Beware the Jabberwock

That's the title of the first book I finished after taking up mystery writing on retirement in mid-1989. It was an end-of-the-cold war thriller. After completing the manuscript, I sent out a few queries to New York agents and got a positive response from one. The agency began sending it to editors and sent me copies of their responses. One referred to it as "creepily plausible and nicely audacious." Another commented on the timeliness of the book but said their fledgling thriller line was taking a style and characterization different from the genre as a whole. An editor at the Berkley Publishing Group wrote, "It is a very well written thriller, but this genre is just too hard to sell in mass market at the moment. Maybe this would work well in hardcover." Another said, "It's a competent and entertaining piece of work." But it wasn't the type of novel published at his house.

After about six months, the assistant handling my manuscript left the agency. The principal agent wrote that she was concentrating on non-fiction and wouldn't be able to represent me. So the manuscript went onto the pile on my office floor. It had been created in one of the early word processing programs before I knew much about Windows. I later converted it to Word and it has been on a succession of hard drives since.

I followed Jabberwock with two more thrillers in a trilogy featuring disgraced FBI agent Burke Hill, who was hired to run a CIA spin-off disguised as an international public relations firm. The second book went to an agent who sounded like an old guy when I talked to him on the phone. He kept telling me post cold war spy stories were difficult to sell in those days (early nineties). After nearly a year, I tried to call him and found he had died. By then I had the third book finished and this one landed with a major New York agency (the one that handled John Grisham). I finally learned the manuscript had been sitting on the shelf until when it finally went to an editor, he wrote that it was too dated.

In the hindsight of two decades, the Cold War spy story has made something of a comeback. I'm too jaded now to venture back into the agent search business, however. So I decided to revise the manuscripts and make them available as ebooks. I have about completed work on Jabberwock and hope to get it up soon for the Kindle and on Smashwords for other ebook formats.

The character of Burke Hill was based on a former FBI agent I met back in the sixties when I was editing Nashville Magazine. His name was Jim Scott and he had quite a tale to tell. We talked about my writing his story for a book, and I taped a few hours of reminiscences. He wrote the FBI to get a copy of his files under the Freedom of Information Act. I still have a copy of the reply he received, asking for money to pay for making copies. But before anything came out of it, he moved on and I eventually lost touch with him. The last i heard he had died in his home state of South Carolina. My character followed Scott's story about being chosen by J. Edgar Hoover to attempt to infiltrate the Mafia. In preparation, he resigned from the Bureau and committed a few bank robberies to establish his bona fides. When he failed to get close to the mob, he went back to Washington and was rebuffed by Hoover. Then the FBI blocked his attempts to find another job.

Jabberwock opens in Vienna shortly before dissolution of the Soviet Union with a clandestine meeting of a high CIA official and a KGB general, where a plot is hatched that would change the course of the two countries.

It's a good thing I'm with a small press, or my new book probably wouldn't have gotten published. The Good, The Bad and The Murderous starts out like a mystery and winds  up like a thriller. Such cross-genre books often get turned down by New York publishers because they don't fall into a convenient niche for the marketing department.

Since Night Shadows Press has no marketing department, that's no problem. Like most authors these days, I'm the nearest thing to a marketer my books will ever see. I put them on Amazon for the Kindle and on Smashwords.com for the rest of the e-readers. And through blogs like this, my page on Facebook, various online lists, and appearances at a variety of bookselling venues, I try to get my name out and information on my books.

Getting back to The Good, The Bad, the mystery is pretty well solved within the first 100 pages. Then things start getting nasty for my protagonists, Sid Chance and his sometimes sidekick, Jaz LeMieux. At that point it becomes a matter of how can they keep their client off death row and save their own skins before the bad guys win out?

The book will be out in paperback this fall, but it will be available in ebook format within the next few weeks. Like a lot of writers currently, I'm selling more ebooks than paper books. The cover of the new book has been revised slightly from what appears here. Instead of billing it as Sid Chance Mystery No. 2, it is now called A Sid Chance Thriller. Inside it'll be identified as Sid Chance Novel Number 2.

