal relationship with Satan. If ever there was a lost boy, it was Caleb Fairley.

Earlier on that same evening, in a small town outside Philadelphia, Lisa Manderich took her 19 month old daughter, Devon, into a children’s clothing store called Your Kidz & Mine to go shopping. I could spend paragraphs talking about their lives, their loving family, the hopes for their futures, but it’s enough to say they were mother and daughter running an errand. Neither Lisa nor Devon were ever seen alive again.

It didn’t take long for the police to connect our Caleb Fairley with the disappearance of the Manderichs. Lisa Manderich had told her husband exactly where she was going to shop and Caleb Fairley was the clerk on duty at the store.

Continue reading "William Lashner on guilt" »

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Alafair Burke, author of Angel's Tip, has seen crime from a prosecutor's vantage point. Saturday at Bouchercon, she'll be on a panel called Murder What Fun: Why we love writing crime fiction. Her take: For me, the fun of writing crime fiction comes from a sick collision between my childhood in Wichita, Kansas, under the shadow of a serial killer, and my years as a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon.

My parents moved our family to Wichita in the late 1970's. The moving boxes had just been unpacked when police announced a connection among seven unsolved murders of women and even children. The man who claimed responsibility called himself BTK, a gruesome acronym, short for "Bind, Torture, Kill." Our home fell squarely within the serial killer's stalking territory. Like other Wichita children of that era, I learned some pretty dark lessons: check the phone line to be sure the wires aren’t cut, keep the basement door locked at all times, barricade yourself in the bathroom with the phone if you have to call 911.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I suddenly started reading mysteries after moving into a world where the killer could be anyone, and where an arrest appeared hopeless. My mother, a school librarian, would take me each week to the public library for a new stack of books. I moved from the Encyclopedia Brown series to Nancy Drew to Agatha Christie and eventually to Sue Grafton. In the books, as opposed to Wichita, smart sleuthing always paid off, and order was always restored.

I was still an avid reader of crime fiction years later when the First Assistant called me – at that time a rookie Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon -- into his office for a special project. Police in Washington had just arrested a man for killing his girlfriend. In the course of confessing to the crime, the man also confessed to several other murders, including the strangling death of a Portland woman five years earlier. The problem was, two other people had already been convicted of that crime.

Continue reading "Alafair Burke on asking "what if?"" »

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Continue reading "Jonathan Hayes on blood and guts" »

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