It was the best of times.
It was the worst of times.
Call me Ishmael.
My mother told me to stop sorting the eyeballs.
Great openign lines. The start of every book has one. They are the beginning. Which is where I'm going to start my own sharing of what I do and how I do it. The beginning.
Once I’d decided that writing mysteries was in my future, there were several minor hurdles like who are the characters? what’s the story? where does it take place? Let’s start with the characters.
As I mentioned in Blog #1, the TV show Ironside came to mind. A strong lead character with a backstory of being shot and landing him in a wheelchair. Two white police officers supporting him- one male, one female. One support person – a black man. I liked the idea of a group. They can play off each other, both in good ways and bad. There can be romance, fights, reconciliations. Even seemingly stand-alone characters – Holmes, Poirot, Spenser – have a group around them to help grow the characters, create tension, move the plot along.
So, who was going to be my main character? My father-in-law had a friend named Harold Arthur Bartlett III. His self-created nickname was The Turd. A great character. Tons of energy and “it”. But he was a drunk and, while funny as hell, not very bright. But I liked the name, and so Harry was baptized. I’d envisioned Harry as a financial Sherlock Holmes. Smart as a whip. Not having the warmest personality, but with unique characteristics. Holmes played the violin, knew about tobacco, donned disguises, lived in a bachelor pad, and did cocaine. I gave Harry the same: composes limericks, fires cannons, has a different apartment, knows numbers inside and out, enters a mental zone when thinking ( better than coke). Why those? Well, I compose limericks while doing yard work. Don’t ask me why. Maybe because Nantucket is nearby ( There once was a man from Nantucket, etc.) Fires cannons. A friend has a miniature cannon that he fires at sunset. It was much louder than we thought. Numbers genius. Well, the basis of the stories was that Harry would solve/pursue fraud cases for clients. Fraud is money. Money is numbers.
So, this brings up the obvious question: how much of me is Harry? To some extent he is because we both work with numbers. But I’m no genius, trust me. And I’ll leave it at that for another post about having a writing voice and seeing myself in my writing. It’s sort of like hearing your voice in a recording, you sound different. Well, writing, at least my writing, is the same way: I read my words and realize that, to some degree, I am those words, and that is striking the first time it happens, but at some point I accepted it. I am who I write, or at least some part of me is.
Back to the topic. For Harry, I picked the smartest person that I ever met. He was the CEO at one of my jobs, and he had the quickest, sharpest, mind that I’d ever been in contact with. As an example, he handed out Christmas bonuses to our 1,500 employees each year. He’d come to an office and roamed the halls, talking with each person. But not just gabbing; he had a sheet with their names what their job was, and something special they’d done. He’d memorized every sheet and would spend 5-10 minutes with everyone, even remembering their conversations from prior years. I saw him do this and it was scary impressive.
Harry was set, but now I needed sidekicks, and came up with a simple solution: use people I know from work or my personal life. Harry’s girlfriend, Megan Webster, is loosely based on Erin Burnett, the CNN anchor. I just liked her look, her attitude, her intelligence, her straightforwardness. If she was to be Harry’s special person, she needed to be at his level or close to it. Megan is an ex-consumer TV reporter and those skills would be useful. To be honest, I have a bit of a crush on her.
Next came Uncle Louie. He’s been with Harry since he was put in an orphanage at age 5. Uncle Louie, though only a teenager at the time, became Harry’s guardian since Harry had no other relatives, and he knew that as mob-connected guy he couldn’t take Harry into his life. The actual Uncle Louie was one of my wife’s girlfriend’s uncle. I met him once, and just being next to him on a sofa scared the crap out of me. Uncle Louie’s outfit of a black suit and gray fedora is what the real Uncle Louie wore.
Ironside being in a wheelchair made me think of a co-worker who’d been in a chair since a high school sports injury. My friend was a bit gruff and irascible, and so he became my Steve Malarkey, a Nantucket newspaper editor who’s run over in my first book, CONNED, and then is confined to a chair due to his injuries. And I had a bit of fun with his last name, Malarkey, as in full of Malarkey/ crap/b.s. The name fits his personality.
I also needed bad guys and I used the opposite method as above: people who I thought were jerks or worse became my bad guys, using their physical as well as personality traits. I needed one really bad guy, Harry’s nemesis, his Professor Moriarity, and a friend’s email name popped into my head. My friend reversed his name from Robert Casey to Yesac Trebor. Name solved. I gave him similar attributes to Harry but heartless, and that was that. Other characters were filled the same way. Some were created by friends asking to be included in a story.
One special character came from a friend’s offer to hear stories from his Mafia-connected cousin. We spent the afternoon with his cousin and heard great stories and toured the city of Revere, a Mafia-controlled area where a suspect in the Isabella Gardner Museum theft lived and was killed. We saw his house, where his body was found in the trunk of his car, the local pool hall where the numbers rackets were run, and the crazy guys who hung out there. All of that made it into DUPED, my fictional story of the Gardner theft.
Ok, enough for now. Sayonara.