The First Book I Ever Read

Frankie here. I’m in Philadelphia for the next couple of days attending the Public Library Association annual conference. I’m serving as National President of Sisters in Crime this year, and we have a SinC panel on Friday afternoon. It should be interesting, but since it hasn’t happened yet, I’ll have to wait to write about it.

I’m mentioning it now because during our preparation for the panel, our moderator asked us to think about the first book that we read that made a difference in our lives.

I confess. I couldn’t remember. Nothing came to mind. The problem was I tried to start at the beginning. I tried to remember the first book I had ever read on my own – assuming that would have been the book that set me on my lifelong path as someone who reads, who must read, who feels anxiety when she has no book or at least a magazine close at hand.

But I couldn’t remember that first book or the second or what I checked out the day that I got my library card.

My parents did not read to me when I was a child. They were hard-working blue-collar folks. Neither of them had graduated from high school, barely finished grammar school. But they valued education and books and reading, so they made sure I always had access to books. And I had cousins who were teachers, at high schools and later at university level. So I had books in my world.

But I can’t remember the first book my parents bought me. I can’t remember the first book I read on my own.

Is it just me? Am I the only one with jumbled odds and ends of Dick and Jane and Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and DC comic books? Robert Frost -- I loved Frost’s two paths in the woods. And Poe’s raven and Emily Dickinson’s buzzing fly. I love animals. I thought I would become a vet, so I must have read animal stories. Peter Rabbit? The Wind in the Willows?

Those were the days when students still memorized speeches such as Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” (I’m a Virginian). Then there was Shakespeare. One play each year. The poetry and the speeches and the dramatic monologues are all jumbled up in my head with the books.

In short, I have no idea which book gave me the urge to keep reading. Maybe it wasn’t one book. Maybe it was the joy of reading that reinforced my urge to read.

I’ve always been fascinated by people who say they never read. When I hear this I wonder if it is because they didn’t grow up with books or with parents who valued literacy. Or was it because during their school years they were force-fed books about topics that bored them and once freed from school, they vowed never to open another book? Or, is it really, as some people will say, that they just don’t have the time to read? If they have spare time they’d rather spend it with their family and friends than with head buried in a book.

In truth, reading is an activity that can be isolating. A wonderful activity for shy, introverted children. But also one that keeps them from interacting with other people and perhaps reinforces their tendency to retreat into their own fantasy worlds.

But perhaps that is why some of us became writers when we grew up. And I like to think that at some point we all learned how to make small talk – at least about books.

At any rate, I do remember the book that I loved most as a teenager and checked out again and again from the library. The book was by an author named Agnes Sligh Turnbull. The Day Must Dawn, set on the frontier during the Revolutionary War era.

I really do need to track down a copy of that book and buy it. Then I’ll read it again on a Saturday evening, sitting up in bed with Starlight mints on the night stand. I’ll read beyond my bedtime, and hear in my memory my mother calling to me to turn off my light and go to sleep.

Will it be as much fun this time around? I can’t wait to see.

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E-Outrage

I like to think I'm a glass-is-half-full kind of guy. I love to write, enjoy the act of composing and creating a book, and never suffer "writer's block." It's the business of writing I don't much care for. And this week I want to point out something that makes very little sense and, to me, borders on outrageous.

Discussing e-rights at Sleuth Fest with a bunch of fellow writers, I was astonished to hear the currently industry standard among the New York publishers is to give authors 25% royalties on e-books.

Now it’s a truism that writers attend conferences to whine about the injustices of the industry. But I have to ask, On an e-book, where is the other 75% going? (A house considering one of my novels currently offers an "author-friendly" 40 percent. Um, someone please define “author-friendly” for me.)

I have heard more than once that it costs between $4 and $8 to produce a hardcover book, and according to a “New York Times” article, “Steal This Book (for $9.99),” by Motoko Rich, the figure is roughly 12.5 percent of the $26 hardcover list price. Major retail chains typically purchase the product for 50 percent of the unit cost. Recently, bestselling e-books have jumped into the $15 range as publishers claim many of the production costs—author advances, editing, and marketing—remain a constant whether the book is published in electronic, paper, or hardcover format.

What’s the upshot of a $15 e-book? We’ll soon see. But consider this from Rich’s article: “‘I love [David] Baldacci’s writing,’” wrote one reader, who decided not to buy [“Last Family”]. “‘Sorry Mr. B — price comes down or you lose a lot or readers. I’ll skip your books and move on!’”

I grasp the constant costs related to publishing, but it remains hard to swallow a 75%-25% split.

A Tidy Home, A Tidy Mind

I am ecstatic.

