Well, actually, with the Readers Digest Condensed Books. Wikipedia tells me it was Volume 57, published in the spring of 1964. The last book in that volume was by an author I’d never encountered before.
His name was Dick Francis.
I devoured that book. And every single one since. Francis wrote over 40 novels. I love all of them. In addition to being wonderful, they are comfort reads, old reliables—rather like a bowl of chili on a cold rainy night. I can always count on Dick Francis and his steadfast, practical and courageous heroes. Especially Sid Halley, who appears in five books, the closest thing to a series Francis ever wrote.
All his books have something to do with horse racing, for Francis was a steeplechase jockey for many years. And a sportswriter for a decade and a half before turning his hand to fiction. In the early books, his protagonist is a jockey, such as up-and-comer Rob Finn in Nerve, his second novel. In his fourth, Odds Against, Sid Halley puts in his first appearance, as a jockey who has retired due to injuries and is now working as a private investigator. In later books, protagonists have other professions—glassblower, banker, photographer—but there’s always that connection to horse racing. Among my other favorites are his sportswriter hero James Tyrone in Forfeit and pilot Matt Shore in Rat Race.
Dick Francis and I share a birthday—Halloween. I was thrilled to meet him several times, at book signings and once at the Edgar Awards ceremony. That was in 1996, the year he was awarded Grand Master and won the Best Novel award for Come to Grief—a Sid Halley book.
By that time, I was writing mysteries myself. With eight books published featuring my longtime protagonist, Oakland private eye Jeri Howard, I decided I really wanted to write a horse racing novel. When I started the book, I quickly learned how much I didn’t know about horse racing. Books, the internet and Dick Francis will only take a writer so far. Write what you know is a commonly used catchphrase, but I use another one. If I don’t know, I go find out. So, Jeri and I went to the races.
An email message to an acquaintance led me to a friend of hers who knew a woman who trained racehorses. Which is how I wound up at a Bay Area racetrack at six in the morning. I spent the whole day following the trainer around from stables to grandstands, talking with trainers, a vet, even a horse player who tried to educate me on statistics, which are still a mystery to me. I even got a tour of the jockeys’ changing room. Of course, that scene had to go into the book. When I’m presented with such great material I have to use it. That’s why Jeri is in the changing room, bantering with a jockey dressed in nothing but a towel. It was all great fun and I hope the resulting novel was fairly accurate. That’s A Killing at the Track, by the way, which has Jeri investigating the murder of a trainer at a fictional racetrack. More bodies turn up and Jeri actually wins a few bucks playing the ponies.
I’ll close with another comment about the Readers Digest Condensed Books. I don’t know how long Mom subscribed to these, but I do know these abridged volumes introduced me to a lot of good books and authors. Abridged or no, the whole point was to get people reading. And I certainly did.
Earlier volumes included books by authors who later became favorites: Victoria Holt, Anya Seton, James Michener, Mary Stewart—and the redoubtable Agatha Christie. As for Volume 57 from 1964, the tome that introduced me to Dick Francis, it contained two other books I enjoyed and remember to this day. The first was nonfiction, written by Gene Smith, titled When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson. The second was by English novelist Paul Gallico. It was called The Hand of Mary Constable, and it had seances, a ghostbuster and twists galore. Great fun.
Often you can tell when a writer’s research begins and ends with a keyboard search: telltale signs include incomplete knowledge and/or cliché-based assumptions, creating eye-roll moments in our readership—something it’s safe to say none of us wants to do. So when Professor Google falls down on the job, it’s time to fold up that laptop and do a different kind of investigating, one that involves people instead of pixels.
First, an example of what to avoid. Some years ago I was reading a novel with a scene set in MCI-Cedar Junction, a maximum-security prison in Massachusetts. Our protagonist steps inside and notes that the foyer smells like vomit, a sensory detail illustrating the degradation of the incarcerated.
