This is a short post that will link you to a New York Times piece that describes absolutely perfectly what it feels like to be in the first months of writing a new novel.  Just click the link below.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/dont-ask-what-im-writing/?hp

James Hayman:  It’s pretty much a given that in mysteries and suspense thrillers that there’s got to be a victim. Somebody or, in some books, a whole bunch of somebodies have got to be done in. One of the interesting challenges for the crime writer is coming up with an original idea on how to commit murder.

The immediate means of death may be straightforward.  The literature is replete with killers who dispatch their victim or victims by shooting them, stabbing them, whacking them on the head, strangling them with ropes, belts or hands or pushing them from a high place. A rooftop. A cliff. But even in these cases there is often a twist that makes the murder more than a simple, if evil, act.

In real life murder is often prosaic.  One of the most common forms of violent death in Maine or, I suppose,  anywhere else is domestic violence. Most typically a husband gets pissed off at his wife, loses control, and kills her.  Maybe with his fists.  Maybe with a gun. Maybe with a knife. Often the death is the culmination of years of beatings and abuse.  It’s awful. It’s tragic. It happens. But it doesn’t make for a story that readers will stay with for three or four hundred pages.

People who read thrillers and murder mysteries read them for entertainment. They want to be drawn in to the story by something more devious, more sinister or, sometimes, more bizarre than some bully beating the crap out of his wife because he’s bored or because his dinner is served cold or he had a bad day at work.

In fiction, we as writers have to tickle the imagination of our readers and keep them reading.  We can do this by making not only the motive for murder and the personalities of our killers and victims interesting, but also by inventing means of murder so devious or so awful that the reader can’t imagine it happening to anyone, even a character in a book.

Hannibal Lechter eating the faces of his victims is one obvious example.  But a writer needn’t go to such extremes to achieve the goal.

A few years ago, when I was beginning to write my first thriller, The Cutting,  I attended a Stonecoast novel writing workshop in Freeport, Maine.  In one of the sessions, the workshop leader, author Michael Kimball, posed the questions, “What is the most terrifying experience you can imagine? What is the worst way to die you can think of?”

The class came up with a number of answers, some involving the level of pain inflicted. Being tortured to death, for example. Being burned to death and so on.  One person said the idea of drowning was what frightened her the most. But I (admittedly a claustrophobic) and several others in our group, said what scared us most was the idea of being buried alive.  Kimball agreed and we were given an in-class assignment to write a short piece about the experience. After which we discussed Kimball’s terrific thriller Undone.

In the opening scene of Undone, a character named Bobby Swift has agreed to allow himself be buried alive as part of an elaborate scheme to fake his own death in order to keep $2 million he and his wife have borrowed for a supposed business deal.  His wife Noel is then supposed to dig him up and the two are supposed to take off together for a life of fun and games in the Cayman Islands where the money can be banked in an anonymous account. But, guess what?  Bobby’s wife has other plans and no intention of splitting the money.  Some of the most terrifying and compelling scenes I’ve ever read are of Bobby lying in a coffin in the ground and slowly realizing, as his air runs out, that he’s been royally screwed.

A far more famous variation on the buried alive theme is the one in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story, The Cask of Amontillado, which was written in 1846.  In this story the narrator, a stone mason,  lures his victim, a man he despises, who is a self-impressed connoisseur of fine wines named Fortunato, to his cellar by telling him that he has acquired something that could pass for Amontillado, a light Spanish sherry. He tells Fortunato he needs someone skilled enough to taste the sherry and tell him if it is the real thing. He says that if Fortunato is too busy he will ask a man named Luchesi to taste it.

Fortunato considers Luchesi a competitor and scoffs, claiming that Luchesi is an amateur, who could not tell if a sherry was a real Amontillado or not.  Thus seduced, Fortunato enters the killer’s underground wine vault and where he is made ill by fumes of limestone rising from the ground. He is told by the killer that the antidote to dizziness from limestone is sherry.

