Category: Favorite authors

Writing Tip

ring-1671094_1280Favorite Author — J.R.R. Tolkien

I am no fan of fantasy.  I didn’t read much of it as a kid – I was hooked on mysteries – so that may be why I can’t get interested now.  If I pick up a fantasy book thick enough to break my foot, I realize I will have to take notes to remember the world’s regions, languages, and alliances, not to mention each character’s abilities, loyalties, and hatreds.  So I quietly lower the book, making sure my feet are clear, and run away.

But I am a huge fan of The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.  I have a special fondness for The Hobbit.  In seventh grade, I was assigned to read it, and it was one of the few assigned stories I ever enjoyed.  Most of my required reading concerned characters who learned valuable lessons and then watched a loved one die.  The Hobbit has a few deaths, but they seem reasonable since they occur during a battle.  And with all the action and heroics, no one has time for valuable lessons.  I loved it.hobbit-1584058_1280

I read The Lord of the Rings when the movies came out.  The best sections are the ones concerning the hobbits, which Mr. Tolkien said were his favorite to write.  I can tell.  The human characters begin to bore me after a while.  They are all so tall and grave and noble that I begin longing for a human who is short and frivolous, and ignoble.

I have recently become interested in myths and enjoy The Silmarillion because it is myths for a modern audience.  As greatly as Greek and Norse myths have influenced our culture, many of the stories make us scratch our heads because they were not written for us but for the people of their time.  The Silmarillion is accessible and identifiable to modern readers since it was written by a man of the twentieth century.

It’s structure is more like pure storytelling than a novel, and I think Mr. Tolkien writes better in that style.  Whatever the reaons, I return to The Silmarillion again and again.

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Writing Tip

crime-999066_1280Favorite Author — What I Learned from Rex Stout

I learned that an engaging narrator, once he or she grabs the reader’s attention, can lead a reader anywhere.

Mr. Stout wrote 46 books in the Wolfe-Goodwin series, many of them collections of short stories or novellas.  The mysteries are decent, some better than others.  My personal favorites are the novellas “Black Orchids”, “Die Like a Dog”, and “Kill Now – Pay Later”, the seasonal short stories in And Four to Go, and the first novel I read Too Many Cooks.  But I didn’t work my way through the series for the plots.  I forget a lot of them and can reread the stories, trying to figure out the clues like it was my first time through.  What I loved was being carried away with Archie’s wry narration of events.  He’s like a an old friend I can rely on for an entertaining visit.

Here are a few lines I enjoy:

“When I feel superior to someone, which I frequently do, I need a better reason than the color of my skin.”

Describing a fight he and fellow P.I. Saul Panzer get in with a suspect: “He kicked Saul where it hurt, and knocked a lamp over, and bumped my nose with his skull.  When he sank his teeth in my arm I thought, That will do for you, mister, and jerked the Marley from my pocket and slapped him above the ear, and he went down.”   From “Fourth of July Picnic”

In Too Many Cooks, he calls one woman, “the swamp-woman — the kind who can move her eyelids slowly three times and you’re stuck in a marsh and might as well give up”.

Since I write in first-person, I need to give my narrator a distinct personality, with a unique way of describing people and events.  Giving him or her strong opinions also makes the narrator interesting.  Archie has an opinion on everything.  Because my narrator is a teenager, it’s easy to give him strong opinions, such as he hates country music, which makes him stand out in rural West Virginia.

Another of my favorite authors P.G. Wodehouse said, “Stout’s supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin.”  Millions of readers would agree.

Here is a chronological list of the series.  If you do find you like it, you don’t have to read it in order, except do not read A Family Affair until you have read them all.  It has a plot twist unlike any other in the series and you don’t want to ruin it.

 

 

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Writing Tip

detective-1039883_1280Favorite Author — Rex Stout

When I was in college, I majored in English and took a course called “Detective Film and Fiction”.   Yes, it was a real course, and yes, it was a lot of fun because I was a mystery fan and a film buff.

I was introduced to the world of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin when I was assigned Too Many Cooks, which opens with how Archie feels about getting his employer, Nero Wolfe, onto a train when Wolfe rarely ever leaves his New York City brownstone.

“Walking up and down the platform alongside the train in the Pennsylvania Station, having wiped the sweat from my brow, I lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming suit; after what I had just gone through.”

Archie’s sarcastic narration hooked me, and I went on to read the whole series.  Rex Stout began the Wolfe mysteries in 1934 and wrote them until his death in 1975.

