The LadyKillers

Big City Excitements

I live and write in a mountain village in Central California about seventy miles from the edge of the Los Angeles sprawl. Last Sunday I headed into The City for the Sisters-in-Crime Christmas party.

I used to be sophisticated, spending the twenty years before moving to the village in Santa Monica. Things happen in Santa Monica. Like many other coastal cities, big ideas bubble up and take shape, things like food, fashion, lifestyle, new ways of being and self-expression.

That’s why I set my police procedural series in the Santa Monica Police Department. The cops there are no stranger to high-tech crime, celebrity, and the crimes that involve runaways and homelessness. Everybody likes the sunshine and seashore.

Now I live in a village of less than a thousand, a lot of them retirees like myself.  Seeing the small-scale scandals that take place here prompted my second series, featuring a homicide detective from the Kern County Sheriff’s department in Bakersfield. The crime stories written up in the local weekly happen right in front of you.

Last weekend I searched around in the back of the closet for something made of silk and a good scarf. I hope that all of you reading this are aware of the many resources you have available as a member of Sisters-in-Crime http://www.sistersincrime.org/ .  Started by Sara Paretsky in the 80’s, the organization offers networking, advice and support to mystery authors and was founded to “promote the professional development and advancement of women crime writers to achieve equality in the industry.” Guppies offers an online critique group for new writers within Sisters-in-Crime.  And there are a significant number of Misters within Sisters-in-Crime.

The Los Angeles Chapter puts on an excellent conference every two years and has monthly meetings bringing in speakers from every niche within the crime-fighting spectrum.

These monthly meetings draw together the known and unknown authors in a casual networking scene where you have fun and learn something new.

I’ve gotten pretty pokey myself since I moved to the village. My big excitement yesterday was seeing a bear shamble right past my office window. I won’t forget my astonishment at trying to put coins in a parking meter in Pasadena and realizing they now take credit cards. 

As I say, I used to be sophisticated.

http://marpreston.com

 

What We Do In Our Spare Time: Characters' Hobbies

Dave Mason, my Santa Monica homicide detective, tells himself that he can start playing hockey again as soon as he has his second knee replacement. Here’s Dave coming home from hockey practice in No Dice, the first book in the series.

Dave Mason left hockey practice, stuffing all his equipment into the back of his Jeep. Sometimes he went out with the guys whose motto was “Hockey is good.  Beer after hockey is better.” Tonight he left the rink at peace with himself, scoured out, his mind clean. A hard fought hockey game sometimes put him in a state of grace. He pulled into the Starbuck’s drive through and ordered.  The Starbuck’s mocha he’d looked forward to all evening came and he took a sip.  The caffeine blew through him, illuminating him like a string of Christmas lights.

                He’s kidding himself about his knees. Here’s Dave Mason in Book 4, On Behalf of the Family: the knee replacements only helped so much.

It was so little to ask of him. And Dave Mason knew it. He and Ginger had been arguing about the dancing lessons ever since he got to her place. She didn’t want to do extremist hikes, attend hockey games, or go dirt bike riding. They were both so busy, the little bit of time they spent together went to grocery shopping, car washing, or the kid stuff they did with his daughter Haley who visited weekends. Ginger insisted they had to plan some fun. Fun for her was yoga or the dancing classes. Under threat, Dave Mason took up tango lessons.

He becomes pretty good at it, but it doesn’t stop him from losing Ginger. That’s another story, as they say.

In the second series I write with Dex Stafford of the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, my detective is learning to play the mandolin, with great difficulty. I can draw from my own experience of learning to thump out a few tunes on the piano.

I get much more pleasure writing about characters with a wobbly interior life than explosions and car chases. You might want to check them out for yourself.

Why I Write Crime Fiction

Don’t you wish you could get back at men who are bullies and jerks, those women who are gold-diggers and narcissists? You can writing crime fiction.

I never wanted to hang out in a cop bar, or be a cop, but police work has always fascinated me. Most law enforcement jobs offer burst of excitement, danger, and thrilling action—in contrast to the way I made my living working on academic social science research projects.

Oh, research had its own set of puzzles and intrigues, its own small excitements from time to time. But I relish the dark side, a bit of noir, semi-hardboiled in fiction-- the thrill me, chill me, scare-me- to-death aspect.  