I finally wrote THE END to my new Sid Chance book, and it's now in the works for publication late this fall. We've had a slight change in the name. It's now The Good, The Bad and The Murderous. I suppose I subliminally thought of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly when I came up with the idea for the name, leaving off the three "the"s. My editor said if we're going to do a takeoff on the movie title, let's go all the way. So there you have it.

The book took some turns toward the end that I hadn't considered earlier. That's the beauty of plotting by the seat of your pants. The author is just as surprised as the reader the way things turn out. If you've read The Surest Poison, the first Sid Chance mystery (and if not, why haven't you?), you'll recall that the story began at the rustic hillside cabin  in the woods where he had made his home for three years. Well, it turns out that the new book winds up at the same location.

The cover, shown above, is simple but dramatic. It features the hit man who is a central figure in the plot. For most of the book, he is a shadowy figure in the background. It's a lot like the antagonist in the third Greg McKenzie mystery, Deadly Illusions. Damon Saint, the bad guy in that book, didn't show his face until toward the end of the story.

Although the paperback edition of The Good, The Bad and The Murderous won't be out until late in the fall, plans are to release the e-book version by the end of the summer. So look for it in a couple of months.

In the next few weeks, I'll have another publishing landmark. My first book, Secret of the Scroll, which kicked off the Greg McKenzie series, has been out of print for the past few years since I parted company with my previous publisher. I got a supply of books from him and have made them available on Amazon.com and at various signing events. But they're now all gone. So the book is being re-issued by Night Shadows Press.

All of my books, of course, are available in e-book format on Amazon.com for the Kindle. Three are also currently on Smashwords.com in various other e-book formats, such as for Barnes & Noble's Nook. All of them will be available from Smashwords shortly.

Good, Bad and Murderous - a look ahead

A murderer turns good, a cop turns bad, a remorseless assassin turns on a man tracking him down. That in brief is Good, Bad and Murderous, the second Sid Chance mystery/thriller. It starts with a young black man getting out of prison at twenty-five for a murder committed at age twelve. When he's accused of another homicide, his grandmother hires PI Sid Chance to find the real killer. Sid's sometimes-associate Jaz LeMieux helps out on the case, and things get dicey when a woman who accused her of making racially disparaging remarks turns up dead. Do a pair of homicide detectives have an agenda of their own? Sid must navigate a maze of lawlessness involving drugs and Medicare fraud and contract murder that leaves him and Jaz in mortal peril.

That's the plot blurb for the new Sid Chance book that's nearing completion. When I started working on the plot, I decided to deal with Medicare fraud. I had seen a piece on CBS about FBI agents in Miami hitting store front operations that bill Medicare for thousands of dollars for durable medical equipment, then disappear. I did a lot of research on the subject and learned that new regulations provided tighter requirements for firms that  bill Medicare. However, some scammers still get around them, as my fictional company does.

Starting the story with a young black man being charged again with murder came out of a newspaper's coverage of what happens to child killers. The focus of the stories was on Nashville's youngest murderer, who had  been out of prison a couple of years after spending most of his life behind bars. I based my character on his experience. He had shot a man during a late night drug sale while he was twelve years old. Despite his age, he was tried in Criminal Court as an adult and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Efforts have been under way to have such juveniles go to Juvenile Court and serve their sentences in a correction program designed for youths.

As with the young man in the newspaper stories, my character came out of prison determined to change his life and become a productive citizen. However, a month or so after the newspaper article, the real former prisoner wound  up in jail for beating up a girl friend. My guy is more reliable.

Jaz LeMieux became a popular character with readers of the first book, The Surest Poison. She's a fun character to write, a young woman who overcame the odds and took over as board chairman of a national chain of travel centers. To give her a bit of a problem with this story, I had her accused of making racially disparaging remarks to a black company employee. When the woman is found dead, the tension ratchets up.

You'll have to read the book (hopefully it'll be out early this fall) to find out what else happens. I should have a cover to show shortly. Stay turned.

A Cop's Night at the Office

I got a good look at what cops face on a daily basis when I did my ride-along (as a member of the Metro Nashville Citizen Police Academy) last Thursday on the second shift, 2:30 to 10:30 p.m. I was assigned to North Precinct Patrol Officer Joshua Mauzy. On the job I only heard him called Mauzy as cops refer to each other by last name. Around thirty, married with children, he was Officer of the Month in the precinct for February after chasing down a burglar.

