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.

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.