Robert Spiller, author of the Bonnie Pinkwater mystery series is as bright and sprightly as his main character.  “Bonnie’s big mouth gets her into these fixes,” he replied. What gets her out when she’s in the crunch nose-to-nose with the villain?”  As a high-school math teacher, Bonnie’s former pupil, the Sherriff that she calls “youngster” can be counted on.

Keith Raffel was our panel’s big stakes Washington, terrorism, and  thriller writer. In Drop by Drop his recent book, the protagonist is a history professor and a one-time intelligence advisor.  Reluctantly his protagonist returns to Washington after a terrorist attack kills his wife, which gives his plot a strong personal motivation to involve himself in international intrigue.

Audrey Braun writes an everywoman smart sleuth whose husband morphs into a dangerous stranger who abandons her in a Mexican jungle. In A Small Fortune her protagonist faces extraordinary circumstances with only the wit and intelligence she possesses to survive.  While that limits a story, Audrey enjoys the challenge of extricating her character who doesn’t know the language and must learn quickly which allies she can trust.

Every protagonist needs allies, even the superhuman type who speak Chinese, can go without sleep for three days, and eat snakes to survive.  You all know the kind of hero I mean and that that’s not what Robert O’Hanesson writes. He writes smart and tough.

His Delta Forces guy in Possum Belly Queen is a guy who’s not eager for more adventure; however,  the kidnapping of a member of his own family draws him back into  the
dark carnival world to pit himself against a human trafficker.

As moderator, my role was to highlight these panelist’s books and provide an entertaining 45-minute look behind the curtain to show how authors drive their plots and find believable motives to enter the world of murder and mayhem.

For my own mysteries, No Dice and Rip-Off,  featuring Detective Dave Mason of the Santa Monica Police Department, it’s easy. Murder finds him.

Next year’s Left Coast Crime Conference will be held in Colorado Springs the last weekend of March 2013. Think about attending.

Left Coast Crime Conference, Sacramento, 2012

The Left Coast Crime Conference held in Sacramento, California brought together fewer agents and editors that I had noticed in last year’s conference. A quick scan of the program revealed only five panels out of the fifty-two varied offerings dealing with the world of finding fans and getting your book noticed.

That means ninety percent of the 45-minute panels featuring three or more crime writers focused on the craft of writing,  genres from quilt murders to killer thrillers, fact-finding, forensics, and law enforcement experts.

The bookroom where authors place titles for sale presents an opportunity to spend way too much money and carry more books home than you intended. Nobody mentions the Kindle in the bookroom.

Guests of Honor, this year Jacqueline Winspear and John Lescroart, were given special notice at hour-long interviews by noted authors Rhys Bowen and James Rollins respectively.

You can learn a lot at these conferences. Because you can’t attend each session the organizers make recordings available for a nominal price.  The conferences are held in large hotels and the panel rooms hold hundreds of fans and writers—all bunched up toward the front. These audiences are keen.

At the conclusion of each panel the panelists make their way to the book room.  Admirers and book buyers come to chat up the authors, get their book signed, and talk about their own books.

Each evening after the day’s panels are over, the program over the four days features an auction, a reception, a banquet and the award ceremony. Lots of conversations happen in the Hospitality Room where you sit down at a round table, have a brownie, and just chat up the person next to you.

Lots of unobtrusive peering at name tags to figure out if you’re talking to a well-published author, a two-book newbie like myself, a librarian, or a just another fan. Again like myself.

Good conversations happen exchanging likes and dislikes about your favorites. Really getting down and trashing a bad book nobody liked. Oh, that’s fun. I don’t know a single good writer who isn’t also an avid reader.

My thanks to the organizers, co-chairs Cindy Sample and Robin Burcell.

A work of fiction has to be about something, doesn’t it?  I’m watching The Old Curiosity Shop on PBS and it’s about debtor’s prisons.  Jane Eyre is the basic plot that underlies all romance novels.  Raymond Chandler’s novels are about crime and corruption in a place he called Bay City.

No Dice is about crime and corruption and the attempt by a casino consortium to build in Santa Monica 80 years or so later, the place called Bay City by Raymond Chandler.

I did the research, actual years of it, to write No Dice, ending about three years ago.  I read the newspapers, kept track of certain stories as they developed in California, and set up a Google Alert for casino development issues. I knew what I was talking about when I wrote the book.

Today I’m trying to catch up what’s happened in the last three years.  I know John Byk is going to ask my opinion.  Byk lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where new casinos are a big land use issue.

I am no expert on casinos. But I am an expert on social issues in Santa Monica. My nervousness comes from my unfortunate habit of blurting out the truth when someone asks me a question. This is a trait that doesn’t always serve you well.