Slight problem, however. I used to teach at that prison, and on precisely zero of the many occasions I’ve been there did the foyer smell like vomit. The only time it smelled of anything other than air was one day when an inmate was mopping the floor, at which point it smelled like Pine-Sol. That, combined with a variety of hilarious gaps in said author’s knowledge of prison security protocols, absolutely trumpeted the fact that he never bothered to visit the facility or even call. I have not picked up one of his books since.
I should add that he absolutely nailed his description of the exterior of the prison. In other words, he googled it, saw what the place looked like, and ended his investigation there.
Circumventing such blunders consists of several steps. First, find an expert. Second, contact them and politely ask for a few minutes of their time. If you are on the shy side, Step Three is, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic.” The words “I’m a writer” convey more gravitas than you might expect, and the phrase “I’m writing a book with a character like you, and I want to be sure I get it right” is usually greeted with enthusiasm. Most people are delighted to share their expertise, especially if they belong to a profession or culture that is frequently misrepresented in popular media. On behalf of my books, I have interviewed prison guards, FBI agents, a Marine who served in Afghanistan, a parole officer, a rabbi, and more; and in almost every case, the interview went over time because we were enjoying ourselves so much.
My most recent book, Stealing Time (co-authored with Norman Birnbach), is set largely in 1980. While we wrote it, we had the very great pleasure of plumbing the expertise of John Barelli, former head of security at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Jonathan Campbell, a Boston-based architect. In both cases, our question was this: how can our bad guys rob a museum—in 1980? We needed specific information about rooftops, scaffolding, and museum security in that era, and the internet was tired of our questions.
I discovered Mr. Barelli via his memoir, Stealing the Show: A History of Art and Crime in Six Thefts. It describes his tenure at the Met from 1978 to 2016, years that neatly overlapped the era of our book. I emailed him to ask for an interview. He replied in the affirmative, and he and Norman and I spent a delightful evening chatting about security arcana of the late twentieth century. Since my partner and I needed to insert one of our baddies into the museum, we asked how long it would have taken for someone to be hired as a security guard at that time. Were there extensive background checks? What about fingerprinting? Mr. Barelli laughed. “Back then, we had a saying,” he told us. “‘If it breathes, put a uniform on it.’”
Thus reassured, we wrote a scene in which our criminal is quickly hired to guard a hall full of precious gemstones. Our editor later urged us to change it, since he was confident the guards’ union would have prohibited such slipshod operations. But we had done our homework with an unimpeachable source, and were able to allay our editor’s concerns. The scene stayed put in all its scintillating historical accuracy.
The second expert, Jonathan Campbell, was easier to find because I went to high school with him. Once again, I needed very specific information for our baddies, whose plan involved climbing scaffolding in order to break into the museum; and once again, the internet failed to answer some basic questions, such as,
Is this possible?
How?
What will our degenerates find on the way up?
During a delightful February afternoon, Jonathan led me cantering about the rooftops of Boston in search of verisimilitude. I learned that,
Yes, it’s possible.
But dangerous. Anyone seeking to climb scaffolding needs to adhere to the “three points of contact rule,” meaning that at all times one must have at least two hands and one foot, or two feet and one hand, in contact with the structure; unless, of course, one wants a very brief flying lesson.
Roofs are messy. Based on my experience, our band of reprobates might reasonably be expected to find pigeon poop; ductwork for HVAC; plastic buckets full of rainwater and chains; and stray tools left behind by construction workers. All of this makes such areas difficult to navigate, which was bad for our baddies but good for us.
Factuality is not meant to set a reader’s pulse a-twitter; for that we have finely etched characters, snappy dialogue, and wicked plot twists. Instead, it is a load-bearing wall: we may not be aware of its function, but it holds our disbelief aloft. Unconventional kinds of research can be fantastically rewarding, and they give our work both solidity and sparkle that come from no place else.
STEALING TIME
Good news for everyone who loved Back to the Future, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Time and Again: the newest page-turner is Stealing Time, a smart, funny caper that will steal your heart.
When there’s no time left, you have to steal it!
New York, 2020. Tori’s world is falling apart. Between the pandemic and her parents’ divorce, what else could go wrong?
