Guest Post: Copperman/Dumas: An Analysis by E.J. Copperman

 

Please welcome E. J. Copperman, Jeff Cohen’s alter ego, to the blog today. His new book, Switcheroo: A Fran and Ken Stein Mystery, releases Tuesday, June 3^rd. Published by Severn House, the read is the third book in this mystery series. Available at Amazon and other vendors.

 

 

Copperman/Dumas: An Analysis by E.J. Copperman

I’ve never been aware of a direct influence on my writing. That is to say, I haven’t caught myself writing like anybody else, except on very rare occasions when I was trying to do so. Which has happened maybe twice.

Lately, however, I’ve been reading the works of an author and finding similarities to my own style. Now, I know that I wasn’t trying to sound like him, because I’d never actually read his work before. And I know he wasn’t trying to sound like me, because he died in 1870. So it’s pure coincidence, obviously.

Still, I seem to write, in some cases, like Alexandre Dumas.

Let me start by saying I’m not comparing myself to the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo (which is the book of his I’m reading now, and it’ll take me a while: it’s more than 1,200 pages long). I’m suggesting that some of the things Dumas did in his book are like some of the things I do in my own, like Switcheroo, the new Fran and Ken Stein mystery novel being published June 3.

Are my characters swordsmen, swashbucklers and people of rank in 1700s France? No, they are not. Fran and Ken Stein are, if you read their names carefully, people unlike others who have some special abilities of their own. They weren’t so much born as created, and they are bigger and stronger than, let’s say, everybody else.

But I’m finding on my reading of Dumas (my previous experience had been an audiobook of The Three Musketeers, heard mostly while I was driving back and forth to Philadelphia, so my full attention might have been elsewhere), that his style might be counter to what I would have expected from an author of some of the most famous adventure novels ever written.

For one thing, Alex (we’re buddies now) writes dialogue. A lot of dialogue. For a guy who’s best remembered for swordfights and galloping horses, he has his characters deliver plot through conversation quite a bit. And, to be honest, so do I, which is also slightly unexpected. I came originally from a screenwriting background (don’t bother checking IMDb because I’m not there), so “show don’t tell” should be my ironclad credo. But I love to write dialogue and I do it a great deal of the time. I think character is often revealed in dialogue and you can have some fun reading it if it’s done right.

Alex also tends to build to a chapter ending with at least a tiny cliffhanger in it. This might have something to do with the fact that much of his work was first published in segments, serialized. This might also have something to do with that 1,200-page length, because like Dickens, he was likely paid by the word when he was starting out.

I am not paid by the word but I do strive to give the reader a reason to keep going, particularly at the end of each chapter, when they could easily say, “Well, that’s enough,” and put the book on the nightstand. So I follow Alex’s lead, without knowing until recently that I was doing so.

He also tends to write about groups of people trying to accomplish a goal. There are, in truth, four musketeers, and otherwise his characters often take sides in clusters. I like to build “teams” rather than have a solitary protagonist who never needs help and takes all the risks alone.

So Alex and I have some things in common. We also have many, many things that we do very differently. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a character ride a horse. He never had one drive in a 1997 Saturn. I have not, to date, written a swordfight. He didn’t have a character scale the side of an apartment building in Queens. In Switcheroo, Fran Stein confronts some unsavory characters in the New York City subway system. Dumas didn’t get to that one, either, because again, the subway opened in 1904, almost 30 years after he died. He also tends to have his characters address each other as monsieur quite a bit, even in translation. Ken Stein uses words like “nimrod,” “nitwit,” and “bozo,” none of which Alex ever employed.

But if I suggest that some aspects of my writing are at least comparable in usage if not quality to Alexandre Dumas, am I being presumptuous? Or are Fran and Ken part of a fiction tradition that goes back hundreds of years?  

After all, Alex didn’t invent all that stuff himself, either.

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/43H77o5

 

E. J. Copperman  ©2025 

E.J. Copperman is not a normal person, but a figment of Jeff Cohen’s imagination. Ken and Fran Stein, characters in Switcheroo and two other mystery novels, are not “normal” people either. But that’s the fun of it, no? E.J. has also been responsible for the Haunted Guesthouse, Asperger’s Mystery, Jersey Girl Legal Mystery and other series. Later this year, the first Haunted Paint Store mystery will appear – magically! – in bookstores and libraries hopefully near you.