“Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker…”

So begins Michael Connelly’s classic thriller The Poet.  For my money those lines are among the best openings of any mystery or thriller I know.

Just about everyone agrees the first sentence or two or maybe even three are often the most important sentences in a novel. They set the tone. They draw the reader into the story. Maybe they introduce the lead character. Or just the setting.   I thought it would be fun to explore some opening lines I think really work. Some of the books are timeless classics. Others just really good books. Here, in no particular order, are a baker’s dozen plus one of my favorites:

“Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.” The Shining by Stephen King.

“Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate but fickle…” Peyton Place by Grace Metalious.

“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.” Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell.

“Call me Ishmael.” Moby Dick, Herman Melville.

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier.

“It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.” Day of the Jackel by Frederick Forsyth.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

“They shoot the white girl first.” Paradise by Toni Morrison.

“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.” Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

“Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942, for wounding a man in a movie theatre.” The World According to Garp by John Irving.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was boren (as I have been informed and believe) at twelve o’clock at night.” David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

And finally, one extra that I probably shouldn’t include in such august literary company but since this is my blog, what the hell:

“Fog can be a sudden thing on the Maine coast.” The Cutting by James Hayman.

If anyone has any other particular favorites they’d like to mention, please send them in. I’d love to hear from you.

For those of you who missed Lloyd Ferriss’s review of The Chill of Night in the August 29th edition of the Portland Press-Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, here it is in its entirety. By the way, the review was only available in the print version of the paper.

Maine Sunday Telegram,  Sunday, August 29, 2010

BOOKS.

Captivating detective again hunts a Maine killer

By LLOYD FERRISS

Readers of James Hayman’s second mystery novel are in for a treat.

He delivers a cast of tantalizingly complex characters. The setting of his book – Portland and its environs – is so accurately described that you practically see detective Michael McCabe driving familiar snow-covered streets in a city threatened by a psychopath.

McCabe, a fictional ace detective of the Portland Police department, is the hero of Hayman’s first novel, “The Cutting” (2009). He returns in the aptly named “The Chill of Night.”

McCabe’s a dynamo of focused energy, so intent on finding the slayer of young attorney Lainie Goff that his own girlfriend, Kyra, moves out of their shared apartment to escape his single-track involvement in the case.

A former New York detective, McCabe is blessed with a photographic mind. If he’s handed a slip of paper with a phone number, he glances at it once, then tosses the paper away. The number is stored in his brain forever. McCabe can memorize the contents of a room in a flash, or absorb the content of a letter left on a suspect’s desk.

But McCabe has his problems. He has a love-hate relationship with his ex-wife. He’s proud of his girlfriend, a Yale educated, up-and-coming Portland artist, yet daunted by her cultured upbringing.

The detective teeters on the edge of alcoholism, but is kept on track by his police partner, the memorable Maggie Savage.

Hayman’s mystery opens on a bitterly cold afternoon a couple of days before Christmas. Attorney Goff waits alone in the downtown high-rise that houses the prestigious law firm where she works. She plans to leave the next day for a two-week vacation on Aruba. But she waits to learn if the directors of Palmer Milliken, conferring at a meeting before the holiday, name her a partner in the firm.

Though in her mid-20’s, young to be a partner, Goff is already a capable lawyer. She’s also intimate with the firm’s managing partner, Henry “Hank” Ogden. Hayman describes him as: “Her mentor. Her boss. Her lover. Elegant. Rich, 53 years old. And very, very married.”

As we find in the book’s first few pages, Goff isn’t voted in as a full partner. Neither does she go to Aruba.

Days go by before her naked, frozen body is found stuffed in the trunk of her Mercedes Benz on the Portland waterfront.

As the who-dun-it plot unfolds, one comes to admire Hayman as a genius of suspenseful writing. His main character, McCabe, fingers half a dozen prime suspects in Goff’s death. There’s Ogden, for one. Another is an ex-priest who runs a refuge for homeless teens. There’s “the hotdog man” who sells drugs on the side (Goff was among his customers), and a creepy landlord who put video cameras in every room of Goff’s apartment.

A wonderfully drawn character, pivotal to the novel’s outcome is a young schizophrenic who grew up on Harts Island. Abby Quinn evokes reader sympathy as she’s plagued by voices in her head. But that’s not all she has to worry about.

