How to Get Published--Party like The Dead

Dear (still out there?) Reader:

I've begun the disheartening and exhilarating process of submitting DRY FAITH for publication and have had an unbelievable stroke of luck. My sister, award-winning author Han Nolan, whose most recent book is CRAZY, arranged through her editor for DRY FAITH to be read by the Editor-in-Chief of Adult Fiction at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I recognize this event as my lucky break, one that most aspiring writers only dream of. I will forever be grateful to Han, not only for this stupendous opportunity, but for thinking well enough of the manuscript to promote it.


Lest I think that's all there is to it, the current of rejections from agents to whom I've submitted DRY FAITH has been as powerful and relentless as any waterfall after a winter storm. To keep my spirits up, I've joined the writers' group at the Eldredge Public Library in downtown Chatham. The group of 18 or so is composed mostly of retirees who are not necessarily interested in getting published, but simply desire to write. Each week, our friendly, volunteer facilitator provides a prompt, and limits the group to writing no more than two pages. Most of the group write essays, memoir or poetry. During the 1 1/2 hour Monday morning sessions, each member reads his offering for comment and encouragement. I've included my first submission beneath this post. It responds to the prompt, "At this very moment I---" I trust the reader will recognize it as fiction, rather than memoir, as the first person narrator is selecting her next murder victim from her fellow guests at a wedding shower.


I am enjoying the writers' group immensely. For one thing, as retirees, or perhaps as Cape Cod retirees, they are all delightfully positive individuals, who've learned over the years what's important to them and what's too petty to keep carting around. What a lovely recess from my law practice, where grievances are our stock-in-trade. A couple of the members were educated in the Jesuit tradition, and their essays are always erudite, provocative, and tongue-in-cheek hilarious. One member is coming to grips with the loss of a loved one through her writings, and the group is supportive of her slow climb out of the Slough of Despond. Each member has a distinct personality that cries out for inclusion in a gripping Cape Cod murder, but I shall keep that observation to myself.


Also to avoid fretting about whether the HMH Editor-in-Chief is reading beyond the first sentence of DRY FAITH, I've begun Book II in my Cape Cod murder mystery series. The story begins with a holiday party, in the inimitable style of James Joyce's The Dead. His party is supposed to be the best in all of literature. The only similarity between his party and mine is that they both zero in on the dead.

Wedding Shower

At this very moment, I am selecting my fourth murder victim. Sitting here at a bridal shower provides the perfect opportunity to shop, if you get my meaning.

I have previously chosen young women as victims and see no reason to change my ways. For all their efforts at physical and intellectual prowess, they're really quite pathetic when it comes to self-defense. Even Lori Putnam, who had taken karate for fours years as a youngster, collapsed like an old tent when I cracked her skull open.

Of course, height matters. I'm always looking for someone who is no taller than five-two, since I'm not quite five feet and not all that strong. But physical attributes are not all I must consider. The victim must come across as the most unlikely to get herself bumped off. It's the irony that appeals to me.

Take for example Angie, the bride-to-be. She still has freckles sprinkled across her nose and the tips of her shoulders--how sweet she will look in her Priscilla gown. A shame to mar that exquisite lace with a wet, sticky blood stain. Everyone likes Angie--she's generosity itself. She invited me to her shower, didn't she? Brie and crackers, chardonnay, a little Nora Jones playing softly in the background. Nice. There was no need to invite "dormitory mouse". Oh, I know that's what they used to call me. But it doesn't bother me. At all. I like to keep myself to myself, to read, to dream--to plot. Now, if I were just trying to be cruel, I absolutely would not choose Angie as my victim. Oh no. A far worse fate than a quick death awaits dear Angie once she marries Cliff. If he doesn't beat her black and blue, he'll grind her down until that wide generouse smile of hers never brightens another room.

But there's always something satisfying about "doing in" the blond. Every shower has a least one dumb blond--when you're planning a murder, being polictically correct is low priority, okay?--as I was saying, one dumb blond. That would be Honey. Believe it? That's her name. As attractive as she is --pink cheeks, eyes flecked with bits of amber--she bores people with her non-stop chatter. No, she exhausts them to the point where they feel like they haven't slept in 48 hours. She is definitely not the most unlikely to get herself bumped off.

