BC Blogcritics, an online blog site featuring reviews and discussions of movies, music and books, just interviewed me about The Cutting and also about McCabe #2, The Chill of Night, as well as the writing process in general. I also provided an excerpt from The Chill. For those who’d like to read the interview, here’s the link.

Inhttp://blogcritics.org/books/article/interview-james-hayman-author-of-the/

Like a lot of people who write mystery and suspense novels for a living, I regularly comb the news for true crime stories that might someday form the basis of either a down-the-road Mike McCabe thriller or possibly a stand-alone. When I find one, I cut and paste it into something I call my “What If?” file. When the news recently broke about the murders recently committed by Dr. Amy Bishop, I thought to myself this might be the basis of something interesting.  Here was an educated professor and scientist and a mother of four children who, supposedly without warning, gunned down six of her colleagues at a University of Alabama faculty meeting, killing three and wounding three others, two critically.

The only problem with the story is that it wasn’t without warning.  There was lots of warning that Bishop was the kind of deranged person who would do almost anything to retaliate against people she felt had wronged her. According to a report by Shaila Dewan, Stephanie Saul and Katie Zezima. in the New York Times, “Dr. Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her. Her life seemed to veer wildly between moments of cold fury and scientific brilliance, between rage at perceived slights and empathy for her students.”

In 1986, when Bishop was twenty-one, she shot and killed her eighteen year old brother with a shotgun in their home allegedly after a family argument.  It’s been chargesd that the incident was never adequately investigated by local police, possibly because Bishop came from a locally prominent family in Braintree, MA. Eight years later, in 1994, Bishop and her husband were suspected as the culprits in a mail bomb plot against a doctor she worked with at Harvard Medical School. The bomb failed to go off and no one was ever charged here either. In 2002 she finally was charged, this time with assault, after punching a woman in the face in an IHOP restaurant because the woman had taken the last child booster seat. She was never convicted.

According to those who knew her, Bishop flew into frequent rages over perceived slights. And after the Huntsville shooting, some in the University’s Biology Department feared that she might have booby-trapped the science building with some kind of “Herpes Bomb.”  Apparently, she had threatened to do just that.

The real mystery is why nobody chose to say or do anything about Bishop before she finally exploded in a frenzy of gunfire. She’d been hired by the University of Alabama without anyone questioning or even being aware of her history of irrational behavior. Why? My guess is, as my fictional hero, Detective Sergeant Mike McCabe puts it In The Chill of Night, “It’s a familiar scenario. Citizens not wanting to get involved. Too polite. Too fearful. Too lazy. It was a problem for police departments across the country.  It bugged the hell out of McCabe but it was tough to figure out what to do about it.”

The Amy Bishop killings were a preventable tragedy. Could they ever become the basis of a future novel? Some sort of female version of American Psycho?  Maybe. Well-educated female killers with a few screws loose often make interesting villains. Just look at Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell and Basic Instinct’s Catherine Tramell for proof.  However, for now, the cut and paste on Ms. Bishop will remain in my “What If” pile.  Her crimes are too recent and the pain they caused too raw for me to do anything with them anytime soon

Did you ever wonder what it takes to write a successful murder mystery? Or a series of murder mysteries or suspense thrillers featuring the likes of  Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Tess Gerritsen’s Jane Rizzoli or Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski?  One answer is not sleeping. Ms. Paretsky once noted the secret to her success as a writer (or at least one secret) was the inability to sleep.  And the longer I ply this particular trade, the more I think she’s right.

Every time I come to a point in one of my books where I can’t figure out what’s going to happen next, I find the best way to come up with an answer is by lying awake in the dark and obsessing about it.  I do this a lot. And it always seems to lead to something that works better than anything I thought of during my normal waking or working hours. I know full well that if I just lie there and eventually fall sleep, I’ll forget what I thought of. So I get out of bed,  be it two AM or three AM or four AM, and trundle into my writing room where I wake up my sleeping laptop and write out the idea in some detail. I hate it but it works.

Right now. I’m trying to work out the basics of the plot for my third McCabe thriller (as yet untitled).  In this book, McCabe’s daughter, Casey, has grown into a drop-dead gorgeous sixteen-year-old boasting her mother’s good looks, her father’s stubborness and her own brand new driver’s license.

In the book, Casey falls for a really hot nineteen-year-old who’s definitely the wrong kind of guy.  And it gets her into trouble (No, not that kind of trouble) and, for the past week or so, I’ve been unable to figure out how to get her out of it.