Like his fictional police detective, Hayman moved from New York City to Maine several years ago. Unlike the detective, he previously worked in a New York advertising agency. Hayman and his wife, artist Jeanne O’Toole, live on Peaks Island.

“The Chill of Night” is an engrossing, character-driven novel. My only complaint, and it’s a small one, has to do with the length of the book and the number of murder suspects.

But there’s nothing tedious about this mystery. It’s a page-turner. All 352 of them.

Lloyd Ferriss is a writer and photographer who lives in Richmond.

In the mood for a good thriller, my wife Jeanne and I went to see George Clooney’s latest star turn, The American.  All I can say is don’t bother.  While I don’t normally write movie reviews, I do write thrillers and, as a thriller-writer, I expect a thriller to have a plot.  Not necessarily a great plot.  Not even a good plot.  But at least some plot.

The American doesn’t.  The movie consists of little more than two hours of mindless violence where people run around shooting each other for no discernible reason. The shootings are mostly interrupted by scenes of Clooney driving around Italy, sitting in cafes drinking coffee and removing his shirt and showing off his muscles by doing pushups and chin-ups.

The film is not without some redeeming qualities.  The scenery in and around the mountainous region of Italy’s Abruzzo  is stunning.  The cinematography is first rate, maybe even good enough to snag Director of Photography Martin Ruhe an Oscar nomination.  But, as Gertrude Stein once said of her return to her childhood home in Oakland, California, when it comes to a story line, “there is no there there.”

For me, your typical post-middle-aged heterosexual male, the single most enjoyable thing about The American was the frequency with which a gorgeous young Italian actress named  Violante Placido removes her clothing and runs around in the nude. If you feel that’s enough to justify spending twenty bucks or more on a pair of tickets, go for it.  Otherwise, as I said before, don’t bother.

The initial inspiration for the story in my new Mike McCabe suspense thriller, The Chill of Night, grew, as it does in so many books, out of a simple “what-if.” Actually, for The Chill there were two “what-ifs.”

“What if,” I asked myself in the first instance, “what if someone had witnessed a horrendous murder but when they tried to tell the police what they had seen, the cops didn’t believe them?”

Following the logic train that led out of that question resulted in the development of one of the key elements of the plot as well as to one of my favorite characters, a young schizophrenic woman named Abby Quinn.

When the story opens Abby is twenty-five years old.

As the book progresses we learn she grew up on Harts Island, Maine, a small fictional island in Casco Bay, about a mile off the coast of Portland.  She led a fairly normal childhood.  Her father, Earl Quinn, was a lobsterman on the island and, as a teenager, Abby sometimes worked on his boat.  He died in 2002.  Abby’s mother, Grace, was an alcoholic who had a series of odd jobs but could never keep anything permanent.  Her mother’s brother, Willis, lived with the family for a time.  “Crazy Willis,” people called him because he heard voices and suffered from frequent hallucinations.  He saw little black bats attacking him from the air and was forever trying to swat them away. Willis hung himself inside Grace’s closet when Abby was eight and Abby discovered the body.

After elementary school on the island, Abby took the ferry across to Portland to attend middle school and high school there.  She was a good student and played on the Portland High School varsity field hockey and lacrosse teams.  When she was eighteen she enrolled in the University of Southern Maine to study Accounting.

Unfortunately, that’s when she started hallucinating and hearing oices that weren’t there.  The Voices twice convinced Abby to attempt suicide by jumping off the rocks on the island into the ocean. She was committed to a psychiatric hospital near Portland where her psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Wolfe, diagnosed her as a schizophrenic.

Under Wolfe’s care she slowly begins putting her life back together. She takes anti-psyhotic medication which keep the hallucinations and voices quiet and which allow her to begin living a fairly normal life.  But then one freezing night in January, she sees a monster she thinks of as Death stab another young woman to death.

When she reports the murder, the cops on the island assume Abby is “off her meds” and hallucinating again. But when McCabe finds the victim’s frozen corpse, he realizes Abby really did see what she said she saw and that he must find her before the killer does.

Early readers of The Chill of Night, including several psychiatrists, have told me the book does “an amazing job,” of getting into the head of a young female schizophrenic and telling much of the story from her point of view.

For that I credit two extraordinary memoirs written by female schizophrenics which I read as part of my research process. The first is called The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett.  The second is The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn Saks.  I strongly recommend both to anyone interested in learning about this terrible disease.

