Misleading Covers

By Chester Campbell

My first Sleuthfest, Mystery Writers of America Florida Chapter's annual crime writing soiree, featured Harlan Coben as the guest speaker. He was just coming into his own with his first standalone novel out. He gave his usual highly humorous presentation, but it contained a lot of good into for writers, too. One thing I remember was his complaint about a cover of one of his Myron Bolitar books that got it all wrong.

My memory is a little hazy after a decade of listening to countless speakers, but it may have been his second book in the series, Drop Shot. That story involves a tennis pro Myron is representing. Seems the cover included a basketball, which is what Myron played before being injured, but it didn't tell the real story of the book.

I've had a couple of experiences with that sort of thing. I love the covers, but they've been a bit misleading for some folks. The first was my initial foray into publishing, the first of my Greg McKenzie mystery series. The plot was built around an ancient Hebrew parchment, and the artist did a great job with the cover, as you can see here.

The only trouble was there's nothing to distinguish it as a mystery. Too many people glanced at it and figured the book was another story about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I cured the problem in the second edition which kept the same basic design but added copy in the lower right that said "An International Thriller, Greg McKenzie Mystery No 1."

The second of my covers that can be misleading is the one for The Marathon Murders. However, it only misleads people who don't pay attention to both the front and back covers. I've had people glance at it during a signing and say something like, "Does it take place during a marathon?" Well, no. The story is built around the old Marathon Motor Works that produced the only automobile made completely in the South. It was in business in Nashville between 1910 and 1914, when it was forced into bankruptcy court.

The cover features artwork of a Marathon touring car similar to one that currently appears in the old showroom  of the company's headquarters building. Both the long-abandoned plant and office buildings have been restored to provide space for artists, photographers, and musicians, among others. The book cover shows a skeleton sitting in the car, which is where the victim of a 90-year-old cold case was found. Still-fresh memories of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics was credited with the impetus for naming the company and the automobile Marathon.

The Marathon Murders' ebook will be available free for the Kindle next Monday through Wednesday (February 25-27). You'll find it in the Kindle Store at this link.

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?

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.

How Writers Come Up with All That Stuff

By Chester Campbell

I was talking with a friend about my books the other day, and she said, “I don’t know how you come up with all this stuff you write about. You must have a really vivid imagination.”

Just for the heck of it, I looked up the definition of “vivid.” Among its meanings are:

Full of the vigor and freshness of immediate experience; evoking lifelike images within the mind; heard, seen, or felt as if real: a vivid description. I suppose that pretty well sums up where it all comes from. What we mystery writers write about is the sum of all the things we have experienced, things we’ve heard, seen, and felt. It’s the product of the stuff that builds up in our minds over a lifetime. The longer we live, the more of it there is.

Should I want to describe a sunset, all I have to do is think back over the hundreds of such phenomena I’ve witnessed. Skipping the first ten years of my life, when I wasn’t thinking a lot about sunsets, and allowing only one a month the rest of the time, that would give me nearly 900 to choose from. One I recall vividly (there’s that word again) took place over the Eastern Mediterranean one November evening in 1998 as I watched from the balcony of a beachside hotel in Netanya, Israel. As the sun sank slowly toward the churning sea, through a bank of dark clouds, streaks shot up like flames, turning the sky a blazing red. I sat entranced and watched until the shimmering ball disappeared as if swallowed by the waves.

A lot of what comes out when we sit at the keyboard involves our unique take on things we’ve read about in newspapers, books, magazines. A story about a disastrous balcony collapse in a hotel got me thinking how it might happen at a high-rise condo. The result was the opening scene in Designed to Kill, where two people are killed when a poorly constructed balcony falls.

A neighbor mentioned her visit to the restored plant and office building of a long-defunct auto manufacturer in Nashville. When I made a similar visit, I saw things in a different light, and The Marathon Murders became a reality.

Imagination is a major factor in the process. Without the curiosity to take a set of circumstances and consider what might have been had things occurred a bit differently, these stories wouldn’t have taken shape. All these words seemingly pouring out from nowhere may sound like magic to a non-writer, but they’re all part of a day’s work in transferring those imaginative images onto the page.

Set up a situation, put some characters into it, and turn them loose. It helps to have a vocabulary nurtured over the years by continuous reading and listening to others. Some few authors have an innate ability to shape their ideas into striking patterns of language. The rest of us spend years working on ways to give our prose the extra oomph that we hope will put us in that elite category.

Let’s celebrate our imaginations and continue to give them a good workout. Provide the readers with a good story and take a bow.