At three-eighteen in the morning an idea came to me.  Thankful for the gift, I got up and went to work, beating most of the local farmers, fishermen and lobstermen to the punch by a good forty minutes or so.

A dear old friend of mine recently read THE CUTTING and commented that he loved the book, loved the characters, and loved the suspense. Said it kept him on the edge of the seat and couldn’t wait for McCabe#2 (THE CHILL OF NIGHT-which comes out June 22^nd…more about that later). However, he said, he had one problem.  He knew who the bad guy was pretty early on in the game. Why did I give it way?

I responded that my reason was that THE CUTTING was more of a suspense thriller than a mystery or whodunit.  “What’s the difference?” he asked, “I thought they were pretty much the same thing.”

Looking at emails I’ve received since THE CUTTING came out last summer, I discovered there’s a fair amount of confusion on this issue.  While there’s no official answer, here’s an unofficial answer or at least my own personal opinion.

A mystery, according to Hayman, depends on the hero solving an intellectual puzzle that leads him to discover “Whodunit.”  Action is often minimal.  The sleuth is seldom, if ever, in physical danger and the reader is kept guessing until the end.  Reader satisfaction is derived from guessing the answer before the sleuth does or, failing that, enjoying the unraveling of the mystery and going back to look over the subtle clues the author sprinkled in along the way. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is, of course, the progenitor of many of the best sleuths out there. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot are also among the earliest and most famous.

A thriller or novel of suspense keeps the readers interest by ratcheting up the action and putting someone’s life in imminent danger.  Sometimes it’s the hero. Sometimes it’s an innocent by stander or potential victim.  What’s kept so many readers glued to THE CUTTING  is the awful suspense of the ticking clock, not knowing whether McCabe can save poor Lucinda Cassidy from a horrible death before time runs out.  That kind of tension definitely makes THE CUTTING much more of a thriller than a mystery.

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books and John Sandford’s Prey novels are examples of other books that are thrillers much more than mysteries.

Needless to say there’s a lot of overlap and many books blend a little of both.  Mine do.  But, going forward, readers can expect most of the books in the Mike McCabe series, like THE CUTTING and the upcoming THE CHILL OF NIGHT,  will fall firmly into the thriller camp.

Hope that helps to clear up the issue.

For those of you who didn’t see the announcement, one of the true legends in the suspense thriller field and one of my personal heroes died Monday at 77. Robert Parker, creator of Spenser and Hawk and Susan and Pearl, suffered a fatal heart attack sitting at his desk working on a new book. We should all be so lucky to go the same way, doing what we love and what we do best.

Parker was incredibly prolific, turning out, I’m told, at least three finished novels a year including the Spenser books and a couple of spin-off series, one featuring female PI, Sonny Randall and another featuring a working cop named Jesse Stone.

Spenser, however was his signal creation.  The NY Times obit described Spenser this way, “…like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, but with a sensitivity born of the age of feminism and civil rights, Spenser is a bruiser in body but a softie at heart, someone who never shies from danger or walks away from a threat to the innocent. Mr. Parker gave him many of his own traits. Spenser is an admirer of any kind of expertise. He believes in psychotherapy. He’s a great cook. He’s a boxer, a weightlifter and a jogger, a consumer of doughnuts and coffee, a privately indulgent appreciator (from a distance) of pretty women, a Red Sox fan, a dog lover. (Mr. Parker owned a series of short-haired pointers, all named Pearl, like their fictional incarnation.) “

Parker also wrote westerns, young adults and westerns. If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t read him yet, I urge you all to jump in now with both feet.  I doubt you’ll ever come across another writer who’ll delight you in so many ways.

Happy New Year.  The following is more than a little unfair to a lot of good writers.  I can’t pretend it’s in any way comprehensive. I’ve read only a small percentage of the good and possibly great mysteries and thrillers that have come out over the last twelve months. These are just a few of the ones I read and enjoyed enough to recommend to friends.

And so I’ll now recommend them to you.  If you have any personal favorites you’d like to recommend, please let me know either through this site or through Facebook fan page for The Cutting.

Beat The Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little Brown). A wildly original and entertaining comic thriller about a fourteen-year-old hit man named Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa.  Pietro agrees to rat out his former mob colleagues on the condition that the FBI put him into the witness protection program and pay his way through medical school. We first meet Pietro in his new incarnation as Doctor Peter Brown, a young resident at Manhattan Catholic hospital where, guess what?  One of his former mafia colleagues turns up as a patient and instantly recognizes him as “Bearclaw.” The rest is all madness, mayhem and great fun.