Fortunato starts drinking the Amontillado and becomes intoxicated. The killer then proceeds to wall in the wine vault. We read in fascinated horror as the killer fills in the last of the bricks and we hear Fortunato’s desperate pleas to allow him to escape. But it is not to be.  The last line of the tale is a Latin phrase meaning “May he rest in peace.”

In my own first suspense thriller, The Cutting, though no one is buried alive, the means of murder are also key to the horror of the tale.  In The Cutting, the villain dispatches his conscious but restrained victims (in all but one instance attractive young women, the outlier being an attractive young man) by cutting open their chests with a scalpel, spreading their ribs and removing their hearts. The ostensible motive is to make money by profitably using the hearts in black-market organ transplants.  But as we read we begin to understand that the killer’s motives are far more complex than simply making money.

Clearly, there are many, many other examples of books where the means of murder is key to the plot and goes far beyond the ordinary “bang-bang, you’re dead.”  I would love it if in the comments section, my fellow crime writers and other readers of this blog  offer their own favorite examples of unique and interesting ways to dispatch a hapless victim.

James Hayman:  My next McCabe thriller, Darkness First, is coming out October 1^st as the lead title in Harper Collins’ brand new Witness imprint that plans on featuring mysteries and thrillers initially in Ebook format and, in most cases, later on in print.

I decided to go with Harper Collins’ after learning that, while roughly 25% of all books sold in the U.S. are sold in Ebook format, in genre fiction such as mysteries, thrillers and romance, the number is closer to 60% and rising.

Darkness First is the first novel in the McCabe/Savage series to feature Detective Maggie Savage, McCabe’s partner, as the key protagonist.  Most of the story is told from her point of view.  As a male writer I wanted to try writing a novel primarily from a female point of view which turned out to be interesting, especially when it came to describing the sex scenes. The book is also the first of the series that takes place primarily outside of Portland.

In Darkness First Maggie goes home to Machias in Washington County, where she was born and raised, to help Maine State Police CID detectives and DEA agents track down a murderous oxycontin dealer who has viciously killed a young woman who worked with him. In the process, the murderer came perilously close to killing Maggie’s oldest and dearest friend, Emily Kaplan, a doctor who was trying to help the murdered woman. Eventually (naturally) the hunt for the killer takes a number of unexpected turns and draws Mike McCabe, into the case.

I drew the title Darkness First from the fact that Washington County is the easternmost county in the continental United States where, as many have noted, the sun rises first in America.  I found it interesting that far fewer people had made the point that Washington County is also where darkness  arrives first.  As Hemingway might have said, the sun also sets. And, of course, bad things happen when it does.

The book introduces a number of new characters I like and who may appear again in future McCabe/Savage novels.

These include Maggie’s father, John Savage, the four term sheriff of Washington County who, “a lean six-four, with a gray mustache and a weathered face, Savage looked more like a sheriff in a John Ford western than one in a rural county in Maine. He was even armed like Wyatt Earp with his pride and joy, an original 1873 long-barreled Colt .45 Peacemaker, strapped to his waist. All he needed was a horse and a Stetson hat to complete the image.  And somewhere at home Maggie was pretty sure he had the hat.”

Another of the characters I like in this book and may use again is Maggie’s best and oldest friend, Dr. Emily Kaplan.  In addition to being a doctor, Emily, at six-foot-three and one hundred and eighty pounds, is a former all-star basketball player and a one-time world-class amateur boxer. She is also something of an idealist. Emily practices medicine out of her childhood home, “a small but pretty colonial farmhouse set at the end of a country road on the outermost edges of the village of Machiasport…It was, she liked telling the few friends from med school who bothered to visit, the global headquarters of Machiasport Family Medicine.  They would smile at her small joke and tell her how much they admired her decision to work here, among the people of the poorest and most underserved county in a poor and underserved state. A few told her they were sometimes tempted to do the same sort of thing. But, as far as she knew, none ever had. Her classmates had richer fields to till.”

