Tag Archives: writing mysteries

My Thanks

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This month I want to express a big “Thank You” to the community of people who stand behind all writers. From the beginning of any writing project this includes those:

who help set up a Web Page and other online venues
who maintain those sites;
readers who give time, attention, and thoughtful criticisms to rough drafts (and I mean often really rough drafts);
editors who accept our work and spend hours nourishing it, trusting it; improving it
reviewers who speak publicly about our books, encouraging readers to buy and read
readers who buy our work, who take the time to listen to our stories

My personal thanks on the Leah Contarini Mystery Series goes to:
Sabine Barcatta
Shanna Siporin
Dov & Lev Siporin
Steve Siporin
Mary Sharp
Steve Sharp
Carol McNamara
Greg Stout
Mark Levenson
Laura Fisher
Level Best Books:
Harriette Sackler
Shawn Reilly Simmons
Verena Rose

Writing and Walking in Tuscany

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Photos from my recent nine-mile walk to a neighboring village and back. These Etruscan trails are the same as those beloved by Leah, protagonist of my Leah Contarini Mysteries Series of Italian mysteries from Level Best Books. The first book in the series, Bitter Maremma is available now from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc; the second book, Death Will Find You, will be out this fall; and the third book, tentatively titled Precarious Refuge, will appear in 2023.  

From a review of Bitter Maremma:

Author Siporin’s novel works on a couple of different levels, first, as a murder mystery—and a very good one at that—and second, as a paean to the Tuscan region, its customs, culture and its colorful residents, all of which are richly drawn by the author. A far cry from the usual noir-ish streets of New York or Los Angeles, Bitter Maremma is a highly entertaining read, one that I most certainly recommend.

–Gregory Stout, author of Lost Little Girl, Gideon’s Ghost, and Finalist in Best First PI Novel category, 2022 Shamus Awards.

From Names to Scenes: Another Step into Reality

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Last week I wrote about choosing names for my characters. What happened in naming
the characters surprised and delighted me. As I named them, they became real, like writing in invisible ink and then holding the paper over a candle. Giving names, I entered the characters’ lives in a way I hadn’t when I was simply outlining a plot and calling them “son of landlord” or “daughter of lace maker.”

Having chosen the characters’ names for meaning and cultural import, they took on flesh: I could see their eyes, the shape of their heads, their hands and hair. Their names blossomed with history, and each character began to fit his/her name in a natural way. With names, they became part of an extended family, of a group of friends, and they began to move in the society I created in the first two books of the series.

The naming done, I’m now working on actual scenes for the book. Sometime ago, I
wrote a film script by writing each scene on a 5 X 7 cards. I decided to try the same process for this new mystery.

This approach doesn’t work as smoothly as it does with a film, because a book grows a
different way. Still, I persist with the 5 X 7 card idea because I am discovering that this process breaks open the plot in a way the outline can’t. Writing scenes illuminates strengths and weaknesses in the storyline, and it ignites new ideas, new twists to the plot, relationships that I hadn’t considered.

Writing scenes, the new characters and the characters from the first two books in the
series move among each other, and this forces me to ask questions. How do these people know each other? Are they friends? Acquaintances? Antipathetic toward one another? Co-workers? How long have they known each other?

Writing scenes also compels me to ask questions about plot: Can Arrammundu be in the piazza bar talking with a friend at this time? Or must he be on the trails that run through the forest below town? How did Leah know that Diego was at home that afternoon? Angelica is talking to her son, can she, in this intensely emotional scene, avoid the truth of what happened, and still answer his questions?

As I try to answer these questions for myself, some of my scene cards become unwieldy. This is a signal to me that I need to expand, that I’m actually writing a whole chapter or two, or more…, not just a single scene. Or, if I find problems with the storyline, perhaps I need to go back to earlier cards to check, or think forward to what’s coming.

Scenes make me see people interacting: talking together, exchanging information,
gossiping….. Writing scenes I can observe these characters, get to know their inner thoughts and emotions; I can see how they behave.

Writing scenes, I am also led to another step in writing the novel: strong sense of place,
weather, time of day. Now that the characters are interacting, I need to give the reader the piazza itself, the bar, the forest trails, the heavy rains of spring, the granary, the smell of cattle, the morning light over a field of winter wheat, the musty smell of Etruscan tombs … I need to give them rural Tuscany.

How Far to Wilderness?

