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.

The Anatomy of a Website

By Chester D. Campbell

I'm not a trained graphic designer. Some might say I'm not much of a writer, either, but I'm a tried and true copycat.  Back when I was a magazine editor, I had an art director to put the pages together with a professional look. I also had the help of graphic artists when I worked as an advertising copywriter. Over the years I soaked up a bit of basic design by osmosis.

Shortly before my first novel came out in 2002, I set up a website. It was pretty basic and not all that attractive, but it got out the message of who I was and that I had embarked upon the mystery writing venture. Over the years I visited dozens and dozens of websites, adding to my perception of what looked good and what appeared amateurish. I revised the site after a couple of years to add more content and improve the visual appeal.

With each new book, I added the cover to my home page, along with a description and, when available, some reviews. When my fourth Greg McKenzie mystery came out in 2008, I made a major revision in the website with a heading that featured the Nashville skyline and a new design with white type on a black background. I thought it looked more mysterious but since have learned many readers have difficulty reading the white on black combination.

I started a new series last year and featured The Surest Poison at the top of the page, with the four Greg McKenzie books below. When I recently received the cover art for book number six, A Sporting Murder, the fifth McKenzie mystery, I added it at the top of the page but knew something would have to give. Things looked too cluttered. I decided it was time for another major makeover.

I wanted to keep the heading but give the pages a more open, colorful look. Several author sites I admired used more color in the design. I borrowed a bit here and there and went to work. I have used Microsoft's Front Page program from the start, although they quit updating it after the 2003 edition. It still does everything I want to do in a fairly simple fashion. Over the years I've learned enough HTML to repair glitches in the code when something goes wrong. I decided on a page design featuring a brownish-orange background and color bars (green and blue) on opposite sides of the white center. Navigation links are on the left bar, which remains the same on all but a few ancillary pages.

The first thing I did was set up a page template with the heading, the color bars and the white center. I didn't realize until I got into it that I had thirty-four separate pages to create or re-create. Plus more than two dozen .gif or .jpg graphic files to create or manipulate. It took a couple of weeks to get it all together. I uploaded it late one night and had to do some tweaking after checking it out online.

I have always enjoyed creating stuff, and I suppose that's a trait you need to go all out at creating your own website. If you have a flair for this sort of thing and are a good copycat, you'll probably get a bang out of doing-it-yourself.

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?

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

By Chester Campbell

I’ve always heard that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I’ve decided to flatter that upstart browser known as Mozilla Firefox. Have you read about the marketing campaign they’re doing for the launch of Firefox 3.5 today? It’s billed as “the fastest Firefox ever” and they’re out to knock our socks off worldwide with a buzz event called “Shiretoko Shock.”


My answer is a campaign for the re-launch of The Surest Poison 1.0 (that’s number one in the Sid Chance series). There’s no doubt that it’s the fastest-paced Chance mystery yet. My buzz event is called “Awe Shocks” (pronounced “aw shucks”).

Borrowing again from Firefox, here’s what you and all my other millions of fans need to do. Tomorrow, on July 1, set your alarm for 1:00 p.m., which corresponds to The Surest Poison 1.0. If you use the 24-hour clock, that’s 1300. At precisely 1:00 p.m. CDT, the Awe Shocks will start in Nashville and move westward around the world. When it’s 1:00 p.m. in your local time zone, you’ll tweet away on Twitter, fiddle around on Facebook, space out on MySpace, blog, flog, whatever, making sure all mankind knows about that great new Nashville mystery.

When the round robin makes its way across the globe and back to Nashville 24 hours later, we’ll touch off the Super Awesome Shock. At precisely 1:00 p.m. CDT on Thursday, July 2, everybody around the world will inundate the web with blogs and tweets and posts and whatever else you can think of to cap off this massive rally. Don’t forget, it all happens at:

Thursday, July 2—
• 2:00 PM Eastern (New York)
• 12:00 PM Mountain (Denver)
• 11:00 AM Pacific (San Francisco)
• 8:00 AM Hawaii (Honolulu)
• 7:00 PM London
• 10:00 PM Moscow

Friday, July 3—
• 3:00 AM Tokyo

Get ready to howl!

Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the Firefox plan, click here.

Making a Movie Trailer

By Chester Campbell

I’ve just started working on a book trailer for The Surest Poison. I have an idea for what I want to do, but at the moment I’m frustrated by not finding photos I need to put it together. You’d think a CD with 30,000 pictures would have the one I’m looking for. It doesn’t. However, I’ve located a site on the web called Fotolia.com that says it has 5,697,796 images. Surely something out of that will work.