In the book we also meet Maggie’s ne’r do well brother Harlan, an ex-marine who suffered serious wounds serving two tours in Iraq and who is still suffering from the effects of  PTSD.   Harlan makes much of his living, such as it is, playing pool for money in a bar, The Musty Moose, in Machias. “The pool tables in the side room at the Moose were crowded with the usual assortment of players and hangers-on. Maggie spotted Harlan in a game at table three and leaned in against the wall under the head of a long-dead bear some taxidermist had stuffed with its mouth open and fangs exposed, in full roar. The creature looked like it was seconds away from leaping off the wall and gobbling up the nearest player.

She watched her kid brother sweep the table till all that was left was the eight ball pressed against the far rail about a foot from the pocket. He had a good eye, that was for sure. Probably why they’d made him a sniper in the Corps.”  That good eye comes in handy later in the book.

The last of the characters to mention is Tabitha Stoddard, the murder victim’s eleven-year-old sister. Tabitha is a nerdy, bookish, semi-fat kid with big round glasses, who, improbably, sets herself the task of tracking down her big sister’s murderer and who, in fact, ends up being a key part of catching him. We first meet Tabitha shortly after she learns that her sister Tiffany has been murdered.

“Tabbie had a hard time thinking of Tiff as dead. Everything about her big sister had always seemed so alive. Tiff was everything Tabitha always wanted to be but knew she never would. She was beautiful. Smart. Fun and funny. The idea of someone like Tiff being dead seemed crazy. Ridiculous.

Tabbie told herself to stop being stupid. Anybody could be dead and, at eleven years old,  a person really ought to understand what being dead meant. Dead was dead. Just like Terri was dead and had been for three years. Just like Grammy Katherine was dead. And their old dog Lucy. She was dead too. Tabbie’d gone to the vet with her mother when they gave Lucy the shot. The vet put the needle in and just like that Lucy went from being an alive thing to a dead thing.  At eleven years old a person obviously knew what dead meant.

What she wasn’t all that sure about was what happened after you were dead. Were you just not there anymore? Gone. Poof. Like you never existed? Just a rotting lump of meat in a box underground being eaten up by bugs and worms?

Or was dying more like what they said in church?  Tabitha was by no means certain it was, but if it was, well then there was a distinct possibility Tiff was flying around somewhere in either heaven or hell. She was in what Mrs St Pierre who lived up the road called a better place. Mrs St Pierre came over with some cupcakes after she heard on television about Tiff being murdered. Tabbie didn’t know why Mrs. St. Pierre thought cupcakes would help but apparently she did.”

Darkness First comes out first in the British Commonwealth countries.  On September 15^th, Penguin UK will release it in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa and so on.  Two weeks later Harper Collins will release the book as the lead title in the launch of their new Witness Impulse E-book imprint.

James Hayman: There have been many dire predictions over the past few years that what we do and enjoy as writers and readers is doomed both as entertainment and art.  The arguments are simple. Today, as never before, the competition for attracting interested customers, or as we used to call it when I was in the advertising business on Madison Avenue, for share of eyeballs is fierce.  They competitors are obvious and omnipresent.  TV. Movies. Music. Trolling the Internet.  Finding “friends” and communicating with them on Facebook and other social media. Video games. Online gaming. Texting. Sexting.  There are probably others I haven’t thought of. And, no doubt, there will be even more to come that nobody else has yet thought of either.

With all of these competitors and distractions, there is certainly legitimate reason to ask how many among us will continue to devote ten to fifteen solid hours to sitting and reading a novel either for simple entertainment or in appreciation of literary art.

I think there is hope. The enormous popularity among young people, of the Harry Potter books and more recently the Hunger Games Trilogy, gives me hope for the survival of a class of people willing and eager to spend hours alone reading a novel rather than watching movies or sports or slaughtering realistic cartoon characters in violent video games.

I think people will continue to read the crime novels that we, the “Maine Crime Writers,” create as well as other genre and literary fiction.  My reasoning is simple. Fiction in all its forms offers us something none of those other things can match.