I wrote at the beginning of this piece that there were two “what-ifs” that inspired The Chill of Night. That’s true.  Unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything about the second one because, if I did, it would give too much away and ruin the story.

A lot of people, but especially self-proclaimed book snobs, create a kind of false distinction between thrillers (and other forms of so-called “genre” fiction such as romance and sci-fi) and what they like to call “literary fiction.”

Genre fiction, they say, is plot driven.   Literary fiction is “character driven.”

That is a distinction that implies that in thrillers or in other kinds of genre fiction, the depth of the characters and the examination of their problems as human beings doesn’t matter.

I think that’s baloney.

Yes, a thriller has to be thrilling. A least a good one does.  To qualify as a really good thriller a book has to have a plot that keeps you on the edge of your seat.  It has to create a need in the reader to find out what happens next. A need that makes them unwilling to put the book down until they’ve turned just one more page, and then one more after that, even if it means staying up way past their intended bedtimes.

But is it only the unfolding of the plot that creates that kind of urgency and involvement in a story?

I don’t think so. I think it’s also the characters.  The characters in really truly memorable thrillers have to be as interesting, as fully-developed and as multi-dimensional as they are in any so-called literary fiction.

I know in my own books, The Cutting and The Chill of Night, McCabe’s problems with his own past and the development of his relationships with his daughter Casey, his girlfriend Kyra, his partner Maggie and especially with his ex-wife Sandy are at least as important to the story as the unfolding of the plot or the undoing of the villains.

And it’s not just me. My bookcase is full of thrillers that, by any rational measure, qualify as first-rate literature.

Take Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River for example. It’s certainly a thriller with a plot that unfolds with all the awful inevitability of a Shakespearian tragedy. But Lehane went beyond plot and explored the character of his three protagonists, Jimmy Markum, Sean Devine, and Dave Boyle with subtlety, intelligence and great literary skill.

Or take John LeCarre’s classic The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Richard Price’s 2008 best-seller, Lush Life. Are they thrillers or literature?  I think they’re both. And then there’s Cormac McCarthy.  He’s the winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and is considered one of the finest “literary novelists” of our time. Yet he has written widely-acclaimed books, such as No Country For Old Men, that any fair-minded reader would call thrillers no matter how you cut it.

Yes, there are lots of thrillers populated with one-dimensional cardboard characters. And yes, there is much literary fiction that offers so little plot that its authors’ main intention seems to have been to induce sleep rather than prevent it.  But, to me, those are the books that don’t work and won’t be remembered.

I think the best novels offer both great characters and great plot and arbitrarily categorizing them as either genre writing or literary fiction is a false and often dishonest  choice. And one that needn’t be made.

I write novels for a living. Suspense thrillers like The Cutting and The Chill of Night. Conventional wisdom and constant commentary tells me I ought to be worried.

They say that books and bookstores are dead or dying, young people don’t read any more and the written word is going the way of the dodo bird. All done in, it is said, by competition for attention (or as we used to say in the ad biz, competition for share of eyeballs) from endless and mindless TV stations, endless and even more mindless video games and, of course, the Internet.

I recently came across (on the Internet, of course) a poem, a kind of take off on Dr. Seuss, written by fellow thriller writer Jeffrey Deaver called The Death of Reading (http://www.jefferydeaver.com/Other_Projects/Death/death.html) in which he states the proposition nicely:

Reading is dead, deceased, pushing up daisies.
People are growing increasingly lazy,
lured by the siren of electronic toys
That fill up their lives with meaningless noise.

PlayStations, Facebook, big-screen TVs
And mobile phones smarter than I’ll ever be.
We pray at the altar of our brand-new God,
Who’s powerful and wise and whose name is iPod.

But, by the end of the poem, Deaver puts the lie to the whole thing.

A few years ago when I was downtown,
Doing some shopping, just strolling around
I nearly died in a massive stampede
Of children, no less, in desperate need

To purchase their latest heart’s desire,
No batteries required, no software, no wires,
A book’s what they sought and they’d waiting all day.
Who’s this Harry Potter guy, anyway?

We love reading so much that the books we now see
Are changing from what they used to be.
Originally written in clay and on leaves,
Books are now “printed” on digital screens.

