The Plot's Boiling for Greg McKenzie

One question readers are forever asking is where do your ideas for books come from? I've tackled it a few times in blogs, where I discussed various novels from the past. But I thought I'd bring the subject up to date with a look at where my newest creation is coming from.

I've spent the past couple of months working on revisions of the first two manuscripts I turned out back in the early nineties with the intent of publishing them as ebooks if nothing else. Now it's time to get back to my bread-and-butter series starring that indefatigable former Air Force OSI agent, Greg McKenzie. I decided to hit a couple of new points about his background that hadn't been explored before.

We learned in earlier books that both of Greg's parents (his father was a native Scot, that's the McKenzie tartan at left) died in an airplane accident on the way to his graduation from the University of Michigan. After that he worked a few years as a deputy sheriff in St Louis County, Missouri. His uncle was Chef of Deputies. In the novel whose plot is currently stewing about in the soupy gray part of my brain, we meet the son of Greg's first cousin, a young man who lost a foot in Iraq and is at loose ends after coming out of rehab.

With all his wanderings about the world during and after his Air Force career, Greg had little contact with his uncle and cousins in St. Louis. Then the young man turns up in Nashville, charged with murder. As Greg frets over what to do, the case summons long-repressed memories of events from years ago. What happens and how it will turn out is your guess as much as mine. That's about all the background I need to get the old fingers tapping and see where the characters take the story.

A couple of other points I see through the fictional fog: a small cadre of militia characters and an involvement in drugs. That's all I can tell you for now. But keep watching these pages (bloggarly speaking) and I'll give some commentary as the project progresses.

Meanwhile, if you haven't read any of the books draped down the right side of the page, click on a cover to get more information, like plots, reviews, opening chapters, where to buy paperback or ebook. Enjoy!

The Bone Polisher Out as Ebook

Tim Hallinan, creator of the fabulously successful Bangkok mystery series featuring travel writer Poke Rafferty, has brought back the final novel in his previous series as an ebook available for the Kindle at Amazon.com.The title is The Bone Polisher, originally published by Dutton in 1996. Here's how the blurb puts it:

2011 Edgar and Macavity nominee Timothy Hallinan's sixth and final novel featuring erudite Los Angeles private eye Simeon Grist takes place in the West Hollywood of 1995, where the community is shaken by the brutal killing of an older man who was widely loved for his generosity and kindness. In a time when the police were largely indifferent to crimes against gay people, Simeon is hired to catch the murderer—and finds himself up against the most dangerous adversary of his career, a man who kills his victims one once, but twice: once physically and once in spirit. The story's climax takes place at a memorable Halloween-themed wake, but there's a big plot twist yet to come.

Booklist had this to say about it:

"Simeon Grist is a private detective with a problem: he is beginning to fear the bad guys . . . Hallinan's sixth Simeon Grist novel is putatively about a serial killer who is preying on the gay community of West Hollywood, but it is also a meditation on life, on commitment, on the meaning of age in a youth-obsessed and media-saturated culture. Hallinan captures the littlest human idiosyncrasies, the most mundane familial interactions, and infuses them with a depth of meaning not usually found in the crime genre. He even manages to do so with a sly grin and a loopy sense of humor. Read his latest as a straightforward detective novel, or read it as a slightly off-kilter philosophical tome, but do yourself a favor and read it!"

Mostly Murder gave it this equally glowing, though more succinct review

“Creepy . . . Screamingly funny . . . A snappy thriller . . . The only question that remains unanswered is whether success will spoil Timothy Hallinan."

Tim says it didn't sell enough copies to do that. But here's the kicker: you can get the ebook free on March 10, 11 and 12!

Do yourself as favor. Get it.

The Fallout of Falling in Love

Falling in love has always been something I do quite easily. My first experience took place at the tender age of ten or twelve. She was the girl next door named Mary Frances (Faffy) Green. I just learned that she died last week in Florida. I used the term "fallout" in the subject of this little opus, which usually denotes something unfortunate. But in this case it simply means the result of an event. And for me that means it had an effect on my writing.