I updated my movie program, Pinnacle Studio, to the Ultimate version. I just need to don my director’s cap, grab my megaphone, and shout “quiet on the set.” Hollywood, here I come.

Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be that simple. I’ve done a couple of trailers. This one wasn't bad for a first effort, but I think it's a bit short of Oscar material. I’d like to do voice-over, but I don’t have the voice for it. I have a friend from church who does narration for musicals and such. He has a great voice. I’m not sure if my ancient audio equipment is up for the job, though.

I’ve learned a few things since doing my last video. Things like apply the old KISS principle: “Keep it simple, Stupid.” Don’t mix in too many weird transitions. Stay with a simple one that keeps the flow steady. I want to vary between still photos and movie footage. I may have to get out the old camcorder and do some shooting on my own.

I like scrolling narration. I haven’t checked out the new program yet, but I hope it lets you scroll off into the sunset. I think that’s really cool. I seem to remember it being used quite effectively in “2001: a Space Odyssey.”

I’d like to throw in a few sound effects, too. I discovered lots of links to free sound effects at http://www.stonewashed.net/sfx.html. I couldn’t find the sound of fire, but it turns out that paper crumbling makes the same sound.

I find lots of people who do their own trailers use Kevin McLeod’s royalty free music. He has a long list of songs in various categories. I used his music for both of the trailers I’ve done and will no doubt repeat that with this one. His site is www.incompetech.com. It costs nothing, but he encourages a $5 donation. A small price to pay.

I’ll let you know how this one turns out in a future Murderous Musings blog.

Seek and ye shall find

By Chester Campbell

Do you harness the power of your word processor’s search and replace function? Every writer knows he or she can change a character’s name throughout the book with a simple click of the mouse. And most of us have learned the hard way to specify “whole words only.” Otherwise, if Art is changed to Will, we wind up with words like “pWillnership.”

Beyond this simple but valuable strategy, using only the search feature can save lots of headaches. My first mystery came back from the editor with the comment (among lots of others) that I must have an affinity for the color blue. I had numerous blue eyes, blue cars, blue suits, blue whatevers. When I searched on the word “blue,” it came up 51 times in a 261-page manuscript.

I then searched for other colors, finding green 23 times, brown 21, red 17, and yellow 8. I combed through the book and toned down my color palette until the scorecard read brown 18, blue 17, green 17, and red 17. Yellow remained a respectable eight. When the manuscript went back to the editor, he was pleased.

Another literary bugaboo is the use of adverbs. I agree, they should be toned down, though an occasional adverb is useful in clarifying an action. In that first book I mentioned above, I searched for “ly” words and found 12 in the first three pages. My new book, The Surest Poison, has only four “ly” adverbs in the same number of pages.

I didn’t feel too badly (to use a good adverb), however. F. Scott Fitzgerald used 12 in the first three pages of his classic novel, The Great Gatsby. A random check of some popular current authors showed the following three-page results:

Harlan Coben – nine
Barbara Parker – six
Ian Rankin – five
James Lee Burke – four

I could say more about adverbs, but I'll leave that for another time.

One use I make of the search feature is to find a particular scene during the revision process. I may not remember where it is, but I can recall a character in the scene, or a place name, or some unique descriptive term. I’ll enter that in the search field and a few clicks on the “next” button will take me to the scene.

I’m only familiar with the search and replace feature in Word for Windows, but I’m sure the other word processors have something similar. If you click the “More” button, you get lots of different options. You can search up or down or through the whole file. You can choose to match the case of what you type in the search field. If you’re looking for a proper name, that will make sure the first letter is capitalized. Another option is “sounds like,” so you don’t even need to spell the word correctly.

A handy feature is the “Special” button, which allows you to search for a particular font or a special character such as an em dash or an ellipsis.

Search and replace is a powerful feature for the writer. Make full use of it if you want to save time and get things right. It no doubt offers plenty of other possibilities. Have you found particular uses that I haven’t mentioned?

By the way, I’m in the sixth day of my blog book tour for The Surest Poison. You’ll find me today at Ann Parker’s Silver Rush Mysteries blog talking about Writing the Private Eye.

The Surest Poison

I want to say something about Chester Campbell's The Surest Poison.