As William G. Tapply writes in an introductions to The Second Confession, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin are paired like “Sherlock Holmes meets Sam Spade”, British whodunit meets hard-boiled detective.

Weighing a seventh of a ton, Nero Wolfe is the brains of the pair, indulging his gourmet tastes as he sits in his custom-made desk chair in his brownstone and solves mysteries

agent-1294795_1280Archie Goodwin is his employee, acting as legman, secretary, bodyguard, and nuisance.  As the last, it’s Archie’s job to annoy Wolfe into working because the man has a lazy streak as big as his custom-made chair.

I never liked Wolfe.  He may have Holmes’s brains but none of his eccentric appeal.  I read the series because Archie’s first-person narration is so engagingly entertaining.

The character I found most intriguing is Saul Panzer, a free-lance P.I. who often works with Archie for Wolfe.  We only pick up tidbits about his personal life but those little facts and Archie’s unqualified admiration for his professional skills makes me wish Stout had written at least one book showcasing Saul.

Next time, I will write about what I learned from the series.

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Writing Tip

scooby-doo-2063042_1280Sheer Luck Holmes

I love parodies.  And I love the Sherlock Holmes stories, so reading a Sherlock Holmes parody is a lot of fun.  But only if the parody is good-natured.  If I read a story and sense the author’s aim is to be mean-spirited, then all the fun drains out of the parody.

Below are some of my favorite Sherlock Holmes parodies.  All of them can be found in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories edited by Otto Penzler, who gives an introduction to each story.  Enjoy!

“The Adventure of the Two Collaborators” and “The Late Sherlock Holmes” by James M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan.

In the first story, Holmes’s deductions so amaze Watson that he leaps to the ceiling, noting  that the ceiling “is much dented”.

“From a Detective’s Notebook” by P.G. Wodehouse.  I love the beginning of this story.

” A private investigator asks a group of men, ‘I wonder . . . if it would interest you chaps to hear the story of what I always look upon as the greatest triumph of my career?’

We said No, it wouldn’t, and he began.”

“Detective Stories Gone Wrong: the Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs” by Robert Barr

This one makes me laugh because Kombs find the weapon used in the crime using ridiculous deductions.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had no reverence for his creation and wrote two parodies of his own: “How Watson Learned the Trick” and “The Field Bazaar”

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Writing Tip

sherlock-holmes-book-1959204_1280What I Learned From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I learned how important it is to create memorable characters.  Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were so believable that during Doyle’s lifetime, some readers  thought they were real people.  Now they have moved into immortality.

You couldn’t have the one without the other.  If you don’t believe me, read the two stories Holmes tells, “The Blanched Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane”.  While they are interesting, they aren’t like the others when the two are working together.   Watson’s admiration and friendship make Holmes human.basil-rathbone-402601_1280

Doyle also created strong secondary characters.  He may have invented the idea of an arch-nemesis, a villain who shares some abilities as the hero but uses them for evil purposes.  Professor Moriarty has inspired a a slew of imitators.

Irene Adler is another fascinating character.  The one woman to foil Holmes and inspire his admiration, she appears in only one short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”.  We learn so many interesting tidbits about her history and character that she has fanned the flames of authors’ imaginations for a century.  My favorite is a short story entitled “A Scandal in Winter” by Gillian Linscott and can be in Holmes for the Holidays and The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.

When I create characters, I want them to come alive to my readers and dropping hints about their hobbies or opinions or dreams, as Doyle did, can aid that effort.  With main characters, I have time to scatter in additional facts about their lives even though those facts are not critical to the plot.  But I must not overload my story with unnecessary details.

Secondary characters are more difficult.  I want to make them memorable but have little space to do it.  I sometimes give them back stories, even though these stories won’t appear in print, so I have a better handle on how the character should act.  Devising revealing traits, such as the character’s appearance, expressions, or speech pattern, can give him or her distinction.pipe-407547_1280

In my novel, the owner of a notoriously wild bar is an important character in the last third of the book, but I didn’t want to bog down my narrative with long descriptions and backstory.  So I tried to convey the character’s personality through dialogue and actions.  For example, I have him say “You guys” instead of “y’uns” which is what everyone else in the county uses.  That is a hint to the reader that the bar owner is not a local.

I have recently read to my kids adaptations of the Holmes stories for children.  They can’t get enough of them.  One more generation is becoming enthralled in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

 

 

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