Faffy's older brother, John, became my best friend in those carefree days. We got into all kinds of mischief, and I wrote about  of some of our escapades in prior blogs. You can check out one at A Flying Dream Adventure. Faffy and Johnny had an uncle who was a pilot in the Air National Guard prior to World War II. I used his experience for a character's father in The Marathon Murders.


When I got into junior high, I fell in love with one of Faffy's friends, Marge, who I met at the Green's house. I had never been the outgoing type and was rather bashful as well. I would bring her packs of chewing gum at school and chat in the corridors or on the lawn at lunchtime. During warm weather when sunset came late, I would walk to her street, several blocks away, and stroll past her house hoping that she might appear at the door. She never did. I used that experience for a character in one of my books. Marge went on to marry a neurosurgeon.

In high school I got a little bolder with a girl named Dottie Wechsel. I carried her books as I walked her home some eight or ten blocks past where I lived. We would sit on the porch and talk, and I got to know her mother quite well. She worked downtown at a telephone answering service. I wound up doing better with the mother than the daughter. My problem was I had little money and was too young for a driver's license. A guy with his own car soon swept her away. But I used her last name for a character in A Sporting Murder.


My senior year I fell for a girl whose dad was a preacher. When he was moved to a church a few miles away in Northeast Nashville, I had to take a bus to First Street, on the east side of the river opposite downtown, then transfer to another bus to reach Ruth's house. Standing there waiting for the second bus, I got a generous dose of the soot that settled out of the smoky atmosphere of the central district in those days. My white shirt would wind up with black specks. We dated until I went into the Army in World War II, and the few times I got home after that. But when the war ended, I went off to college in Knoxville and she went her way back home. I used some of our experiences while writing about characters in an unpublished manuscript titled Hellbound.


In a bit of a switch, it was my writing that brought me to the lady who became my wife for some forty-five years until she died of Parkinson's complications. After (actually during) journalism school, I went to work as a reporter for The Knoxville Journal. As part of my job on the police beat, I made rounds at Knoxville General Hospital to check the records at the Emergency Room. I'd chat with the student nurses and soon fell for one named Alma Miracle. We married when I returned from Air Force service in the Korean War.


Sarah, the current love of my life, and I met in Sunday School and have been married nearly thirteen years. We enjoy a lot of friendly by-play, which turns up in my Greg McKenzie series in conversations between Greg and his wife, Jill. For a sample, check this exchange from Chapter 3 of Deadly Illusions.


I've used actual names here, but the ladies have gone on to identify themselves by their married names. At a any rate, there aren't too many people left who could identify them. I went to my high school alumni association's monthly luncheon today, and one of my classmates remarked that there were only three of us in attendance from 1943. The ranks are thinning.


But I'm sure falling in love will always be in fashion, and I'll keep remembering things from the past to write about.

The Writing Life - Silent Screams

My guest today is C.E. Lawrence, a New York-based suspense writer, performer, composer and prize-winning playwright and poet. Silent Screams, Silent Victim and Silent Kills are the first three books in her Lee Campbell thriller series. She discusses here her experience in writing at retreats in New York's Catskill Mountains and a Scottish castle.

Hi, everyone! The experience of writing this novel about a serial killer was interesting, because I wrote most of it in a secluded cabin in the woods of Ulster County. My “security” consisted of a feeble hook and eye lock that a five year old could pry off with a screwdriver. My Home Protection System was a fat, indolent tabby who was more interested in chasing chipmunks and coming home smelling of skunk than warning me of intruders.

