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.

Chester Campbell and THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE MURDEROUS

By Jaden Terrell

I've long been a fan of Chester Campbell's work. His sleuthing sextagenarians Greg and Jill McKenzie are like old friends, and Sid Chance, the...pentagenarian?...of his new PI series is a strong, understatedly sexy hero you can depend on. Sid's herculean size (he's 6'6") is reminiscent of Lee Child's Jack Reacher, but unlike Reacher, with his legendary propensity to roam, Sid has roots that run deep. He's been wounded, but maintains his connections to friends and loved ones. And, while Chester doesn't expressly say this, I suspect Sid changes his underwear more often.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say Chester and I have been friends and in the same critique group for about 15 years now. A long-time journalist, he was always the most polished writer among us, and at every meeting, we struggled to find room for improvement. Partly because of that, and partly because of his tenacity, no one doubted that we'd see his work in print. Because of its setting (partly in Nashville and partly in the Holy Lands), I always had a soft spot for his first published novel, Secret of the Scroll, but the first Sid Chance novel, The Surest Poison, quickly became a favorite. With every book, Chester does the seemingly impossible: he just keeps getting better.

The Good, the Bad, and the Murderous, Chester's latest book and the second in the Sid Chance series, continues this trend. As the book begins, Djuan Burden, a young man recently released from prison after serving time for a murder committed when he was twelve, has been arrested for a second murder. Djuan claims to have found the victim dead and fled the scene in panic, which explains why witnesses placed him at the scene. Despite Sid's doubts about Djuan's innocence, Sid is persuaded to investigate the case. This decision leads Sid and his partner, Jaz LeMieux, into a complex web of murder, police corruption, Medicare fraud, and false accusations. Chester deftly weaves these plot elements into a compelling tale of greed and redemption.

The Good, the Bad, and the Murderous is a top-notch mystery by a top-notch mystery writer. Highly recommended.

Good Cops, Bad Cops

The usual good cop, bad cop connotation in a mystery novel refers to the interrogation technique where one tough-looking detective tends to browbeat the suspect, while his more personable partner acts the good guy, seeking to gain leverage by taking the suspect's side. In my new Sid Chance thriller, there are basically two good cops and two bad cops. But their roles don't involve interplay with suspects.

In her review of The Good, The Bad and The Murderous at The Deepening, Sylvia Cochran  wrote:

"Another aspect that makes the storyline quite endearing is the topic of police corruption. It is tackled with respect for the profession but a candor that bespeaks a reality, which we frequently prefer to ignore. Although fictional, the frustration and anger that corruption at this level leaves behind is palpable in Campbell’s writings."

The primary good cops are members of the Miss Demeanor and Five Felons Poker Club, a small group that includes PI Sid Chance and his part-time partner, ex-cop/businesswoman Jaz LeMieux. The active duty officers are Metro Nashville Homicide Detective Bart Masterson and Patrol Sgt. Wick Stanley. Sid and Jaz run onto the shady cops, a pair of detectives, early in the story as they work to prove a young black man just out of prison for a murder he committed at age twelve is not guilty of a new homicide.

I hadn't considered this angle when I began writing the story. I don't plot ahead but follow where the action leads. I suddenly realized (as did my PI's) that something wasn't right about the way the detectives were handling the case.

As I was finishing the novel, I attended the Metro Nashville Citizen Police Academy and got a first-hand look at what goes on among the men in blue. I was struck by the dedication of the officers I met. During a ride-along with a patrol officer, I got a good indoctrination into the ever-shifting milieu that cops face on a continuing basis.

One of our presenters was the woman, a former trial lawyer, who heads the Metro Nashville Office of Professional Accountability, what most departments call Internal Affairs. She told of cases where they had investigated officers involved in variouas crimes. She also stressed that they represented only a small fraction of the city's 1500 sworn officers.

In the end I dedicated the book to "all the great men and women who carry the badge of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. They risk their necks day and night to keep us safe. We owe them more than we can ever repay."

The Perils of Plotting

Maybe perils is a bit melodramatic, but it's eye-catching. How about dilemmas? Okay, still a little heavy, but it carries the connotation of difficulty. Things don't always pan out the way we plan. Take my new book, whose cover appears here. As I've said before (likely too many times), I'm a "pantser" when it comes to plotting. I start with a basic idea and jump in feet first.