Sid Chance and Jaz LeMieux are fresh, new characters, and fun folks to follow. And I know something about the subject matter of the book: TCE and tracking down from whence it came. For twenty years I defended TCE pollution cases, as TCE was the most commonly used degreaser in the world up until the mid-eighties and it's found its way into the groundwater in many areas.

How did it get there? Sometimes from dumping, but usually from plant spills, leaking pipes or product stored outside.

And the chemical is interesting. While it's allegedly harmful to many systems in the body, it's like beer; it's not stored. It quickly leaves the body through urination. The original EPA mouse/rat studies which led to the "Possible Carcinogen" determination, were flawed, seriously flawed. The studys' flaws were similar to those which led to the erroneous determination that saccharin was cancer causing, which it took the EPA over thirty years to correct. Indeed, TCE used to be the decaffeinating agent in coffee. If you drank Sanka, you drank TCE. And it was used in the dry cleaning process. If you wore dry-cleaned clothing, you wore TCE.

But there's a more dangerous aspect to TCE than its immediate harmful affects on the body or even its effects over time. TCE changes its chemical composition, and when it does so, it evolves into much more dangerous chemicals, known cancer causing agents, agents like PCE or vinyl chloride. Allow TCE to percolate long enough in your ground water and you will find these chemicals there. And they can kill you. And this is just the groundwater. Soil gases, gas percolating upward, is also dangerous.

So Chester's spot on, and the problem with TCE cleanup is finding who to blame. Cleaning the groundwater, so it's free of these chemicals is very expensive. It requires pumping stations and filtration equipment. You have to draw the flow in, clean it and then disperse it so it flows naturally, not an easy thing to do. And in many cases, the party responsible for the TCE leaching into the soil and groundwater is dead or ceased operations many, many years ago. In some cases, the government is even responsible, because the government took over the operation of some plants during the Second World War. Chemical procurement records must be researched, aerial views, if they exist, must be studied, loan and property ownership records, and trucking company records. It's a tough job. We had a case in Rockford, Il where we found over eighty companies had used TCE during the period 1940-1980. The groundflow was from the industrial area into suburbs that didn't exist during most of that period. The cost of cleanup was in the hundred million dollar range. The cost and number of companies involved was so high, the city, in conjunction with the EPA, organized a special cooperative arrangement to manage cleanup and funding.

So the problems Sid and Jaz face in The Surest Poison are real. Many companies have gone bankrupt facing the prospect of TCE cleanup. The opportunity for crime is high.

Bravo, Chester, for bringing this to light and for the opportunity to meet folks like Sid Chance and Jaz LeMieux.

Touring the Blogs - A Challenge

By Chester Campbell

I'm getting ready to do a Blog Book Tour for my new Sid Chance mystery, The Surest Poison. My Musings colleague Jean Henry Mead knows all about it. She's done one. In my case, I'll be doing guest posts at a variety of blogs for fifteen days, between April 15 and May 1. I'm skipping Sundays to give everybody (including me) a rest.

It's become more of a challenge than I thought it would before starting this venture. I think most writers, when they've finished a book and have the printed copy in hand, move on to the next project and only rarely open the pages to read any of it. I know some mystery authors who say they never crack a book once it's finished.

With a Blog Book Tour, it's quite different. Not only do you find yourself going back to read passages, you do an awful lot of thinking about what's in the book and how it came about. I'm working on short articles dealing with book promotion, the setting of the story, how the plot came about, thoughts on writing about Private Eyes, dialogue, how to use electronic rights, is the mystery really about murder, writing about social issues, using sub-plots, multiple points of view, plus interviews with me and my main characters.

So far I have only four out of fifteen completed. If I wasn't the type of guy who works better under deadlines, I would be thinking panic time. It doesn't take me long to write a piece. My problem is getting past all the chaff that clutters up my daily schedule. And I use that term loosely. A schedule implies you have a list of things lined up to do.

I'm encouraged by those who've been there and done that saying the tour will help spread the word about your book. If all goes well, it should encourage people to get the book who otherwise wouldn't have known about it.

So if you happen to spot me wandering around in cyberspace over the next few weeks, looking a wee bit lost and unsure where I'm headed, give me a kindly nod and a cheery "Hi, there!" And if you spot one of my guest blogs, post a comment and get your name in the hat for free books I'll give away during the tour.

To find where I'll be, when, and what I'll be writing about, check out my Mystery Mania blog for a complete schedule of the tour. I'm looking forward to it. It should be a lot of fun.