My beloved cabin is part of Byrdcliffe Art Colony in the Catskill Mountains, where I slaved over a hot manuscript for two summers, researching by day and writing by candlelight. I put in requests to the Woodstock Library for every book they had on serial killers, forensics, and other sordid topics. This was during the Bush administration, so I’m surprised they didn’t flag my library card – I kept expecting a Lincoln town car to pull into my driveway with two Men in Black wearing Ray Bans and ear pieces. I imagined being whisked away by the FBI or the NSA to languish in an Egyptian prison, where I would finally give up the names of my “handlers” – Pia and her colleagues at the Woodstock Library, where they don’t charge late fees, because, according to Pia, “We tried it once, but it was too much trouble.”

Such is the spirit of Ulster County at its best, and such were my summers, where recreation was playing an old upright piano (formerly owned by The Band), in between death matches of killer ping pong in the barn with fellow writers. The closest I came that summer to real danger was the hike I took in the Catskills with Byrdcliffe colleague Alexandra Anderson and painter friend Lucy Nurkse. We entered the woods at about ten in the morning, thinking we’d be out by tea time. Our Three Hour Tour turned into a Death March that had us staggering out around sunset, covered with mosquito bites and poison ivy, down to our last bottle Evian. I’m not sure which of us was Ginger and which was Marianne, but I’m pretty sure I was Gilligan. We’re still not sure why our copious maps led us astray, but I learned something that day:

The woods takes no prisoners.

So I came back to my cabin, settled in with a bottle of ibuprofen and a cup of coffee from Monkey Joe in Kingston, and worked on my manuscript. I had a first draft by the end of the second summer there, and the rest, as they say, is silence – as in Silent Screams.

I wrote the sequel at Hawthornden Castle, an international retreat for writers in Scotland where I was a Fellow (I love saying that) last January. The castle was a medieval structure which provided shelter to William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, during their rebellions against the British crown. I hiked through the glens to Wallace’s Cave, where he allegedly camped while in hiding from the English. The castle was later owned by poet Lord William Drummond, and now is a retreat for writers owned by the heir to the Heinz corporation. So every packet of ketchup sold by McDonalds helps support working writers.

In Scotland, I learned to eat haggis (notice I didn’t say “liked”), took long hot baths in a tub the size of the East River, and was taken very good care of by the wonderful Scottish staff. They kept tea out for us at all times, which was good, since the Scots apparently don’t believe in central heating – and Scotland in January will freeze your tatties off.

Words can hardly do justice to a landscape that, even in January, brought tears to my eyes daily. The glens are as romantic and craggy as I had hoped they would be, and the Scottish people were as friendly as their landscape was rugged. My fellow writers included two wonderful British poets and a lovely Russian writer who spoke no English. We communicated through a computer translator program, which was rather like being on a bad episode of Star Trek.

Ah, Scotland! Ah, Ulster! I long to return to you soon . . .

C.E. Lawrence's other work is published under the name Carole Bugge. Titan Press recently reissued her first Sherlock Holmes novel, The Star of India. You can read more about her at her website:

C.E. Lawrence.com

Carl Brookins Reviews The Good, The Bad

Veteran Minnesota mystery writer and reviewer Carl Brookins has checked in with this review of The Good, The Bad and The Murderous:

This is Campbell's seventh novel of crime fiction. There are a number of strings to the plot and a sub-plot or two as well. They are all nicely balanced, in that the main crime, murder and Medicare fraud remains at the center of attention. Sid Chance is a private investigator in Tennessee. His occasional assistant is a wealthy ex-cop improbably named Jaz LeMieux. LeMieux has inherited a successful retail travel business. In this story, she's besieged by erroneous reports of having made damaging racial slurs and as the book develops she shares some risks with her buddy, Sid.

Chance is a former Special Forces veteran, a former Forestry ranger and small town police chief. Now he's dipping an experienced toe into different waters as he establishes himself as a private investigator. When a young man, fresh out of prison, is arrested for a murder, the case appears to be a slam dunk. But the accused man has a fervent supporter in his grandmother and she appeals to Jaz who turns to Sid. And as Sid remarks, "Do I sense Messers Pro and Bono arriving?"

