Personal Research of the Wrong Kind

By Chester Campbell

Some of my colleagues have been discussing the problems of aging lately, so I might as well join the club. Actually, my situation is not so much age related except as it applies to the slowness of recovery. When my wife and I booked a week at a resort on Tampa Bay for the end of September, I looked forward to some relaxing days with a bit of writing when the spirit moved me. We planned to drive halfway from Nashville the first day, then finish up on the day of check-in.

Travel to Dothan, Alabama proved uneventful, except for a Cracker Barrel stop. We had some free nights thanks to my Choice Hotels credit card and checked into our suite at a Clarion Inn. It was handicapped equipped, which meant a large shower as an extension of the tile bathroom floor. We went out for dinner, watched the evening news and went to bed. I awoke early in the morning, feeling a tad queasy. I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the toilet.

My next recollection is looking up from a bed in the Emergency Room at some medical type who was asking my birth date and where I lived. My wife had heard me fall and found me on the tile floor, my scalp split open in back. She thinks I hit the edge of the shower drain. She called 911 and the rest is history. I wound up with seven staples closing an upside-down Y-shaped cut. Because of the concussion, they did a brain scan but found nothing out of order. So I have no excuse for being like I am.

My step-daughter came down and drove us back home. I sat around the first couple of days, then got on the computer and set up my next free ebook promotion on BookBub. By the first of the following week, my doctor tried to extract my staples but ran into a problem. I won't go into the gory details, but I now know a bit about how the early settlers felt when the Indians started scalping them. If I ever decide to write a Western, maybe it'll come in handy.

I also learned from the experience what the after affects are of a solid blow to the back of the head. Take it from me, your protagonist won't jump up and start doing battle. Were I considerably younger, I likely would have bounced back quicker. I was lucky I didn't have a bad headache, but my head felt a bit strange for a few days and I felt rather rocky at first.

Last week I started back on my daily walk at the mall and increased it to two miles by Saturday. This week I'm back to about two miles in thirty minutes. I've also returned to work on my sixth Greg McKenzie mystery. I got the opening idea from a news story that took place near my home. A senior citizen type in a power chair was hit and killed while driving on the street at night. In my story, it was a hit-and-run.

Incidentally, I've decided it isn't the best idea to indulge in head wound research as a do-it-yourself project.

Keep Titles Short. Really?

By Chester Campbell

When it comes to rules, I'm like my PI protagonists. I don't particularly care for them. Greg McKenzie, the main man in my first mystery series, got his Air Force career stalled out at lieutenant colonel after some of his superiors didn't like the way he played the game. He declined to be a clone of the good old boy, let's get along model investigator.

My second series features Sidney Lanier Chance, better known as Sid, who refused a desk job after a marijuana grower's gunshots interrupted his career as a National Park ranger. He took a job as a small town police chief but refused to kowtow to the local sheriff. This resulted in his being setup for a charge of bribing a drug dealer. Following a period of isolation at his hillside cabin, Sid hung out his shingle as a private investigator in Nashville's Madison suburb.

The second Sid Chance book is titled The Good, The Bad and The Murderous. Okay, it's somewhat longer than the conventional wisdom would dictate. But I've never been one to slavishly follow the conventional wisdom. I chose this title because...well, because it fit.

The "good" is a young black man named Djuan just out of prison at age twenty-five, where he had been since shooting a man during a drug deal when he was twelve. He moved in with his grandmother who vowed to help him follow his determination to make something of himself.

The "bad" is a  pair of tainted cops who accuse Djuan of committing a new murder on flimsy evidence. Sid reluctantly takes an assignment from Djuan's grandmother to try and prove he isn't guilty.

The "murderous" is a deadly hit man we don't see until the latter part of the book. But when we do, he has Sid in his sights.

I initially came  up with the title "Good, Bad and Murderous," but my colleague Beth Terrell, now  known as Jaden, said since it was obviously a parody on "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," I might as well add the rest. Which I did. And I think it's quite effective.

Today, tomorrow and Friday (Jan. 29-31) The Good, The Bad and The Murderous will be free to download as an ebook in the Kindle Store.

Has William Kent Krueger Written a Cozy?

By Chester Campbell

I just finished reading Northwest Angle, Krueger's eleventh Cork O'Connor novel. It's the first one of his I've read. From comments I've seen on DorothyL, it isn't typical of his series about the former Chicago cop now dabbling in the PI business. Apparently the publisher wasn't sure exactly what to call it. The promotional blurb on the back cover of the Advance Reading Copy ends with this:

"Part thriller, part mystery, part exploration of the human heart, Northwest Angle is a dynamic addition to William Kent Krueger's critically acclaimed, award-winning series."