I did a previous interview and listened to it later, slapping my hand on my forehead, shouting at myself, “I can’t believe you said that! You idiot!”

More interview experience will surely cure me of this.

And I know John, whom I’ve come to know a little from an exchange of emails, isn’t out to get me.  John Byk writes under the pen name of Conrad Johnson, and I’ve just read one of his novels, Crying Bullets.  The book is about the prevention of school shootings in Detroit. And it’s a good book.

His show features authors who write about serious social issues, either fiction or nonfiction. That would include most scribblers, wouldn’t it?  I’m sure even James Paterson or Dan Brown thinks he writes about “serious” issues.

Oh, that was terrible. I shouldn’t have said that.  See what I mean about telling the truth?

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By the way, here’s a link to the podcast: http://2012writersalive.blogspot.com/

It went well.

John Byk, Naturalist & Author of Crying Bullets

John Byk, who writes under the pen name of Conrad Johnson, wrote a mystery called Crying Bullets whom I thought of  today in regard to the the school shootings in   Ohio. I finished Crying Bullets recently, liked the book so much, and today just can’t get it out of my mind.

Crying Bullets features Arnold Penxa, war veteran and retired policeman, who  uncovers a planned school massacre with a motive so insidious it would make the devil  blush with envy. The problem is that nobody believes him except for a few close friends, so he’s forced to act  alone to bust up the plot. This is Detroit, Michigan, a city that makes its own rules where the line between common sense and crime is never clear.

John was kind enough to send me his reflections on a few questions I asked him to consider.

1.    With this recent news, how are you reminded of events in your life as a teacher who lost his job because he blew the whistle on the school’s terrible security procedures?

If you are referring to the high school shootings in Ohio, I am deeply saddened and also angered at the administration for not having prevented this.  School officials often see this is as a societal or psychological issue that is better left unspoken or left to local enforcement who do nothing but clean up after the fact.  However, I am happy to say, that after losing my job (actually I was forced into retirement), the upgraded security procedures which I spoke out for were finally installed because I created such a rancor in the local community.  If one child’s life will be saved, then it was all worth it.  Also, I have a good rapport with the new principal there who was an ex Chicago cop who I am in regular contact with and who, I found out, was supporting me behind the scenes during the entire ordeal.

2.    Do you find signs of optimism about a recovery for Detroit’s economy?

No.  Politicians have been promising the mythical resurrection of Detroit since the population exodus began in the late 60′s and nothing has changed.  Of course, there will be certain economic ‘pockets’ that will thrive and be protected, like the casinos, the GM headquarters downtown and the bridge to Canada for NAFTA purpose, but the rest of the city will rot slowly out of sight.

3.    Penxa realizes graft and poverty are endemic at the end of Crying Bullets and retreats. What will it take for the public school system to overcome incompetence, declining enrollment base, and all the other problems it’s currently beset with?

I don’t think Penxa actually retreats.  He’s just licking his wounds. There’s no victory without sacrifice.  I expect him to resurface in a later work.  As for the Detroit Public School system, I believe only an extreme gutting of the top heavy, corrupt and central administration needs to be done and parents and teachers need to step up and take charge of their schools like they do in forming vigilante groups to protect their neighborhoods from crime.

4.    You mentioned writing  Crying Bullets drained you. How closely have you identified with Penxa?

Much too closely but it was something that I finally needed to come to terms with in my life.  Like I mentioned above, there’s no victory, small or great, without pain or sacrifice.  If a person decides to put himself on the line for a just cause, then he’d better be prepared to deal with the consequences if he or she plans to continue all the way.

5.    How close are you to finishing another book and what is this one about?

I couldn’t write anything for weeks after finishing Crying Bullets, so I decided to write a small nonfiction, self-help book which I write under a pen name.  After toying around with several other ideas related to Detroit, I finally decided to give it a break and try something completely opposite, humorous and fantastical.  Currently, I’m working on a sci-fi novel called, Pissed Off Aliens, a la Kurt Vonnegut Jr., which is really a disguised metaphor about globalism and the destruction of earth’s natural resources by aliens from the planet Rio Tonto.  It takes place in the fictional county of Paulding near the Big Lake (which is really Lake Superior) and is told by an escaped slave worker who records what he calls the “true story” of how the aliens conquered the earth as his grandfather told him before he died.  It’s one hundred years into the future and he’s forced to record the narrative from deep inside an abandoned mine shaft so that the Tontins won’t locate him and “de-grid” him.  It’s very colloquial and tongue-in-cheek and fun to write and it’s what I need to do at the moment.

