In Reference to Murder: Author R&R with M.B. Courtenay

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In Reference to Murder: Mystery Melange

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In Reference to Murder: Author R&R with Richard A. Danzig

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Bookblog of the Bristol Library: Travel Guides

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Saturday Evening Humor

 

SleuthSayers: You Could Look It Up

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Ink-Stained Wretches: Writing “Galápagos People Watching” by N. M. Cedeño

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Murder Books: Rabbit Holes of Research by Isabella Maldonado

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Guest Post: Get Curious and Go Beyond -- Write What You Know by J. R. Lindermuth

Please welcome J. R. Lindermuth to the blog today as she shares some writing advice that crosses genres and projects….

 

Get Curious and Go Beyond -- Write What You Know

 

Beginning writers are often advised to write what they know.

Personally, I've always considered that rather limiting advice. Granted all of us have experiences which we might utilize in our writing. But is your experience broad enough to justify a short story or even a novel? A good writer should have curiosity and imagination, two traits which go beyond mere experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to experience. It can be a great teacher--provided you're willing to learn from it.

In contrast to writing what they know, I believe writers can benefit by writing about things that arouse their curiosity. As E. L. Doctorow put it, "Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go."

This desire to learn has the power to stimulate your imagination and take you places you've never experienced before, a voyage which can transform your writing and give it a power it might otherwise lack. Your enthusiasm for the subject should shine through and transfer to the potential reader what you've learned about a subject.

For me, research is half the fun of writing and provides opportunity to delve into many fascinating topics. Still, we need to beware of lecturing to our readers. What you've learned about a particular subject must conform to the story you're telling and contribute to the advancement of the plot. It may please you to elaborate on a particular theme and this is where you need to exercise care lest you stall your story and leave your readers exasperated.

In my writing of both contemporary and historical mysteries, I've learned a lot about myriad subjects that were new to me. In fact, some of those subjects were even the inspiration for a story. I already knew mine owners frustrated by increasing demands for unions in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region recruited cheap labor from Eastern Europe in the late 19th Century. My research on this subject revealed the same tactics were used to find women for factories and as domestics, a practice that enticed some victims into the sex trades. This was the inspiration for By Strangers Mourned.

Here's the blurb for By Strangers Mourned:

Spring is usually heralded as a time of renewal, not murder.

Preparations are underway in the spring of 1899 for the wedding of Deputy Cyrus Gutshall. Sheriff Tilghman is hopeful this will put his sweetheart Lydia Longlow in the marital mood.

But then a woman is found drowned in a local creek.

Doc Mariner's autopsy reveals the woman is a victim of foul play. The sheriff’s investigation soon puts him on the trail of a mysterious man named Bauer and a gang preying on young immigrant women.

One of the women escapes her captors and comes to their small town in search of help. A coal miner she encounters, a fellow Pole, brings her to Tilghman and helps translate the story of her ordeal. The girl is befriended and sheltered by a coworker of Lydia's, an act of kindness that puts both young women in danger.

Sylvester Tilghman will need all his detecting skills and the help of his friends to unravel the many skeins of the case before he can dream again of marriage.

 

 

John Lindermuth ©2022

J. R. Lindermuth lives and writes in central Pennsylvania. A retired newspaper editor, he currently serves as librarian of his county historical society where he assists patrons with genealogy and research. He's the author of 18 novels and two regional histories. He is a member of International Thriller Writers and is a past vice president of the Short Mystery Fiction Society.

 

 

Judy Penz Sheluk: Behind the Scenes: Law Enforcement in the 19th Century by J.R. Lindermuth

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In Reference To Murder: Author R&R with Len Joy

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SHOTSMAG CONFIDENTIAL: Rob Parker on research!

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Lesa's Book Critiques: SUSAN SPANN, GUEST AUTHOR

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In Reference To Murder: Author R&R with Emilya Naymark

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SleuthSayers: Gettin' Back My the Mojo by Steve Liskow

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Guest Post: Writing about characters on the wrong side of history by Paul A. Barra

Please welcome author Paul A. Barra to the blog today as he discusses his new book, Full of Eyes: A Rebel Bishop Mystery.

 

One of the great cultural policies that passed down to the U. S. Navy from the era when Britannia ruled the waves is that certain topics--namely sex, religion and politics—should not be discussed in the wardroom of a commissioned naval vessel. The stricture, generally observed, maintains an atmosphere of comity in Officers Country. Kevin Tipple, the architect of this Kevin’s Corner blog, wisely enforces the same rule for guest bloggers (excepting sex, of course. After all, this is a blog about creative writing) but admits to allowing certain instances when religion and politics are integral to the plot or the make-up of a main character in the book being written about.

