by Rebecca Cantrell

Here’s an opening based on a thriller I’m working on. I fudged a bit. The scene is set in Venice, so there’s no high rise, and Clara’s in her 20s instead of her 30s. But at least I followed a couple of the rules of the assignment. There’s a gun and he’s older than her.

THRILLER:

A woman in a burgundy suit showed her to Commissario Rutelli’s office. Stacks of paper towered from each corner of his scarred wooden desk. The papers on the bottom looked older than he did. Between the stacks was a pistol. She had seen one like it before in a glass case in Vienna. And another near the body of a dying man.

“Signora Bloch.” He rose and took her hand between both of his. “You are well?”

She pried her hand free and gestured to the pistol. “A connoisseur, I see.”

“The M1910?” He made a sound of dismissal. “A common gun here.”

“Yet it is the gun that killed Archduke Ferdinand and started the first world war,” she said. “The tool of an assassin.”

* * *

I rewrote it as a mystery. I don’t quite like it yet, but decided to post it anyway. Not all experiments are successful, and that’s important to show too. Or at least that’s the high falutin’ excuse I’m spouting so that I can gracefully give up and go to bed.

MYSTERY:

I took a water taxi to the police station. The brackish water reeked of decaying fish, the smell of the sea that my mother always raved about. I clenched my hands in my lap and tried not to think about her.

At the Questura a woman in a burgundy suit with a golden scarf knotted in that clever European fashion that I could never master showed me to Commissario Rutelli’s office.

I knocked once and went right in before he could send me away.

He sat in a rickety office chair that failed all Silicon Valley’s ergonomic standards, head resting on a stack of papers piled up on his desk. A pistol sat square on his desk next to his outstretched hand.

“Hello?” I asked, but he didn’t move. In fact, he wasn’t going to ever move again.

* * *

You be the judge: is the thriller a thriller? the mystery a mystery? or did I cheat the assignment?

Today’s post is about inciting a riot and then getting off scot free. Hannah Vogel, as we know, never gets off scot free, no matter how glib she might be. This is because her author is mean to her and forces her to constantly confront Nazis in a time of escalating evil. I’ve assured everyone that, between shootings and stabbings and poisonings, she sits around in Switzerland eating the really good chocolate and getting daily massages from a hot Swedish guy named Ulf. So far, no one believes me.

I’m suffering from a bit of disbelief myself. According to my publisher and Amazon and Barnes & Noble and various other online sources, the paperback version of A NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES is being released TODAY. Yes, today. Sorry for shouting there, but I’m excited.

I want to find my book in the wild (a bookstore) and take pictures and hold it and pet it and casually watch every single person who comes in to see if they will hold it and pet it and buy it. I want to turn its cover out when no one is looking. I want to write my name on it and stick the “Autographed Copy” sticker on the front with my own hands.

But I can’t. I live on one of the most geographically remote islands on Earth and it’s turning out to be literarily remote as well. Our local Borders went out of business on Saturday. We bought “The Haynes Manual for the Starship Enterprise” on the very last day, plus the first Ian Rutledge mystery because I felt that Inspector Rutledge has been through enough and couldn’t bear to think what might happen to him after closing. Which is a long way of saying: my book isn’t there this time, because there is, in point of fact, no there there.

We have a lovely indie bookstore called Kona Stories in the Keauhou Shopping Center. I’ve bought most of my books there for the last few years and I’ll definitely get to pet A NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES when it finally arrives there. But it’s not there yet.

So, I’d like to incite a riot. Please rush to the nearest bookstore and look for the beautiful paperback with the zeppelin on the cover. Take pictures and pet it and turn its cover out. And, if you want, feel free to sign it and slap a sticker right on the front! Talk your way out of it if you can.