Sure it’s research, but the food is good
September 8, 2009
If I could invite three characters to dinner, who would they be and what would be on the menu?
I’ve been feeling cut off from my German inspiration here on the island, so I would have a German night.
The menu would be provided by Laslzo from “Gloomy Sunday: Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod.” It would be his famous rouladen with gravy, potato dumplings, red cabbage and Brussel sprouts.To my right would be any role that Sebastian Koch has ever played (if CJ gets George Clooney…). He could be that sympathetic SS command from “Black Book” or that upright playwright from “The Lives of Others” or “Stauffenberg” or “Speer” depending on how he was feeling. Any of them would be a treasure trove of information for my book, although Ludwig Muentze would be my first choice. Muenzte could tell me about the command structure of the Nazi army, and how he managed to secure such a plum post in Holland.
Next to him would be his partner, Carice van Houten (hey, I’m happily married) so I could beg her to be Hannah Vogel in the movie made from my book. Based on her work in “Black Book” and “Valkyrie,” she’d be perfect. And I’d really love a few minutes with Rachel/Ellis to ask her about life as a spy in Holland in World War II and where she played as a singer. What would she have for me for tips and tricks to navigate through an occupied country collecting information while staying one step ahead of the occupiers?
Finally, I’d like to have that creepy Colonel Landa from “Ridiculous Basterds.” I wouldn’t be alone with him, mind you, and I would have to have Ryan Lock from “Lockdown” working security to keep an eye on him, but I think he would definitely hold up his end of the conversation. After dinner, I’d send him quickly back to the land of fiction, but the others could stay for tea and apple strudel. Then we could invite over Salley Bowles and Clifford from “Cabaret” and find a good place to go dancing.
Sam Spade in a Cage Match with Precious Ramotswe
September 1, 2009
by Rebecca Cantrell
On the left, wearing a rumpled trench coat and reeking of Scotch, is Sam Spade. He’s a tough looking customer, with the face to prove it. But he’s out of his element without his trusty gun. Still, it’s not going to be easy to take him down. In his corner, he has Effie, his disillusioned secretary. She looks as likely to stuff the threadbare towel down his throat as throw it in. One red lacquered fingernail taps against the liquor bottle.
On the right is a large figure covered by a robe with a hood. It moves with such calm authority that Sam gets even more edgy. He’s not a big guy. His opponent has height, weight, and probably reach on him. And no one’s allowed out of the cage.
The figure shrugs off the robe, folds it neatly, and passes it through the cage bars. Her brightly patterned dress matches her blue and white head scarf. She waves and Sam flinches.
It’s Precious Ramotswe.
In her corner sits JLB Maketoni. He doesn’t look the least bit nervous. With him are two children, Motholeli and Puso. Motholeli holds a steaming cup of red bush tea.
The opponents walk toward each other in the ring. Sam’s head is down, his fists are up. Precious’s arms are loose by her side.
The lights flicker. Go out. The crowds gasps. The audience babbles so loudly no one can hear what’s going on in the ring.
The lights blaze back to life a few minutes later. Sam is sobbing on his knees in front of Effie. He apologizes for his past behavior and proposes to her on the spot.
Mma Rawotse sips her red bush tea with a mysterious smile. Peeking from between her fingers is a slip of paper. On it? The location of the real Maltese falcon, of course.
Worse Than Sex Scenes
August 25, 2009
This is the post I’ve been dreading writing. I’d sooner admit to my criminal past (OK, I actually finessed that one), than write about my favorite book.
It’s not that I don’t read. I do. I read constantly. I’m currently reading:
• HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISON OF AZKABAN (aloud. All the Harry Potters are much funnier that way. I’m sure they’d be even better if I could do accents).
• FIVE QUARTS (a great collection of essays on blood. Wonderful historical background and a sweet love story too.)
• THE NAZI OLYMPICS (a museum exhibition catalog I picked up at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Lots of pictures. Grim ending, I know, even though I’m not there yet)
• THE XIth OLYMPIC GAMES BERLIN, 1936 OFFICIAL REPORT VOLUME I (646 page summary of the games written by the German government for the Olympic committee shortly after the games ended. I’m kind of skimming this as it’s pretty dense stuff, including a list of all the extra subway trains added, number of policemen added to various beats, etc.)
