The question of place has been in the air and on blogs lately, including here in a useful post by Donalee Moulton. I’ve been thinking about another perspective that came up in my reading lately—location as muse.

Few writers or artists stay in one locale but if they do so it’s because of a special affinity for that one place. Wendell Berry is well known for his series of novels and short stories about the fictional Port William, set in his beloved Kentucky, as well as for his nonfiction on the issues besieging farmers and farm communities. By focusing on one location, Berry creates an entire community of interrelated families, histories of growth and change, and effects of changes in the larger, surrounding world. His narrow focus on one place, one he knows well, has led to a prolific career in both fiction and nonfiction, including poetry. Reading even one book introduces the reader to an entire family, way of life (farming), and community (Port William).

Sally Mann, the photographer, has made the same choice by focusing on Lexington, Virginia, her home state. She’s known for her photographs of children and families as well as the area in Virginia.

I think of these two artists because their work stands out for its depth and breadth while not straying far from home. Each piece is linked to another, and each location is explored in several ways. I think of these two writers also because I understand their sense of rootedness and its importance. It’s a truism to say that our place shapes us, but it is less often observed that we are still most often limited in our understanding of what that location means, of how it shapes us, of what the consequences are.

When I began writing crime fiction I created a fictional town, Mellingham, which is really the town I grew up in. Several readers have asked if that town is really X or Y, usually referring to a small town in Essex County they’re familiar with. The only people who recognize the place are those who live there, and have for some time. (The key, which few seem to consider, is the layout of certain streets.)

There are seven books in the Mellingham series, and I have long considered these enough because these seven stories complete the trajectory of Chief Joe Silva’s adult life, his progression from a chronically reluctant bachelor to a devoted stepfather in a committed relationship. But there are more stories in Mellingham, and more corners of the town that have yet to be explored. I’ve been struggling with this question for some time—do I continue the Mellingham series, or let it go (as I have) and continue with the two other series that haven’t reached their finale. Anita Ray, in the Anita Ray series, isn’t getting any closer to finding a partner or changing her carefree life of sleuthing with and without a camera. Felicity O’Brien, in the Pioneer Valley series, is more likely to reach her fitting ending, which includes changes to her beloved farm. But I’m not sure I want to write that one either.

The commitment to a single place means we see more of it. We see what we don’t need as well as what we think we need for a particular story. For me, knowing the town’s history also means a cacophony of voices from the past calling to me to resolve the mystery of the unusual tools found in the shed of what was once a furniture workshop in the 1930s. Or the story of a small freestanding ballroom converted to a condo in the middle of a pasture where no flock of four-legged animals ever roamed. The loss of craftsmanship in modern industry circles around the first history and the changing world of New England social life is hidden in the second. 

For me, writing a crime novel isn’t a question of merely coming up with an idea and planting it in a preferred location. I struggle with setting as much as with character. The ideas I spelled out above are organic to the place, and understanding how that can be so defines the story. To tell the story of one particular small-scale furniture workshop I have to resuscitate the Mellingham series. Some stories are so insistent. They can be worse than some characters (alive and fictional).

I’ve had the Mellingham series on my mind because Worldwide Mystery is reprinting the last two books in the Mellingham series for its book club as well as general sales. Chief Joe Silva retired, but the town is still there, and its history unhidden. What to do, what to do.

Back in the Dark Ages, probably only in the 1980s though it feels like it was that long ago, I was hired to edit the manuscript of a visiting scholar at MIT who was considered “very important.” As a result, another academic had already taken a pass over his ms before it was sent to the press and then to me. I don’t know why they did this, but they did. It was probably a warning, akin to carrots are good for you, and so is liver.

The ms was pretty clean, as we say, and I settled down for what I considered an easy job. My biggest decision was how to style certain topic titles that he used throughout the book. I scanned the pages, saw no consistent choice had been made, and picked a format that wouldn’t clutter up the page visually and yet be clear for the reader. I chugged along happily, with few other editorial issues to slow me down, and turned in the ms on time. Piece of cake.

About a week later I heard from the helpful academic who had read the ms first and, unknown to me (and not evident to me or anyone else), had made some stylistic choices that, in my drive for consistency, I had reversed, and instead imposed another stylistic choice, mine. To this day I still wonder that he thought he had sent over a completely edited ms.