Plenty! Like discovering that a jewelry heist forty years ago sent her grandfather to jail and destroyed her family.
New York, 1980. Bobby’s life is pretty great—until a strange girl shows up in his apartment claiming to be a visitor from the future. Specifically, his future, which apparently stinks. Oh, and did she mention she’s his daughter?
Soon Bobby and Tori have joined forces to save the mystical gemstone at the heart of all their troubles. But a gang of thugs wants it too, and they’re not about to let a couple of teenagers get in their way.
This time-travel jewelry heist will keep you guessing till the end!
Tilia Klebenov Jacobs is a bestselling novelist and short story writer. She is vice president of Mystery Writers of America-New England, and is proud to say that HarperCollins calls her one of “crime fiction’s top authors.” Tilia has taught middle school, high school, and college, as well as classes for inmates in Massachusetts state prisons. She lives near Boston with her husband, two children, and pleasantly neurotic standard poodle.
Norman Birnbach is an award-winning writer who has published over a hundred short stories and articles. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall St. Journal, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New York Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Militant Grammarian. He has also studied gemology at the Gemological Institute of America. Stealing Time is his debut novel. A native New Yorker, he lives outside Boston with his wife, three children, and dog, Taxi.
As a writer of both short stories and novels, I’ve grown accustomed to research. It is a part of writing, much like plotting and editing. Because I’m naturally curious, I have to limit the amount of research I do on any given subject.
When I began writing Misconception, a domestic suspense thriller, I had no idea how much research I’d need to do. That’s because up until then I’d been a short story writer and only needed to research small bits of information to propel my plot forward.
A tried-and-true pantser, the ideas that combined to form the plot led me to realize just how much research was needed.
The book contains medical research on infertility, psychological research on personality types and disorders, employment research on workplace disputes and criminal law research, including jail/prison conditions for female inmates.
What worked for me and what I will share are five tips on how to get through the research hurdle.
1) To avoid long gaps in writing while researching subjects, consider doing just enough cursory research. That means conducting research prior to or early on during your first draft. That way you’ll avoid having to correct large parts of your story or manuscript later on. In my case, as I was writing Misconception I decided to set the story in Chicago. I felt the large city coupled with challenging weather would set a moody tone for the domestic suspense thriller. This is especially beneficial when you are deep into developing characters and plot points. Once you are at a point to take stock of what you’ve written so far, you can continue researching and filling in any gaps. This can also reduce the chance of falling into a rabbit hole by limiting what you need to advance the story.
2) Create a system to keep track of research sources. I use Scrivener to write my manuscripts. The software provides a handy corkboard to place website links right next to the page where the information will be placed. It’s important to obtain at least two to three resources for each subject, to ensure information or resource isn’t outdated or incorrect.
3) While artificial intelligence resources can be helpful, I would caution their use. Though a resource like ChatGPT can narrow down resource options, it isn’t a replacement for doing your own thorough research. Some resources I used included: WebMD and Health.com for medical conditions, university educational programs for fertility specialty information, past news coverage of sports and team rivalries, news coverage and/or documentaries on jail conditions, fertility health associations, hospital chapel coverage by local newspapers and a website called Lifeway that offers examples of funeral sermons.
4) Check and recheck sources. It’s a good idea to use respected sources for medical and legal research and avoid copying what you see on television or in movies. Tapping into my past experience as a paralegal working for a New York City DA’s office, I knew my knowledge of criminal law wasn’t enough to flesh out the details of Cassie Nichols’ harrowing journey through the Wisconsin legal system. Make sure to drill down to the state, and sometimes the city, when it comes to researching criminal law. I researched specific areas from a state and local angle, going so far as to find real accounts of what jail conditions are like and locating transcripts of initial court appearances so I could use the information as a guide. If you are good at deciphering medical jargon, by all means do so. If you’re not, don’t be afraid to reach out to an expert. A helpful website to assist in locating an expert in a field is HARO or helpareportout.com.