No, I have not sold a new series or won the lottery. My husband and I have finally caved in and hired a housekeeper to help keep our rambling apartment under control. Um. Not a daily (as we call them in England) – but someone who comes in regularly and puts our place in order.

Both my husband and I work full-time. He’s an Associate Creative Director for an advertising company and regularly works a seventy-hour week. Like many authors, I too have a full-time job and write in the mornings, evenings and at the weekends. With what precious free time we do have, cleaning house does not feature high as a priority.

Many people are fine about having their home in disarray and I say, lucky you. Personally, I can’t stand it. Maybe it’s a female thing. For me, an untidy house makes my mind spin and concentration hard. I’m easily distracted and if I’m sitting at my computer and there are dust bunnies turning cartwheels on my floor, believe me, they have to go.

So, it was with great joy that I came across a wonderful entry in one of my favorite books—The War of Art: Break Through The Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield.

A Professional Seeks Order
When I lived in the back of my Chevy van, I had to dig my typewriter out from beneath layers of tire tools, dirty laundry, and moldering paperbacks. My truck was a nest, a hive, a hellhole on wheels whose sleeping surface I had to clear each night just to carve out a foxhole to snooze in.

The professional cannot live like that. He is on a mission. He will not tolerate disorder. He eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind. He wants the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the Muse may enter and not soil her gown.

Learning things you don’t really need to know

As I’ve alluded to on more than one occasion, I make the bulk of my income by doing graphic design, sadly. The way I got into that biz was rather circuitous, and the fact that my life has changed to this place never ceases to astonish me.

I grew up in a household of two artist-parents. Neither made their livings from art, but both were very talented and would rather have spent their days on this passion than what they wound up doing: homemaking/secretarial and running a photo engraving business. (I’ll let you guess who did which.) What happened, though, to my brother, sister and me was we absorbed my parent’s artistic ethic. My sister is a talented artist, my brother an excellent draftsman, and me? Well, let’s just say I have a keen appreciation of art and a bit of knowledge, but I can’t draw anything more advanced than stick figures. I became a musician, and still harbour a real envy of people who have the ability to draw.

So, based on that, how and why did I get to graphic design? Let’s just say that it was a circuitous route, led by my dissatisfaction with teaching instrumental music. After 23 years of it, I decided that I was no longer able to give my best to my students (the reasons were wide and varied), and it was time to get out. Unless I got really lucky, writing wouldn’t pay my way, so I was keeping my eyes opened for something else I could do.

Since I’d grown up in a photo engraving plant, I had unknowingly absorbed a lot of knowledge about what the graphic arts are and how they worked. I was helping with my dad’s hand proof press (when there was a need of such things), when I could barely turn the crank to make the bed travel down the press. When most kids were still struggling with long division, I knew how to break down an image into 4-colour process negatives, and the basics of setting type (still mostly by hand at that point).

But I became a musician and music teacher. When a life-change was needed, I got offered a job, based on my printing knowledge and skill with computers, plus my organizational ability learned as a classroom teacher, to work in a small design studio. My two bosses (I was the only employee) set about giving me on-the-job training in graphic design. Fortunately, they were very patient with me and good at explaining things, but often felt completely at sea in the early days.

Curiously (and surprisingly), knowledge I had acquired by osmosis when I was a kid became a valuable commodity. At the same time, I made it my business to learn the graphic arts requirements for good book design: covers and interior, since that’s where my interests lay. Maybe I inherited some of my parents’ artistic talents after all. I only needed a computer to help me realize it.

In the end, another thing I didn’t really set out to learn has come to be very valuable. My current publisher’s design department probably finds me rather annoying. I can look at a cover proposal and fire back detailed notes about all the little things that need work to help pull the design ideas together. I bit my tongue with my next book’s interior design, but the cover is far too important not to say something if I can help make it better, so I spoke up. There was the expected push back, but in the end, they did most of what I wanted since my points were very valid. The cover is pretty snappy now, but most wouldn’t be able to say why because the changes were tiny and subtle, but they do work.

How does all this fit into my topic today? (Or, how in heaven’s name is he going to wrap all this up?)

One thing I dislike designing are websites. A web designer must assemble a huge amount of arcane knowledge to work in this field, a world filled with acronyms and formulae that would make the average person’s head spin. I had learned enough of it to be dangerous.

But currently, I have to redesign my wife’s flute school’s website. Biting the bullet, I’m learning a new website compiling program. The for it manual is 1200 pages thick. I barely have a handle on things, but I’m trying to cobble together enough skills to do the job right. Pretty far from writing crime fiction, eh?