To put it simply, fiction uniquely allows us, both as readers and as writers, to enter into, share and explore the interior life of other human beings.  Both the characters in the book. And the creator of those characters. “The deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction,”  novelist Jonathan Franzen argues, “is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness.” Characters that are well drawn offer readers insights into themselves and to other human beings whose thoughts and feelings are usually as real and intimate as the author can make them. Writers who write well offer eaders similar insights into themselves.

As a writer of fiction, the physically solitary act of creating a character, allows me to explore as deeply as I know how, the inner lives of other people. The the feelings, emotions and attitudes of the characters I create  are of course bent by passing through the prism of my own attitudes and emotions.  But this in no way negates the connectedness Franzen was writing about. It adds to it.

Both writing and reading fiction are voyeuristic exercises. We peer into the lives of others.  But unlike the voyeur who eavesdrops on a conversation or reads someone else’s mail or illicitly peers through a window, the writer and reader of a well-imagined and well-crafted novel get to share the deepest emotions and thoughts of the characters. They come to know and understand them in a way that it is difficult to match in real life where  even those closest to us create emotional barriers and try to reveal only what they want us to know about them.

The removal of those barriers allows the sense of connectedness Franzen was talking about.

But, some may ask, how real can the connectedness be when the characters are made up.  When the characters aren’t real.

The simple answer is that they are real.

McCabe is to some extent the real me.  So is Maggie and the other characters in my books, both male and female, adult and child.  But in the act of creating them, in the process of giving them thoughts and feelings, of putting them in conflict and often in dire straits, the characters often take over and take on lives of their own.

I’ve written before that perhaps the most difficult and interesting character for me to create in the three books I’ve written so far was Abby Quinn the young schizophrenic woman in The Chill of Night.  In creating Abby I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about schizophrenia. I read a number of memoirs written by schizophrenics about their own interior lives.  I began to understand what its like to suffer this terrible disease. Then when I put Abby in extreme circumstances of witnessing a murder and then being pursued by the murderer, my understanding of who she was and how she would react became much deeper.  I believe readers of the book begin to share that understanding and develop a deeper sympathy and empathy for someone like Abby. That kind of understanding and empathy is what Franzen was talking about when he said, “The deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness.”

James Hayman: “My name is Dr. Jenifer White . I am sixty-four years old. I have dementia. My son , Mark, is twenty-nine. My daughter, Fiona, twenty-four. A caregiver, Magdalena, lives with me.”

This is the opening paragraph of the front jacket copy of one of the most original, beautifully written and genuinely frightening murder mysteries I’ve read in years. Titled Turn of Mind, the book is a debut novel by a writer named Alice LaPlante  who teaches creative writing at Stanford and San Francisco State University.  LaPlante’s previous fiction consisted of short stories published in literary journals like Epoch and the Southwestern Review.

Imagine a murder mystery largely narrated in the voice and thoughts of the suspected and likely murderer, a once distinguished orthopedic surgeon who specialized in surgery of the hand but who is now descending into advanced Alzeimer’s Disease.  The suspect, a woman named Jennifer White, has no idea whether or not she committed the crime. At times she thinks she may have.  At other times she thinks she might not have.  As often as not she’s not even aware that the victim of the crime is actually dead. Or that her husband James is also dead. Or, as the book progresses, even who her own children are.

Still the evidence against Dr. White as the killer seems compelling.  The victim, named Amanda O’Toole, was, before her death, an imperious and controlling woman in her seventies who lived a few doors down from Dr. White in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. In spite of O’Toole’s bristly personality and their frequent disagreements O’Toole and Dr. White are described as lifelong best friends. Each had keys to the other’s house.  O’Toole was the godmother of the Whites’ two children, Mark and Fiona.

The victim is already dead when the book opens.  Her body was found lying in a pool of blood.  The cause of death was a blow to the head. White and O’Toole were heard arguing loudly shortly before the killing.  Even more damning for White, the hand surgeon, is the fact that four of the fingers of O’Toole’s right hand were carefully and expertly amputated after her death for no apparent reason.  Later in the book a Saint Christopher’s medal belonging to White turns up. It is found to have traces of O’Toole’s blood on it.

