Crimebake 2009: Awesome Again!

Just returned from Crimebake, the New England mystery conference for writers and readers. Wow! What fun.

It's hard to pass on a chance to brag, so here it is. I submitted a Flash Fiction piece to the conference contest and was one of three winners! You can read my winning entry and more about the contest here.

Too many thoughts to give a coherent "report" but here are random experiences mixed with a few of the many factoids I picked up:

• An authors' panel called "T is for Traditional" was asked to share the name of the author that they most admired. Interestingly, two authors (Mark Arsenault and Cynthia Riggs) named Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark) - the author that our Book Club is currently reading. See a subsequent comment to me from Cynthia Riggs.
  
• Criminalists (in the past) did not have the ability to make absolute ID's from hair analysis. All they could do was narrow it down. Now, DNA analysis from a hair root can be, potentially, absolute. And also - DNA from fingerprints can sometimes be more significant than the fingerprint left behind! Great presentation from Mary Kate McGilvray, former acting director of the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab.
  
• Speaking of stuff related to CSI - in real life, what is portrayed by a single crime scene technician is frequently the work of many, many specialists.
• Want to be a writer? Can you put up with 50 "rejections" before getting an acceptance - or maybe never getting an acceptance for a book. Chocolate brownies was mentioned a few times! (I can relate!) Several panels addressed this but none more bluntly than "P is for Persistance." Several spoke of turning to different projects: short stories, other novels, true crime, or just personal activities as distractions. Keeping stories in "inventory" was mentioned; often, a request for a particular type of book/story could come up several years later.
• What creates tension or fear in a book? One panel of authors totally agrees that it is not violence or blood. Among other things it is pacing. One insight - humor accentuates tension; tension accentuates humor. I have to agree with comments of one of my favorite authors (and favorite persons), Michael Palmer - it is understanding the emotion of fear, in other words, successfully conveying the experience of the character, from being in the character's shoes. A helpless character contributes to that, and no one is more helpless than a hospital patient. Dr. Palmer has a lot of insight into that and brings it out well in his medical thrillers. That's Michael Palmer on the right (with me) - below.
  

• Sue Grafton gives credit to her attendance at a Jack Canfield workshop for helping her to get onto the Best Seller list. (Just a tiny nugget from an extensive list of tidbits from her interesting luncheon speech.)
  
• Highly published short story author Stephen Rogers has managed to get 13 stories published by Women's Day. That magazine pays well at about $500 per story. On the other hand, he has had some 200 other stories published many of which pay poorly. It's too bad - short stories is a great art form in itself. I had a very enjoyable time chatting with Stephen on Friday evening as well as receiving some helpful tips on a short story manuscript.
• The best way to remove the serial number from a handgun is to use a power drill and take out the metallic ridges. Of course that wouldn't work if the imprint is inside the gun barrel. That from a ballistics expert.
• Solving a mystery-game-crime with clues scattered on 30 tables and 250+ participants must be "impossible" given that none of us solved the crime exactly! LOL - maybe it was the script?
  

Scarpetta and the Challenge of Series Books

I read two of Patricia Cornwell's books featuring Kay Scarpetta, forensic pathologist, but it was quite a few years ago. The first in the series was written in 1990! Time flies when our heads are buried in mysteries! I digress already.

Why did I stop reading the series; why did it take so long to return? I'm not sure exactly, but my best memory is that the second book that I read (I don't know which book title this was) contained the re-appearance of the "bad guy" from the previous book I had read. That bugged me. When the book is finished, I want the mystery to be solved, and the killer to have been "finished." Perhaps that is unfair, because I have maintained an interest in other series where that has happened. But still, how many series can a person read where you begin to lose track of what happens in which series?

No matter which Hardy Boy book you read in which order, you are not going to be confused by the series because the main characters are always the same. Frank and Joe remain more or less perpetual high school juniors and seniors through over 50 summer and winter vacations. In the Perry Mason series by Erle Stanley Gardner, no matter which book you read in the 80 book series, nothing has happened in the personal life of Perry, Della, or Paul to make you wish you had read 32 other books first. And so on.

Nowadays, this is not the case. The main character gets married in one book, divorced in the next book, raped in the next book, and provides legal aid to her rapist in the tenth book while trying to help the grown child of her former husband's second marriage alluded to briefly in the fifth book. Try reading that series out of order. Who wants to read the Harry Potter series in backwards order? (Confession, I have not read even one of the books.)

The way that authors approach the development of their central characters is spread along a continuum of "No Change" (like Frank and Joe or Perry and Della) on the one extreme and the "Every Book is a New Chapter" (like Harry Potter and pals) on the other extreme. I'm fine with the middle of the continuum. V I Warshawski (in the series by Sara Paretsky) and Kinsey Milhone (Sue Grafton) do make some life changes over the course of the series, but not enough to confuse the reader who might join the series in the middle.

Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta series is (for me) annoyingly not in the middle of that continuum, but veers toward the "Many Changes" end of the line. Cornwell's 2008 novel was given to me by a good mystery reader pal and I decided to give it a go.

The plot and characters were great! No problem -- enjoyable. The author played fair with the ending, letting you in on the clues ever so gradually.

But the book was annoying! So much reference to events of the past. I wouldn't be surprised if the total of all such paragraphs might equal 20% of the 500 page book. Since Scarpetta's past (15 books in all) is referred to at length, and since I had not read those books (not all of them, and none recently) it was hard to make sense of all the allusions. These references included previous cases, previous jobs in her career, previous locales in which she had lived, people close to her in previous books who are no longer living, and on and on. I suggest that a huge amount of that material could be deleted -- yep, edited right out of the book. That way, previous readers in the series can pick right up and new readers are not left feeling like the out duck out at the class reunion. Knowledge of every preceding event is NOT necessary to understanding the present case. So why burden me and confuse me.

There you have it. My own take.

Happy reading!