 

So I asked Kevin for an exemption from the rule since my commentary is about the difficulty of writing an historical novel from the vantage point of a member of an abhorrent cohort—in my case, slaveholders. I was moved to defend the man who was the spiritual leader of Catholics in both Carolinas during the Civil War once I researched him and came to realize that he had been basically good, perhaps a holy man.

 

The novel in question, launched from D2D as an ebook on January 6 and available at Amazon and a dozen other stores, began when I was researching the life of the third bishop of Charleston for a magazine profile. Patrick N. Lynch was a brilliant orator and writer, famed in the South in the mid-nineteenth century, a polymath, compassionate, heroic in his struggles to do what God asked of him, and admired by the people who knew him even before he became ordinary of the Diocese of Charleston. He was a protege of the beloved founding bishop of the diocese, Bishop John England.

 

Patrick Lynch was also a slaveowner and such an exquisite, eloquent opponent of abolition that no less a personage than Horace Greeley dubbed him The Rebel Bishop in his New York Herald. Not surprisingly, the modern Diocese of Charleston kept him hidden from public view well into this century. With all that packed against him, how could I not write about him?

 

 I found that Lynch was misunderstood, and continues to be misunderstood, so I determined to write a novel featuring him as a real person, a mystery taking place as war is on the near horizon, with a theme of: how did a large part of the nation decide it was okay to own other human beings? Southerners who couldn’t afford a slave—90% of them at least—still considered slavery important enough to their heritage to die for. And die they did.

 

Lynch’s defense of the institution was both scriptural (slavery was common in the bible and Jesus of Nazareth accepted it) and pragmatic (slavery in the South was becoming too expensive and socially problematic, and technology was about to make it unnecessary for planters to maintain hundreds of agrarian slaves, so if Mr. Lincoln could have managed some patience, the institution would have died out on its own, eventually). Those were Bishop Lynch’s arguments. He could not have known that fully one-third of all white South Carolinian males of fighting age (18-50) would end up dying in that conflict, but he knew in 1861 that the nation was embarking on a divisive and horrifying event long before it came to be known by his flock as the War of Northern Aggression.

 

In a work of fiction, I couldn’t have the real Bishop of Charleston hunting clues and chasing bad guys; I made Lynch instead a kind of Nero Wolfe character with his aide an Archie Goodwin-like character and my protagonist. Lynch comes off as a wise and compassionate man in my novel FULL OF EYES (a quote from John’s Revelation); Yankees are the bad guys. I tried not to emphasize the north-south calculation, and the novel is not about the war itself but about a local crime and the drama of finding the killer before the chaos of war descends on them all, but slavery is the overarching theme of the book. Lynch’s aide, Fr. Tom Dockery, is a former NYPD officer who is both devoted to his bishop and shocked by the idea of someone having a deed to another person. The bishop talks about it and Dockery listens. The two must identify and stop a very determined killer, though, so the young priest does not solve his moral dilemma about slavery before the story ends. I’m writing a sequel now.

 

Neither book will be successful unless readers can get past the facts that the Rebel Bishop in real-life owned a house slave (my character Flora) and that his diocese inherited a plantation full of slaves. That made the ordinary of the diocese the owner of them technically. I’m hoping readers will appreciate learning about the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century South, when its membership was puny except in Charleston itself and where those members she did have were often abused by nativists. The book manuscript was vetted by the eleventh Bishop of Charleston and by the historian of the diocese; readers will be informed as they are—hopefully—entertained by following Dockery and a Jesuit friend while they investigate a murder in the cathedral and pursue the murderer.

 

Can modern-day readers identify with or at least appreciate a main character in a novel who defended slavery? Can millions of people from off who have now migrated to Southern states for the gracious way of life they find here ever learn to consider the war from a Southern perspective?

 

FULL OF EYES would have been a lot easier to write if Lynch had carried less baggage into the tale. Writing a novel is difficult enough, God knows, without introducing a sympathetic character who requires a lot of explicating. Some historically significant people just must be written about, however, even if they were on the wrong side of history. I think the Rebel Bishop is one of them.

  

Paul A. Barra ©2022

Paul A. Barra’s last novel, Westfarrow Island, published by The Permanent Press, was called “exciting” by Publishers Weekly. His short story, Assignment: Sheepshead Bay, was selected for the MWA anthology When a Stranger Comes to Town, released by Hanover Square Press in April 2021. Barra has had five novels published, plus a non-fiction book about the founding of a Catholic high school without diocesan approval. He is a decorated former naval officer, was a reporter for local papers and was the senior staff writer for the diocese of Charleston when he researched Bishop Lynch.