Ripples on the Pond

 

Ripples on the Pond, the latest story in the Justinia Wright Private Investigator canon, is live on Amazon. It’s a short story and only 99¢.

Originally, I gave the story to my mailing list as a gift. After 3 years, I made some minor changes, re-titled the story, and now offer it to the public.

Harry discovers that the old lady who stood on the street corner, and from whom he bought flowers, was killed in a hit and run accident. He also learns she left him a sizable inheritance.

He decides to hire his sister, ace Minneapolis private eye, Justinia Wright, to find out who killed the Flower Lady.

I won’t tell you anymore, as I don’t want to spoil the story. I will say, it has all the elements that people love about the Justinia Wright mysteries.

It has the warm, cosy atmosphere of a place you just want to be.

It has humor threaded throughout a fun and often tense story.

There’s good food, good wine, and good music. What more do you want out of a story?

I know thrillers are all the rage. Books where the pages turn themselves. I’ll be honest here. After a long day, the last thing I want are thrills and excitement.

I want to relax. I want to go to a place that feels like home. And if there is excitement, I want it to grow naturally out of what’s going on in the story. Not impossible stuff that smacks me in the face from page one.

So, if you want to go to a place where you can take your shoes off, and sit in your easy chair by the fire — then the adventures Tina and Harry find themselves in are right for you. Mysteries told in the British tradition, but set in contemporary Minneapolis, Minnesota. America’s Northland.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

Tony Price: Confidential

 

Richard Schwindt’s monster hunting social worker, Tony Price, is one of the most recent additions to the ranks of the occult detective.

He features in 4 novellas:

Scarborough: Confidential

Sioux Lookout: Confidential

Kingston: Confidential

Ottawa: Confidential

The first 3 were collected in Tony Price: Confidential. The fourth novella is a prequel that takes place in Tony’s college days, where he discovers his gift for detecting evil.

Readers of this blog know I’m a big fan of Schwindt’s fiction, and his satires. His writing has gravitas, yet can be tongue in cheek. It is serious, yet laced with humor. It is often weird and spooky and over the top, yet he never loses you. You willingly continue to suspend disbelief, because you just have to see what happens next.

And the Tony Price stories are no different. Monster hunting was never so scary — or so fun.

We read non-fiction to be informed, to learn something. We read fiction primarily to be entertained. To lose ourselves in something not of our humdrum lives. Fiction is escapist entertainment. A good book takes us out of our everyday routine and plunks us down in another world.

Sure, we know we are reading a story, something somebody made up. It is the storyteller’s job to make us think otherwise. To help us make believe the story is true.

Richard Schwindt excels at the art of make believe. The Scarborough, the Sioux Lookout, the Kingston, the Ottawa of Mr Schwindt, while real places, are not the places of this reality. They are make believe.

Yet when he weaves his magic, we willing believe that his made up world is the real world. That is the artistry of a master storyteller at work.

Do you want to fight monsters? Do you want to beat supernatural bullies and make the playground of our world safe again?

Then join forces with Tony Price — monster buster extraordinaire.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

The Ghostbusting Duo

 

There’s nothing better than reading a mystery that has a ghost or a monster in it. And that’s essentially what the occult detective genre is. A fusion of the traditional detective whodunit and the horror story.

Now, I will admit my description is a bit of an oversimplification. But for now, let’s run with it.

The prince, if not the king, of the ghostbusters is undoubtedly Jules de Grandin. Only Thomas Carnacki is perhaps more well-known.

Carnacki was the creation William Hope Hodgson. And Carnacki pastiches are almost as numerous as those of Sherlock Holmes. I’ll talk about Carnacki in another post.

Jules de Grandin and his “Watson”, Dr Trowbridge, were the creation of Seabury Quinn. They appeared in 92 stories and 1 novel, in the pages of Weird Tales magazine. From 1925 to 1951, the exploits of this dynamic duo thrilled readers of the Unique Magazine like no other.

GW Thomas, on his now defunct website, archived here, summarized de Grandin in this way:

Jules de Grandin is the master of the outrageous detective genre. Everything about him is over-the-top from his Hercule Poirot moustache to his outbursts of stilted French. De Grandin and his Watson-like companion, Dr. Trowbridge, live in Harrisonville, NJ, a town haunted by monsters, mad scientists and all manner of weird phenomena. As with Carnacki, not all of de Grandin’s adversaries were supernatural. The de Grandin stories appeared only in Weird Tales, where they were the most popular of all characters, beating even Conan the Cimmerian and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

From what I’ve read, Mr Thomas was spot on. Of all the writers who contributed to Weird Tales, Seabury Quinn was the most popular and, as a result, was paid at a higher rate.

Of all the characters to appear in WT, de Grandin was the most popular. And it was the promise of a serialized Jules de Grandin novel that held off the debt holders from shutting the magazine down in 1931.

