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?

Memories of High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.


The poem “High Flight” by RCAF Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr. is a familiar one to those of us old enough to remember when TV stations signed off at midnight. The poem was recited as jet fighters swirled through the sky. But it goes back even further for me. I carried a copy of it when I was an Aviation Cadet in the Army Air Forces during the latter part of World War II.

I can’t remember exactly where I got it, though I think it was in something my mother sent me. I had dreamed of flying since early childhood, and that poem was a real inspiration. I never realized my dream, as the need for pilots became less and less with our success in the air war. I was discharged as an Aviation Cadet about three months after the war ended.

The poem always fascinated me, though, especially after it began showing up on nightly TV. When I ran a trade association back in the 70s and 80s, I used the movie version with the Air Force fighters at conventions.

I hadn’t thought of “High Flight” in a long time until I read Pat Browning’s weekend posts about the downing of a B-26 in Wales in 1943. I looked up the poem in Wikipedia and learned a lot about the young poet pilot and how his verse has spread over the years.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was born in Shanghai, China, in 1922, the son of an American Episcopal priest and a British mother. He attended school in England and the U.S., winning Rugby School’s Poetry Prize in 1938. He earned a scholarship to Yale University in July of 1940 but spurned it to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. After receiving his wings in July 1941, he shipped out to a unit in RAF Llandow, Wales to train in the Supermarine Spitfire.

Assigned to the 412th Fighter Squadron at RAF Digby, he flew fighter sweeps over France and air defense missions over England against the German Lufwaffe. On Sept. 3, 1941, while on a high altitude test flight of a newer model Spitfire V, he received the inspiration “to touch the face of God.” He composed the verse soon after landing and wrote it on the back of a letter to his parents.

A few months later, on Dec. 11, 1941, three days after the U.S. entered the war, Magee died when his Spitfire collided with a training plane in clouds while descending near his base. At the age of 19, he was buried at Holy Cross, Scopwick Cemetery in Lincolnshire, England.

According to Wikipedia, “High Flight” is the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air Force, and it is required to be recited from memory by first year cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Passages from the poem have been quoted in many books. John Denver adapted it and put it to music in his 1983 album It’s About Time. Parts of it have been used in movies and a TV series, and President Reagan quoted from the poem in a speech following the Challenger disaster.

I still get goose bumps reading the vivid imagery in the verse.

The Mysteries of Writing

by Jean Henry Mead

I wonder whether some of us are born with a compulsion to write. Many writers have created not only elaborate stories, while still in elementary school, but novels and three or four-act plays.

But why do we write?

Mignon G. Eberhart once said: “I write because I like to, sometimes hate to, but I have to write. I started when I was very young, almost as soon as I could put pencil to paper.”

Fellow mystery writer Lawrence Kamarck added: “I suppose I have a storyteller’s compulsion. I want to tell somebody what’s happening to all of us. I’m convinced nobody really knows but me. And because I want to keep the [reader’s] attention, I tell my story with as much force and drama as possible, within credible limits.”

Pulitzer winner A. B. Guthrie, Jr. told me during an interview that “the fun is having written well.” But he confessed that he didn’t enjoy the actual process of writing. “At the end of the day, I go back over it and say to myself, ‘By golly, that’s right, that’s right.’ And then I’m rewarded.”

So why do we write mysteries?

Ross MacDonald said: “Mystery stories have always interested me because they seem to correspond with life. They deal with the problems of causality and guilt that concern me.”

Loren D. Estleman wrote as an adolescent and sold his first novel at 23. He saw little of his parents because he spent so much time in his unheated, upstairs room, his only companion a typewriter. "I lived in my study and I didn’t have much of a private life,” he said. “It revolved around my writing . . .”

I like Estleman’s description of a mystery. “For me, a good mystery places story and character ahead of all else, yet never loses sight of the simple truth that in order to be a mystery, a question must be asked. It needn’t be a whodunit, and might be something as simple and maddening as why the murdered man had three left shoes in his closet and no mates. If the writer has done his job well, the reader will forget the question as the story draws him in. But there had damn well better be a mystery involved if he’s going to call it one.”

I pulled an aging copy of Mystery Writers Handbook from one of my book shelves and found the following quote from the editor, Lawrence Treat:. “Great ‘mysteries are great novels, like Crime and Punishment, A Tale of Two Cities and The Scarlet Pimpernel. And they’re clearly mysteries.”

I then asked my fellow blog team members why they write mysteries. Ben Small, during one of more serious moments, had this to say:

“I write mysteries and thrillers because I love the high stakes competition between good and evil, the uncertainty of justice, and the suspense of the ticking clock as the protagonist puzzles out a solution. Good stuff, escaping into a make-believe puzzle-world where I push the reader to beat me to the solution.”

Beth Terrell said that she loves the fact that the detective puts his own life at risk to protect others. She also loves the fact that “the good guy always wins--or almost always--even if it’s at a terrible cost. I feel like mysteries work on so many different levels. They are ripping good stories, thought-provoking puzzles, and wonderful vehicles to write about real human problems—things that matter. They’re a challenge to write; a good mystery or thriller has to do all the things a literary novel does and weave a gripping plot as well.”

Pat Browning concluded that a mystery is the oldest form of storytelling--with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Sometimes there's a moral, sometimes it's acautionary tale. It reassures us that good triumphs over evil. It satisfies our need to know that everything turns out all right in the end. Contemporary mysteries often have a romantic angle, and a humorous twist In short, the mystery offers something for every reader.