• THE DOOMSDAY KEY by James Rollins (a rollicking fun read and I always want to get some popcorn while I’m reading it)
• THE PAPERCLIP CONSIPIRARY by Tom Bower (a nonfiction book that details the rush after World War II to capture German scientists, whitewash their pasts, and bring them to the United States, Britain, and Russia to work).
• TRAIL SINISTER by Sefton Delmer (a lively and charming autobiography about a British journalist’s adventures in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s).
Do you see a pattern? Well, except for the research stuff, me neither. And that’s my problem. I read constantly, shamelessly, and indiscriminately. And I always have. There, I admitted that on the Internet. Why do I still feel much more embarrassed than relieved?
I don’t have one favorite book. I have a thousand. And I can’t write intelligently about any of them. I get all bollixed up. I have tons of friends, heck everyone else on this freakin’ blog, I bet, who write beautifully about books. I can’t. For me, that’s as hard as writing sex scenes (and don’t get me started there).
Anyone want to analyze that? What can’t you write about that you feel you should be able to write about?
Where I Like to Write
August 11, 2009
Ah, this one’s more complicated than it looks. I grew up with four siblings and it seems like we constantly have house guests or extras around. So, I like to write anywhere that no one is poking me, talking to me, waving their arms, sitting on my hands while I type (you know how you are), talking loudly on the phone, asking for food, handing me papers to sign, standing around with bandaids or pressing medical issues, crying, or just in general expecting me to interact with them. This means I usually need to leave the house.
The good news: I can write any place I’m not being actively bothered. I’ve written outside at my blue desk staring at the ocean, at cafes, in airplanes, in airports, on friends’ couches, at the beach, in the closet, in a snow cave (that one’s hard to do for very long), on the subway, and in the bathroom at night (hotel room with roommates).
Right now I write at Starbucks. I put on my headphones, sip my chai, and drink up the air conditioning. I like to write where it’s chilly enough to need a light jacket or a long-sleeved shirt. In Hawaii, that’s not easy. I like to write in the corner with my back against the wall so no Nazis can sneak up on me. I like to go out into the bright, warm sunshine when I’m finished so that I can remember that, as real as it seemed while I was writing it, I actually made it all up and the real world is much warmer and fuzzier and gentler (yes, I know that’s not really true, but it’s what I like to think, so don’t burst my bubble).
My favorite place to write: from deep inside my head, from that place where you can’t hear any noises no matter how loud they are, where you don’t notice people walking by, where you don’t even realize that time is passing. As long as no one pokes me, I can get there almost any where. On good days.
How about you? How do you get to the magic place?
Rebecca Cantrell, A Trace of Smoke
Criminal Writerly Habits
August 4, 2009
Do I have criminal habits?
I have some habits that would be considered criminal in writer’s court, punishable by not getting as much writing done as I think I should. Here are the top 5, in reverse order. Try not to be too shocked.
5. Bitching about promotion. I hate it. We all hate it (except for Kelli, but I forgive her because she
’s so darn nice when I complain about it). So, maybe I could just shut up about it. Enough said.
4. Remembering only the bad reviews. I got almost uniformly great reviews for A TRACE OF SMOKE, including starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. Do I remember quotes from them? No. But I can recite all the damning bits from the ‘mixed’ New York Times review. Obviously, this is a trend that must be reversed. I must set about memorizing the good reviews and blurbs and become positively insufferable.
3. Not backing things up. I do back up my work daily. But not my iPhone. Not when I’m traveling. This one ranks so high because a couple of gallons of the Chesapeake Bay killed my iPhone with all my pictures from my
2. Over-researching. I write historical mysteries, so I 
have to do a lot of research. But I overdo it because it’s just plain fascinating. I find out tons of things I don’t really need to know to finish the book. For example, I have a scene with Hitler in it in A NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES. I read tons of diary entries of people who were at that event, bits from the Nuremberg trial, historical analyses, etc. I compiled them all and picked out what I needed for my scene. That should have been enough. But I kept going. I call it the “what would Hitler smoke?” syndrome. He’s not smoking in the scene, so I don’t need to know it. But I do. In fact, that’s a trick question. Hitler was a nonsmoker. (hey, I did get to use that bit of research somewhere!)
1. Spending too much time on the Internet. Sure, I can pretend that some of it’s promotion and some of it even is, but I think I’d get a lot more done if I moved to a remote island with no Internet connectivity. Wait, I do live on a remote island. If I just disabled my wireless connection…
What are your writer’s crimes? Reader’s crimes?