Carly. Now she is a prime candidate for my victim--a kick-ass twenty-seven year old who's close to becoming President of the March of Dimes. And the right height too. Bright girl. Why as I arrived she stood at the door by Angie's sister and gave me the once over, perhaps assessing the small size of my donation capabilities based on the sleeve length of my blazer, an inch too long. I heard her tell Honey that she'd left her infant son, Chris, with her husband for the first time today. Yes, she's perfect. "Young professional mother dies from strange gastric malady following best friend's shower. Survived by grief-stricken husband and son Christopher, age 11 months."

You might ask why I murder people. Oh, I know all the reasons people usually make this life choice: vengeance, fun outwitting the police, hit a stone wall in their careers and reinventing themselves, but what it really boils down to for me is this: I like closure.

Reeling in the Great White

One of the great pleasures of being a writer is reading from your own work to a sympathetic audience. I say sympathetic, for who else would listen to six-minute snippets of unpublished works? A Book in the Hand's 2nd Annual Open-Mic Night was held on September 14 at the Jacob Sears Memorial Library in East Dennis, MA, and I was fortunate enough to participate.

The library, recently added to the National Register of Historic Places, made for a perfect setting, cozy and smelling of old books. You enter the front parlor and believe for a moment you're Mrs. Muir seeing Gull Cottage for the first time, filled with a sense of rightness about the place. The building is 114 years old and is located in the Quivet Neck section of East Dennis, and keeps company with the most beautiful New England homes you're likely to see--large white clapboard dwellings with black shutters, dropped from heaven onto maize-colored fields marked with large chestnut trees, old barns and stone walls.

Sixteen writers had signed up to read, most of them published authors who were trying out their new work on their colleagues. Humbled by my own amateur status, I felt more and more convinced of my own unsuitability for the writing profession with every word I read. Added to the self-imposed trauma was that inflicted by the time-keeper who, every five minutes of reading, would call out, "One minute warning!" In the case of one reader, a swarm of grasshoppers was climactically overwhelming a vacationing family's station wagon when the gong rang, so to speak.

The week-end following the reading I returned with my husband to Quivet Neck for a pleasant, uneventful drive only to have a wondrous thing happen. We spotted a House for Sale sign, and beneath it the magic word "Open". The hunt was on. We followed the signs down one sun-dappled lane after another, tantalized by the Indian Summer breeze full of late-blooming roses and salt sea air. And there it was, fittingly beached on Sea Street, the Great White, aka the Captain Stillman Kelley House.

This house was no mere antique Cape that sat quietly year after year. This one wagged and wandered about, with each new owner's structural addition moving the main house ever closer to the huge old barn, whose loft was made from a shipwreck's timber.

The rooms were filled with antique furniture, including some that belonged to the original owner, according to the agent's informative flyer. How the Captain had kept his ten children from wearing out every stick of it I don't know. Perhaps the child named Heman kept the other nine in line.

I've now returned to the Great White with my co-conspiring sister and best friend in the hopes of finding the wherewithal to reel this one in. We've thought about subsidizing the carrying costs by turning the home into a writers' retreat, executive conference center or summer rental. There are of course doubters among us exerting a repressive influence on our enthusiasm--husbands--but they've got to face facts: When a great white house hunter starts to fantasize furniture placement and color schemes, the "Deed" is all but done.

My Week-end with Cynthia Riggs and Barack Obama

What better way for a Cape Cod mystery writer aspirant to spend her week-end than with the much-published and enjoyed author, Cynthia Riggs, who also runs a bed and breakfast from her ancestral home on Martha's Vineyard. Last week-end was my third visit to Cleaveland House, but the first time I found myself within the Presidential Penumbra. The first family was just blocks away, and I was pleased that a place that gives me so much pleasure--with its rolling farmlands, tall oaks, old stone walls, and thundering waves--suits the Obamas too.

My purpose in crossing from Woods Hole to Oak Bluffs for the past few years has been to soak up atmospherics and inspiration for a good Cape Cod mystery, but most of what I've soaked up is Murdick's Fudge. Still, I've enjoyed the lively goings on in Cynthia's living room. One time I arrived during a televised interview by Cynthia of another Vineyard author. This time, I enjoyed a lively chat with Cynthia and her other guests about the creative side of the brain--heady stuff.