Each of John Byk’s books is a good read, well-crafted, and plotted and written with empathy and intelligence. I recommend them highly. Buy them at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006OL6JVS

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I must also mention in passing my friend Marcy Axness’ book Parenting with Peace, which has just been released. Today it seems appropriate. You’ll find a rave review at the Huffington Post.   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-chuda/parenting-for-peace-by-ma_b_1284623.html

It’s New Year’s Day and I’m not hung over, and that’s a very good thing. In fact, I haven’t been hung over for a very long time and that’s an even better thing.

Time to shrug off 2011. Many good things happened. My first mystery, No Dice, was published. It’s sold a modest number of copies. A few good friends died, more friends felt the pinch of the economic vice, and a good few Americans lost their last bit of faith in our government.

My second mystery, Rip-Off, is in the hands of the third proofreader and then ready to launch. Oh, was that a bad day when I opened the first copy of No Dice. Despite careful, careful proofreading it appeared that every time I’d opened the file to correct something, words flew out of sequence, and paragraphs jiggled themselves around. Oh woe.

And I’m almost ready to turn the third one over to a story editor.

All this time and productivity was exacted from my addiction to email, Facebook, and lately Twitter. Did I mention Spider Solitaire?

I make daily resolutions to turn on the timer on the stove and stop frittering around when the buzzer goes off. Do I do it? Sometimes.

Well, it’s 2012 now. In the interest of human perfectibility, I vow to do better this year. Cut back on the things I do that I punish myself for later. Admit it. You all have those.

Be kinder. Watch out for gossiping, stretch a hand out in friendship, and give away more money and things.

I have so much.

Pacifico is a spell-binding story teller, and for a crime writer it’s a task to keep up with the anecdotes and good stories you want to make notes on.

I worry sometimes that I’m developing a far too positive perspective on law enforcement because I’m only meeting the good cops. I wonder if other crime writer’s watch themselves in fear of writing from a too rosy vantage point.

Last week I did a ride-along with Officer Milosevich of the Santa Monica Police Department where my murder mystery series featuring Detective Dave Mason is based. Over a long shift I learned he taught defensive tactics, and watched him interact with a mentally ill woman who likes to fight. We went on a lot of calls that led to the humdrum non-excitement of an upscale beach city’s ordinary doings.

Much in contrast to the ride-along experience I had in Compton on a hot, August Saturday night a few years ago. I thought I was going to die as we raced from one call to another, lights and siren. An old latino man pulled us over to where he was sitting on the curb to show the officer a bullet wound in the sole of his foot he’d got from running away from a fracas.

At one point in a very long graveyard shift, we were sent to a parking lot behind of one of the projects. A crowd of young black kids watched the cruiser pull in with a lot of jeering and name calling. The officer slid down the window and slowly drove through. The kids moved out of the way, taking their time. Lots of attitude.

There’s no place to dive for cover in the passenger seat of a police cruiser once the shooting starts. My heart had just settled down after he got a call and we humped over the median racing in the opposite direction.

All that happened was him dispensing a lot of “Hi, how are ya’s? How’s it going, buddy?” He called a lot of them by name, people he gets to know as they cycle of in and out of County jail. Maybe he was just showing the flag of law enforcement.

These guys were great and I admire them for their discipline, people skills, and self-control. There’s a lot like them.

But what about the cops I’m not meeting? All I have to do is pick up a newspaper to know they’re out there. Close by, the Bakersfield Police Department seems to shoot first and ask questions later. The Maricopa (a Kern County town near here) Police Department has been investigated for gross incompetence and mismanagement, and Kern County Sheriff’s Department has taken them over. I notice the Seattle Police Department is in trouble.

I’m sure J.A. Jance who writes about a Seattle investigator shakes her head reading that, thinking of all the good cops she knows.

Check out Derek Pacifico’s seminars for yourself at http://www.crimewriters.globaltraininginstitute.com/HOMICIDE_SCHOOL.html

It’s the puzzle. It’s keeping violence and mayhem at a distance maybe. It’s hoping to learn some new wrinkle on human behavior.

I’m curious to watch how other murder mystery writers perceive the world, to find out if I’m weird or not. Am I weird?

I’m not one of those who flips back to look for half-remembered clues to figure whodunnit before the story ends. I’m content to look for the scaffolding to see how the author unravels the plot. I can wait, if I like the book and the characters, content that I’m in good hands.

But once in awhile a book comes my way where nobody dies violently, and I enjoy it hugely. I wonder what happened to my resolution to read the Russian classics, all of De Maupassant’s stories, Hemingway from beginning to end. I still intend to, really I do.

But writing takes so much time. And as I get older, my energy wanes. Am I the only one in my sixties who can’t imagine pulling an all-nighter, even for a real page-turner?

I read Chechen newspapers in English for three years and everything else I could find on the people in this fascinating, war-torn country. In my third Dave Mason mystery I am driving to Riverside, some hundred plus miles away, to talk to a cop about Kurds living in Turkey.