Rain Gods by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster).  Rain Gods is the second James Burke Lee novel to feature a small town Texas sheriff named Hackberry Holland.  Lay Down My Sword and Shield was the first and is definitely on my must read list.  Holland is a Korean War Vet, a hard scrabble septuagenarian who longs for nothing more  than a quiet life.  For better or for worse, in Rain Gods, that’s not what he gets.

The book tells the story of a young innocent named Pete Flores who inadvertently witnesses a the machine gun massacre of nine illegal immigrant  women behind a church in Holland’s jurisdiction.  Flores and his girlfriend Vicki flee the killer, a psychopathic whack job named Preacher Jack Collins.  It’s Holland’s job to find Flores and Vicki before Collins does.  A great tale, beautifully told.

Scarecrow by Michael Connelly (Little Brown): Michael Connelly has been one of my favorites for a lot of years.  I’ve enjoyed just about every one of his Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller books.  Scarecrow brings back crime reporter Jack McEvoy who we first met in The Poet and then again in 2004’s The Narrows.  In Scarecrow, McEvoy’s just been laid off from his job on the L.A. Times. He wants to go out with a bang by writing one last great story. He decides to investigate arrest of a young L.A. gangbanger for the brutal rape and murder of an exotic dancer.  He soon realizes that the wrong man has been charged with the crime and teams up with his old flame, FBI agent Rachel Walling, to uncover a string of  bizarre and frightening serial killings. The real killer?  I’m not giving anything away by revealing that its a strange and frightening  computer hacker who uses his skills on the Internet to find and track down each of his victims.  The Scarecrow is one hell of a good read.

Vanished by Joseph Finder (St. Martin’s Press). Vanished is the first in a new series featuring Mick Heller, corporate espionage operative and former Special Forces tough guy.  After hearing from his nerdy fourteen-year-old nephew Gabe Heller comes home to Washington to learn that his older brother  Roger has vanished and Roger’s wife Lauren is in a DC hospital in a coma.   With help from Gabe, Heller unravels a nasty scheme involving a the CEO of a Security firm intended to look and sound a lot like real life company Blackwater.  Vanished moves at breakneck speed and the plots offers up a lot of fun, if not totally believable, twists and turns.  Definitely a good read.

The Silent Man by Alex Berenson (G.P. Putnam). This is Berenson’s third novel featuring CIA operative John Wells and his girlfriend and fellow agent Jenny Exley. This time the baddies are Islamist jihadists who manage to get their hands on small nuclear bombs and intend using them on The Great Satan.  Unlike most thriller villains who tend to be cardboard thin, Bernson’s are well drawn three-dimensional characters.  If you’re not familiar with this series I suggest you start with Berenson’s first, The Faithful Spy, that was published in hardcover in 2006 and in paper in 2008.

As I said at the top, these books represent only a small fraction of the large number of terrific mysteries and thrillers that came out last year.  Please let me know what you particular favorites was and, yes, you can include The Cutting on your list

I just got back from my first New England CrimeBake sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America and by the New England Chapter of Sisters in Crime.  CrimeBake 2009 was held at the Dedham Hilton just outside Boston.  Sue Grafton creator of the alphabetized Kinsey Millhone series (A is for Alibi and so on practically ad infinitum) did a fabulous job as the keynote speaker. She was funny, informative and completely approachable.  Her latest U is for Undertow comes out December 1st.  Wonder what she’ll do after Z is for…?  She didn’t let us know.

I appeared on a debut panel to discuss both the process of writing my first thriller and, of more interest to the 60 or so wannabe writers in attendance, how I found an agent and got my book published by a major house.

I also had a chance to meet and chat with a bunch of New York Times bestselling thriller writers including Joseph Finder (Vanished), Michael Palmer (The Second Opinion) and Lisa Gardner (The Neighbor).

All in all a terrific weekend.  Will definitely attend again next year.

http://www.crimebake.org/index.htm

I decided to write my first novel in January of 2006. I had no idea what I was getting into. Not a clue.

Yes, I’d been a writer all my life. I wrote TV commercials for a living for more than twenty-five years. And when I left the agency business to become a freelancer, I wrote brochures, byline articles, annual reports and white papers for clients mostly in the financial services and healthcare industries. I even wrote two non-fiction books. Big glossy corporate histories written under contract to corporate clients.

But never any fiction. Not even a single completed short story let alone a three-hundred page novel. But it was something I’d always wanted to try, I wasn’t getting any younger, and as Rabbi Hillel famously asked, “If not now, when?”