The title comes from the setting of the book, a remote area of Minnesota that juts out of Canada and includes islands in Lake of the Woods. That is one reason I question whether it could be called a cozy. The normal definition of the subgenre includes the setting in a small community where everybody knows everybody. Although the area of the Northwest Angle isn't really small, it's sparsely populated, giving the same effect as a small community. Everybody gets around on boats.

Cozies are supposed to be short on sex and violence. The only sex here took place before the story began, when a young Ojibwe girl got pregnant. Most of the violence comes about from the forces of nature, a destructive storm called a derecho. Other than that, there are lots of threats but only a couple of shooting scenes. There's no more actual violence than takes place in my Greg McKenzie series, which a few reviewers have called cozy.

Of course, I happen to disagree with that characterization of the McKenzie books and also would not hang that moniker on Krueger's latest. Northwest Angle is mostly the story of Cork O'Connor's family problems and how they are resolved. There is a mystery at the core of it, but the novel is heavily weighted on the characters. It is well-written and suspenseful. Makes me want to go back and read some of his earlier books.

Visit me at Mystery Mania

What's Up with THE END?

By Chester D. Campbell

I just finished typing THE END on the last page of Good, Bad and Murderous, the second book in my Sid Chance mystery series. Frankly, I'm not totally pleased with the ending. I got to thinking about mystery endings and what we expect from them.

One requirement is to tie up all the loose ends. Well, most of them anyway. A reviewer of my first Greg McKenzie book complained that my ending was too pat. Although the reviewer liked the writing, she concluded:

"Every single thread was neatly tied at the conclusion of the book, which felt contrived and implausible."

So now I resolve all the major plot points, but I leave some of the character outcomes for the readers to draw their own conclusions.

In her book How To Write Killer Fiction, Carolyn Wheat says in the Golden Age of mysteries, the author could simply show that the detective knew how everything turned out. She points out how Ellery Queen would gather the suspects in a drawing room and "spend seven or eight closely reasoned pages expounding his theory on who had done what and why."

A feature of the ending for most mysteries these days is the confrontation between the hero (or PI, in my case) and the villain. I provided a double feature for this one. The first turns out a draw, so they meet again.

Carolyn Wheat calls what I refer to as the "wrap-up" chapter The Coda. She talks about Linda Barnes closing her book with a seder, the traditional Jewish ceremonial dinner. I wasn't aware of this, but I've used a dinner with all the good guys in most of my Greg McKenzie books. I also relied on it for the wrap-up of Good, Bad and Murderous.

I've depended on this technique in the past to have the main character say something illuminating, if not profound. I suppose that's what bothers me. I'm not sure what I have written here works. So maybe THE END isn't all that final after all.

How do you like your mysteries to end?

An Interview with Jill McKenzie

Jill McKenzie, the distaff side of McKenzie Investigations, has never granted an interview. She isn't the outspoken type like her husband, Greg. However, with the fifth book featuring the sleuthing pair, A Sporting Murder, popping up all over the place (I hope), she agreed to sit down and share a bit about herself. Here's the interview:

MM: Why is it your best friend, Wilma Gannon, says she was born with chopsticks while you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth?

JMcK: She breaks me up sometimes. We both grew up in Nashville, but she was born in China while her parents were missionaries. I was born out Hillsboro Road, which she calls the ritzy part of town.

MM: Actually, your parents were pretty well off, weren't they?

JMcK: I don't want to sound like a braggart, but my father, Daniel Parsons, was a quite successful life insurance salesman. His clients were mostly businessmen. He handled buy-sell agreements and that sort of thing.

MM: What about your mother?

JMcK: She studied at Juilliard and played violin with the Nashville Symphony.

MM: You didn't follow in her footsteps.

JMcK: Nor my dad's. He wanted me to go to Vanderbilt, where he graduated, but I had idolized Amelia Earhart and Nashville's own Cornelia Fort. Did you know she was in the air over Honolulu flying with a student pilot when the Pearl Harbor attack took place?

MM: I wasn't aware of that. I knew the Cornelia Fort Airpark along the river was named for her.

JMcK: When I found that Middle Tennessee State in Murfreesboro had an aviation program, I knew I had to go there. I could be as stubborn as my dad, so that's where I went. I've been flying ever since.

MM: Wasn't Middle Tennessee State where you met Greg?

JMcK: It sure was. He was in his first OSI assignment at Sewart Air Force Base located in Smyrna, not far from Murfreesboro. He came over to talk to my Civil Air Patrol unit about security. I gave him a hard time, asking all kinds of questions. I think he made up some of his answers. When he'd finished, I asked if he could get me a tour of the air base. He did, and served as my escort. We were soon dating.