While there, I did manage to squeeze in some writing. I started a short story to keep me busy while my query letters for my novel, Dry Faith, go unanswered. Don't get me wrong--I'm not in despair. I expect to send my novel out at least one hundred times. As my sister, National Book Award-winnning novelist Han Nolan says (latest book, Crazy), "If you've got some ability and can stick with it a long, long time, you're probably going to get published." Stick with it? That I can do.

I picked up Cynthia's most recent book, Touch-Me-Not, a thoroughly enjoyable read, and was delighted to recognize the places I passed on the Martha's Vineyard shuttle bus, which by the way is the only way to travel on the Vineyard. It's clean, reliable, and cheap, and you meet happy, interesting people who can steer you to the less-frequented sites and the best watering holes.


I arrived home on Sunday mid-morning, but still had another cross-Cape journey to make--this time via ambulance. For those of you allergic to shell fish, don't try your luck with crab cakes the night before you run three miles in 90 degree weather. Fortunately, when Cape Cod Hospital does ER triage they don't check the patient for brains.

Bosch Rocks and Thrift shops

I'd intended to start a new short story, not having written one since I began writing a mystery three years ago. Instead, my time has been consumed by researching agents and drafting query letters. At this rate, I don't think Turow needs to worry about stiff competition in the pipeline--not from me, anyway.

Undercutting my not-enough-time excuse is that fact that I did manage to read an early Michael Connelly, Black Echo, which reminded me of what the gold standard for a thriller/police precedural is. I'd picked the book up at a church thrift shop--and let me stop right here to plug one of the greatest pleasures of living on the Cape, exploring its pristine beaches and windswept marshes to be sure, but also its many thrift and consignment shops--and rediscovered Connelly's main character, Harry Bosch. The great thing about Connelly is that you can count on an intelligent, complex, suspenseful novel without having to wade through cliched situations and self-indulgent overwriting. His background as a police reporter allows the reader to believe that Harry Bosch, the bad boy outsider cop who adheres to his own moral code to get his man, might actually answer the phone if you dialed up the LAPD. The only minor criticism is that some of the backstory, like how Harry was able to afford his apartment on a cop's salary, appears twice in the novel, but how critical should we be of someone who publishes one, if not two gripping novels each year.

Before I allow the you'll-never-write-like-him devil to defeat me, I shall now turn my attention to drafting a synopsis of my novel, as required by a number of agents I've identified. I thought I knew what a synopsis is, but having read the agents' descriptions, I'm no longer sure as each demands a book summary of different length and emphasis.

Until next week.

Lee Doty

Summer Reading Brings "Hispanic Rapist" and "Nigra Buck" to W.Va. Hotel

I've just finished my second novel.

My reason for writing that sentence is to make it so. Having nursed the little devil for three years, I'm not sure I can let her go. Since finishing up at 5:00 yesterday morning, I've mentally rewritten so many scenes my fingers simply tingle to revise some more.

The result of working so hard to complete the book is that I've not worked on much else besides. But I have a summer reading suggestion for those who enjoy Southern writers, and in particular, Carson McCullers.

I'd just finished Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, absorbing and highly informative if you're a writer trying to create an unforgettable character, and found myself on vacation in the mountains of West Virginia without another book to read. Fortunately, my step-daughter- the- bookworm arrived with a pile of them, and I chose Carson McCullers' Clock Without Hands. Her final novel treats timeless themes like death, final reckonings, and racial prejudice about 80 years after the Civil War.

Two things struck me about the book. The first sprang from a familiar-sounding challenge voiced by one of the main characters, Judge Clane, who asks, "Would you let your sister marry a Nigra buck if you had a sister?" The sentence captures so well the kind of emotional appeal used by apologists for discriminatory acts even today. It's as though someone is exhorting these apologists to get out there and make the threat personal! Bring it right inside home and hearth! I shouldn't have been surprised when, while on that same West Virginia vacation, a fellow guest at our hotel used a similar strategy when commenting on Arizona's controversial immigration law. He was trying to justify overturning the new law based on the recent release from jail of an alleged Hispanic rapist, saying, "Would you want that to happen to your daughter?" As I say, Clock Without Hands deals with timeless themes.