5) Do a final fact check while the book is in self-editing mode. Things change, especially when it comes to legislation. My book was about a third of the way complete when I discovered that it couldn’t be set in Chicago, as planned. During research I learned that in the state of Illinois, in vitro fertility treatments are covered by insurance, whereas in Wisconsin they are not. This was an integral aspect of the plot, given the tension between the main character, Cassie Nichols, and her husband Jake. The financial strain burdened the already stressed couple, adding to the tension. Because I wanted to retain the moody weather as a backdrop to intensify certain scenes in the psychological thriller, I chose to move the setting to a fictional town in southeastern Wisconsin near where I grew up.
Though research may seem daunting, with a little strategy it doesn’t have to be painful.
Misconception
Cassie Nichols wants a baby. Badly.
She’s certain a baby will anchor the crumbling relationship with her husband, Jake, who she suspects is having an affair.
But after a miscarriage and continued trouble getting pregnant leads the couple down the frustrating and expensive road of in vitro fertilization, Cassie finds herself running out of time.
Pumped on hormones, fueled by anxiety, and believing it is the only way to save her marriage, she does the unthinkable to ensure a viable pregnancy.
Now, the happy family she envisioned remains out of reach and is instead wrought with lies, deception, and murder.
Denise Forsythe is the author of the domestic suspense novels Misconception and the forthcoming Misconstrue.
An award-winning and recognized writer of mystery, horror, and science fiction short stories; you can find these works under the pen name Denise Johnson (see author page).
A member of Sisters in Crime, Inc. and multiple Sisters in Crime chapters, she is a Charter Member of the Sisters in Crime
Grand Canyon Writers chapter and its current vice president.
She resides in the Southwest with a precocious Labradoodle that keeps her on her toes.
Visit her at her website:deniseforsythedotcom to learn more about freebies, upcoming book projects, and book signing events.
I’ve been taking time this summer to catch up on my reading, which is a fancy way of saying that I’m reading those books that I’m embarrassed to say I never read when they came out or, in the case of a bunch of dead white men, when I was in college. I’m picking out books with titles known to just about everyone.
Reviewers are prone to lot of literary fallacies—the main character is really the author, the entire novel is autobiographical, the hero is the author’s cousin who got into drugs in exactly the same way, and on and on. These reviews can spoil the book for some of us, me, for instance, by messing up how I see the entanglements. I’m glad to not read the reviews, and go by nothing more than the familiarity of the title. Who hasn’t heard of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, or John Updike’s Couples? Both gave rise to hours of juicy gossip and, just as likely, a lot of ill will. I’m glad to ignore the warnings, which are also suggestions on “how to read” the book. I don’t need to be told where the story blossoms into personal truth.
Often when I’m reading I come to a passage that stops me, holds me from riding forward on the narrative river. There is something in the tone, the detail, the feeling that tells me this really happened. This is real, this is the truth. It could be lines in the dialogue, a setting and how the main character, or a secondary character, reacts to it; it could be a surprise, a reversal, in behavior, a character stepping out of character. But the sense that I’ve come to something out of the author’s life is compelling and convincing—the feeling conveyed reaches me. The passage may go on for several pages, or no more than a few paragraphs, but it does come to an end, and the story flows on as before.
I occasionally recognize the same quality in nonfiction, when the author comes to a moment of truth, as it were, and her struggle with it is revealed on the page. It may or may not be the issue that is the focus of the work, and may not be resolved, but it’s there for the reader to recognize and dwell on. I found this in Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking, and have wondered if she returned to it later.
Occasionally a reader will ask me if a certain passage is real, or, more likely if it’s another writer, she’ll say, that really happened. And in most cases she would be right. When we’re writing, we’re pulling things out of ourselves to make sense on the page, and after doing this for a while, a few minutes or an hour, we may be so deep into the excavation, touching things set aside, that we don’t record in our own mind that this is different from the surrounding passages.