Outline or wing it?
July 28, 2009
Both.
There. Done. My shortest blog post ever.
More details? It won’t be pretty.
Don’t tell my editor, but I write the first 50 pages blind. I have no idea who the characters are or what they will do. Because I write historical fiction, I know when and where they’ll be, and have researched the era and place for hours and hours and hours and…you get the picture. I have some ideas of cool or truly awful historical events and facts I want to look at, but that’s all.
After I finish those 50 pages I read them to see if they might actually be part of a novel. If not, I pitch them and write another 50 pages. If so, I start to outline. I outline the whole book, beginning to end.
Then I write another 50 pages. At the end of those I discover that my outline is wrong. The outline is wrong both going forward (i.e., things I haven’t written yet) and going backward (i.e., things I have written that weren’t in the original outline). More outlining. I write another 50 pages and…you get the idea.
Looking at it put down here, it seems totally crazy, but it is my process. After having sat through many classes on “the writing process” I’ve discovered only one truth: Your process is your own. Figure out what your process is and honor it. If you think outlining sucks all the fun out of writing, don’t make yourself do it. If the thought of embarking on a year long journey of novel writing without any damn idea of what you’re doing gives you hives, by all means write an outline. Neither approach is wrong, despite what you may hear.
When I’m all done I match up the outline to the actual book I wrote so I can keep track of what happens in the book. Rewriting starts. I rewrite tons as I’m one of those weird writers who writes too little and always has to add new scenes (as opposed to the writers who write too much and have to delete scenes).
There it is: the good, the bad, and the ugly. My process.
What’s yours?
Criminal past
July 15, 2009
Not having an actual criminal past that I am willing to admit to on the Internet, I decided to talk about the crimes that started me down the road to publication.
When I was on Spring Break near Munich, I skipped out on Oktoberfest and went to Dachau. Wind moaned through the open wooden barracks. I shivered in my 1980s fashionable black leather ankle boots, transfixed by pictures of some of the greatest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated. One wall held a row of colored triangles: yellow, red, green, blue, purple, pink, brown and black. Above, thick black letters spelled out the categories: Jewish, political prisoner, habitual criminals, emigrant, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, gypsies and asocials (a catchall for murderers, thieves, and those who violated the laws prohibiting Aryans from having intercourse with Jews).
Even though I was just a teenager, I’d read enough to know what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Communists, and the gypsies. But I’d had no idea they’d imprisoned people for being gay.
I stuffed my hands deep into the pockets of my too light coat (with rolled up sleeves and the collar up in the back, because it was 1985) and thought about my host brother. He was the same age as me and we often went clubbing in Berlin until the wee small hours of the morning. The subways stopped running around midnight, and if you missed that last one, you were out until five. My brother had perfectly style 80s blonde hair, an extravagant fashion sense, and he was gay into the marrow of his bones. Forty years before he would have gone to the camps for it.
All the way back home I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s been twenty five years and I’m still thinking about it. I wrote my senior history thesis on it, where I discovered that when the Americans freed the camps we sent the pink triangles straight to prison. Because it was still against the law.
Hard to find a bigger crime than the Holocaust, and that’s where my road to publication led me.
* * *
Fun fact for the week: My next book opens with a zeppelin-jacking, so I got to do a lot of research on zeppelins. I’m willing to bet that in terms of miles traveled, zeppelins were far safer than the airplanes of the day. Anyone know where I could track down that statistic?
It depends on where you’re sitting
June 30, 2009
NEWS: Busy week for A TRACE OF SMOKE. SMOKE is Thriller Book Club selection at dearreader.com:
http://www.supportlibrary.com/fm/shelf_main.cfm?win1=LLIST&id1=81&CFID=21947286&CFTOKEN=97892259
SMOKE also got a good review in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper on Sunday:
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009906280314
Finally, SMOKE and I got a write up in the Hawaii Tribune:
http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/articles/2009/06/26/features/features05.txt
POST: Do I think like the hero or the villain?
I’d like to say I think like the hero, and mostly I do. I tend to follow the rules, try to help people out, and just in general be an annoying goody-goody. I’m so bad at lying that I have to call my sister when I need a whopper. I won’t tell you which sister, and I have three. But one of them is a genius at lying. Simple lies, complicated lies. She’s got the gift. She doesn’t lie all the time, but it’s there when she needs it, and it’s also there when I do.