We drew an old car (Chevrolet Impala) which was not as jazzily appointed as the newer models. Its computer didn't want to work at first, but Mauzy coaxed it into action. The radio channel with the dispatcher came from a speaker around the computer, while the officer talked with his colleagues on another channel using a mike attached at his shoulder. I presume cops, at least the younger ones, aren't too good at housekeeping as the floor on the passenger side was covered with papers and an  empty drink cup. Having experienced that sort of thing with my stepson, I wasn't all that surprised.

During roll call, the lieutenant assigned duties and car numbers. We were Car 12. Our assignment was not to a particular zone but was called Enforcement. Basically we were driving around looking for trouble. We also served as backup when somebody else found it first. As it turned out, that happened on our first call. We had just pulled out of the parking lot and stopped for the traffic light when an ambulance roared past on Clarksville Pike. After it had headed across the Cumberland River bridge, Mauzy said, "We have to follow that ambulance."

He hit his lights and siren and swung out onto the street, which was five lanes wide, including a turn lane. He didn't believe in slowing much, if any, for cross streets. We swung in and out of lanes, but almost came to a stop at one intersection with a traffic light and two cars in the turn lane. The blaring siren convinced them to move out of the way.

We finally arrived at the scene where an ambulance and fire truck sat with another police car already there. The paramedics were bandaging a woman's leg as she lay in the front yard of a house. She told the officers three teenagers had thrown bottles at her. One broke and cut her leg. The ambulance crew said it was a deep cut. She claimed to have run from a street almost a mile away. We left her to be transported to the hospital. The two cops agreed it didn't likely happen as she reported. The first officer on scene would send in a report and let the detectives follow up.

Although Mauzy didn't have to file the detailed report, he pulled out his clipboard box and wrote an IR, Incident Report, giving the basic details of time and place and result of stop. This was required for everything we did.

We were assigned to generally patrol  the County Hospital Road area. As we drove back in that direction, a car ahead of us at a stop sign had darkly tinted windows. Tennessee law requires side windows to allow at least 35 percent of visible light to pass through. On windshields, only a small strip at the top can be tinted. After the car pulled across the intersection, Mauzy hit his lights and siren and the car turned into a parking area.

He approached the car slowly from the back, remaining to the rear of the driver's window, which is standard practice. He checked the window tint with his light meter and found it on the dark side. He asked the woman for her driver's license and  brought it back to the patrol car. Entering the details into the computer, he brought up her record. The license was valid, no outstanding warrants. He let her go with a warning.

When I told my thirteen-year-old grandson about that stop, he said, "Tinted windows are cool. I'd never stop anybody for that." For a cop on the lookout for trouble, there are two good reasons. One, darkly tinted windows are a threat to an officer who has to approach a car. He needs to see if anyone inside is armed. The two most dangerous situations for a cop are traffic stops and domestic violence calls. The second reason is that experience shows if a driver violates one law, he's probably violated others as well. Traffic stops are the main source of catching criminals. In a large percentage of traffic stops in Nashville, the driver has no license or a revoked license.

Whenever an officer makes a stop or answers a call, he reports it on the radio. If one of his fellow officers in the area is free, he heads for the location as a backup. We pulled in behind another cop on one occasion where the car he'd stopped had three people inside. The driver had a previous arrest for marijuana possession. Nobody in the car had a driver's license. You'd think somebody would go to jail, but not so. Because of the leniency of the local court system, you can be caught a couple of times without a license and get only a warning or a ticket.

We did one backup that resulted in sitting at an intersection for about fifteen minutes, listening to the radio and watching traffic pass by. Another officer had reported a fight in the block ahead, but we saw nothing. They finally decided the fight had ended or moved on. Mauzy filled out his IR and we took up our roving patrol. If you see a police car sitting alone at the side of the street, sometimes with the blue lights on if he doesn't bother to switch them off, the cop is likely filling out his paperwork.

Each time we would finish a task and find nothing of interest where we were driving, Mauzy would pull up the list of  outstanding calls on the computer. They were listed with the time, location, and type of incident. Clicking on one would bring up the details. At one point there were twenty-seven 911 calls outstanding in North's territory. The precinct covers the entire north side of the county. Metro's total area is 526 square miles, so North's officers cover a lot of real estate. Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County includes several smaller municipalities, but MNPD has jurisdiction over the whole county.