Not really. Last night I was adding a div to surround the outer container of my web template (told you it was arcane, didn’t I?), when a plot point in the novel I’m currently working on suddenly occurred to me. I could wrap this point around another point and add a whole new layer to the story, one that could be quite breathtaking at the novel’s end when All Is Revealed.

I wouldn’t have come up with this excellent idea if I hadn’t spent the whole day dabbling in HTML divs, CSS and PHP.

And so for this week, I’ll say TTFN.

A Look Back – In Admiration

I have now been writing mystery novels for – um – fourteen years. Or thereabouts. I started on January 2, 1998, approximately six months after I departed from my day job with the Library of Parliament's Research Branch here in Ottawa. Thus far, I have published three novels in my Inspector Stride Mystery series. Not bad, but not exactly prolific. There was a long, slow learning curve – which continues. Stride #4, tentatively titled Birthright – is still in progress. And still a bit of a muddle. Lots of characters sitting on various keys on my laptop, and lots of situations that plead to be rationalised and interconnected. In other words, lots to do, still.

The term "prolific" having been mentioned, I will move away from Stride-related issues and write some lines about a writer – unhappily, no longer with us – to whom the term applies readily. The name is Paul Winterton. Some of our readers might know his name; some of our regular bloggers might also. It's a name worth knowing. And if "Paul Winterton" doesn't ring a bell, perhaps one of his pseudonyms will. Andrew Garve. Roger Bax. Paul Somers. In other words, Winterton had as many pseudonyms as I have published titles.

A quick bio. Paul Winterton was born in England, in Leicester, in 1908. His father was a journalist who was also a British MP for the riding of Loughborough, from 1929-1931. Difficult years in Britain, as they were almost everywhere else in the world, with the Great Depression settling in. He graduated from the London School of Economics in 1928, and joined the staff of The Economist at age 21. He stayed there for three years before moving on to the London News Chronicle, for whom he wrote for more than a dozen years. One especially notable assignmment for the News Chronicle was as a foreign correspondent reporting the Second World War from Moscow,  in 1942-45, some of the the war's most critical years. His time in the Soviet Union provided him with material for a number of his later books.




Paul Winterton - aka Andrew Garve, Roger Bax, Paul Somers

A fairly detailed bio on Winterton/Garve/Bax/Somers, and a list of his books, can be found here:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/agarve.htm

My interest in Winterton is long-standing; it goes back to about 1970. One thread even goes back to 1959, although I wasn't aware then that it would prove to be a thread. (I will come back to this.) In 1970 I moved, with my wife and two daughters, to a house in what was then the City of Nepean, long since gathered into the warm embrace of greater Ottawa. One of our neighbours in Nepean was a British couple, he Scottish, she English, parents of two young sons. The older son had the given name "Andrew". (Aha, a clue!) She, Bridget by name, was Paul Winterton's daughter. She was a writer herself, with one children's book to her credit. Oddly, in retrospect, do I not recall that Bridget ever said very much about her father's writing career. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention at the time. (And, if so, shame on me!) Perhaps a natural modesty on her part was at the base of it. I don't know. In her place, I think I would have bragged about my father's prolific writing; he did after all have more than forty – yes, that's 40 – books to his credit.

I do remember that Paul Winterton visited Nepean/Ottawa once, but I have no recollection of having met him. I am pretty sure I would have remembered. I do have a vague memory of seeing father and daughter setting out for a brisk walk on our street, probably heading for the Greenbelt trails nearby, which went for miles into the near-wilderness. I also have a memory of Bridget's husband John saying that he usually declined to walk with them because their walking pace was more like a determined sprint. From which I gathered that the English take their walking very seriously.

Had I known more about Paul Winterton at the time, it is very likely that I would have read at least some of his books. I read a lot of mysteries in those days, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald being among my favourites.

But back now to the nebulous thread from 1959. In that year I was still an undergraduate at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's. One evening I went to see a film, A Touch of Larceny.  The film starred James Mason (famous for playing Field Marshal Rommel in two films, The Desert Fox and The Desert Rats), Vera Miles, and George Sanders. Mason was a brilliant actor, one of my favourites of all time, able to play a villain, a tragic hero (the Rommel part), and he also had a deft touch for light comedy, never better displayed than in A Touch of Larceny.




I saw the film only once, the year it was released, but Mason's performance, and the film itself, stayed with me over the decades. Sometime in the 1980s, I managed to capture the film on VHS tape, probably from a public television screening, either on PBS or the Ontario semi-equivalent, TVO. I still have it somewhere, packed in a box with several dozen other VHS tapes. Ever since I have been waiting for it to appear on DVD, but so far no luck.