MM: You ran your own air charter service for awhile, didn't you?

JMcK: You've heard of Hemingway's moveable feast. That was my moveable firm. I had to relocate several times to stay near bases where Greg was stationed. I enjoyed it, though. I still have a Cessna at the Nashville airport. We've used it a few times during our investigations.

MM: How did McKenzie Investigations come about? You'd never been involved in Greg's Air Force job, had you?

JMcK: Half the time I didn't know what he was doing. When we went down to Perdido Key to find out how Wilma and Sam Gannon's son died, I helped out with questioning some people who might have been involved. I knew Greg wanted to get back into investigative work, so I suggested we go into business together. It's been a riot.

MM:Didn't you have to do some adjusting in your views on some things?

JMcK: Boy, did I. Firearms was one subject. I never liked the fact that Greg had to carry a weapon all the time during his Air Force career. I knew that's what law enforcement agents did, but I had this naive view about the propriety of such things. It just didn't seem socially acceptable. But I quickly learned in some cases you have only one chance to save your life, or someone else's. Greg taught me how to shoot, and it's proved invaluable. I've learned to be a pretty good shot.

MM: You've been in some hairy situations. Has it changed you in any way?

JMcK: It's made me stay a lot more aware of what's going on around me. I'm not as trusting of people I don't know. My experience as a pilot taught me to keep one jump ahead of what's going on. I've learned to apply that to my job as an investigator.

MM: I'm sure you'll have many more successful ventures ahead. It's been a pleasure talking with you, Jill. Good luck!

JMcK: (Wink) Good luck to you. Thank goodness I don't have to sell books.

Okay, she's right. I have a book to sell, and you can read all about it at this page on my website.

What's in a Name?

By Chester Campbell

Our live-in grandson, just turning thirteen, has been taking Taekwondo since he was in the first grade. Last year he got his probationary black belt. Louie G. Aregis, Jr., the sixth degree black belt owner and chief instructor at the school, is a four-time winner of Instructor of the Year for the Choong Sil Taekwondo Federation. His wife, a fifth degree black belt, is an avid mystery reader. Aregis had been bugging me for some time to be a character in one of my books. He wanted to be a bad guy.

When I started work on A Sporting Murder, my fifth Greg McKenzie mystery, I decided to put him in. Since the name is rather unusual, I did some Google searches on it and found there were several versions of it, including Arigis, Ariges, and Aritzia. Some genealogical info on the web indicated Louie Aregis' grandfather came over from Greece in the early 1900s. I used a similar scenario for my character's father, though it took place toward the middle of the century.

To give a little variety, I threw in an Italian mother. She came from Miami, with roots in Sicily. That provided some interesting possibilities. The father got in early on the Disney World project, and Louie was born in Orlando.

Except for the link to the Greco-Turkish border area, the character bears no resemblance to the real Louie Aregis. But he's not one of the good guys. That's all I'll say about that.

My only other experience with using names of real people for characters came with writing of The Marathon Murders. With that one I ran a contest before I wrote it, with the grand prize being your name used in the book. The winner was Wayne Fought, a faithful reader along the Alabama Gulf Coast. In that case, I just used his name and completely invented the character, a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent. Wayne came to buy the book when I signed near his home, and we shot a photo that appears on my website.

Of course, the major character naming issue comes with the protagonists, particularly in a series. You're going to be living with them for a long time (hopefully), so you need a good solid background. Greg McKenzie came from several qualifications. I wanted someone with a Scottish background, a former Air Force officer, a senior citizen, and married to a wife he's in love with. I didn't want to use my own surname, so I chose McKenzie. In Scotland, it appears as both McKenzie and MacKenzie.

For my second series, I thought the name Chance offered a good mystery connotation. It could refer to a gamble or to the random luck of the draw. For a first name, I picked out Sidney and then got the brainstorm of having his mother name him for the the nineteenth century Southern poet, Sidney Lanier. I had already created some background before looking into Lanier more deeply. I found they shared a love of music and a military history.

Choosing names can be as simple as looking for something in the phone book or as complicated as tailoring it to a character's background. It's a fun exercise, though, and offers the writer an interesting challenge. Have you run into any characters with signs of complex naming lately?

Writing: Fun, but Frustrating

By Chester Campbell

I've always contended that I don't consider writing books difficult since I enjoy doing it so much. I still go along with that premise, but I'll have to admit that the fifth Greg McKenzie mystery, which I just finished, turned out out to be, well, frustrating.