1. In my fictional life I can dance on the dark side, speed into an alley in a Porsche after midnight, insult a gang banger, or talk back to a cop with impunity.
2. I can be 32 again, and 5 foot ten. I can have a romance with a hard-bodied cop who can dance the tango.
3. Goodness will prevail over evil and the villain will be punished. I guarantee it.
4. In the name of research, I get to ride in the back seat of a police car, buy a pair of handcuffs, fire an AR-15, and pet a canine unit.
5. I get to slide in my opinions on social issues. Good mysteries are about something, usually a social problem that has given rise to a crime. In my book On Behalf of the Family it was about honor killing. In Rip-Off it was about human trafficking. Believe me, I have opinions, but the trick is not to beat the reader over the head with them.
6. I really like my fellow writers who like the stroll down dark alleys as much as I do. I love crime fiction fans who read and review my books.
7. I can curse and swear and put gutter language in the mouths of my characters that I would never, ever say. I can let them have sex as much as I’d like, flaunt cleavage, and walk in five inch heels.
8. I love the detectives in both of my police procedural series, one set in Santa Monica, the other in the peaceful village where I live in the central California mountains. Of course, Dave Mason is me, but he’s not me too. Same with Dex Stafford and Holly Seabright. I get to visit with them any time I like.
9. I love puzzles. In the process of writing seven crime fiction novels, I’ve had to devise plots that sometimes seemed to have no resolution. But I get to tinker with them, set my characters in motion, and solve the puzzle.
10. I get to visit exotic locales. Friends consider them strange choices. Chechnya, for example. I read Turkish and Chechen newspapers in English for years, yes years, to get the plots and characters right. I get to poke my nose down rat holes in the name of research that I’m sure has earned me a place on Homeland Security Watch lists.

But I’m harmless.  Really I am. I’m just a writer.

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Too Many Cats

I moved to a mountain village in Central California where a small group of good-hearted people were battling a desperate overpopulation of unwanted cats. We started a SPCA and for the next years my life was filled with cats, and writing crime fiction.  Fostering cats, raising money for cats, writing grants, starting a thrift store to support our spay/neuter clinics. And, of course, taking home unadoptable cats. At one point of madness I had twelve. Gradually they’ve winnowed down to two.

They crept into my crime fiction. There was always a cat or two in the margins of each chapter. With my latest book, The Most Dangerous Species, cats came to the fore. Murder in a mountain village cat rescue sanctuary. The story is based on my own experience and visits to The Cat House on the King, a 12-acre property near Fresno, CA devoted to more than 600 cats. If you can imagine cats everywhere, above you in trees, draped over the mantle and the door sills, on the bookcase, twining around your feet, purring for attention.

Well, a crime story has to be set somewhere, doesn’t it? My protagonist’s love interests has to have some kind of backstory, doesn’t she? With 12 cats of her own and a job as a village patrol officer, she becomes the prickly ally of my protagonist.

To introduce a little conflict, I gave him—the hotshot Bakersfield detective—a cat allergy. To kick off the story, the killer opens the gates and all 150 cats escape, complicating the murder investigation. I enjoyed fitting in the interstices of the story everything I knew about capturing large cat populations. No, the killer is not killed by a cat.

Here's a link to a short video of a Day in the Life at the Cat House on the King:     https://youtu.be/g3cQCjCQWIc

You might enjoy The Most Dangerous Species.  It’s definitely not a cozy.

Writing Like A Man

I had a radio interviewer ask me once how I learned to write like a man.  I couldn’t think up a quick answer at the time. But I've thought a lot about it since. 

As a woman I’ve been studying men since I was about twelve years old. First it was monitoring what kind of boyfriends they’d be. I learned the hard way how men behave in romantic relationships.  Haven’t we all? Then I learned about men bosses.  Then husbands? And men friends. And gay men friends.

Men have been a topic of fascination my whole life.

I never thought writing a male protagonist was a stretch.  Creating a living character whom you might recognize walking down the street toward you was a matter of making sure you knew what kind of car he drove because that mattered to most men. You knew about his attitude to clothes, kids, and his relationship to the boss.  You knew most men dread the “state of the relationship” talk. Men have strange friendship relationships with other men. They didn’t really talk to each other the way women do. If men knew what their spouses confided in women friends, they’d be horrified.