Then, about a month ago, I discovered that the entire film, in a very clean copy, is available on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVXXiMiFreI

The film, of course, was made from one of Winterton's novels, The Megstone Plot, from 1956. Several other of his books have also been made into films. As one writer noted, his books lend themselves very naturally to film scripts.

It was after I found  A Touch of Larceny on YouTube (Oh, happy day!) that I decided to look for Winterton's books. The Ottawa Public Library has only one: Counterstroke, from 1978. A quick search at Amazon.ca revealed that only one of his books, No Tears For Hilda, is available new. Many more are listed as available used. Chapters-Indigo does rather better; while none of his books appears to be available in hard copy, a large number are available in eBook format.

The difficulty finding Winterton's books is just a bit sobering, and more than a bit sad. He was prolific, he was very, very good, and he was well-regarded. But it's now hard to find his work in a format – other than used – that Winterton himself would recognise; i.e., the printed page. Perhaps his books are more readily available in Britain. One online source states that he thinks it's overdue that his books should make a comeback. But it hasn't happened yet. One hopes that will change. And soon.

Where I Went Wrong

The most productive writer I know is Loren Estleman. He writes award-winning mysteries and westerns of such astonishing literary merit that he was nominated for the National Book Award. Publisher’s Weekly singled out one of his westerns, The Master Executioner, as one of the 50 best books published. His awards would fill a room. This June he will receive the Wister Award at Western Writers of America for lifetime achievement. I can’t tell you how much members of WWA revere this award.

Loren Estleman

Just how good is the man? PW had this to say in a starred review about his short story collection. “All the elements that have made Estleman one of the best hard-boiled writers of all time – just a notch below Chandler and Hammett – are present in these 32 short stories. Remarkably, he has kept his Detroit-based Amos Walker series (Motor City Blue) fresh after three decades and 20 novels… What's most impressive is Estleman's ability to blend sharp-edged language, cynical characters, betrayals, twists, and a memorable narrative voice within the short story format.”

And the Boston Globe says “"...a true professional, a writer of a sort increasingly rare...so given to his work as to spontaneously combust to genius."

Half mystery—half western!

It’s fitting that his logo is split personality

And get this. He does it all on a 1950 manual typewriter. He managed to stay free of the wretched technology that plagues most of us. I’ve seen some of his manuscripts. They sell for a fortune at the annual WWA auction. He’s an impeccable typist and says 'I like the clip-clop of typewriter keys striking the keyboard and the sweet cedar smell of a freshly sharpened pencil."

This week, I descended into technology hell. One thing after another shorted, blew up, or simply died of the proverbial “cause of death unknown.” My thoughts turned to Loren and the simplicity of his methods. If I were to keep a time log where my life is spent during an ordinary work day, I suspect shockingly little of it goes to actually producing new creative material. My descent began about 20 years ago with my first Apple 2e, and the skid continued.

I went wrong. I’ve stayed wrong. I vow I will change.

Conferencing: A Week in Review

Last week I posted that I was at Sleuth Fest and had left my wife home alone in a snowstorm with three kids.

This week, I offer a follow-up.

Sleuth Fest was my first conference in several years. Previously, I had my agent include a clause in my contracts stating my publisher would cover airfare to one conference each year. My last contract is up, and without a new book to promote, I haven’t attended conferences in a while.

Last week, I came to realize what I’d been missing: the sense of community the mystery world offers. My friend, a poet, was heading off to a larger writing conference last week and told me he wasn’t looking forward to it. He said, in the literary fiction and poetry worlds, the social scene at conferences can be constant games of “who you are” and the haves and have-nots.

The mystery community is not that way. At Sleuth Fest, we shared market tips, contacts, and many war stories. Friday, I had dinner with 11 other writers. The conversation ran to a discussion of e-rights (the big six houses in New York are offering writers only 25% royalties on e-sales, making small houses offering as much as 40% or 50%, attractive) and the pros and cons of outlining one’s novel before beginning (several thriller writers around the dinner table reported outlining for up to eight months before writing the book in only three months; mystery scribes like me sat shaking our heads). The meal ended after midnight—lots of laughs, interesting discussions books, of raising kids, and (of course) of the publishing industry.

I also left Sleuth Fest with good news: independent houses seem to be gaining traction due to their plethora of recent award nominations. Several editors at houses like Bell Bridge Books reported authors previously on the “New York Times” best-seller lists choosing the smaller houses for their “author-friendly” contracts and for making a genuine attempt to slowly grow series.

All in all, it was a worthwhile week. I need to attend one conference a year. (Just don’t tell my wife.)