What makes this book so compelling and frankly unforgettable, however, is not the details of the crime or the work of the cop in charge, a dogged and determined woman named Detective Luton. It is not even the ultimate solution to the murder.  Rather it is the beautifully constructed portrait of the disintegration of a once brilliant mind belonging to a character we come to know and care for.

A group blog on the Maine Crime Writers blogsite (www.mainecrimewriters.com)  this weekend will have us all tell of the scariest villains we’ve experienced in fiction. While Dr. White is no Hannibal Lechter, in many ways she is more frightening.  The descent into Alzheimer’s Alice LaPlante describes so beautifully is a condition we all fear for ourselves.  It is one that many of us have experienced first hand watching the slow disintegration of elderly parents or others we care for. It makes an absolutely brilliant choice to wrap around a tale of murder and deceit.

James Hayman:  At the moment, I’m in the middle of making final revisions to my third McCabe/Savage thriller. Titled Darkness First the book is due out in the UK in June 2013 and, hopefully, around the same time in the US.

Darkness First is the first of my books to require any kind of extensive editorial rewriting.  Number two, The Chill of Night, sailed through with only minor tinkering and the first, The Cutting, required only one fairly simple, though important change to attain its final form.

Darkness First was the most difficult of the three books to write, in many ways the most ambitious and, in my view, also the most interesting.  It’s also the first of the three that helped me truly appreciate how valuable a perceptive and talented editor can be, in this case Stefanie Bierwerth who works with Penguin UK in London, can be.

The plot itself is fairly simple.  A large haul of oxycontin is smuggled by boat from Saint John, New Brunswick into Eastport, Maine. A distribution network is set up. The drugs are sold. Money is made.  Eventually, there is a falling out between the two people responsible for the crime. One is a vicious killer named Conor Riordan and the other a beautiful young woman from Eastport named Tiffany Stoddard. On a dark and steamy (no, not stormy) night in Machias State Park, Conor Riordan brutally stabs Tiff Stoddard to death.  The police quickly discover Riordan is the culprit. The only problem is Conor Riordan doesn’t exist.

At the suggestion of her father, Washington County Sheriff John Savage, Detective Maggie Savage of the Portland Police Department comes home to Washington County and volunteers to join the state police investigation into the crime. Eventually, with the help of her Portland partner, Mike McCabe, Maggie discovers the true killer and solves the crime.

However, in my view, what makes the book work is not just the story line (which I think is pretty good), but also the exploration of Maggie’s feelings for the other major characters and the conflicted feelings/relationships she has with them.  She  finds herself trying to mediate a nasty feud between two men she has loved all her life, her seventy four year old father, who she learns may be dying of cancer, and her  wild and irresponsible younger brother Harlan, who has recently returned from service in Iraq and is recovering from a serious wound and suffering from PTSD.

Maggie’s also trying to sort out her screwed-up love life and needs to resolve the strong attraction she feels to both her Portland partner Mike McCabe and a charming and handsome state police detective named Sean Carroll.

In the end unraveling and resolving these feelings and relationships added a lot to the story.  It also made the book more challenging to write and, in my view, ultimately much more interesting. Stef Bierwerth at Penguin understood this and her perceptive insights and suggestions were a huge help in getting it right. Thanks in part to her, I think it may be the strongest of  the three McCabe/Savage books so far.  I hope my readers agree.

James Hayman: Although there are a lot of great neighborhoods in the city of Portland, anyone who reads my books must know that Munjoy Hill has long been my favorite. My hero Mike McCabe, his girlfriend Kyra and his daughter Casey share a three-bedroom condo on the Eastern Prom “looking out at Casco Bay and the islands. That view, and the fact that it was less than a mile walk to police headquarters were the primary reasons he’d paid more than he could afford for the…condo when he signed on, three years earlier, as chief of the PPD’s Crimes Against People unit.” (From The Cutting.)