Being a seat-of-the-pants plotter, I write in a linear fashion. I start with the opening scene and move forward. I tell the story as it unfolds in the characters actions and in my own mind. Writing in this fashion results sometimes in the story getting finished before I'm ready for it to end. I discovered I was woefully short of enough words when it happened this time.

Over the years I have developed a rather terse style, partly as a result of reading Robert B. Parker. It helps speed up the pace. However, it sometimes leads to short conversations. Of course, that's also a reflection of my own conversational style. On the phone, I tend to give the facts as simply as possible and hang up. I'm not good at social chatting. I went back over my PI's interviews and worked to make them a bit more voluble, while sticking to the point of the dialogue.

Then I started looking for places to beef up the plot with new characters and new threads. I found a place for some good misdirection and another for planting a clue. I worked over descriptive passages in an attempt to make them more colorful and polished the red herrings until they sparkled like the pearls in an oyster.

I thought about just asking the publisher to do like some people claimed Parker's publisher did with some of his shorter mysteries. They said the books used larger type and wider margins to make a novelette look like a novel. But, with the revision finished, I had enough words and turned in the manuscript.

I suppose the smart thing to do if I run into such a situation again would be to step back and rethink the plot. Add a new subplot that would give an opportunity to further develop the characters and add new intrigue to the crime under investigation.

I'll keep that in mind as I start work on my second Sid Chance mystery. That one's still in the gestation stage. But it'll be fun to write, I'm sure.

Characters: Paper, Cardboard, Flesh and Bone?

By Chester Campbell

You won't get any argument that characterization is one of the key elements of a mystery novel. But how far should you go to make your characters come to life? Some writers use elaborate computer programs to  give all the details of a character from birth to the present. That's a bit more than I need to know. I want to know his basic background and how he got to where he is now. I'll come up with some of his personal traits in advance, but a lot of that stuff will make its way into the story as events unfold

It's like dealing with a close friend. You know a lot of the basics, but you don't know how they'll react in a specific situation until it happens. Of course, when you're writing, what the characters do must come out of the way you've portrayed them. Unless you're depicting somebody who's mentally unbalanced, they won't be doing something totally off the wall.

With your major characters, you want to make the reader feel  they're encountering real people with all the hopes and desires and fears and fervor of people they know. That requires giving such characters the background neccessary to convey those feelings.

People talk about cardboard characters, but just how much do we need to know about all those who are merely walk-ons? I'm reading John Sandford's Heat Lightning. He's a real pro, and I've been noting how he handles minor characters. There are two Indian cops on the reservation, for example. Sandford doesn't give us any information about their parents or their early life or where they live, except on the "res." We know a bit about how they look. One is older, one younger. But from their speech and actions we can tell  all we need to kow about who they are and what they're doing. They become flesh and bone.

Those cardboard caracters we hear about are just names and faces on the page. They don't come alive for us but are more like talking heads on TV. They have their moment of glory and then disappear.

Sometimes we throw in a bit part to dress up a scene or give a little variety to the landscape. I'd call them transitional characters. In my Greg McKenzie series, I liven things up a bit by having Greg's wife get onto him occasionally about keeping his weight down. In my current WIP, I use a flouncy waitress to stir the pot. She makes only a brief appearance, but I try to make her unique. I don't think it's necessary to go into a lot of background about such characters, though.

How do you feel about what makes characters tick? What makes you remember one character and forget another?

Novel or Novelette?

An interesting thing happened on the way to the ending of my fifth Greg McKenzie mystery. I stepped up my output in the past couple of weeks and am now significantly past the halfway mark, which is 35,000 words since my books usually run around 70,000. However, I am not siignificantly close to this latter figure. What makes it interesting is that I am quite close to the final chapter.

As anyone who has paid attention (both of you) knows, I do not outline or plot ahead. I start with a premise and some characters and let the story go where they take it. Reading through what I have written so far, there are plenty of plot complications, a sufficient number of suspects, and a nice twist to the conclusion. But so far I have only written a novelette.

Not to worry. This has happened more then once. What I need to do is go back and find a good spot to take off on a new subplot that will complicate things even more.

One reason my books don't occupy an inordinate number of pages is my writing style. I like to keep things terse. I don't go in for long pages of description, and I don't telegraph every move my characters make as they go through the day. Greg, in whose voice the story is told, doesn't go in for a lot of instrospection. Most of what he has in mind is expressed through dialogue.

I suppose I could use the Robert B. Parker method and ask the publisher to use bigger type and wider margins. That would make the book look larger with fewer words.