I rarely edited fiction, but when we first set up the Larcom Review, in 1998, that changed, and I learned that writers of fiction have a different attitude to editing compared to writers of nonfiction, and I don’t argue with it most of the time. In one short story, the only change I made was to remove a single comma. The author restored it. The story was not, I hasten to explain, a mystery but a literary story, so perhaps that explains it.

Editing is always on my mind, but especially now because the editors at Crime Spell Books are editing the sixth anthology this summer. Death Camas will be out in the fall, in October, but the work is done in the summer. The other editors have turned in their changes, and I’m adding mine. So far the editors fall into two camps, those who take out commas, and those who put them in. My job is to integrate my edits and approve the ms changes overall.

At this point in a discussion about editing someone always pops up with the infamous quote: “Consistency—the hobgoblin of small minds.” At which point I used to send them to some poorly edited books so they could enjoy a text free of consistency and even coherence sometimes.

The trouble with editing is we all need it, no one wants to admit they need it, and amateurs aren’t really clear on what it is or entails. But it’s good for all of us, like veggies. One or two of my Beta readers have also been editors and I always looked forward to what I could learn from their reports and responses. Good editing is like a healthy dessert, an oatmeal cookie instead of a chocolate torte, after a healthy main course of composing the ms.

I’ve stretched the food metaphor till it’s ready to snap, if I can mix metaphors here (and I can because I’m the author), but we all come up against editing. How we feel about it is key to how much we’ll benefit from it. I try to tell other writers that it doesn’t mean they have to take every suggestion (and each editorial change should be considered a suggestion), but they should care enough about their work to think about why the editor made the change. Is the editor following a strict grammatical rule that offers no flexibility? Does the change take a light-hearted verbal twist and reduce it to a pedestrian phrase? Does the editorial change erase an allusion to another story or author, something to entertain the well-read mystery fan? Is the editor’s change clarifying an idea the author struggled with but couldn’t quite express satisfactorily?

Editing is work. If you love working with words, as I do, it can also be fun. Done with respect for the work and the author, editing can steady a ms, an overarching idea, strengthen the work’s best qualities. Editor and author always have the same goal: to take a good book and make it better.

Annual meetings of library associations are always a fun way to meet librarians from your state or region, and my local chapter of Sisters in Crime (New England chapter) signs up for every one of them in our area. We make new contacts and catch up with colleagues, and I always learn something. 

I make a point of wandering the exhibitors’ room to find out how libraries are changing and what’s new in how things are done. This year turned out to be an eye-opener. I met Susan Ostrowski, co-founder and owner of Reading2Connect, who talked about her work with Alzheimer’s patients, and this is where my eyes were opened.

People with Alzheimer’s are losing their short-term memory but they’re not losing their level of intelligence and intellectual curiosity, which can make once pleasurable activities like reading frustrating and disappointing. The purpose of Susan Ostrowski’s program is to provide these readers with books tailored to their interests and limitations. 

The typical “book” published by Reading2Connect is 4,000 words in 30 pages and approximately five chapters, along with illustrations. The stories are written and structured to accommodate the specific limitations of fading short-term memory. The program has published dozens of stories in various genres but none in mystery fiction. They hope to change that, and to that end Susan Ostrowski explained at length the requirements for one of their books.

Each story will have only two to four named characters, and few or no other proper nouns such as the names of towns, streets, businesses, special buildings. The story is written linearly, with no flashbacks. Each chapter opens with a summary of what has gone before, and what the reader needs to know moving forward. A mystery must still include clues and all the other features of a mystery—crime, motive, clues, investigation, conclusion. The syntax is straightforward, with short sentences in basic declarative form with some variation. Susan stressed that they can take a short story and modify the syntax to meet their needs if the writer overall understands and fulfills their other requirements.

Her description brought to mind the short “Solve-it-yourself” mystery stories in Woman’s World magazine. Through the Short Mystery Fiction Society chat group I’ve met several writers who have published stories there, and appreciate the purity, if you will, of their construction. Although those stories are under 700 words (or thereabouts), they are clear, concise, few characters, usually one setting, etc. The language, though, is probably not exactly what Reading2Connect is looking for, but as I indicated Susan and her editors can work with that.