I don’t think reading is dead, either. Yes, like Deaver, I’m a writer. And yes, like Deaver, I have a vested interest in people buying and reading my books. But even if I didn’t, I still think I would believe, as Mark Twain once said of his own death, that the reports of the death of the written word are greatly exaggerated.

In fact, I would argue just the opposite, that reading, writing and the written word are healthier and stronger than ever. It’s just that the delivery system has changed, going  from paper and ink to a digital screen.

When I was a kid, there were only two ways to read.  You either picked up a book or you read a newspaper or magazine. That was it.

Today more people than ever are reading and writing. They’re mostly just doing it on a screen. Kindles. Nooks. iPads. And, of course, regular old computers.  Life Magazine is gone.  But Slate and The Daily Beast seem to be thriving. Written emails have replaced letters and even, to some extent, the telephone. I don’t know how many blogs or bloggers there are but it’s got to be way up in the millions or even tens or hundreds of millions. And people aren’t just writing blogs, people are reading them. A few like Julie Powell are even becoming famous and turning their blogs into traditional books and then turning them into movies starring Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci.

But I think even traditional paper and ink books will manage to survive and prosper.

While commercial publishers have seen their sales decline, self-publishing is booming. It’s allowing many new authors who never would have found a publisher before to enter the field and find success. Just recently a friend and neighbor of mine named Fran Houston self-published a lovely and evocative oral and photographic history of the people who live on a small island off the coast of Maine. The book is called For Love of Peaks. And people are buying it.  Both in local bookstores and on the Internet.  Twenty years ago that never would have been possible.

There are fewer independent bookstores. According to an article in the Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/04/02/unchained_success/)  their numbers declined from around 6,000 in the early 1990’s to roughly 2,200 today.  But according to that same article, in spite of the worldwide recession, those that survived seem to be stronger than ever. Online book sales have exploded. Amazon is a retail phenomenon. The chain bookstores, Borders, Barnes & Noble and others seem constantly crowded.

I still like the feel of a real book in my hand.  But, if the truth be told, I really don’t care whether the people who buy my Mike McCabe thrillers, The Cutting and The Chill of Night, read them in hardcover, paperback or electronically.  I just hope they enjoy the story.

Did you hear the one about the bearded, gray-haired male geezer who somehow managed to turn himself into a twenty-five female schizophrenic?  No?  Believe me it happened. It happened to me. And it wasn’t the first time I became somebody else.

Living inside the heads of different kinds of characters is something writers have to do all the time. Writers of mysteries and thrillers as well as writers of so-called literary fiction.

But creating the character of Abby Quinn, the young schizophrenic woman who is a central character in my newest Mike McCabe thriller, The Chill of Night, was one of the most challenging and most fascinating experiences of my writing life.

Abby, for those of you who haven’t read the book yet, is a young woman with a history of mental illness. She hears Voices that aren’t there. She sees visions that aren’t there. When she’s good about taking her anti-psychotic medication, these things are pretty much under control.  But when she goes off her meds or runs into something majorly traumatic, all bets are off.

And one freezing night on an island in Maine that’s exactly what happens.  Abby sees a murder.  She’s sure she’s seen it.  Or is she?  She runs to the local police station and tells the cop on duty what she has seen.  Or thinks she has seen.

The cop knows Abby’s history and assumes she’s hallucinating.  He doesn’t even bother reporting what she has told him.  But then a body turns up and McCabe realizes the details of the crime match Abby’s story so precisely that she must really have seen what she said she saw. But by then she’s gone. And a murderer is trying to find her.

I wrote a good portion of The Chill of Night in Abby’s voice, from Abby’s point of view. To get the voice right, I had to really get into Abby’s head. To become in a very real sense, Abby Quinn.

To help get it right, I read personal memoirs written by a number schizophrenic women.  Two in particular helped me.  The Quiet Room:A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett and The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn Saks.

These allowed me to get understand Abby Quinn. To experience, as I wrote, exactly what a young woman in her condition might experience under similar circumstances. It was sometimes frightening.  But it was also very revealing and very rewarding.  In the process, Abby became my favorite character of any I’ve ever created.  In a very real sense, she and I have become one.

“I had a headful of gray hair and a hell of a lot of miles under my belt before I even thought about writing fiction. I published my first suspense/thriller, The Cutting, with St. Martin’s Press just three and a half years later.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began composing minuets at the age of five and penned his first symphony when he was nine.  Pablo Picasso earned his first public exhibition in his native Spain at thirteen and, by sixteen, was winning public honors and a national reputation as an artist of the highest caliber. Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane at twenty-five and F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise at twenty-four. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, came four years later.  He died at forty-three.

