Lunch Room Surprises - Robert Fate Returns

I am ecstatic beyond reason - my pal Robert Fate has graced us with his presence here in the Lunch Room yet again. Bob's fourth Baby Shark book, Jugglers at the Border, is now available at your favorite bookseller.

Bob and I sat down and had a conversation about the Baby Shark series, and I learned a lot of really fascinating things I didn't know before about Kristin, Otis, and the story behind the stories. The iced tea's fresh and cold, so grab a seat and 'listen in.'

JB: Thanks so much, Bob, for coming back to the Lunch Room again – it's always so great to have you here!

We're going to talk about Jugglers at the Border, but first let's give our guests a quick rundown on Baby Shark's history. Tell us a little bit about Kristin, where she came from, and how she became Baby Shark. Sans too many spoilers, of course. ;)

BOB: J.B., I am so delighted to be here – let me put my menu down and pay attention. I agree with you – a little in front info about Baby Shark is a good idea. So – Kristin Van Dijk was born in the mid 1930s in a small rural town on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Her father was "off at war" for a large part of her young life and her mother died of cancer when Kristin was in high school. She dropped out of school to be with her father and spent eighteen months "on the road" with him, traveling around Texas, sometimes living in his new Cadillac, as he made his iffy living hustling pool. Kristin and her dad actually spent more time parked beside the road reading books than shooting pool – and from Kristin's point of view, being with her father was more important than anything else happening in her life. When she was seventeen, their vagabond, pool-hustling life caught up with them. In one tragic event in a roadside pool hall out west of Abilene, Kristin's life was changed forever. That story is told in Baby Shark, book one in the Baby Shark Crime series.

Now, as to how Kristin became Baby Shark – well, that's because of her pool shooting ability. Like father, like daughter, Kristin became a pool hustler. Her nickname had always been Baby, but after she began cleaning out pool halls all over west Texas, she became Baby Shark. Also, after she trained for a couple of years at "taking care of herself," the name seemed particularly appropriate. Baby Shark carries knives and guns and knows how to use them.

Let's see – Kristin is five-eight, weighs 130, and has platinum blonde hair. In Jugglers at the Border, the most recent book in the series, she's 23 years old. She doesn't think of herself as pretty, but people say she is. She turns heads, so she probably is.

I hope I didn't just run on here, but I think you have the essentials now.

JB: Run on as much as you like – we can't get enough Baby Shark around here!

Since Jugglers at the Border features Kristin's partner, Otis Millett, so prominently, let's talk a little bit about their relationship. Otis pulled a lot of strings to get Kristin licensed as a P.I., which speaks to how highly he values her and her abilities. Considering this is 1950s Texas and she's female, this is a bit atypical of most men in that time, but Otis strikes me as a bit atypical anyway. Now that we know more about Kristin, can you tell us a little more about Otis? Obviously they make a great team, but what advantages did you see in putting these two characters together?

BOB: Okay – how about a quick sketch of Otis first?

Otis was born in a rural East Texas community in the early part of the twentieth century – twelve pounds at birth and over six feet tall by age fourteen. Fully grown he weighed 280 and was six five. He was raised on a dairy farm and could wrestle a heifer to the ground by the age of twelve. He was in grade school during World War I and during the Great Influenza Pandemic and had a clear memory of death happening all around him. He also remembered riding in horse and buggies when he was little, and how motorcars and trucks replaced that form of transportation. He rode to school and delivered newspapers on horseback, and recalled sleeping on his way home from those pursuits secure that his horse knew the way. He wore overalls during the week and knickers and long socks to church. He was one of three children. He had an older sister and a younger sister and a father that encouraged him to protect them. He told Otis, "The only fighting at school I'll put up with is if you are protecting the good name and honor of your mother and sisters." The Millett girls didn't marry until their brother left home, because every boy in the county was afraid of Otis.