So, I think I’m mostly a hero.
But recently I borrowed a friend’s car. A non-writing civilian with a real job. He was having problems with his boss and told me not to put anything in the trunk so it would be empty when I picked him up from work. Without missing a beat, I said, “So you can put in a body?” He looked at me in total astonishment and said, “So I can put in the boxes if I have to clear out my desk.” And that was when I realized that maybe I think a bit like the villain after all.
I’m trying to pass that off as a good thing, so pay attention here (and, no, I didn’t call my sister before coming up with this explanation). Every hero has some bit of villainy he needs to vanquish in himself and conversely every villain has noble reasons for her actions (yup, I’m messing with the pronouns just for fun). 
Hero? My main character in A TRACE OF SMOKE thinks long and hard about taking in an adorable five year old orphan who appears on her doorstep one night. She doesn’t send him out into the darkness alone in the middle of the night.
But she thinks about it.
Villain? My main villain is based on a historical figure, top Nazi Ernst Roehm, who was sure that he was the hero who was going to restore Germany to greatness. He did terrible, reprehensible things. He also had a warrior code that he lived by, he suffered horribly in World War I, and he was a highly decorated soldier.
Like all villains since the dawn of time, he was human.
For better and for worse.
Not a grown up job
June 23, 2009
Why do I read crime/mystery/thrillers?
The first part of the answer is: because I read everything. I read crime, mystery, thriller, literary, historical, some sci-fi, the occasional romance, film scripts, and nonfiction. If it’s printed, I read it. Probably some kind of weird compulsion I ought to see someone about.
Reading takes me to different worlds and different lives. I doubt I’ll ever climb Mount Everest, fall in love with a Scottish Highlander, or solve a tricky murder. But because of books I can experience all that while sitting in a hammock sipping lemonade and listening to the surf. I know, it’s a rough life in Hawaii, but I will point out that the hammock broke because the salt air ate through the nylon so you know that it’s not all bliss out here. Yes, we have real problems.
My mother would say that I read mysteries because I have an overblown sense of justice and I expect the world to be fair. As usual: she’d be right. I do. And in mysteries everything happens for a reason, the evil are exposed and, usually, they even get punished for what they did. Who could not want to read that?
Obviously there’s a leap from reading them to writing them.
I could make up a deep psychological reason, but really I write them because they are fun. I get to do all kinds of research and ask questions that normally cause trouble. I just recently watched someone blow a giant pile of lava into gravel, begged an autopsy report off someone, found an expert on chemical weapons, and am going to spend this morning watching “The Olympiad” by Leni Riefenstahl. As a friend said: “It’s not a grown up job.”
I like that.
Favorite Criminal Mind
June 22, 2009
I am currently blogging over at 7criminalminds.blogspot.com with 6 other crime writers. I’ll be cross posting the blog entries here too.
My current favorite criminal mind is a guilty pleasure. I first met him a few years ago in a place I don’t usually hang out: TV. We had mutual friends, so I thought I’d give him a go in spite of my reservations. I Netflixed him.
I didn’t want to like him. He’s brutal, sadistic, and good at what he does. Even the people who do like him don’t want to. Because he does horrible things. There’s just no getting around that.
Sure, he had a traumatic childhood. But that’s no excuse.
Slowly, he grew on me. I tried to resist him, but he was self aware and funny. A deadly combination. He has a strong honor code too. It’s just warped. And I love his theme song.
But really, he’d make a good roommate. He’s very tidy and organized. Easy going too, most of the time. You know he wouldn’t drink straight from the milk carton. He can cook too, at least breakfast. If you asked him, he’d leave the seat down. If it was his job to make sure that the air conditioner got fixed, you’d know he’d get it done. Especially the air conditioner.
I admire how he treats his girlfriend. She’s been through her own traumas, but she’s sweet. He’s great with her kids too. A real father figure.
Dark, dangerous, yet strangely reliable.
His only problem: he’s a serial killer. His only redemption: he only kills other killers. Ah Dexter! In fiction, you fascinate me. In real life, stay away.
I wrote and scheduled this post a week ago, but after I read CJs post and realized that she’d chosen the same guy, I thought of rewriting it, but decided to let it stand. Sometimes, panelists agree.