Those were the big differences, as I see it, based on a lifetime of study of men.

In both crime fiction series I write, the protagonist is a man, a homicide detective, one in urban Santa Monica, the other in rural mountainous California. They have enduring, but troubled, romances. I don’t think I’d like writing about a men who hopped from bed to bed. 

That may tap into another important gender difference. Men, and particularly young men, have an ethos of hook ups that I find hard to understand. And young women too. Bed hopping is regarded much more lightly. Boy, have things changed.

What remains the same? I don’t know, and that’s an area I’d wade into with much reluctance.

Perhaps you’d like to judge for yourself how well I’ve handled this male gender issue. Let me point you back to a book that is a favorite of mine, called Rip-Off.

Mentors

 

I’ve watched a lot of writers from a distance and learned from them.  I don’t think I’ve had a real up close mentor, mostly because I’ve been too over-awed by the ones I admire and too shy to ask for help.

Also I live in an out-of-the-way village about 70 miles north of the Los Angeles sprawl. Perhaps the isolation from the big city writer’s scene is why you see me so often on Facebook.  I know it’s a fictive community but it keeps me in touch.

I meet writers locally who inspire me.  I admire my friend Judith Cassis. She authored as a ghostwriter a book that made the New York Times best seller list.  When she talks I listen.

I read a lot of books too. I write police procedurals and John Sanford is my ideal. I heard an interview with him once and maybe it hit me at exactly the right time, because as I write this now it doesn’t seem nearly as profound. 

Sanford recommended a close study of the first couple of chapters of a book you wish you’d written. Any of you English majors know what a close reading is. I took it to heart. Although it seemed savage I took actual paperback and hardbound books that I liked and turned down corners and underlined and cut out whole passages with scissors and hung them up on a clipboard at my desk. And I read them over and over, trying to deconstruct what I liked about them.

I watched how characters walked onto the stage, how the inciting event was set up, and tried really hard to learn what it was that sparked my continued interest.

Do I write like these mentors now?  Snort!  I only wish.

I’ve distilled all this study into a series of EBooks on Writing Your First Mystery  The techniques that propel a mystery forward are transferrable to any genre of fiction. There are six of these titles now and I am working on a seventh.  

Please check them out and recommend them to any writers you know who are new in the writing world.

Please check them out and recommend them to any writers you know who are new in the writing world.

Fate – the Road not Taken – Mar Preston

In 1970 I left Toronto and went to Europe to set off for Europe to see the world.  I met a man who became my husband who brought me to California.  What are the odds of that?

Had fate not intervened I suspect I would have gone back to Toronto or even my home town, a middling-size city of not much importance in northern Ontario.

Would I have become a writer? I could always string together words in a way that people found interesting, writing reports, letters, this and that. It was a time when public education was more thorough than it is now. I couldn’t believe there were people in high school who couldn’t read. I thought everybody could write, so it wasn’t a skill I imagined was worth much.

Fate kept twining my path with people who took writing fiction seriously. I stood at the edges, admiring what they did. I’ve always been a serious reader and knew what good fiction sounded like, but I never had a story that insisted I write it.

As a research worker at the University of Southern California, an opportunity to get a MFA degree was free, so there must have been some hard wind behind me.  I worked hard to get that degree. But no degree can give you a work ethic and the ability to apply seat of pants to chair for long periods of time.

That was the beginning of the hard work to teach myself how to write: four finished practice novels that no one wanted to publish.

Fate intruded again when I turned my sights on crime fiction. And as the Robert Frost says, “that has made all the difference.”

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Now I write about writing: Please check out my six EBooks on Writing Your First Mystery.

 Recommend them to a beginning or intermediate crime fiction writer.

 

Trends - Mar Preston

There’s a lot of things I have opinions about (and thus regard as facts) that may be just a bunch of hooey. I’m pleased though when I encounter opinions that confirm my own observations. A trend towards shorter books, for one.

“I think in genre fiction, the readers are pushing for shorter chapters, quicker reads, and less depth. The publishers are following their lead. Literary fiction still allows the full beauty of the language to be explored, but genre authors have a unique challenge. Many of us try to inject a literary tone while still producing a page-turning quick read. That’s the sweet spot we are all shooting for, but with shorter attention spans, it is becoming a greater challenge.”—Julie Cantrell Perkins, NYT

 

I’ve been working on the fifth book in my series about Dave Mason, the Santa Monica PD homicide cop, watching the pages accumulate, and my energies decline. Everything in me says I no longer have to push for a highly-developed sub plot and a story that carries the action to 300 pages.