But where to begin? What kind of novel wasn’t much of an issue. I was and am a fan of thrillers. Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Tess Gerritsen, Dennis Lahane, and Laura Lippman are all among my favorites. I wanted to write the kind of book I liked to read.

Choosing a setting wasn’t a big issue either. I’d moved to Portland, Maine a few years earlier and was convinced Portland would make a great location for a series. For reasons why, check out my blog post below titled “What Came First

A much tougher question, if this was to be the first book in a series, was creating a hero I could live with for a long time.

It seemed like it every possible variation on the thriller hero had been done over and over again.

The hero as superman has been done and done and done from Ian Fleming’s James Bond back in the 60’s to Lee Child’s hugely successful and on-going Jack Reacher series.

Ethnic diversity also abounds. Consider Alex McCall-Smith’s Mma Ramotswe from Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Indian detectives Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn.

Examples of interesting professions or unusual skills? No problem. Dick Francis’s ex-jockey turned private eye, John Dunning’s rare book expert in the Bookman series and, probably the biggest money-maker of all time, Dan Brown’s Harvard Symbolologist, Robert Langdon.

Handicapped detectives seemed to represent an entire sub-genre. Suzanne Barnhill notes in her piece The Perfect Detective Novel,  “There are blind detectives (such as Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados), deaf detectives (Jack Livingston’s Joe Binney, Ellery Queen’s Drury Lane, and Dwight Steward’s Sampson Terhune), and lame or handicapped detectives (M. K. Shuman’s Micah Dunn and John Lutz’s Fred Carver)”  Of course, we’re all familiar with Raymond Burr’s wheelchair-bound Ironsides. And a writer named George C. Chesbro has even written a series featuring a dwarf detective who is also a professor of criminology.

There may be even more clergymen and women out there solving fictional crimes than handicapped people. A list compiled by reference librarian Beth Radcliffe includes eleven nuns as sleuths and eight series featuring priests (most famously G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and Ralph McInerny’s more recent Father Dowling). Jews are less well represented, though Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi series (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late et al) was hugely successful. As for the Protestants,there are quite a few of those too. The one I’m most familiar with (and personally enjoy)  is my fellow Mainer Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Rev. Claire Fergusson who is both an Episcopal priest and a US Army helicopter pilot (I believe Claire’s currently back in the pilot’s seat in Iraq, her National Guard unit having been called up.)

It seemed the only thing left for me was to create a series featuring trans-gender Siberian piano-tuner with a passion for raising parakeets. And, for all I knew, that had probably been done as well.

But the more I thought about it the more I realized it didn’t matter. 

The heroes I liked best I liked not because of their peculiarities or deformities. They were simply flawed human beings like the rest of us. They solved murders because it was their job as cops. They were people we could all identify with. Yes, they each have a few individual quirks. Everyone does. Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch is the orphaned son of a prostitute and his first name is Hieronymus. Ian Rankin’s John Rebus is an anti-social alcoholic. And Tess Gerritsen’s Jane Rizzoli has deep insecurities, anger management issues and major problems with both her mother and her insensitive lout of a brother. But they are all cops and, more importantly, they are all real people.

And so Michael McCabe, the hero of The Cutting, was born. Like all good characters, McCabe has a few idiosyncrasies of his own. He studied to be a film-maker and has an encyclopedic knowledge of old movies.  He has an eidetic memory and can remember verbatim virtually everything he ever read or heard. But most important he’s a real human being, a good guy cop with plenty of problems and flaws. He’s a single father struggling to raise a teenage daughter on his own. He drinks too much. He has a hang-up about his ex-wife Sandy and still dreams about her. And he thinks he can solve every crime all by himself with little or no help from anyone else. As McCabe’s partner Maggie tells him in The Cutting, “Shit, McCabe, you always think you can do everything alone. And you call Kane a risk-taker. Even the Lone Ranger never went anywhere without Tonto.”

If you intend to write a series think very hard about who you want your hero to be. It’s the single most important decision you’ll make. And if you’re successful you’ll have to live with him or her for a long long time.

It’s sort of like the old chicken and egg thing.  People are constantly asking me, “When you decided to write a mystery/thriller series, what came first? The character or the plot?

The short answer is neither.

What really came first when I decided to write The Cutting, was the setting.

Well before I began to dream up McCabe or Maggie or any of the other continuing characters in The Cutting, I knew I wanted to write a series set in Portland, Maine.