I'll probably go ahead and finish the story, then backtrack to find places where I can beef it up with new situations that will dazzle the reader. Do readers dazzle? Oh, well, I'll keep plowing on and see how the old ball bounces. That's an apt metaphor since the book is titled A SPORTING MURDER and involves a conflict between supporters of professional basketball and pro ice hockey. Hmm, you might say the puck stops here.

Writing at a Snail's Pace

By Chester Campbell

I’m in the process of working on my fifth Greg McKenzie mystery. So far it has been moving like a snail racing across the street. Matter of fact, I wrote something about creating the plot on my personal blog (Mystery Mania) back toward the end of February, and I'm now only a third of the way through the writing. I suppose the problem is still as I characterized it earlier: "the old gray matter, she ain't what she used to be."

When I began working on the plot, the first idea out of the box did not deal with character or setting or plot action. Well, setting, in one of its narrow aspects. We're talking about time. The series has been moving at a leisurely pace through the calendar. Designed to Kill took place at the first of November, Deadly Illusions followed with the first blush of spring (does spring really blush?), and The Marathon Murders sweated out the steamy days of August. So, I reasoned, the next adventure should occur at Christmastime.

Wouldn’t you know, in Greg years, it’s still 2004. If I could do that, I wouldn’t be quite 80 yet. However, it presents a few problems in keeping the details straight. For example, the plot involves professional sports. In 2004, the arena where the Nashville Predators NHL team plays was called the Gaylord Entertainment Center or "The GEC" (pronounced Geck). Now it is the Sommet Center. So in the book it's only referred to as the "arena."

Anyway, back to the plot. As a seat-of-the-pants plotter, I had a basic idea, but I needed a cast of characters to do the work. I didn't want to get stuck with doing all that work myself. I had my main characters, Greg and Jill McKenzie, my indefatigable pair of senior sleuths, but a bunch of people was required for them to bounce off of.

I quickly came up with job descriptions for four possible bad guys or gals. And just as quickly I spotted the one who really “did it.” I picked an age and began to delve into the person's background. What would make this an interesting character? How did the killer become what they were today?

Okay, this is a mystery, and I’m not giving you any clues. I did a lot of Googling and bounced around the Internet quite a bit to track down some facts. Hmmm, come to think of it, back when I first began searching for stuff online, Yahoo was the big thing. But you don’t hear of people Yahooing. They’ve been sort of left in the dust, I suppose.

The subject of the plot is not one in which I’m particularly well versed, so I also searched about for some basic information on the business. Since it involves a conflict between people involved in two different sports, basketball and hockey, I decided my best bet was to talk with a TV sportscaster. Both Greg and I interviewed Rudy Kalis, sports director at Nashville's Channel 4, WSMV.

So far, Christmas has been sort of incidental to the action, but who knows how it will play out. A Christmas party provided an opportunity for Greg to get some information he needed. I suspect there's more to come.

Sometimes I start a book before I’m ready with a full-blown plot by sitting at the computer and writing a first page. It may not be the same first page I end up with, but it gets the window open and the curtains blowing. That's what happened this time. And after five books, it's my first experience with a murder on page one.

So after eight months of dilly-dallying around, promoting the heck out of my latest book and finding places to sign and sell all five current titles, I'm faced with the necessity of locking myself up (would be nice, but won't happen) and knocking out another 50,000 words in the next couple of months.

Wish me luck. And let me know how you're doing on your latest masterpeice.

On Being a Pro-Crastinator

By Chester Campbell

My wife calls me a procrastinator. I say, heck, it's good to be a "pro" at something. But I suppose she's right in one respect. I should be writing on my current WIP (Work in Progress, for the uninitiated), but here I sit chatting up the blogosphere.

My Murderous Musings colleague Beth Terrell is getting ready to take part in NaNoWriMo, pounding out 50,000 words during the month of November. If I could mirror that feat with my fifth Greg McKenzie mystery, I'd be in high cotton, as they say in these parts. Since I'm currently at the 18,423-word mark, that would take me almost to 70,000 words. My books don't usually run much longer than that.

NaNoWriMo, as you may or may not know, is National Novel Writing Month, when authors around the globe are challenged to turn out 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. The object is to take an idea and plug away at it, just to get all the words on paper, or in the computer. There's no time for editing. Just keep the pot (or plot) boiling. After all is done, you can go back and clean it up, patching the holes and prettying up the language.

As a procrastinator, I can't work like that. Each time I sit down, I have to go back over what I wrote last time out and make it sound better. Chances are I've had a new thought that requires me to go back and add something I neglected to do earlier. Like the other day I thought of a question the detective should have asked, so I backtracked to the proper spot in the story and beefed up the dialogue. Keeps readers from thinking why didn't the idiot pursue such-and-such?