A lot of people think creative genius, for those who have it, inevitably blossoms early. Apparently, that simply isn’t true. For all of us who spend our early years toiling to pay mortgages and college tuitions yet nonetheless yearn to express ourselves as writers or artists or musicians, there is hope.

I just finished reading a fascinating essay titled Late Bloomers by Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. I would recommend this piece (which appears in Gladwell’s latest book, What the Dog Saw) to anyone who wants to enter the creative life late in life.

Gladwell’s main point is that for every Picasso who explodes on the scene early there is also a Paul Cezanne, who wasn’t recognized as a decent painter, let alone a genius, until he was well into his fifties.

While I, in no way, pretend to genius, early or late, I did have a headful of gray hair and a lot of miles under my belt before I even thought about writing fiction. I published my first suspense/thriller, The Cutting, with St. Martin’s Press just three and a half years later.

To be fair, I had experience as a writer. But a different kind of writer.   I’d spent roughly twenty-five years as a copywriter and creative director for some of Madison Avenue’s biggest advertising agencies, happily churning out TV and print campaigns for mega-clients like Procter & Gamble, Ford, and the U.S. Army. After leaving the agency business, I continued writing. Brochures, newsletters articles, a few ads, an annual report or two and a few rip-roaring speeches for non-writing CEO’s who were unable to turn out prose, on their own, that would accomplish little more than allow their audiences to catch up on their sleep.

None of this was fiction.  But all of it helped me hone skills that served me well when I decided to try my hand at writing the kind of books I enjoyed reading.  Murder mysteries.  Suspense thrillers.  Whodunits.

I started writing The Cutting on January 2, 2006.  On June 23, 2009 the finished product was published by St. Martin’s/Minotaur.

The lesson in all this is simple.  To be successful as a novelist, you have to have an ear for and a facility with the written word.  You have to practice your craft and make your writing as good as it can be. And you have to be disciplined enough to get up every morning and work hard.

The one thing you don’t have to be is young.

Ever wonder how mystery and thriller writers come up with all those arcane bits of information they include so casually in their stories? I know I always did.

One of the sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating challenges of writing mysteries, thrillers and suspense novels is getting the details right.

Take, for example, an autopsy of the victim in my second Detective Mike McCabe thriller, The Chill of Night.

The book takes place in the middle of one of the coldest winters Portland, Maine has experienced in many a year. Night after night temperatures go down to single digits, sometimes even colder.

Since the killer stuffed the body of beautiful Portland attorney Lainie Goff into the trunk of her own BMW convertible and left it out in the bitter cold for more than a few days, Lainie is, naturally enough, frozen solid. Like a rock.  “Think Butterball turkey,” says Terri Mirabito, my fictional medical examiner whose job it will be to defrost and autopsy the corpse.

I was pretty sure that doing an autopsy on a frozen corpse was going to present difficulties that would impact the flow of the story.  But what difficulties?  I needed expert help.

My first step was to Google “Autopsying a frozen corpse.”  I discovered a professor of forensic pathology at a University Medical Center in South Carolina had written an article on exactly that subject.  The article wasn’t available online but I was able to track down her email address and contact her.  She sent me the article and agreed to become one of my “regular experts” on anything to do with the physiology of death.

It turns out you can’t just warm up a frozen body and proceed with the autopsy.  It has to be defrosted slowly in a refrigeration unit at a steady thirty-eight degrees which can take up to  week.  Go any faster and the outside of the body will start to decompose while the inner organs are still frozen. Important evidence can be lost.

The effect on the story was that McCabe had to proceed with his investigation without the benefit of autopsy results. No way to estimate time of death.  No way to check for DNA evidence of sexual assault. No way to check for the presence of drugs or poison in the body.  All that made McCabe’s job more difficult.  But it also made the story more accurate. And that, I think, is important.

On Friday June, 18th, I made a guest appearance on 207, a interview show that appears on Portland’s NBC affiliate WCSH 6 right after The Evening News with Brian Williams.  While I’m usually highly critical of how I look and sound on television, I think this one came off pretty well. Take a look yourself by clicking the link below and let me know what you think.

James Hayman Interview on 207 on WCSH 6