The Nashville I Write About

By Chester Campbell

I write mysteries set in and around Nashville. But it isn’t the Nashville that most folks are familiar with. You’ve probably heard about it primarily as Music City USA, home of the Grand Ole Opry, the number three recording center in the country. A place where names like Taylor Swift, Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, and Keith Urban are tossed about. And, of course, the home area of Mylie Cyrus (alias Hannah Montana) and her dad, Billy Ray.

If you're a sports fan, maybe it's the place where the Tennessee Titans play, or home of the Nashville Predators NHL team.

The music industry merits an occasional mention in my books, but the locations I use are seldom connected to it. The last Greg McKenzie mystery, The Marathon Murders, deals with a part of town that hasn’t had the best reputation in recent years. The plot is built around the old Marathon Motor Works just beyond downtown, in an area where a low-rent housing project became such an eyesore it was demolished.

When a Type A entrepreneur bought the badly run-down buildings of the auto maker that went out of business in 1914, he had to clean up the debris left by years of homeless squatters. A cop told him he’d better carry a big gun if he wanted to survive around there. After all the restoration work, it’s a neat place, housing studios for artists, photographers, and musicians. The housing project has been rebuilt as modern multi-family houses.

The entrepreneur, who renamed his venture Marathon Village, scoured the country and found a couple of rebuilt 1912 and 1914 Marathon touring cars and put them in the old showroom. That’s where I had my launch party for The Marathon Murders.

I visited the opposite extreme in that book with a couple of characters who live in the city’s most posh suburb, Belle Meade. In that case I alluded to an old sobriquet for Nashville—the Son-in-Law Town. Years ago when I was publishing a local magazine, the popular refrain referred to young out-of-towners who came to Vanderbilt University, stayed on and married girls whose dad’s were captains of industry. When the dads retired, the sons-in-law took over the businesses.

In the new Sid Chance series, the main character comes from my side of town, a traditional middle class area. His sometimes associate lives in a mansion among the upper crust, just across the line from Williamson County, one of the highest income counties in the nation. It provides an opportunity to show some contrasting lifestyles and the possibility for conflict that brings.

My aim is to get beyond the stereotypes and show the city as it really exists where the people live. I’ve only scratched the surface so far, which leaves a lot more to tell.

The Surest Poison will be out in a couple of weeks. Keep an eye on my Mystery Mania blog and my website for news about the book launch.

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.

Random Choices

By Chester Campbell

I suppose things happen in fiction as in life, the result of random choices made on the spur of the moment. I was reminded of that recently when I made a talk to the Trousdale County Historical Society in Hartsville, TN.

It was an interesting group. About twenty-five people came out on a cold rainy afternoon to listen to a mystery (not history) writer. Why Trousdale, the smallest county in Tennessee with only 7,700 residents? That's the result of one of those random choices.

Incidentally, the photo above shows one of the county's main claims to fame, the abandoned cooling tower for the Hartsville nuclear power plant, the $12.3 billion project TVA scrapped in 1982.

When I started writing The Marathon Murders, I had only a basic plot idea in mind. Back in 1914, when Nashville's Marathon Motor Works went into bankruptcy, a company official disappeared and was accused by his boss of embezzlement. Now, 90 years later, documents are found during restoration of the defunct company's plant and administration building that may show the accused man was framed and murdered. His great-great granddaughter hires PIs Greg and Jill McKenzie to recover the documents, which have gone missing.

I had used a Metro Nashville homicide detective as Greg's main police contact in previous books, so I decided to do something different this time. On every trip downtown, I always passed an impressive building that housed the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Why not use a TBI agent in this book, I thought?

I knew little about the TBI except that they worked mostly with county sheriffs and small town police forces that lacked the expertise to tackle major crimes. So I started looking for a small county not far from Nashville. That's when I found Trousdale, only 35 miles away, was the ideal candidate.

I put the contractor who possessed the long-lost documents in the small county, and as fate (and the muse) would have it, arranged for three murders to be committed there.

It had been a couple of years since I finished writing the book, and I hadn't really thought about the way it had happened until a lady in the Historical Society asked how I came to use Trousdale County in the book.

I had been a bit concerned when the organization's president invited me to speak, since I barely got into the county's history in the book. But it turned out many of the members were avid mystery readers and they asked numerous good questions. They also bought books.

Before I left, they told me about a famous unsolved murder in the area and invited me to come back anytime and set some more mayhem in the county. I received a copy of The Hartsville Vidette, their small weekly newspaper, and the editor, who took pictures during my talk, promised to write a story about another of my books the next week. Happily for me, another serendipitous random choice.

For more random ramblings, visit my Mystery Mania blog.