My daily, when I can arrange it, walk at the mall provides a fertile time for thinking about the plot and searching out those holes that need to be filled. Sometimes I come up with ideas on new twists to put more strain on my poor protagonists. I'm a remorseless taskmaster. They don't get time to procrastinate.

But me? I have an excuse. I spent the past five days, including travel, atternding Bouchercon 2009, pushing my published work and trying to convince the good folks who read mysteries that I'm working on more to come. And I am. As soon as I finish this little tome, I'm heading for the living room and my laptop to plunge headlong into Chapter 13. Hmm, that's an ominous note. But what's even more ominous is that it will probably be nearly ten o'clock. That means local news, followed by a DVD recording of the early evening national news. Than it'll be bedtime. We have to arise at 6:15 to get grandson ready for school.

Okay, no more procrastination. As soon as he's off to school, I'm battening down the hatches (good old naval cliche) and battling away at the laptop. That's a promise. Unless something unforseen comes  up, of course.

Getting Re-Acquainted with Characters

By Chester Campbell

An interesting facet of series writing is dealing with characters who wander in and out of the stories as the protagonists face a variety of circumstances. I’m working on the fifth book in my Greg McKenzie series, about a retired Air Force OSI agent and his wife, and the Gannons have just turned up again. They took a prominent role in the first couple of books as Greg and Jill McKenzie’s best friends. After a minor role in book three, they pulled a disappearing act in the last one.

It wasn’t anything planned. The story just moved in a way that didn’t call for any interaction with the folks who normally make contact with my main characters, particularly on weekends. My books take place on a pretty tight schedule, usually over a span of no more than a week. If the action doesn’t call for a little leisure activity, close friends get crowded out.

The Gannons, Sam and Wilma, took a prominent role in Secret of the Scroll as fellow travelers on the Holy Land tour where the trouble began. A retired Air Force pilot, Sam helped plan the trip for their Sunday School class. It was a mix-up that left the “souvenir” scroll at the Gannons' house that resulted in Jill’s being taken hostage by local cohorts of a Palestinian terrorist group.

In the second book, Designed to Kill, the Gannons' son died at Perdido Key, Florida in what police chose to call a suicide. Sam asked Greg to go down and try to find what really happened. As you might guess, it wasn’t suicide. But it was that investigation, and Jill’s participation in it, that led to the establishment of McKenzie Investigations shortly before the opening of book three, Deadly Illusions.

The Gannons played a minor role in Illusions, but the next book, The Marathon Murders, moved at such a pace that they got squeezed out. It involved a character who played a crucial role in the latter part of Secret of the Scroll. I suppose it’s a case of having room to deal with only one close friend at a time.

The new book, as yet unnamed, takes place around Christmastime. My characters, being good church-goers, take a break from the current case to attend the Sunday School class Christmas Party, part of which takes place at the Gannons' home. I have no idea how it will affect the plot. It will be as much of a surprise to me as to anybody. My current task is to re-introduce Sam and Wilma with enough background to satisfy new readers to the series without boring those who’ve been around from the start.

As a side note, the ranks of those starting with the first book grows each time I do a signing with all of my backlist on the table. Two people bought all four McKenzie books last Saturday when I signed at the Cheatham County Public Library. Ya gotta love those folks.

And it’ll be interesting getting re-acquainted with the Gannons.

Is Eyewitness Testimony Reliable?

By Chester Campbell

I’ll soon be heading down to watch the 10 o’clock news for the latest word on murders and mayhem in the community. It’s a wonder that people still enjoy reading about our fictional bad guys with all the real ones staring at us nightly from the TV. I suppose it’s the hope that unlike the cases they see paraded across the screen, our mysteries will end with satisfying conclusions and villains behind bars or beneath gravestones.

One departure from the usual fare was Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” segment about an innocent man who was convicted largely by unreliable eyewitness testimony. I’ve heard and read opinions from investigators about the faulty recollections of witnesses to crimes, but I hadn’t come across professional studies on the subject.

The TV show interviewed psychologists and criminologists who talked about research that shows how people’s memories are affected by the way photographs are displayed and lineups presented.

The story involved a young white woman who was raped at age twenty-two. She had concentrated on the black rapist’s features so she would remember him afterward. She worked with detectives to create his likeness. When they showed her mug shots of six men who’d been arrested, she picked out one as the guilty party. When they brought the same man out in a lineup, she identified him again.

Largely on her testimony, the man was convicted and spent a dozen years in prison before a law professor got his DNA tested against evidence from the case. It showed him innocent. The DNA was matched to another man with similar features who had already been convicted of another rape.