In an early scene from The Chill of Night I describe McCabe as he “turned left on Congress and headed west down Munjoy Hill. In spite of a decade of gentrification The Hill still retained the look and feel of its working class roots. Smallish wood-frame houses built sometime around 1900. Most divided into apartments. Tonight (an especially frigid winter night) they were all closed up tight, curtains drawn. He continued down the hill, passing a few couples heading for one or another of the bars and restaurants that were sprouting like weeds. The Front Room. The Blue Spoon. Bar Lola.”

Detective Maggie Savage, McCabe’s partner in crime-fighting has her own place on The Hill, a three-flight walkup on Vesper Street, a couple of blocks in from McCabe’s apartment on the Prom.

This summer my wife Jeanne and I decided for the second summer in a row to rent our house on Peaks Island to summer visitors and move into town.  We’re living on the third-floor of one of those hundred-year-old wood frame houses on The Hill (more or less halfway between McCabe’s and Maggie’s) where we enjoy an excellent view of the water.  Not quite as good as McCabe’s but still pretty nice.

Portland fireworks display goes off almost flawlessly (Press-Herald)

Perhaps the best part is that we’re only one house in from the Prom and less than a one-minute walk from Fort Allen Park, Portland’s most beautiful public space and, without question, the jewel in Munjoy Hill’s crown.

Set on a sixty-eight acre grassy hill, Fort Allen Park slopes down from the Prom and offers, in addition to its tennis courts, sandy beach and picnic tables, endlessly breath-taking views of Casco Bay and the islands beyond.

Every Fourth of July what seems like most of the population of Portland crowds into the park to watch the annual fireworks display set off from a barge anchored just off-shore.  This year, however, just as the Portland Symphony was winding up its concert of patriotic music and minutes before the fireworks were set to begin,  a lightning storm lit up the eastern skies in a heavenly display that dwarfed anything the city could hope to put on. Torrential rain, high wind and dangerously close lightning strikes forced officials to cancel the show and reschedule it for the following night. The crowd trudged home, soaked I assume, to the skin.  I thought, given the disappointing evening, most wouldn’t return.

Turned out I was wrong.  By the evening of the fifth the skies had cleared and most of the people came back. Not quite as many as the night before but still an estimated thirty thousand of them.  The Portland Symphony replayed its entire program concluding with the signature 1812 Overture which was followed one of the best fireworks displays I can remember seeing anywhere.

According to the Portland Press Herald, “PSO conductor Robert Moody summed up the mood of the crowd before the signature overture (began). ‘ “I don’t think there’s any place better in the country to celebrate Independence Day than on the Eastern Prom with the Portland Symphony Orchestra,’ he said, to cheers.” I agree.

During the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s I worked at some of Madison Avenue’s largest and most prestigious advertising agencies. Most notably, I spent nearly twenty years at Y&R New York which at the time was considered one of the best of the best.

I started as a lowly junior copywriter struggling away in a tiny interior office (we didn’t have cubicles in those days) and rose to become an executive creative director assigned to some of Y&R’s biggest and best accounts. For a time, I even got to sit in an oversized corner office (admittedly on one of the agency’s less prestigious floors) where I got to choose my own furniture and knick-knacks with the help of our on-staff interior decorator.

In other words, I spent my Madison Avenue years kind of like a mini-Don Draper albeit with glasses and curly, instead of slicked back, black hair.  Unlike Draper, after my first seven or eight years on the job, I got to wear jeans and turtleneck sweaters to the office instead of Brooks Brothers suits and skinny ties. At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, wearing jeans to the office became a sign that one possessed greater creative powers. As did sporting facial hair, though only for men.   After that, the suits came out of the closet only when I had to go to meetings with senior clients which was was because most of our senior clients had yet to be informed of the creative powers of blue denim.

Anyway, when Madmen came on the air six seasons ago, I watched one or two episodes and then stopped.  I didn’t find the ones I saw all that interesting and except for news and NY Giant football games I don’t watch a whole lot of television anyway. Obviously, the show turned out to be a big hit and for the last six years whenever I meet someone new at some kind of social function, they inevitably exclaim, ”Oh, you were in advertising. You must watch Madmen.” Up until this weekend, I inevitably disappointed them when I responded “No.”

