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.