After the Great Depression, Otis moved up to Dallas/Fort Worth and got into police work. He was in his twenties, tough as nails, and seriously honest; he made a good policeman. He was in his early thirties when he joined the Army. He was a Master Sergeant by the time he landed in France on D-Day. He was wounded at the Siege of Bastogne while single-handedly destroying a Nazi pillbox. He spent six months in a hospital in London, and returned to the Dallas PD in 1945. Less than a year later, he had earned the rank of Detective.

Otis was a married man. The first four books in the Baby Shark series each tell some part of his relationship with Dixie Logan, the Dallas Firecracker, as she was known on the Texas strip tease circuit. So, I won't repeat it here. Suffice it to say, his marriage to Dixie was the major turning point in Otis's life. She took him by storm, and he never got over her.

It was Otis' mother, Hattie May, who encouraged his addiction to caffeine and cigarettes. She smoked a pack a day and was a ten-cup-a-day coffee drinker. She outlived her husband and siblings and died with her boots on while striding to the milk barn at the age of 92. Otis adored her.

Otis entered Kristin's life shortly after her father's murder, and was instrumental in assisting her in locating the killers and making them pay for their vicious attack on her, her father, Henry Chin, and Henry's son Will. That was from 1952 to 1954. Shortly after that, Otis asked Kristin to be his partner at the Millett Agency. He saw in her the makings of a first rate detective and wanted to be her mentor. She was nineteen and he was in his late forties. Perhaps – though it's not easy to see into a man's heart – he may have thought Kristin needed a strong, positive male figure in her life.

But let's be honest, Kristin had several strong male figures to influence her after her father's untimely death. There was Henry, Harlan, Sarge, and Albert besides Otis. Each of these men helped shape her, each of these men helped blur the lines for her between law and justice. I think you could say that without them, she would not be the Baby Shark we have come to know.

JB: Yes, I think you could say that. In your third book, High Plains Redemption, we see a little bit more of Kristin's coming to grips with who she is and how she handles the necessary evil of killing people that she faces nearly every day. Let's talk a little about the progression of that into Jugglers at the Border. The killers she faces in the fourth book are a lot different from the ones she's faced before. Did that make it easier for Kristin to justify what she had to do?

BOB: The first killer Kristin faced in Jugglers was a cold-blooded sociopathic thief, a man who found it more expedient to kill and rob than just to rob. Taking life was of no concern to him. Kristin got the drop on him and tried reason, tried to talk him down, but he wasn't having it. From his point of view, she was just another problem that could be solved with murder. She realized her position was deteriorating and moved to control him by shooting him in the shoulder. The wound rendered his right arm useless, but didn't change his mind about killing her. The next few seconds – because these things seldom take more time than that – saw an exchange of gunfire that finalized their disagreement in Kristin's favor, but afterwards, it was clear it could have gone badly for her had he not made a mistake.

Kristin viewed killing the sociopath as self-defense. Lt. Lynch of the Fort Worth Police agreed with her and ruled the killing justified. However, Otis and Lt. Lynch both felt that Kristin was quick to the trigger. Then – Otis, just being himself, confused things by being proud of her killing skills.

Kristin's real problem is that she is good at what she does. She was an excellent student when she was being taught to kill and, when she is put in the position of having to decide how to act in the face of danger, her instincts take her to the extreme. She has said that she will never be taken advantage of again and that any fight she has is a fight to the death. She is working with her tendency to "overreact," but it is an uphill battle.

JB: I love how intimately you know your characters. Have you always known them this well or have you come to know them over the course of writing the books?

BOB: I remember thinking, before deciding to pen novels, that it was a truckload of bull when writers said their characters often told them what was correct to say or do. But four books into the Baby Shark series and I must admit Kristin, Otis, Henry, et al, have many times straightened me out about who they are and what they will and won't do or say. Henry, for instance, has worked too long and hard at learning English – especially mastering the idioms – not to expect his speech to improve from book to book, from 1952 to 1958. There are other examples like that one. Characters grow and change.