I don’t think that’s particularly unusual.  A sense of place is key to a lot of the best mystery writing. It would be hard to imagine James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels set anywhere but in Louisiana. Or Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee stories taking place anywhere but in New Mexico. The same holds true for Carl Hiaasen’s Florida, Dennis Lahane’s Boston, Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Millers Kill, New York, and, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s London.

I don’t know for sure but I’d be willing to bet every one of those writers knew where they wanted to set their books before they knew very much about who their characters were and certainly before they developed a specific story line.

For me the perfect place turned out to be Portland. I moved there from New York in 2001 and discovered a city that offered just about everything a writer could want in creating a new mystery series.

It had a gritty urban setting. A vibrant street life. Great architecture. A rich history. A working waterfront. Good bars. Great restaurants. A lively art scene. And not unimportantly, a police department with big-city skills and resources that was still small enough for most of the cops to know and care about each other. Portland even offers interesting and often extreme weather to set scenes in.

My editor at St. Martin’s was very upfront about it. The Portland setting was one of the key reasons he offered to buy the series.

One of my most perceptive reviewers, Judy Harrison of The Bangor Daily News recognized the importance of place to The Cutting right off. She wrote:

“Sam Spade had San Francisco.

Spenser has Boston.

Mma Ramotswe has all of Botswana.

Now, McCabe has Portland — as in Maine.

Maybe it’s the other way around. Portland has McCabe.

It’s hard to tell sometimes whether a detective in a mystery novel owns the setting or it owns the detective. What really matters is that the location becomes such an integral part of the character that it is inseparable from the gumshoe, P.I. or self-educated investigator who always, eventually, solves the crime.”

To anyone thinking about writing a new mystery or thriller series, I’d suggest trying what worked so well for me in The Cutting. Pick a place. Then make it your own.

“Where do you write?”

I’m sure most writers have been asked that question.  I know I have more times than I can count. At least once at every public event and private gathering I’ve attended since my first suspense thriller, The Cutting, leapt its way onto bookstore shelves at the end of June.  (Author’s Note: Okay, leapt is a bit hyperbolic. But, as a writer of stories involving sex, violence, murder and mayhem, I do like action verbs, and “leapt its way” seems more appealing than the more sedate, though possibly more accurate, “found its way” or the more passive, but definitely more accurate, “appeared.”)

Anyway, for me, the short answer to the question of where I write is: Not At Home.  A lot of people who know where I live find that puzzling.

Thanks to a couple of decades spent churning out detergent, car and army recruiting commercials for the likes of Procter & Gamble, Lincoln/Mercury, and the US Army, home for me is now a beautiful light-filled house set on the rocky coast of Maine. From its many windows I can watch the waves crashing onto the shore and gaze at a series of islands receding into the distance across the water.

Sounds idyllic, right?

It is.

Sounds like the perfect writer’s retreat, right?

It ought to be.

So, that’s where you wrote The Cutting, right?

“Uhh, well, no. Not exactly.”

Turns out, that for me at least, the perfect writer’s retreat only works perfectly as long as my mind is in gear, the plot is unfolding as planned, and my characters are behaving exactly as I want them. In other words, when I’m writing the easy parts.

However, when I get to one of those places where I’m not quite sure what Mike McCabe, my hero, and Maggie, his partner, ought to be doing next. Or exactly how bitchy I ought to be making McCabe’s ex-wife Sandy. Or how graphically I should describe the next slaying or autopsy, well, then what seems to be the perfect writer’s retreat unfortunately morphs into the perfect place for procrastination.

It’s the place where I can stop writing for any of a million reasons. All valid, all rational, all stupid.

“Gee, shouldn’t I be checking my emails?”

“Gee, shouldn’t I be checking that stock I bought last week and see if it’s recovering yet from its precipitous fall?”

“Gee, I’m almost out of clean underwear. Shouldn’t I be washing a load?”

Annie Dillard, a writer whose work I admire, once described the perfect place to write fiction as a small cinderblock cell without windows, without telephone and without Internet access. A place where one’s imagination can stay in its imaginary world because there are no other choices.

My choice of the perfect writing place isn’t as extreme as Dillard’s. I chose a fifth floor carrel in the library of a nearby university. Once there I can’t log on to the Internet because I’m not registered as either a student or a teacher. I can’t stop for a snack because there are no snacks to be had.  I can’t even go to the bathroom without lugging my laptop with me.

Yes, I miss the view of the waves and the islands, but my carrel is ideal. Without it I wouldn’t get the next book done.