I had the sense they wanted to question me about the show’s accuracy depicting life in a big New York ad agency back in the day. I suppose, if I had been a Mafia hitman instead of a copywriter, they would have been equally disappointed at my inability to comment on Tony Soprano’s methods of bumping off other wiseguys.

Since I still practice copywriting when I’m not writing my Mike McCabe thrillers, last Thursday I attended a party thrown by the Advertising Club of Maine to celebrate this year’s season finale of Madmen.  After chatting about the show for most of the two or three hours I was there I decided it was time I got up to speed with what all the hoopla was about.  So Saturday morning I hit the Netflix “Watch Instantly” button on my computer and, in something of a Madmen marathon, spent the next two days arbitrarily watching nine episodes of Season Three.

So now I can finally stop disappointing all those people who have been asking for the inside skinny for last six years and provide the definitive answer.  Yes, I will tell them, the show is fairly accurate though more than a little exaggerated.

Yes, we worked hard.  “If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Sunday,” was a quip one often heard in the halls of Y&R on Friday afternoons.

Yes, the politics could be gruesome. But politics anywhere are always gruesome.

Yes, we drank and smoked a lot. The creative head of the agency, my boss for most of my twenty years at Y&R, swilled down at least two and usually three vodka martinis and smoked about ten cigarettes during the course of each and every two hour lunch I ever had with him. Even so he worked till nine or ten practically every night and showed no signs of diminished judgment. In fact, even after three martinis, he was one of the smartest guys I ever worked with.

And yes, as in Madmen, people had more than a few illicit office affairs often with other people’s spouses.  I remember one young female copywriter who worked for me complaining bitterly about another young female copywriter who received what copywriter #1 considered an undeserved promotion by the time-tested tactic of sleeping with her boss. “That bitch,”  copywriter #1 snarled after the event, “She’s the only woman I know who actually f*#&ked her way to the middle.”

What Madmen misses, at least in the nine episodes of the show I watched, was the fun we all had. Being in advertising in those days of big budget commercials and business class travel, especially at a great agency like Y&R, was a ball.  Sitting around with a bunch of smart, funny creative people and dreaming up whacky ideas for new TV campaigns, then selling them to the client and then going out to shoot them in Hollywood or on some exotic location somehow made all the hard work and political baloney worthwhile.  For me and for most of my friends from those days (many of whom I still see), it was a great way to make a damned good living.

Do writers, musicians and film-makers deserve to be paid for their work? I think most people would agree that they do.  Does anyone have the right to create electronic versions of someone else’s work and sell it or give it away over the Internet without compensating the copyright holders? Of course not.  Unfortunately Internet piracy of intellectual property is expanding exponentially and so far, at least, no one seems willing or able to do much about it.

A couple of weeks ago, on Friday January 20, leaders in both houses of Congress delayed action on two anti-piracy bills that, if passed, would have provided some measure of protection not only to major media companies including commercial publishers but also to individual writers, artists, filmakers and musicians against the wholesale theft of their work on the Internet.

The bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA, in the Senate were designed to provide greater powers to law enforcement agencies in the US to crack down on foreign websites that were suspected of wholesale piracy of music, movies and electronic versions of books. Some of the pirates even scan paper versions of popular books that aren’t available as ebooks , convert them to electronic files, and sell them or give them away for free. Naturally neither the creators nor licensed distributors of these works (the publishers) make a dime on these transactions.

Unfortunately, the proposed legislation created a firestorm of protest, most of it directed at congressional supporters of the bills.   Big name Internet companies including Google, Wikipedia and Twitter as well as civil liberties groups lobbied against them claiming that the powers granted by the bills were too broadly defined and could effectively inhibit freedom of speech.

According to an article published in the NY Times on January 20,  the problem apparently stems from the fact that some of the larger websites that legitimately sell copyrighted content also sell unauthorized content. “Megaupload and similar sites, like RapidShare and MediaFire, are often promoted as convenient ways to transfer large files legitimately; a recent promotional video had major stars like Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas singing Megaupload’s praises. But media companies say the legitimate uses are a veil concealing extensive theft.”

