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.

From January to the end of March, New England writers can submit stories for the annual Crime Spell Books anthology. We get a variety of stories from a diverse groups of writers, and often a new writer’s first story. Although each of the editors probably has a private set of expectations and standards, I know I’m going to be surprised more than once. I learned that lesson years ago.

In the 1990s I was invited to judge a short story contest sponsored by a local newspaper. I was one of three local writers who would judge the stories submitted to the editor of the arts and culture insert magazine. 

We were a dutiful trio, reading each story more than once, taking notes and evaluating each one according to whatever we considered the appropriate set of criteria. We knew of each other but didn’t know each other personally, though we all knew the editor. At the end of our period of private deliberations, we gathered an hour before the luncheon, where we’d announce the winners, who would be awarded certificates. This is where the surprise came in.

Each of us came with a different story that we ranked as number one. As I look back I’m amused by our passion for our chosen piece of fiction. We couldn’t understand how the other two hadn’t seen the perfection, the style and wit and wisdom in our perfect piece of prose. Of course we discussed our choices at length, certain we could persuade the other two because weren’t we all rational, professional writers?

One writer chose a story because it was a quiet meditation with a gorgeous nearly perfect sentence right in the middle. And it was a lovely arrangement of words expressing a gentle wisdom, but what about the rest of the work? The next judge picked a story that dawdled until the punchline, which I had to admit was effective. But neither judge had picked the story I chose, which to this day I’m convinced was the only true story—with a beginning, a middle, and an end, describing an experience that left the characters changed and the reader nodding in recognition and satisfaction. I’ll admit that the other two judges probably felt as strongly as I did and still do. How did we resolve this dilemma? We didn’t.

The newspaper was on a schedule. The program had to begin, but the editor was ready for us. Another writer gave a talk, the editor congratulated all the writers who had submitted stories, and then she announced that three stories had taken first place. Each judge got to present “their” choice, to the delight of three writers (and their families) in the audience.

I learned later that this is what happens every year. Three judges and three stories. We just can’t seem to agree on what makes something work, something worth reading a second time, something to share with friends and talk about in classes. The editor doesn’t try to persuade the guest judges to reach consensus. Wise move. Instead everyone learned the lesson of the world of publishing. Tastes will range, but every writer is encouraged to follow their own path, and every reader will find a work that resonates with them.

Each writer has a different way of getting started on the next book. Some prepare a story board, others keep pages of notes, some make an outline. I see a group of people moving around doing whatever it is they’re doing, which isn’t always clear in the beginning but I know it will be soon enough. Because location is especially important to me, I pull out photographs I’ve taken of the general location I’m focusing on. They aren’t usually of a specific place I have in mind for the plot, though they can be, but more of a way to get my brain thinking about what I’ve seen there, how people move through the space. Right now, that means India.

My current work in progress is an Anita Ray story, most of which usually takes place in the coastal resort of Kovalam, just south of the state capital Trivandrum. Even though such a story might begin in Hotel Delite, Auntie Meena’s business where Anita lives and helps out, the plot may take Anita away from the water and into a nearby city or inland village. She might go to Chalai, the main bazaar in the city, or to Connemara Market, where I often went to take pictures of fish or vegetables. (I love markets.)

In this mystery novel, Anita travels into the hills with a group of tourists staying at the hotel. They’ve heard about a particularly interesting chapel and want to visit. So, off they go. This gave me a chance to pull out images of the twisting roads rising up the Western Ghats, with homes built right along the verge and bougainvillea or other vines tumbling over trellises and brushed by a passing lorry. 

While I was sorting through images I came across one of groves of rubber trees. The hills can be a surprise to some foreigners who expect all of South India to be a jungle, huge climbing vines, thick bush, and bright flowers the size of basketballs. They don’t expect a small forest of deciduous trees.

Mature rubber trees look like saplings but they’re mature enough to produce the sap that is the basis for rubber, and farmers capture it the same way we capture sap for maple syrup. I lay the photograph out on my desk alongside two or three others, and let my thoughts drift. I needed a murder scene the reader could grasp in hindsight but nothing obvious, and this needed to be away from Hotel Delite and Kovalam. The rubber tree grove gave me plenty to work with.

With important scenes taking shape near the rubber plantation and a tea shop, I had some important questions resolved and now needed only a Catholic chapel, so I rummaged around and found a photograph of one set among the trees. It was the right size for what I had in mind, and its location gave me plenty of scope for the specific activities I was toying with.

It’s exciting at this point to look at the photographs arrayed in front of me and see more fully the progress of the story. The characters are there, they’re spreading out among the trees and the buildings, and their voices punctuate the sound of feet shuffling through leaves and forest debris. I can see them and follow them, and when I do their behavior begins to fill the plot. My story idea, initially vague, takes shape.