Because I’m a woman of a certain age, and a volunteer with a helium-filled right hand that rises at every opportunity, my energies have always been distributed across a variety of good causes. When I’m not reading good fiction, I watch crime dramas on my TV, my computer, my tablet, and sometimes even my phone. And I’m not reading less than really good books to the end.

There’s too much competition other entertainments.   For example, I’m now listening to The Great Courses, a series on the Medieval Period before I go to sleep.  That used to be my reading time.  

That brings me back to gratitude for shorter books.

I’m just grateful I’m way beyond following fashion trends.  How about these fake, thick dark eyebrows? And talking in your Fry voice? 

Check that trend out. Creepy.

 

If I could start a new series - Mar Preston

I have been fascinated for decades with the Bloomsbury Group in late Victorian England. The writer at the center was Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa, the center of the cutting edge artists of her day. The luminaries of the day circled around them.

I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters, I must confess, with more enjoyment than her novels. She was reportedly a brilliant talker who could spin airy bubbles of pure invention that left her dinner partners helpless with laughter.  There was gay, spindly Lytton Strachey and his simmering platonic romance with the painter Carrington who killed herself when he died.  And Lord Maynard Keynes. How about the very strange Lady Ottoline Morrell and her diplomat husband, or Virginia’s lover, Lady Vita Sackville-West and her ancestral pile Sissinghurst?  Wonderful stories surround them, the aristocracy and the cultured elite of their day. They had the moneyed privilege of eccentricity.

   Virginnia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell.  All were regarded as beauties in their day.

Of course there’s a mystery series idea here and unless I’m mistaken no one has done it. I’ve read that Virginia would happily have killed one of the series of cooks or maids they hired to work in a drafty, cold house in the country with only an “earth closet.”  I think you can imagine what that was. Perhaps the series could focus on the minor crimes of theft, burglary, defamation rather than killing off your major characters. Perhaps it could be a cozy series, Virginia and Vanessa teaming up to solve crimes. But how could you create those evenings of brilliant conversation?

It would require an effort of scholarship because you can imagine the sniffs of the Bloomsbury academia industry if you got one thing wrong.  But what a pleasure to have an excuse to read the letters and diaries of not just Virginia Woolf but all these eccentric people of true achievement. 

It might transport you away from the ugliness of today.

In the meantime, you might like to check out my latest novel, murder in a cat rescue sanctuary. It’s called The Most Dangerous Species and like most good books, it’s not just about cats.

Time Management? Mar Preston

I don’t know how I ever accomplished anything when I was working, that is working for a decent salary rather than the pittance I earn writing fiction. Time sifts through my fingers like sand. The fact that fall is approaching makes me shudder.The fact that I don’t optimize every working hour of the day may be to age and I hate to admit that. I hate to admit that some of it may be plain laziness. It may also be due to the pleasure I take in reading other writer’s work.

But, and it’s a large but, I’ve managed since 2010 to produce six crime fiction novels that I also take pleasure in reading from time to time looking for a quote. To write well, you need to know what good writing sounds like. That's what I tell myself when I sink into a chair with a good read at 9:30 in the morning.

You might think with these six novels and another six eBooks on the subject of “Writing Your First Mystery” I would be a ruthless time manager. Perhaps I am and I can’t see behind the closed doors of other writer’s working space.

Do they fool around on Instagram and Facebook during writing time?  Do they all have to read The New York Times to begin the day?  Do they brush the cats? Do they throw the ball of socks for the dog?  Answer every phone call without checking who’s calling? I managed to break my vicious addition to Spider Solitaire and I know that just one game, one game, can suck me back in again to wasting hours of the week.

Are you aware of a little piece of software called Rescue Time?  It gives you a percentage look at where your time goes. It can be horrifying to see how much goes to Facebook if you enjoy it the way I do.

I’m depending on you telling me in your comments where your time goes. All in all, I know I never worked this hard for a paycheck.

You might enjoy one of my books.  They're available on Amazon.