We took one call involving a suspicious SUV in a driveway, but by the time we got there it was long gone. Another call involved a burglar alarm that went off. It indicated a back door involved. When Mauzy checked he found a man there who said the house belonged to his sister. Mauzy brought his driver's license back and looked him up on the computer. He had the same last name as the home owner and no criminal record, so we moved on.

We stopped for a dinner break at a Taco Bell not far from the precinct headquarters with five other officers, including a Tennessee State University campus cop. TSU is located in the North Nashville section which is the highest crime area for the precinct. The mealtime conversation covered peculiar people or incidents they had encountered. Officers enjoy chatting with each other. In our wanderings we occasionally came up on a patrol or an unmarked car sitting at the curb. Mauzy would pause by the window and say something to the officer.

As the evening wore on, the list of outstanding calls shrunk, and we took a recent one involving a man cursing fellow tenants at an apartment. The location was a one-story strip apartment more like a motel, across the street from a low-rent housing project. Mauzy had been there before on a complaint about the same tenant. He checked with the on-site manager and a woman standing outside, then knocked on the offender's door. It was a large black man who sounded fairly well educated but quite agitated at everyone who, he claimed, gave him no respect, accused him of all sorts or things, and called him names. Mauzy talked to him for twenty or thirty minutes, calming him down, advising him to forget what other people thought. Leave them alone, he said, and just mind your own business. The guy finally agreed that's what he'd do, and we headed back to Car 12.

It was getting close to the end of the shift when we turned onto Rosa Parks Blvd. behind the precinct headquarters and saw a car with its brake lights on. It turned onto Mainstream Drive, the brake lights still burning. Mauzy switched on the blue lights and siren. The car stopped at the curb and we pulled in behind it. Another patrolman arrived about the time Mauzy approached the driver, his flashlight probing the inside of the car. When he told the man about his brake lights, the driver said he'd been having trouble with a connection. But as Mauzy moved closer to hear him better, he smelled a strong odor of pot.

The driver admitted having smoked a "joint" but claimed it had been several hours before. The other cop said, "No way, man. That odor is too strong." They searched him, including stripping beside the road (about the only vehicles that passed were trucks or other commercial vehicles). He had enough "roaches" (marijuana cigarette butts) to make more than an ounce, which Mauzy dropped into an evidence bag. The man said he was on his way to work at a TV station nearby. Mauzy gave him a citation arrest, requiring him to turn himself in within three weeks for fingerprinting and booking. He put the guy in the secured rear seat while he did some of the car search and got on the computer to fill out all the information for the citation. Using a small printer that sat like an arm rest between the front seats, he printed out two copies, about two feet long, one for the arrestee and one for the file. The whole process took about an hour, while I sat in the car with the blue lights flashing.

 It was an interesting day that concluded around 10:45 p.m. at the station, where I thanked Sgt. John Henry and Officer Mauzy for the experience. My driver was facing an extra shift on Saturday for the Music City Marathon. As I left, he said, "Come on back on a weekend and we'll have some fun."

Of Cops and Guns

Sheesh! I can't believe I haven't posted on my blog since February. I've been working feverishly on Good, Bad & Murderous, the second Sid Chance book, but that's no excuse. I'm still not in sight of that magical THE END. Lately I've been attending the Metro Nashville Citizen Police Academy. It's only one night a week, but it has been quite interesting.

This morning I ventured out to the Metro Nashville Police Academy gun range and fired a few rounds. Shot the Glock 22 used by Metro police officers, an AR-15 from which the military M-16 rifle was derived, and a Thompson submachine gun. I had fired a "Tommy" gun while taking firearms training as a basic trainee in the Army Air Forces during World War II.

The officer who monitored my shooting kindly said I did good, that I had obviously shot before. Actually, I had fired on a range during MWA Florida's Sleuthfest mystery conference for a couple of years, though that's been awhile back.

Our police instructors gave high praise to the Taser (shown at right) as a defensive weapon, particularly for anyone who's unsure they have the will to use deadly force. Most of us think we would fire a pistol at someone who is threatening us, but when it comes time to pull the trgger, some have second thoughts.