Choosing a setting because it’s real and readers will recognize it is not the same thing. Using a real politician as a character because he is known to readers isn’t the same thing either. The passage that stands out is something whose meaning and experience is known only to the writer, but when it is shared, it is recognized and felt as special by the reader.
For me, as both writer and reader, this is the best part of the entire experience because I know I’ve come to a passage that is true and unique, lived and remembered and shared.
We have a gorgeous flow of Mule Ears (Wyethia) and Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) that swirls down the hillside behind our cabin, forming a river of color. While Mule Ears happily look like their sunflower cousins, Queen Anne’s Lace bears a striking resemblance to plants far less friendly. It brought to mind a 700-word mystery I wrote, featuring Cora Countryman (The Wanee Mysteries) and her brother Jess, on another summer day, 149 years ago on the Illinois prairie. I hope you enjoy it!
Cora Countryman sat on a rock in a fast-running stream that bisected her brother Jess’s farm, watching a stand of delicately flowering Queen Anne’s Lace bobbing white in the breeze. Cows grazed nearby, a fat catfish swam in the shadows of the hazelnut bushes, and bugs glistened on a summer breeze that wafted the perfume of carrot, parsnips, and timothy grass warmed by the sun.
Across the stream, a white fence boxed in three graves. One was fresh; two were not. Cora waded across the knee-deep water, the hem of her plain calico smock held high, her feet bare, and leaned on a fence post. The new grave was marked by a plank, two question marks and a date scratched into the wood.
Jess had found a man and a woman right here, their bodies near tied in knots, their heads in the flowing stream, the girl clutching flowers in one hand. He buried them, no postmortem by the town’s doctor, no undertaker, nothing but a few words muttered over their open grave.
Not that Cora was a romantic, far from it. As soon as she was able, she intended to leave her hometown, her brother, her mother (wherever she was), and her suitors to see the world. She spun in her bare feet at the possibilities – London in the fog, Boston in the rain, Egypt in the sun, dark men with dark ways. She would be fearless but carry a derringer for insurance.
She spun again and tripped. Checking her feet, she discovered a fire ring, its rocks jumbled. The fire had been doused by water, leaving a sheen on the charcoal. In the same rush that knocked rocks aside, a tin cup had tumbled under a neighboring bush.
“Cora,” Jess called from upstream, wiping his hands clean on a thick stand of grass. “Louisa has supper on the table.”
Cora held up the tin cup. Jess joined her, fingering the cup as she had, then shrugged.
“How old were they?” Cora asked, eyeing the fire ring for more clues.
“Young. He was in trousers over a red union suit, which served as his shirt. He’d pushed up his sleeves in the heat. The girl was young, maybe sixteen, in a plain blue calico dress, short like yours. They looked to be out on a picnic by the hamper I found.”
“When you found them side-by-side, their heads underwater, weren’t you curious?”
Jess handed her the cup, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Just wanted to get them in the ground. The boy had welts on his arms, and they had thrashed about before they died. I didn’t want what they had. No mystery there.”
“They might have been murdered or committed a lover’s suicide to be together forever. What about their families?”
“They were diseased, Cora. The best thing to do was get them buried.” Jess began picking Queen Anne’s Lace, gathering the tall stems in his left hand, the delicate white heads of the flowers forming a lacy umbrella. “There was a name in the basket. When I gave it to the Constable, he said he’d track down their folks.
“What flowers was she holding?” Cora asked, toeing the ground around the fire ring. When a tuber emerged from the coals, she lifted it from the ground with her toes. One end was cut. She let it fall, wiggling her toes in the charcoal.
“These.” As he shook the lacy flower heads, several ladybugs took flight.
“Not those?” Cora pointed to a stand of white lacy-headed flowers downstream.
Jess grinned. “Do you find mystery everywhere?”
“You missed it, but I’m right, right?”
“The girl dug a tuber to make tea for their picnic.”
“Believing it was parsnip by the smell,” Jess said, holding the cup to Cora’s nose.
“Purple spots will kill you lots.”
“As our thieving mother used to say,” Jess said, turning for the farmhouse and supper.
Ladies of Mystery 
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