With this book, the second Sid Chance entry, I did a bit of cogitating and came up with the idea of building the story around the subject of Medicare fraud. I got the impetus from a CBS news piece about FBI agents in Miami tracking down storefront scammers who billed Medicare for durable medical equipment, like power chairs and such. It has been a lucrative business, but I didn't recall any mystery novels delving into it. I know, somebody will write that they've read a dozen of them, but I haven't.

Anyway, I researched the subject, learning the requirements for setting us an operation able to bill Medicare. I read about the new regulations aimed at making it more difficult for fraudsters. I learned that some drug traffickers were finding it more lucrative than selling dope.

Before I plopped down on my recliner with laptop on lap, the local paper ran a few stories about the problem of killers who are kids getting tried in Criminal Court and sentenced to prison. If they weren't genuine ciminals when they went in, they probably would be when they came out. In juvenile correctional facilities, they get guidance designed for people their age.

The main story featured Nashville's youngest murderer of recent memory, a black boy who shot a man during a drug deal at age twelve. He was released from prison at twenty-five after spending more than half his life behind bars. He vowed to lead a changed life now, though he hadn't been able to find a job. I read a few months later that he'd been arrested for beating up a girlfriend, but I already had my character who vowed to go straight.

My man, Djuan Burden, appears at a Medicare scam shop in the process of closing and ready to skip town. The owner had just been shot, causing Djuan to flee in panic. A pair of Metro Nashville homicide detectives with his description and license number, plus a paper he'd left on the desk with his fingerprints and his grandmother's address, promptly arrest him for the murder.

PI Sid Chance is hired by the grandmother, who had reason to believe in Djuan's innocence, to prove he didn't murder the shop owner. Sid and his sometimes partner, Jaz LeMieux, find evidence of Medicare fraud which the cops missed because they were only interested in the homicide. Sid turns it over to an FBI agent who is a key contact as the story progresses.

Great so far, but at this point the plot switches gears. Sayonara Medicare fraud. The story turns into a tale of bad cops and other villains involved in murder and revenge and similar nastiness. There are good cops, too, of course, including Homicide Detective Bart Masterson and Patrol Sgt. Wick Stanley, who along with Sid and Jaz are members of the Miss Demeanor and Five Felons Poker Club. While writing the book, I attended the Metro Nashville Citizen Police Academy. It prompted me to dedicate the book to the men and women who wear the badge and risk their necks day and night to keep us safe.

I suppose what happened with the plot to this book illustrates why I prefer the "seat of the pants" method of plotting. I had no idea things would turn out they way they did. It's exciting to learn what characters wind up doing and how they steer the story into new dimensions.

You'll find more about the new book here at my website.

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?

To Be, or Not To Be?

By Chester Campbell

Now, that's a question. While trying to decide what to write about today, this phrase came to mind: To blog, or not to blog? Thinking about where that came from, I realized how much of everyday speech we derive from literature. I looked up Hamlet's soliloquy and those once-familiar lines I had memorized in high school seventy years ago spread rhythmically down the page:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? 

Farther down the quote from Hamlet's soliloquy I found other familiar sayings like perchance to dream and ay, there's the rub. Then there's shuffled off this mortal coil.

While writing this, my wife told our grandson to do something and he said a loud, "No." When she repeated it, he began the old "why, why?" To which I replied rather automatically, "Yours not to reason why, yours but to do or die."

So where did that come from? I began ruminating around in my mind and remembered it had to do with the Crimean War. I found it in The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson. The correct quote is:

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do & die.

If we use such quotations in a mystery, are they cliches? I use a few in my Sid Chance  books as part of his character. His mother was an American Literature major who taught high school English. She named him Sidney Lanier Chance after the Southern poet of the late nineteenth century. He occasionally comes out with an appropriate quote, which he is then forced to relate to its author. It isn't original, of course. There have been other literature-quoting PI's, but at least mine has a good excuse.

Do you feel that familiar quotations should be avoided in mystery writing, or do you agree with how Shakespeare might have put it: Much ado about nothing?

Check out my $2.99 books in the Kindle Store

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?