Seabury Quinn and Jules de Grandin dominated Weird Tales. Quinn’s only real challenger was Allison V Harding in the 1940s.

Yet, Quinn was unfairly maligned and minimized by the Lovecraft Circle (because HPL didn’t like Quinn’s style and perhaps the fact that he wrote for money) and it has only been within the last dozen or so years that Quinn has come under reassessment. And I’m glad he has, because he was a good writer and should not be forgotten.

What I find interesting is that for all of de Grandin’s popularity, he was the product of having to meet a deadline. Quinn, himself, wrote:

One evening in 1925 I was at that state that every writer knows and dreads; a story was due my publisher, and there didn’t seem to be a plot in the world.  Accordingly, with nothing particular in mind, I picked up my pen and — literally making it up as I went along — wrote the first story which appears in this book.

I don’t know what collection of stories GW Thomas got that quote from, but I find it simply delightful. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

I own the 5 volume Nightshade Books edition of The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin. You can, of course, find them on Amazon.

I’ve read over a dozen of the stories and I like them. The fun quotient is high and each story will give you an enchanting hour’s worth of entertainment. What more can you ask from a story?

Should you begin reading the de Grandin tales, and I encourage you to do so, keep in mind they were written for a monthly or bimonthly magazine. The storylines are somewhat formulaic. Certainly written to an established pattern. But then, so were the tales of Sherlock Holmes’ exploits.

I would recommend not reading more than a couple stories at one sitting in order to keep their charm and appeal fresh. Plus, doing so, will give you many, many days and weeks of reading pleasure. And who doesn’t want that?

Seabury Quinn was a superb storyteller. He had over 500 publishing credits during his lifetime, and was himself a magazine editor.

Approaching Quinn as a reader, I can say that he delivers the goods. He succeeds in transporting me to another time and place, and provides the entertainment value I’m looking for.

Approaching Quinn as a writer, I sit at the feet of a master and learn the craft of how to tell a story so that it will move the reader.

Last Christmas, I read Quinn’s Roads (his classic Christmas tale) to my sister and nephew. So captivating was Quinn’s prose that my nephew, at one point, uttered an interjection of awe. If only all of us writers could have that happen!

The occult detective genre is rich with exciting and spooky and chilling stories. The exploits of Jules de Grandin and Dr Trowbridge deliver on all counts.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

Suspension Of Disbelief

As readers we all know that when we pick up a novel or a short story, it’s a work of fiction. Something someone made up in order to entertain us.

In other words, we know it’s a story but choose to disregard that knowledge, and instead pretend it’s real.

Lawrence Block posited an interesting thought in his book Telling Lies for Fun & Profit:

But first is it not essential that the writer suspend his own disbelief? He more than anyone knows it’s just a story… To the extent that he visualizes it first, to the extent that he has the experience of his fiction himself before he puts it on paper for someone else, his work acquires an essential reality in his own eyes. He suspends his own disbelief and makes it easier for the reader to go and do likewise.

I hadn’t thought about suspension of disbelief this way before, but I’d have to say Block is on target.

When I think about my own stories and novels, they do indeed acquire an essential reality. The characters become alive and their story becomes real.

I know objectively that Pierce Mostyn and the OUP, Tina and Harry, Bill Arthur and the world of Rocheport, aren’t real. Yet, they are very much real to me. They have lives of their own, and I’m privileged to share their lives on occasion.

The more real my characters are to me, the more I transfer that reality to my writing, which in turn transfers that reality to the reader.

I can’t help but wonder if the books I read that I find boring and fail to enable me to suspend disbelief, are the ones that, in Anthony Trollope’s words, were written by writers telling a story, instead of having a story to tell?

In the first instance, a writer tells the story because he feels he has to. Maybe he needs to pay the rent. In the second, he has a story and it’s so amazing he just has to tell someone. The first is a case of manufacturing a story and selling it to the reader. The second is a case of receiving a story, as it were, and telling it.

When a story has captured a writer to such a degree that he has to tell it, that’s when I think the writer has suspended his own disbelief and thereby enables us to suspend ours.

Of course, subject matter, genre, the writer’s skill, the writer’s style, all come in to play and impact suspension of disbelief. There are some writers who I just can’t stand, yet others love their writing. It’s the beauty in the eye of the beholder thing.

Nevertheless, I’ve read books where the writer truly needed to hire a proofreader. Yet, I read on in spite of the textual interruptions, because the writer told his story so well. My suspension of disbelief weathered the interruptions.

Lawrence Block’s observation is something to think about, and one we writers need to take seriously.

If the story we are writing is just a story, how can we ask our readers to treat it as anything else? They may enjoy it, but will they remember it? Will they even finish reading it?

But if our story is reality to us, then there’s a much greater chance our readers will be suspending their disbelief right along with us.

You can get Mr. Block’s excellent book on Amazon.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!