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.

Internet - prime source for research

By Chester Campbell

The Internet is a great source for research on a mystery novel. When I started working on The Surest Poison, my new book due out next month, I had the basic idea for a plot contributed by a friend who’s a PI in Nashville. She’d worked a case a few years back that involved the dumping of a large amount of the toxic chemical trichloroethylene, commonly known as TCE.

My first step was to Google the chemical compound to see what it was like, how it was used, and what effects it would have on public health. I found both government and non-profit organization sites devoted to information on various pollutants, including TCE. I copied pages of details on the chemical and its health effects. I also found it was used as a degreaser in cleaning things like auto parts. All vital information for use in the novel.

I decided to locate my fictional chemical dump behind a small plant in a mostly rural county on the west side of Nashville. The other adjoining counties all had large populations and at least one moderate-sized city.

Back I went to the Internet to gather all the information available on Cheatham County. I found enough to steer me in the right direction when I made my first on-scene visit.

Since I put my protagonist, Sid Chance, in my home area of Madison, a northeastern suburb, I didn’t need the Internet or anything else to handle that area. However, I gave him a female sidekick who had inherited controlling interest in a lucrative chain of truck stops from her father, a French Canadian import.

I wanted Jasmine (Jaz) LeMieux to live in a French Colonial mansion in an affluent section on the other side of Nashville. I did a search on French Colonial houses and came up with one I used as a model. I also did a Mapquest search, both street and aerial views, to check out the Franklin Road area for a likely spot.

I also used Mapquest to look into several other areas, including the small town of Centerville, where I had them make a helicopter landing. It was also useful to figure how long it would take to drive from Jaz’s house to the location of a climactic event. And when I did the helicopter flight, I looked on the Bell Helicopter website to pick out the Jetranger III for the ride.

I set a few scenes in the fictional town of Lewisville, where Sid worked as chief of police until false accusations of bribery ended his career. I named it after explorer Meriwether Lewis, who died on the Natchez Trace near where I placed the town. I checked the Internet to be sure I had my facts correct on the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s chief.

I used the Internet in countless other ways to check out minor points. The common advice is to be careful of the facts you get off the web, as there is plenty of misinformation out there. If it was something I needed to be sure of, I always chose a reliable source, and on occasion checked another to confirm what I found.

Another use I made of the Internet was to ask questions on listserves or through emails to people like Dr. Doug Lyle, the forensic guru, or in one case, ex-policewoman Robin Burcell.

The Internet has made researching for a book as easy as sitting down at your computer. It can save hours of time and miles of travel. I recommend it highly.

A Bailout for Hitmen?

By Chester Campbell

I wonder if President Obama will come up with a bailout plan for hitmen? Don't you suppose they're getting laid off as well as everybody else? The way the Dow Jones is falling off a cliff, there's probably a shortage of funds for paying hired killers.

Any day now I expect to see one standing on the corner at a busy intersection with a crudely lettered cardboard sign:

"Will Kill for Food." Or maybe, "Will Knock Off Your Old Lady for a Six-Pack."

The times are getting desperate. With all the travel cutbacks we've been hearing about, it might even be iffy for a Harvard symbologist to travel to Paris. Think what that would mean for Dan Brown. Might jeopardize any reprise of Leonardo's decoder ring. Or am I thinking about something I got out of a cereal box years ago.

With the cost of guns and ammunition going up as people rush to the dealers before the Democrats can gum up the Second Amendment, murderers may have to turn to cheaper methods for disposing of those who stand in their way. Knives are probably less expensive, but they leave all that bloody mess and DNA lying around.

Poisoning might be more tidy and cheaper, if the bad guys could pick up a little cyanide at a jeweler's. Or maybe pilfer some strychnine from a pest control outfit.

Even cheaper would be strangulation (known as "throttling" in the UK). The classic method involves a ligature or garrote. It could be a chain or rope or wire. All materials that won't break a slayer's budget. And if he's really strapped for cash, he can use his hands.

Let's face it, with the economy heading downhill like a Utah avalanche, the murder business may be falling on hard times. But mystery writers are a hardy lot. I'm sure we'll find the wherewithal to keep assassins plying their trade as usual, even if they might be forced to resort to doing it on the cheap.

But don't rule out a bailout. I saw where the auto parts industry is talking about asking for one. No telling who might be next.

If you'd like to find out how the bad guy does it in The Surest Poison, the book is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. And the guy is no piker.