The model cops use (at right) has a light and camera on it. Everything that takes place during use of the Taser is available for playback as a movie with sound. This is available for use in court to show how the weapon was deployed. It may include whatever threats the subject used against the officer. The smaller civilian model has no camera. Held in the hand, it looks much like a cell phone. Similar to the law enforcement version, it projects a red laser dot on the body where it's pointed. That's where the two barbs will hit when the trigger is pulled, giving a debilitating shock nineteen times per second.

The instructors debunked a lot of stuff shown on TV, such as a gunshot blasting a person backward. Also the one-shot kill. They said people have been shot multiple times and kept on coming at the shooter. Only three to four percent of people shot with a gun are killed. Frequently a shootout will result in no one being hit.

We were told how the Metro Police Department came to switch from a six-shot revolver to the Glock 22 with a magazine that holds fourteen bullets. Two officers went to a house looking for a fugitive with an outstanding warrant. His girlfriend said he wasn't there, but they searched and noticed scraps of insulation on the closet floor beneath an attic opening. They went up and found the man crouching in a corner. When they told him to come out, he opened fire, shooting numerous rounds with a crude-looking pistol that had an enormous magazine attached.

Both officers were hit but returned fire. One went down and the other jumped through the closet opening. Homicide detectives theorized that the fugitive thought the downed cop was dead until the oficer fired his last shot. Then the criminal stood over him and shot him in the head. The first officer went for help and the crook climbed down. When he heard more cops outside, he started firing indiscriminately through the front wall. They finally killed him.

The policemen complained to the chief that the officer might have lived if he'd had more rounds to fire, putting him on a more equal footing with the fugitive. The chief told them to find what they wanted. After testing and studying several guns, they decided on the Glock 22 and the department bought one for every sworn officer.

Though the cops are well armed now, they still suffer some disadvantages under the law. As one of them put it, "A mail carrier is better protected than we are. The penalty for punching an officer in the nose is the same as stealing bubble gum at Walmart."

Creating Secondary Characters

Our main characters, the folks who are in charge of the story, have elaborate backgrounds that we bring out in various ways. They are described as they move through the pages, and we learn about relatives and friends, places they've studied, jobs they held, all sorts of interesting facts as the story calls for them. We insert a lot of this "backstory" in small doses to avoid slowing the pace.

But what about secondary characters? They can be just as crucial to the story, depending on the roles they play. So how much background should they have? I don't have rules for writing. That sounds too inflexible. But I have a modus operandi, to use a good crime-speak term, that I follow with below-the-top-tier characters.


a. Use some sort of physical description, not necessarily any of the usual height, weight, eye or hair color. Here's one I used for lawyer Arnie Bailey in the first Sid Chance book: "Bailey launched his short, chubby body through the door like a well-dressed groundhog storming out of hibernation."


b. Provide some background pertinent to the story. In A Sporting Murder, which involves a basketball franchise, I used this bit for Greg McKenzie's friend, Sam Gannon: "He grew up in a rural area south of Tulsa and met Wilma at the University of Oklahoma, where he played basketball."


c. Describe their relationship with one of the main characters. Sam Gannon's wife, Wilma, is the best friend of Greg McKenzie's wife, Jill. Here's a spot where I gave a little comparison of the two women: "The daughter of one-time missionaries to China, Wilma liked to say Jill was born with a silver spoon in her mouth while she arrived with wooden chopsticks."


d. If possible, show how they think, how their opinions differ or mirror those of the protagonists. Here's an example from The Surest Poison, where Sid reflects on his friend Patrol Sgt. Wick Stanley: "Without a feature unique enough to stand out in a crowd, he would have made a great undercover man, Sid thought. Wick had no interest in detective work, though. He liked to be out on the street, dealing with the rough and tumble of everyday life."


Walk-on characters who fill minor roles in the story need less description. When Greg goes to a delivery service to find out who sent him a bottle of Scotch laced with arsenic, I described the man he talked to this way: "An older man with an abundant white beard that made him resemble a character out of a nursery rhyme greeted us from behind the counter." The man, who had only three lines of dialogue, was described otherwise as squinting through large, round glasses.


As I said, these should not be taken as rules, just the way one mystery writer does the job. Other opinions may differ.