Now the woman and the man she wrongly accused travel around the country speaking to lawyers and law enforcement personnel, asking them to use better techniques in presenting photographs and lineups. The psychologists said the victim’s incorrect memory was reinforced by the way the evidence was presented.

In The Marathon Murders, I had my PI Greg McKenzie caution his wife, “Don’t forget, eyewitness accounts can be notoriously unreliable.”

Have you run across any fictional cases where eyewitness testimony was crucial to solving a murder? Best to use caution in this area.

Read more about The Marathon Murders.

Merging Fiction and Fact

By Chester Campbell

True crime writers take a murder case and explore it from beginning to end, going into great detail about the partipants, their actions, and their motivations. It takes a mountain of research to make sure all the facts are correct. Otherwise, they would likely face a lawsuit. Some do anyway.

Mystery fiction writers take an actual case and change enough of the facts that they can say whatever they wish without getting into trouble. That's what I did in my first Greg McKenzie novel.

I wanted to saddle Greg with a recent troubled past. I had him quickly tire of retirement and take a job as an investigator for the district attorney in Nashville. I needed something that would get him fired from his job, plus anger many in the police department. I picked a case that remained unsolved but was in and out of the news on a regular basis.

A young lawyer had reported his wife, a talented artist, missing two weeks after she supposedly left home for a "12-day vacation" following an argument. Her friends said she would never leave her young son and daughter like that. The police quickly targeted the husband but were unable to find a body.

I changed the husband to a CPA and the wife to an interior designer. They had only a young son. But I kept most of the circumstances of the police search and their concentration on the husband as the murderer.

In the real case, the wife was the daughter of a prominent local attorney, who sided with the police in believing his son-in-law guilty. I made the missing wife the daughter of a prominent banker, who was the chief backer of the district attorney. When my protag, Greg McKenzie, makes some off-the-cuff remarks quite critical of the lead investigator, they turn up on the front page of the newspaper. The wife's father is infuriated and Greg gets fired.

Long after my book was published, the actual case reached a conclusion when the husband's father turned on him and testified he had helped dispose of the wife's body. The story was told in a true crime book titled An Unfinished Canvas, by Nashville author Phyllis Gobbell and Michael Glasgow.

Fictionalizing fact is a much simpler operation. Of course, Nashvillians who read my book recognized the similarity to the Janet and Perry March case. After his conviction in August of 2006, March was sentenced to 56 years in prison. I can't tell you what happened to the young CPA in Secret of the Scroll. That would be a spoiler.

ChesterDCampbell.com
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Greg McKenzie takes on the world

Today Murderous Musings is conducting the second phase of the interview with retired Air Force Office of Special Investigations Agent Gregory McKenzie, otherwise known as the guy behind (or inside) the Greg McKenzie Mysteries. This will give us a look at his views on current affairs.

MM: Nice to have you with us again, Greg. I hope things are going well with McKenzie Investigations.

GM: Well is a relative term. If you mean it financially, you’ll have to ask Jill. She keeps the books.

MM: I’ve heard she’s quite effective in the financial realm.

GM: She hasn’t invested anything with Bernie Madoff. You can bet your granny’s gold snuff box on that.

MM: What does she invest in with the economy on such a wild ride?

GM: I try to keep my distance from that stuff, but I’ve heard her talk about “inverse ETFs,” whatever the hell that is. I think it means when things go down, our nest egg goes up. I just hope we don’t have to eat that egg. But she’d have a great recipe for it, I’m sure.

MM: I’ve read about her culinary exploits.

GM: Yeah. She’s a good cook, too.

MM: How has the economy affected the PI business?

GM: Everybody wants us to track down people who owe them money. But when we find them, chances are the money has vaporized like sweat on a sunbather.

MM: Speaking of which, do you still have your condo on the beach in Florida?

GM: It was rebuilt after Hurricane Ivan pulverized it. As if that wasn’t enough, the county doubled our taxes. Wouldn’t be so bad if they doubled the size of the sheriff’s patrol. Of course, Jill likes to stroll the beach at sunset. I enjoy that part, though I don’t care much for water, except when it’s in a glass of Scotch.

MM: As I recall, you’re a Tennessee Titans’ fan. What did you think of their loss to the Ravens last weekend?

GM: If Jill wasn’t listening, I’d give you one of my good expletives. That’s all water under the goal post now, but I’d hate to be Coach Fisher. He’s got about as big a dilemma as Barack Obama.

MM: As a former lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, how do you feel the new Administration should attack the current world situation?