The second is that the book had much in common with To Kill a Mockingbird, complete with a trial, noble white lawyer and black man convicted for his color rather than his guilt. Clock Without Hands' first publication (1961) postdates Mockingbird (1960) by just a little, but McCullers had been working on her book as early as 1955 (according to Google sources). I intend to re-read Mockingbird to try to figure out why it has become a classic in American literature and the other book remains all but unknown, to me at least.

I'm bound and determined to move on from my novel and get back to short stories, and hope to make an excerpt from a new story my next post.

Stieg Larsson's Salander Merits Good Character Reference

Like anyone else reading this blog, I've read some mysteries more than once. But if the point of a mystery is for the reader to solve it before the author gives the solution away, why read a mystery more than once?

We all know a great mystery needs excitement--conflict and strife, much at stake, and all taking place in a vividly protrayed location at breakneck speed. But that's not enough, or not enough to make a good mystery great.

Elizabeth George, the creator of arisotocratic Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and New Scotland Yard's answer to Georgy Girl, Barbara Havers, says in Writing Away, "[I]f you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspriration."

Let's face it--unlike a literary work, a mystery has neither the time nor excuse for intriguing phrases or arresting imagery (puns intended). Too much of these will distract the reader and slow the pace down. Devices like riveting plot and unusual setting are therefore all the more important. But without well-developed characters, you may as well read about a murder in the newspaper and save yourself the cost of a book.

Not any old character will do. For me, a good character has to do with recognition--I come upon someone in a story whom, because of his annoying humming at the end of each sentence or her rapacious finger licking while she eats, I'm certain I've met before. Or maybe a character says something that I've always felt inutuitively but have never quite put into words. These tidbits of character bring satisfaction and even comfort because they close a loop, or at least allow for circling back, on my own life story.

That satisfaction and comfort could get boring, unless the character does something totally unexpected, yet somehow still within character. For example, think of Harriet Vane, Lord Peter Wimsey's love interest. Wimsey has both wealth and position, and has saved Harriet's life in Dorothy L. Sayers' Strong Poison. Despite all this, and the fact that Harriet loves him, she rejects his proposals of marriage. Her actions are perfectly in keeping with her character, but surprising just the same.

Here's another example. Didn't you cheer every time Lisbeth Salander appeared on the page in Stieg Larrson's best-selling trilogy? While we may not all know a ninety-pound genius-waif whose body is covered in tattoos, we probably know someone brilliant and joltingly anti-social, like Salander. But even more than recognizing her peculiar traits, we're surprised, if not staggered, by her act of revenge against Bjurman, her guardian slash rapist (pun intended). And it wasn't the mere violence of the revenge that gripped us, but the uncompromising justice Salander dares to mete out, all perfectly consistent with her morality.

If my formula for a good character in a mystery is recognizable traits, coupled with surprising actions, I'm interested in others' comments on what makes for a good character in a mystery.

It's Alive!

Mooncusser Mystery Writer is a blog for mystery writers and readers who are thinking about writing mysteries. I’ve been practicing law for over 30 years and, like many of my colleagues, have always thought I should be doing something else. Five years ago, I decided to quit thinking about it and do it. Writing was something I’d always wanted to do, but was unsure of my ability. Knowing what I now know about writing, what seems to matter more is persistence and a thick skin. I’ve now completed a Masters of Fine Arts, had some poetry and short stories published, written a practice mystery that remains hidden under my bed, and am working on a second mystery I hope to get published. To all with similar aspirations, I’m hoping we can encourage one another with blog entries about the mystery writing experience, suggested reading, and short writing samples.

Note about the term Mooncusser: Centuries ago, pirates along the shores of Cape Cod would lure ships into treacherous shoals by waving decoy lanterns during storms, and then plunder the cargo. A bright moonlit night would foil the pirates’ game, and thus their name “Mooncusser”. I’ve chosen the name for this blog because such clever deception is not only the aim of a murderer, but of a successful mystery writer as well. Also, my murders take place on the Cape, where we’ve recently moved.