Things spiral out of control as the motive for the murder becomes much more than originally considered and both Sid and Jaz are targeted. The writing is straightforward and very believable. There's plenty of detail but it's rarely more that we need. Characters, setting, plot points are all rational and nicely handled. Readers won't finish this novel musing over revealed heavy philosophical truths, but they will have a bang-up satisfying time skulking about and sliding through dark tunnels with Sid Chance and Jaz LeMieux.

Librarian Janet Ohles Reviews Good, Bad

Janet A. Ohles, Associate Director of Library Services at Western Connecticut State University, wrote the following review of the second Sid Chance mystery, The Good, The Bad and The Murderous:

Djuan Burden, recently released from a prison term for murder, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He finds himself arrested and again charged with murder. Sid Chance agrees to assist his friend Jaz LeMieux in proving Burden's innocence, although at the outset he believes him guilty. Within the first few chapters, we are sure that good will prevail. And, it does. But, how many will die first? As the two friends delve into the investigation and get close to finding out the truth, others fall victim to the killer.

This novel deals with the serious issue of one cop on the take. Yet, it manages to honor, acknowledge and respect the majority of the force -- the ethical, good cops. What makes this novel especially appealing is that it addresses a flawed character and allows good to triumph over evil -- without the pitfall into which many authors fall -- it does not preach.

What the novel does, and does well, is to engage the reader on a variety of levels. The character development is superb. Hard decisions are made by realistic characters. Are these really just characters in a book? They seemed so real to me. In my mind's eye, each character has a face, a body, a voice.

The plot development is equally well done. The plot moves along and keeps one engaged. Finally, an author whose plot and characters are strong. They do not require the addition of contrived boiler plate romances or terrifying scenes. Nor will you find any boiler plate scenes in the book.

Like a fine wine, a very satisfying read. Sid Chance is definitely worth investigating, be prepared to fall in love with the characters. I did. And, now, I am reading the first Sid Chance novel and awaiting the next.

Bill Crider's Ebook Triple Play

The first three books in Bill Crider's PI Truman Smith series are now available for the Kindle at $2.99. The author of the popular Sheriff Dan Rhodes mysteries,  now numbering eighteen, started the Tru Smith series in 1991 with Dead on the Island. It was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best First Private Eye Novel.

In this first novel, Smith returns to his hometown of Galveston, Texas, to investigate the disappearance of his sister. He gets sidetracked by an old  buddy from his past, who wants hm to look into another missing girl. Tru thinks she may have run away until her boyfriend shows up dead. More bodies and an attack on Truman keep things lively. 


Publisher's Weekly said Smith was "another well-drawn protagonist, this time a moody, introspective PI in the finest tradition, who works in a seamy city smoldering with old and dangerous secrets."


The second in the series now available as an ebook is Gator Kill. When a family friend who is protective of wildlife finds the butchered carcass of an alligator on his property, he persuades Truman to find who was responsible. It turns out to be somewhat more difficult than the semiretired PI's usual job as a house painter. Publisher's Weekly described the plot this way:


"Soon the brooding gumshoe is stumbling over the bodies of dead humans, is shot at and run down by a souped-up four-by-four as he's embroiled in a plot complete with crooked police, a possible land-grabbing scheme and bad guys who, but for their lack of redeeming good nature, could be Damon Runyon inventions."


The third book is titled When Old Men Die. Tru Smith is called on by his old friend Dino from book one to look into another missing person, a vagrant called Outside Harry who has connections with Dino's family. Smith gets shot at and roughed up and some other characters wind up dead while the action uncovers some unsavory business taking place around Galveston.


As Crider himself describes it, "Does anybody care when old men die? Private Eye Truman Smith does, and he's going to find out who's responsible, even if it kills him."


If you're ready for some good tough PI adventures on your Kindle, check out the Truman Smith series.