Ordinary People

 Foyle's War is my favorite mystery series. It's being rerun on the Acorn channel. I like it because of its superb acting, plot line, and the faithfulness to historical accuracy. 

The series is set in England before, during, and after World War II. Foyle is a Detective Chief Superintendent who quietly serves as a policeman for a small English village. The complexity of war and the depiction of ordinary life on the home front is often heartbreaking. 

I had not realized how many children living in Londan were sent to the historic "great houses" and had to live in the countryside during the bombing. I hadn't thought about the number of Englishmen who had relations living in Germany and the ache of having to break off communication with those who believed in Hitler's aims.

Ordinary life is the backbone of literature. We are all enriched when persons from different time periods and countries understand and share the details of their culture. Throughout literary history, talented writers have given us a glance of ordinary life. Even a partial list would be too long for this blog.  

Last year, one of the Edgar finalists, Before She Was Helen, was especially intriguing to me because of the author's bio. It was about as modest and unassuming as it could be. Caroline B. Cooney taught Sunday School and helped with a choir. And she wrote this superior book set in a retirement community.

Wow. Some authors' credits are awe-inspiring. I'm quite wistful when I read of their travels and adventures and their interesting occupations. I would love to be able to follow in their footsteps. But then when I read Cooney's bio, I realized life is right under our noses. 

The rich and famous may be intriguing, but so are the ordinary people all around us. It's a matter of paying attention.   

Brooklyn Wars

 
Weekend guest Triss Stein is a small–town girl from New York farm country who has spent most of her adult life in Brooklyn. She writes mysteries about different Brooklyn neighborhoods and their unique histories, in her ever-fascinating, ever-changing, ever-challenging adopted home. In the new book, Brooklyn Wars, murder gets in the way as heroine Erica Donato researches the proud history and slow death of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

My current book, Brooklyn Wars, was released in August so now I am deep into writing the next book in the series. There are writers who plan out an entire book before writing begins. I am not one of them. Every new book has a few surprises for me.

My amateur sleuth is a historian, a specialist in Brooklyn history, and her writing about Brooklyn’s varied neighborhoods gives her a reason to ask questions. She regularly stumbles across people who don’t want some questions answered. Or even asked.

So every book starts with a real place, a neighborhood that has interesting potential. I begin in the Brooklyn history room of the public library. I sit down with a stack of clipping files and a stack of books. Brooklyn Wars is set against the background of the renowned Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was already more than a century old when World Ward ii began, but that became its finest hour. I fully intended to build a book around it. It was the largest shipyard in the world in those years, employing more than 70, 000 people, many of them women doing what had been “men’s” jobs.

New York in wartime? Spies on the waterfront? The mob on the waterfront? Women’s changing expectations? The never-solved burning of the French ship, Normandie? There was a story possibility in every article.

But wait. I soon realized that the generation that lived those stories is mostly gone now. A contemporary mystery with roots in that past would be hard to pull off.

But wait. Those files told a few more stories, including the devastating closing of the yard in 1966, the long downhill slide of the property and its surprising current rebirth. And there was an entire dissertation in the library files, with a new plot idea on every page. In the end, I did manage to layer a bit of the wartime story in there too.
The work in progress is about Brooklyn Heights, one of the oldest parts of Brooklyn, the first suburb, the home of Brooklyn high society, and the scene of an important Revolutionary War battle. (Washingon lost). It was also the first Historic District in New York. I expected to learn a lot about that civic battle, with city planners/developers on one side and preservationists on the other.

What I did not expect to find was a third player, a somewhat mysterious religious organization which owns a large stake in the neighborhood. Hmmm. What can I do with that?

Stay tuned.

Long, Short, or Both

I can now go to the EQMM website and see my short story, "The Singapore Sling Affair," listed in the next (November/December) issue. It's like that moment when you see the cover of your book and know you'll soon have it in your hand. This will be my third published short story -- the first in an anthology, followed by two in EQMM. I'm surprised because I've never thought of myself as a short story writer.

Now, I admit, my short stories are long. "The Singapore Sling Affair" is almost 12,000 words. I wrote it because I discovered a fascinating historical tidbit and because I wanted to try writing about a new protagonist. I'm hoping my former Army nurse will get her own series. I'd love to write about the adjustments people were making to their lives after World War II in a small town in upstate New York.

But even with my motivation to write this short story, I went through multiple drafts as I tired to find the focus that a short story requires. I love subplots. I love finding connections. There isn't a lot of time or space for that in a short story. Still, I found that I enjoyed the challenge.

That doesn't mean I'm about to give up novel writing. Books provide the opportunity for subplots. For character development. For descriptions. I can write 100,000 words and then make adjustments by trimming away the flab. I can go off on tangents while finding the story. Short stories, on the other hand, require a plan.

But for a writer who is introducing a new protagonist, a short story has advantages. Much less investment of the writer's time. Much less investment of the reader's time.

Thoughts from those of you who write (or read) both novels and short stories?