One of the commenters to the Times articles, a man named Peter Sykes, put the issue well. Mr Sykes said “…the copyright owner is the one who gets to decide if they want to give their product away, not some third party – who BTW is profiting from someone else’s creation. That’s greed.

If Ben & Jerry’s want to give away a free scoop of ice cream every Tuesday as a promotion that’s their choice. If you just decide to walk into the shop and grab a scoop without paying for it that’s called theft. It’s really very simple.

I’m sure if (someone) had spent his time, energy and resources creating a song, a book, a movie etc. he wouldn’t be as keen on the idea of other people making that work available for free without his consent.

Consumers wanting free product, that’s greed.

Making copy written creations available for downloading without authorization is theft.”

Perhaps Google and the others have a point and the SOPA and PIPA legislation went too far. I don’t know.  But I do think Congress absolutely has to come up with legislation that effectively prohibits the unauthorized online distribution of copyrighted material.  And I urge anyone who agrees with this to start tweeting about it.

The summer before last I attended an International Thriller Writers get together at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan.  One of the better-attended sessions over the three days of the conference was an interview and discussion with Harlan Coben, whose books regularly hit the best seller lists and one of which, Tell No One, was made into a successful French movie starring a British actress, Kristin Scott Thomas (who speaks pretty good French) complete with subtitles.  (Yes, I know Coben’s books usually take place in New Jersey. This movie was definitely French.)

Anyway, I digress. At the conference, one member of the audience asked Coben how much research he does when writing his books.

“None,” replied Coben.

“Then how do you know if what you are writing is accurate?”

“I don’t,” Coben said. “My books are fiction. I don’t pretend that they’re anything else. I don’t really care if they’re accurate or not. All I care about is whether people enjoy reading them.”

I remember the exchange so clearly because at the time I found it troubling.

Unlike Coben,  I spend a fair amount of time and go to some lengths to assure the technical accuracy of what I write about.

My first novel The Cutting is typical.  The Cutting is a story about illegal heart transplants.  Before I wrote a single word for the book about transplant procedures, I read at least a dozen articles and watched a number of videos that describe and show the operation in detail. I talked to three cardiac surgeons about how one goes about removing a heart from one human body and then implanting it in another. I researched the instruments and tools required for the job, learning among other things how heart-lung machines work and the brand name of the saw most typically used  to cut through the sternum and open the rib cage to get at the heart (Stryker, in case anyone is interested).

I also spent several hours with the transplant co-ordinator at Maine Medical Center discussing where hearts come from, who co-ordinates the process and who would be eligible or ineligible for such a procedure. Before publication, I sent my (almost) final manuscript to an old friend and college classmate who was and is a transplant surgeon at the Iowa Heart Center in Des Moines for a final fact check. He said I got almost everything right but suggested a few small changes, which I made.

All in all, at least a hundred hours and maybe more went into this research.

Was it really necessary for a reader’s enjoyment of the story?  Probably not.  Could the time have been better spent writing and polishing the manuscript? Possibly. Undoubtedly, most of my readers probably wouldn’t have known the difference if I’d fudged it. And for those few who happen to be cardiac surgeons and would recognize an inaccuracy, I can always adopt Coben’s retort. “Hey, it’s fiction. Who cares if it’s accurate?”

Harlan Coben has published a dozen or more successful books. I’ve published two, neither even remotely successful as most of his.  Coben’s been number one on the New York Times best-seller list.  I haven’t gotten anywhere close to that lofty status.

Still, as I close in on the finish of my third novel, Darkness First, I find myself spending more time than I probably should researching exactly how much of what drug a murderer should put in his tranquilizer dart to make sure the victim’s vicious rottweiler goes to sleep and stays asleep until the murderous deed is done.

Maybe Coben’s right.  Maybe this kind of obsessiveness about accuracy isn’t necessary.  Somehow I just like it better that way.