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Given the recent snows and thinking of friends and family living in currently sub-zero weather, I’m posting a short essay from my book, Stories to Gather All Those Lost . Published by Utah State University, the essays were originally radio commentary aired on KUSU-FM, Logan, Utah,  and KUER-FM, Salt Lake City, Utah. The book is available on Amazon.

It is 8 P.M., and I have decided to go for a walk.  I will find out tomorrow that the winds tonight are 65 mph and, with the wind chill factor, the temperature is -80 degrees.  But I do not know this yet, and I think only of the walk.  I dig my jacket with the coyote fur hood out of the closet.  It is an old military jacket I was given when I was a visiting poet in a prison in the Midwest.  It embarrasses me to have it; every time I wear it I think of all the jackets like it and all the coyotes that were killed in order to make them:  thousands of coyotes, all slaughtered for the Air Force.  Still, I keep it.  It reminds me of the young prisoners, and me, immured in the sloping stubble fields of central Iowa, all huddling in our khaki green jackets crossing the barren prison grounds to the classroom building.      

     When I step off the back porch, away from the protection of the garage, someone punches me in the chest.  I suck air.  It is the wind.  I pull the hood as far forward as it will go, creating a six-inch, fur-circled tunnel around my face.  It could be perfect.  I am warm from the waist up and around my head, but I have forgotten to wear long underwear, and my jeans are too thin:  only a minute out and my thighs hurt. 

     But I will not go back.  I am alone with the wind, the way I want to be. 

     I turn left, skirt the golf course on the north, and head toward Lundstrom Park, where, on a night last summer, I lay in the grass next to the canal and watched the Perseid meteor showers.  Now the park is cold and barren, the wind slapping against the ball diamond backstops. The road and walks are clogged with drifts.

     Tonight the wind is in a wild dance with the snow, and the wind is the stronger partner. It howls across the surface of the streets and yards, ripping away the fine top layer of the drifts, incited to a cold stinging fog that swarms over the drifts and scuffles along a frozen gutter.  Bearing the snow, the wind shifts and dodges along the ground, stops suddenly, then leaps up again, lashing my feet and legs.  Across from Lundstrom, I turn west, toward the dirt hills.   The wind is behind me now, plummeting down from the Wasatch Front.  This wind wants me to do something wild.

     I cut off the street into the dirt hills.  The street is too safe, I’ve decided.  How far do I need to go for wilderness? 

     Fifty yards in, the drifts are suddenly waist high and hard.  It is as if I stood still and they crept in around me.  I start over them, slipping, regaining balance just before I fall and then slip again.  I can’t get a grip on the sanded snow. The drifts undulate in front of me.  Sucking air, I make my way.  One strong gust and I am blown down, rolling as I fall to the bottom of the drift. 

     Things are getting serious.  This isn’t suburbia, this isn’t Maple Drive winding gently through one of the older developments of Logan. 

     A friend, Kim, once told me to “Know your place.”  I think of him.  My place is a brick house behind a row of maple trees.  Secure in that warm house, I make stew and watch the snow drift against the juniper bushes. 

     But tonight, only blocks away, I find another of my places. I have walked here dozens of times before, and I know now I never knew this place;  I am only beginning to understand.  This wind torn barren field, scarred by backhoes, disfigured by the encroachment of ranch houses, is keeping itself.  The wind slaps me in the face, and I pay attention.

     I push myself up to my knees, dig in the steel toes of my boots, and heave myself up, leaning hard into the wind.  My hands ache, my thighs sting. 

     I begin to run;  I am only on the edge of being frightened. Mostly, I am cold.  I run in a jerky, uneven motion.  My boots grip one step and slip the next, one step slides and the next sinks, waist deep.  I stumble, fall, groping my way toward the road, head into a wind too painful to breath.

     My friend’s mother died in a drift at the end of her street.  She wanted to die there. She planned it that way, and she went there on purpose to freeze to death. She was only yards from a house.

     This story I’m telling is small. It is just one of many of a season when I learned to let the snow take me. To let the snow gather me in with all those lost.     

Beginning a New Book

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To animate work on a book, I gather ideas from three sources:  scholarly / public records; interviews; and notes from my own experience. Combining these three elements jumpstarts my imagination, and I know if I keep sifting through these elements, the story I discover, one of hundreds of possibilities, will make itself known. Personal memories of food, landscape, gestures, and the sounds of a language infuse scholarly information with vibrancy, and the scholarly writings provide details and facts that may have become fuzzy in friends’ telling of personal stories.