GM: Besides with bombs? Just kidding. I wish the new Prez well, but if he can wiggle out of the Iraq-Iran-Israel-Palestine-Afghanistan-Pakistan mess, cope with the oil-gas-coal-energy crisis, and squiggle the economy back together, he’ll be the reincarnation of Harry Houdini.

MM: I take it you’re a pessimist?

GM: Not at all. I never take on a case that I don’t feel confident I can solve. I know it won’t be easy, but I’m optimistic that we’ll worm our way out of this somehow, by the grace of God, I guess.

MM: Thanks for taking time to be with us, Greg. Drop by again soon.

GM: You can count on it.

Editor’s Note: To read more of Greg’s views, check out the books at www.chesterdcampbell.com.

Also visit Mystery Mania

The ABCs of Writing a Book

By Chester Campbell

A few people seem to possess a sort of inherent compass that guides their minds into creating stories that satisfy all the requirements of good writing in one fell swoop of the pen, or a single foray across the keyboard. I'm in awe of the one-draft author. That's because I’m the polar opposite. I constantly edit and revise as I go.

Every writer must find what works best for him or herself. I don’t advocate that anyone follow my style of creating a book, but if you find something here that validates what you do or in some way intrigues you into trying a different approach, I’ll feel I have succeeded in some small manner.

I approach a new a novel with a basic idea for an incident that could lead to lots of complications. In my second Greg McKenzie mystery, for example, I considered what might happen if a penthouse balcony collapsed during a party at a new beachfront high-rise condo, killing two people. That presented the questions: what caused the accident, and who was responsible?

With the major premise in hand, I needed a cast of characters. I’m not a detailed plotter or an outliner, so I depend on my characters to dictate the direction of the story. I decided on a young architect/engineer from the previous book to bear the brunt of blame for the accident. For potential bad guys I picked a developer, a contractor, and an inspector. I later added a female real estate agent.

At that point I needed a little initial research to put me on the right track. Since I knew little if anything about condo construction, I consulted a couple of friends. One was a civil engineer, the other a structural engineer who dealt with concrete, the material of choice for building beachfront condos. That gave me enough information to start writing.

I began with a Prologue that, thanks to later revision, introduced all the suspects and most of the major characters, except for my protagonists, Greg and Jill McKenzie. I set it at the penthouse party and used a third person omniscient viewpoint so I could let the reader know the balcony was in trouble from the opening line. Starting with Chapter 1, the story is told in first person from Greg's point of view.

The architect/engineer is found dead the next morning of what the sheriff calls a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The young man’s parents are the McKenzies’ best friends, and his father doesn’t believe he would commit suicide. He asks Greg, a retired Air Force investigator, to look into it.

After the first few chapters in Nashville, the story moved to Perdido Key, FL. It was time for more intensive on-scene research. My brother had a condo there where my wife and I had stayed a couple of times a year, which is how the plot idea came about. We spent two weeks there checking out various angles. Since the so-called suicide occurred at the Gulf Islands National Seashore, I interviewed the National Park ranger responsible for law enforcement. Following up on what I learned from him, I talked to a sheriff’s investigator, a medical examiner’s tech, and a man in the building inspection office.

I also researched locations and backgrounds on Perdido Key, in Pensacola and around Escambia County.

Although I don’t outline, I did extensive character sketches for the major characters and typed up detailed notes from my research. And early on I plotted out where all the main characters were each hour on the night of the murder.

By this time I knew who the murderer was (or so I thought) and had a pretty good idea of where the story was headed. I sat down to write in earnest. But things happen. About halfway through the book, I changed my mind about the murderer. It required going back to make sure I had left enough clues to make the ending believable. That’s what I love about fiction. You’re free to alter the past anytime you like. Makes you feel like God tinkering with the universe.

As I mentioned at the start, I am a constant rewriter. Each time I sit down to write, I go back at least to the start of the last chapter, read through it and make changes where something doesn’t quite fit. Now and then I’ll start from the beginning and do a quick edit up to the point where I left off. Sometimes I may change a line back to what I had on the first try.

When I get to the end of the book, what might be called a first draft is really anything but. I take this opportunity to go back through the manuscript looking for places I can make the writing more colorful, more dramatic, more scintillating (okay, so I don't scintillate all that much). I also delete those too-cute phrases that I got carried away with in their creation. I try to smooth out the rough spots Chris Roerden cites in her book Don’t Murder Your Mystery.



The book I covered here is titled Designed to Kill and was published in 2004. You can read the Prologue and Chapter 1 by clicking this link to the Designed Opening. If you're interested, go to my home page for a 40 percent discount on purchasing the book.

And if you don't agree with my technique for creating your masterpiece, work out your own. But sit down and write it. That's a requirement.