It’s rare to come across a new genre or even a new publisher today—more often they’re going out of business—but this one is intriguing. Over the years I’ve written short and long fiction, academic articles, nonfiction long and short, reviews, advertising, essays, themed stories and essays, brochures, research grants, fundraising appeals, and probably a lot of other stuff I can’t recall. But this Reading2Connect format is different and something of a challenge. 

Like many other people, the thought of Alzheimer’s is daunting, but I hadn’t stopped to think about it from the person’s point of view—to continue with the same level of intellectual ability and interest thwarted by an unreliable memory. I remember my grandmother at 85 working so hard to pull out of her brain something she knew she knew and just couldn’t find. She was a great reader and continued to read until it became too confusing and frustrating to bear, but she still kept a book nearby.

Susan Ostrowski changed how I look at Alzheimer’s patients in the early stages when they still should be able to enjoy as many of their former pleasures and activities as possible. Finding books written so they can enjoy them must be a great delight.

A final word on Reading2Connect. They have recently received a grant that will enable them to buy short stories for their program. They will pay $300 per mystery story (and perhaps other genres as well).

Finding the Ending

In some stories I know where the ending will be. I work toward it as I construct the plot, discover byways and digressions and facets of characters I hadn’t considered as the story takes shape. That’s one of the advantages of writing crime fiction—the writer has a pretty good idea of where she’s going to end up, still with room for surprises. But that isn’t always the case in some stories. One effort stands out in particular for me. For several weeks I worked on what had seemed to me a simple tale of a fisherman in India, “Tukku’s Dream.”

Tukku gave up fishing after losing a hand to a shark, a fairly common occurrence in that part of India. The reader follows him through a series of jobs as he tries to make sense of his new fear of the water. An unexpected call for help leads to more than anticipated. But I didn’t know how to end the story and kept writing—filling page after page with verbiage and still confused. I gave the story to a friend to read, and his response was terse. The story ended for me right here, he said, pointing to a page about half way through. And he was right. He found the ending after one reading when I couldn’t. I amputated the story at that point and sold it soon after.

The Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva seemed a simple matter of giving Joe a series of crimes to investigate while I introduce the quirky, sometimes criminal inhabitants of his little town. I went along placidly, happily until I finished book number 7, Come About for Murder. And then nothing. Any ideas I had after that seemed more suited to short stories, and Joe found himself marginalized. Only then did I realize what had happened.

In book three, Joe meets Gwen McDuffy, who is guardian to two children. By the end of Family Album, love has blossomed and Joe’s chronic bachelorhood is coming to an end. In Last Call for Justice Joe visits his family and Gwen’s daughter, Jennie, plays a role, and the reader gets to know her and how she views their new family. In Come About for Murder, the focus shifts to Gwen’s son, Philip, who is presented as Joe’s stepson. By the end of the book it is clear that Joe is his father in every possible way, and the family devotion runs deep for them all. 

What I had done in the Mellingham series without realizing it was follow the earlier principle that it took seven mystery novels to tell the story of the main character. This was an idea we avid mystery readers batted back and forth in the 1970s and 1980s, and then as many beloved series expanded to far more than seven books, the idea was mostly forgotten. But there is something to it. 

The form of the mystery novel requires a lot of the writer (and the reader), so it’s not surprising that the additional theme of the series character’s personal life finds less scope in the 250 pages allotted for mystery novels back then. When the format and page length changed, the series focus did also, and we now have mystery novels over 500 pages and some over 1,000 pages, with attention shifting from the main character and family to formerly minor characters.

Writers have far more options now when it comes to length. Our preference is a personal choice, but I still look at my series as focused on one character and how she or he evolves through crises and challenges. I found the ending for the Mellingham series unless I want to shift attention from Joe onto someone else (and I don’t at the moment), but I haven’t found the ending for the Anita Ray series or the Felicity O’Brien series. 

The so-far last book in the Anita Ray series, number five and titled In Sita’s Footsteps, opened doors I hadn’t expected and I’m playing around with some new ideas. Much as I love Anita and Auntie Meena, I see problems with future books because I’ve made them somewhat static though fun and charming. In the Sita mystery, I found areas in which they can grow and evolve. The question is now what to do about it, how to take the series into this new, unexpected direction. 

