I had my second COVID vaccine shot on Wednesday, and when I didn’t manifest a reaction (beyond soreness at the injection site, which I’d had with the first one) by Friday, I thought I was in the clear.
Not so.
Saturday morning, I woke up stuffy-headed and a bit light-headed and running a mild (not even a full degree) fever.
Despite that, I sat down to work on “Child of Iron.” And I got a page or so … and then realized that the event I was trying to force into the story just wouldn’t fit, and the page needed to be deleted. (I will revisit that decision before I actually delete the page; I could be wrong.)
So, I grabbed a mystery paperback that I’d bought earlier in the year (or maybe toward the end of last year) when my favorite used-book store was closing. I’m not going to name the book or the author, even though I’m confident it’s the only one he (male name on the cover) ever wrote.
Why am I confident? Because even typing the full title and author’s name into the search box on Amazon didn’t pull up this book. It wasn’t until I backed out to do a basic Bing/Google search on name and title that it came up. Yes, there was an Amazon link, as well as a Goodreads link. Amazon showed two reviews (both 4-star); Goodreads had a couple of dozen (averaging 2.5 stars).
My own opinion is lower than the Goodreads average (1 star) because … well, a lot of reasons.
The biggest one is that it reads like something Dame Agatha might have written, despite a copyright date of 1992 and a publication date of 1997. That only matters because knowing that it was completed in 1992, and assuming it’s set contemporaneous to that date, the technology just doesn’t match up to what’s presented.
As one example, Our Hero and his Chief of Police boss (the story takes place in a wealthy but small university town) waste half a day driving to/from the nearest Big Town to get some forensics results. Now, in 1992 (let alone 1997, when it was published), telephones had been around for a century (Bell’s patent was filed in 1876) and widely distributed (in the U.S., where the book takes place) for half that.
Fax machines had been around for a decade and were widely available (again in the U.S.). Certainly, the university would have one, and it’s not implausible that the police station in a wealthy town would have one. (At the very least, *A* government or public service office would have one, and it would be a lot faster to walk or drive ten minutes to the next office and retrieve a fax than to make a four-hour round trip to the next town.)
Okay, that’s more an irritant than anything else, and not anything a writer can particularly learn from, aside from a general warning to be cognizant of technological changes.
So what do we (read: I) learn from this book?
Well, first – pacing. Aside from long, clunky paragraphs of description that don’t create tension, there’s no sense of urgency in solving the first murder. In fact, one of the first scenes (seriously, one of the first five in the whole book) involves Our Hero, his CoP, the town mayor, and the university president (the story takes place at the university) having a discussion about calling a press conference (including reporters from major daily newspapers … like the Washington Post and the New York Times, and the story doesn’t take place in either of those cities) and deciding whether or not to call in investigators from Philadelphia.
Further, there are at least two scenes in which Our Hero pulls out a legal pad and starts summarizing everything he’s learned, including playing back recordings of interviews) and just thinking about it. No drama, no tension.
The second murder occurs, and still there’s no sense of urgency, no sense that, wait, whoever it is could kill again. Just a leisurely feeling that the murder needs to be solved.
In the end, the solution turns on one reference to one character being bisexual that, honestly, if I hadn’t read the book in one (very long, punctuated by naps) sitting, I probably would’ve forgotten. And even then, Our Hero doesn’t have any solid evidence, so he – with the help of his CoP and a university department head – sets up a trap for the killer, and then they persuade said killer to confess.
Lessons learned:
Remind the reader of things once in a while. Oh, don’t go all in on tell them what you’re going to say, tell them, and then tell them what you said – that would be tedious. But having more than one reference to a salient fact isn’t a bad idea.
Use description wisely – just telling the reader how something looks isn’t enough. How does the character feel about or react to the setting? And for the love of G*d, don’t dump it all in half-page long blocks of text.
Skip the scenes that don’t add much of substance (i.e., character, plot, tension) – like the daily press briefings that CoP is giving to the reporters of the major dailies … who apparently have nothing else to do but camp out in a university town waiting for developments in the murders of a grad student and a retired professor.
Hopefully, the next entry I write like this will be learning from a “good” book.