 And it’s just background because both books take place in Santa Monica.

 I marvel at Christopher Meek’s book, Love at Absolute Zero http://christophermeeks.weebly.com We met and started talking at the Ventura County Book fair and traded books when buyers were few. I was hooked within a few pages, couldn’t wait to finish it. One of those.

 Christopher Meeks is an English professor at Santa Monica College, not a physicist writing what he knows. You wouldn’t know that reading this book. Large dollops of quantum physics appear in digestible and even enjoyable hunks.

Meeks insisted he knew nothing about physics but he had an idea and he learned what he needed to convince the reader he was a scientific naïf  who sets out to find his soul mate using the scientific method, within three days.

What would a storyteller do nowadays without the Internet where you can read about your idea in ever-widening circles? And when are you simply procrastinating the writing by contacting yet one more expert?

 I was rooting for everybody at the end of Love at Absolute Zero, though resistant to the idea that the hero greatly damages his scientific career for love. 

 But people do that, don’t they?

  An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.  Niels Bohr

I value what you have to say and invite you to comment. Please share your views with me and other readers below. Thanks, Mar.

• Donna White Glaser: The Enemy Within

I read Donna White Glaser’s The Enemy We Know with great pleasure.  The cover with its bloody knife stood out, particularly the circle with A Letty Whittaker Mystery and the words 12 Step within the triangle, within the circle.  Any Twelve-Stepper, and there are millions, recognize the symbol of the Anonymous programs.

Letty Whittaker, and her creator, are psychotherapists working in a counseling clinic in northern Wisconsin. The reader roots for Letty from the beginning.  She’s new in sobriety and she’s raw, and maybe not thinking straight.  The murder in her clinic falls too close for comfort and pushes her into amateur sleuth situations where both her safety and her sobriety are threatened. Suspense mounts and then explodes.

The depictions of AA life, the way the clinic functions and the therapists interact, feels satisfyingly authentic.  Yes, they do take confidentiality seriously–and that’s a real handicap for Letty as she pursues the killer.

The last quarter of the book was a little long as Letty questions herself and her logic–and illogic–in figuring out the murders.  Nonetheless, when you like the character and you’re caught up in the story, maybe it’s not a bad thing to linger a bit and not race to the finish.

 Julie  Dolcemaschio – Testarossa

Julie’s debut mystery takes place in Venice, California, a place close to my heart.  She writes very convincingly about the politics of the LAPD and the relationships between partners. Also, for a hard-boiled mystery she writes a good, sexy romance.

• Susan Goldstein:  Hollywood Forever

Susan lets you know she’s a Beverly Hills divorce attorney and very good at it. I believe her. We met at the Left Coast Crime Conference in Santa Fe this year and have become friends.  I liked Hollywood Forever a lot. The story pulls you right along with the spoiled and pampered lead character who comes into her own solving a murder that casts a shadow over her. It’s lighter than the other two I’ve mentioned, and funny, but it’s never fluffy.

Then in the dark of a moonless night vandals destroyed the Shrine of the Five Maidens as it was now called. The circle of stones where the ashes of long-gone pets were intermingled was scattered far and wide. A sign was left days later: Fundamentalist Christian Taliban We Know Who You Are. Then a secular tract was nailed to a pine on the trail  leading up to the Shrine . Then came a religious tract nailed up on another tree by an unknown. The desecration of the trees continued. Then came piles of teetering stones like cairns set in the middle of the path. This was followed by 5s painted on the trees farther up the mountain, perhaps in commemoration of the Five Maidens.

***

Speculation runs rampant with volleys of accusations making the rounds on private email lists with vitriolic and emotional content. This is a small enough village that everyone knows everyone and what faction they belong to. The local weekly began printing Letters to the Editor decrying this villainy. It was said that witchcraft was taking place at the Shrine. The Christians as a bloc wisely did not respond publicly. The Forest Service denied any involvement. Then came a specific accusation against an environmentalist who had expressed the personal opinion, who knows where, that the Shrine was just a “bunch of junk.” This was vociferously rebutted in the stream of Letters to the Editor that followed. A national environmental organization was one of the accused perpetrators.

You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this? These are the issues that eat up my time as a writer of mystery novels set in Santa Monica, California–nowhere near where I now live. I have no idea who desecrated the Five Maidens Shrine. I thought it was weird, peculiar, and wonderful.

There is no way I can stay out of the controversy that is whipping around. I read every email, gossip at the post office, and go to private meetings where this is the topic. I know there are writers who can get keys moving on keyboard no matter what. I heard Jane Yolen at a conference once say: “I tell my children. Don’t bother me unless there are broken bones protruding or hemorrhaging.”

How I wish I could do that as a writer, but I can’t.

* Details have been obscured because feeling is still intense.