I’ll figure it out eventually, and a new Anita Ray with a new and, I hope, interesting slant will appear. Right now I’m celebrating the long-lived life of the Mellingham series. Last Call for Justice, number six, will be out in paperback in August (and book club members in June). And I’m about to sign for Come About for Murder, number seven, which will appear within two years. Meanwhile I’ll think about Anita and Auntie Meena and Felicity.

Sometimes it feels like the publishing process is changing daily, with information on new strategies and technologies flooding our email boxes, not to mention the bounty of scam offers to showcase our books in book clubs and on podcasts. Yet some things change slowly or not at all, especially the themes, tropes, and story lines in traditional or cozy mysteries. 

I’ve been thinking about this over the last year or so because of a mystery I wrote some years ago that was published by Midnight Ink and did reasonably well before the publisher dropped its mystery line. Felicity O’Brien is a farmer who is also a healer, and she treats this ability matter of factly—she has a skill, or a gift, if you prefer, to alleviate pain and heal where she isn’t in conflict with a greater power (the Deity). She grew out of my years of working with holistic practitioners treating men and women with HIV/AIDS before there were any treatments for the disease. The massage therapists, reiki practitioners, and others had a remarkable impact on many of the patients. And although we never tried to analyze it, those of us on the periphery recognized that some practitioners brought the patient to a greater level of health than would be expected. Felicity has the same capacity to induce health.

When I tried to interest a mass market paperback publisher in the series, the publisher who had happily published several of the Mellingham series and later the Anita Ray series said no, they didn’t do paranormal. They did send it out to one of their readers but I never heard about it again, and now accept that it has drowned in the slush pile.

The problem with this is that the mind-body connections seem too other-worldly, too unscientific, too far out there. And I too understand that. I grew up with the same perceptions that some things fell into a category that might be fun but couldn’t be taken seriously—ghosts, various forms of the paranormal and the like. Science was serious, the paranormal was not. But that’s no longer true. 

I like to read widely, and one of my interests is neuroscience. Only as an adult, long out of school, with the current emphasis on books on aspects of science for the general readership could I have come across some of the more interesting titles I’ve found, and one in particular astonished me. In Cerebral Entanglements by Allan J. Hamilton, the author, a neurosurgeon, talks about the current state of neuroscience including research into the mind-body connection.

In one chapter in particular he talks about experiments with individuals who (this one is called the viewer) could study an assigned image and send it mentally to another individual thousands of miles away (the receiver), to someone they didn’t know and who had no idea what the image was. The image was chosen at random at the last minute. As it turned out, “receivers could exhibit an uncanny ability to generate an accurate impression from the sender.” The author goes on to say that “the results have been replicated in dozens of laboratories by different researchers.” (p. 239)

Researchers have also produced the same results in tests of precognition—the receiver could draw the image even a day before it was to be sent and before the sender had received the image to be sent. 

Not every person has these skills or capacities, which is probably a good thing. But the abilities do exist in many of us and may be used for nothing more important than thinking hard on hurrying the person ahead of us in line at the coffee counter.

Mental telepathy, ESP, whatever it is called can hardly be called a fantasy trope in fiction if laboratories around the world are confirming its existence in replicable experiments. Skeptics can still reject the process out of hand, and for most people that would be correct. Not everyone can transmit mental images or receive them. But some people can.

So where does that leave Felicity O’Brien? I treated her healing powers and the insight that comes with them as fairly ordinary, a capacity passed down through the female line along with the advice to treat it carefully and respectfully. Otherwise, it was an ordinary trait not different from an ability to sing or pick up a new language easily.  Her capacity does not extend to saving the world, instigating spontaneous combustion to block a criminal’s flight, or anything else fantastic or magical. Her capacity is ordinary, just a part of her ordinary life on the farm.

It will take a while for literature to catch up with science—it’s usually the other way around. In the meanwhile I have to consider the next act for Felicity. Will she embroil herself in another suspicious death, or will she just try to keep her farm going and her father healthy in the nursing home? Do I have to wait for common knowledge to absorb new science on the paranormal before Felicity and her inherited talent can be taken seriously by publishers? That would probably require far greater change than what is typical for publishing. I wait but also ponder other options.