So when I was recently asked at a reading if my stories are autobiographical, or if the stories I am putting to paper are the stories of someone else, or if I just create the narratives whole cloth out of imagination, I say that none of these is the case, and yet, all of them are the case.

Everywhere I go, in everything I read, hear, and see, I find pieces of life — good, evil, and inbetween — and am compelled to make a story. The pieces appear everywhere: in a fact in a book, in a neighbor’s tears elicited by a memory, in the vison of a landscape, in the unique sound of a dialect, in the way the rain fell outside the window on a certain day, in the moment I understood the profound anger of a woman who remembers running through the forest, SS and dogs not far behind.  From these pieces, an incipient story nudges at me.

I begin a narrative. Perhaps the woman was crying when she remembers how it was raining the night she slipped from her house and fled into the forests of Tuscany, the SS not far behind.  It could be that the trail that  night was muddy, like the trails I explored years later in the same forest, the mud sucking at my feet. Perhaps the Italian peasant man I interviewed still makes the same sausage his grandfather made, and can give me the recipe, which in my story becomes a murder weapon.

These chunks of life add up to a story, which, good or bad, is a reflection of my vision, risen from the urge to create a narrative. My ultimate goal is to look into my own and others’ hearts, including the darker sides, to grasp some understanding of human nature.

Why Read Mysteries?

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Last blog, I wrote about why I write mysteries: the puzzle aspect; the chance to deal with
death, which is the center of all our maps; the opportunity to re-create geographies I’ve known and loved; the chance to live through characters that are stronger, smarter, more courageous than I am; the chance to explore my own inner world, including the darker side; and the chance, almost like a folktale, to clarify the differences between good and evil – and more: the confusion of the two.

What about you? Why do you read mysteries, or why don’t you read mysteries? If you
do, when did you start reading them? Or did you pick one up, start reading, and decide the genre’s not for you? What do mysteries offer you that other genres don’t? What subgenres (thrillers, cozies, detective novels, police procedurals, etc.) do you read? Or, what is it mysteries lack that you find in other genres? Who are your favorite writers of mysteries? Why? Who your favorite writers of other genres?

I hope you’ll send a line or two – or whole paragraphs – and tell me your thoughts on
mysteries.

WHY MYSTERIES?

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“Why mysteries?” Someone asked me.

I didn’t have a ready answer. I never planned to write them. I’ve mostly written poetry, commentaries, a few short works of fiction, and there’s an unpublished novel languishing on my shelf. 

The idea of writing mysteries started some years ago while I was hiking in the forests of the upper Maremma of Tuscany. Walking past three Etruscan burial caves, a mystery popped into my head.

So, I began.

I wrote the story, and in the way a reader or a listener lives through stories, so does the writer. My characters are not me; they can do and say what they want in ways very different from me, but I still get to act through them in a range of ways:  I can fight off attackers, I can get angry when I shouldn’t, I can be any age I want; I can have long braids, or shave my head and wear tattoos. I can be cruel, tender, harsh or sweet, beautiful, with long legs; I can go anywhere I want. And because mystery is a natural setting for shadowy characters, I can explore the dark sides of myself with impunity. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never murdered anyone and I don’t intend too, but writing a mystery I do search my own dark corners for understanding. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “Writing, I experience becoming, find out what’s inside me, make my soul grow.”

Another reason I like writing mysteries is for the fun of the puzzle. Can I play the game well enough to make several characters suspicious? Can I leave a clue so subtly no one notices it’s a clue? Can I set the game so well, it’s the end before anyone guesses who the murderer is?

A third reason:  I get to weave setting with plot. Ok, this is true in any genre, but it’s still a great delight to be able to talk about places I’ve lived and loved, to make those places themselves, characters.

Fourth:I get to deal with the subject of death. Death is the country at the center of the map in everyone’s life, and in writing mysteries I can confront it, and in some ways be relieved of it.

 Fifth:  E.M Forster once said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” This applies to writing in general. I don’t write mysteries because I understand why humans kill each other; I write mysteries because in writing them I work to understand why they kill each other. 

Sixth: Finally, it’s rewarding to “take a close and uncomfortable look at the world.” (Walter Mosley). In mysteries I see, up-close, the worst side of human beings and the best side. I have the possibility to watch people make choices in difficult circumstances, to learn and clarify the differences between good and evil. In this sense, mysteries are like traditional folktales, and I have always loved traditional tales.

Most of the reasons I’ve given for writing mysteries, are also reasons for writing in any genre. At base, I simply love to write, and I think that as I work to understand my characters – which means understanding myself as well – I become more human.