My writing habits contribute in a meaningful way to the surprises I confront at times in my stories. As you know, my story outlines are rudimentary at best, more just a mental list of events in a sequence that is often fluid. I also think about times, places – that is to say, scenes – and what I want to see accomplished by that point in the happenings. I couldn't prove it, but I think everything that happens is in the service of a distant goal, an ending that I hope for, that always seems to magically come to pass. One of the more peculiar things is how the correct length of the book happens without any conscious effort on my part. Somewhere around 280 pages, give or take a few, the story has been told. This was a page total that was suggested by my publisher for his own reasons. I agreed to it and have never thought about it again. Like I say, it just happens.

Reading the above, isn't it easy to believe what I have always contended – that is to say that I don't write these books at all. It's another guy. A guy who shows up and does all the work while I'm in alpha state. "Are you working?" my wife asks when she sees me staring out the window. I tell her yes, but in truth I'm doing nothing. It's that other guy who has his shoulder to the stone.

So, let's see – your question. Getting to know them is a process, I think. You know how I prefer allowing Kristin to tell the story so that she and the reader discover things at the same time? First person, it's called. Well, it's like that for these folks. We all kind of get to know them as we go along – you know Otis was raised in a rural Baptist house by parents who brought him up to respect things many people today not only don't respect, they don't even know they're supposed to respect them. A different world, you know? When Kristin becomes Otis' partner and he removes the words painted on the door to his office, it was because he was sensitive to something most people today wouldn't notice or even think about. Maybe you remember this little narrative from Kristin in Jugglers–

      The Millett Agency was painted in black letters on the frosted glass door of our office. When I became Otis’s partner, he removed the two words that had been lower on the glass.
      Otis felt that Suspicions Verified conjured up lascivious acts that would be inappropriate now that he had a female partner. I appreciated his sensitivity and was glad to see the words go, but for a different reason. I thought they narrowed our expertise.
      Exposing infidelity might make up the larger portion of our business, but it hardly described everything we did.

You see how much more practical – or modern, if you will – Kristin is than Otis? This was in the early fifties and Kristin is already pushing for women to be treated equally and Otis is still concerned about their feelings because they're women. He believes they should be treated differently, protected.

Do you remember in High Plains when Otis is in the hospital and Kristin tells him the baby girl he helped to birth has been named after him?

      "There was a baby girl," he said.
      "They named her after you. They call her Millie."
      It was just humming machinery for a stretch of time while he gazed at me. I was afraid he didn't understand until tears came to his eyes.
      He said, "She's gonna get a good education, Missy. That's how gals go places and get what's theirs. Education."

These are breakthrough moments in the development of these characters. Otis is seeing into the future. He's imagining a time when a woman can earn the same as a man. This was revolutionary thought in 1957. There are members of Congress who to this day vote against equal pay for women – fifty years after Otis dreamed of it for his tiny ward. He is a complex character when you watch him ask Kristin, a young female, to become his partner in a man's business, and then show a lack of sophistication by growing tongue-tied when he must converse with a nun who speaks French. The thing about Otis that keeps him steady in all our minds is he knows right from wrong. You can never trick him about that. He never gives a second thought to ridding the world of a bad guy.

So, to get back to your question again – it's a process. The characters are constantly introducing themselves. I don't know from one day to the next what they're going to say, but you can trust they are who they are.

You know what the problem is? You make it too comfortable in your lunchroom, the coffee is too good, and the atmosphere is so congenial. It's your fault I ramble on.

JB: Oh, I'm so sorry about that. I'll have to slack off a little bit from now on.

And now the last – and probably most burning – question, the one your fans are on tenterhooks over. Are we going to be seeing more of Kristin and Otis in the future?

BOB: Did I mention before that I am writing a standalone? There is a story I want to tell about a guy who makes a mistake without knowing he's done it, falls on the bad side of a mobster, and ends up on the run. I'm calling it Kill the Gigolo, a contemporary, third person tale with a male protagonist. This book is half finished, so things can change, but right now here is what the back cover would say–

Erik Lamar, a smooth-talking ladies' man, is on the run. Gangster Al Foley has a grudge to settle and only Erik's head will even the score. The Irish Mob is given an assignment: kill the gigolo.

When the mutilated corpse of Erik's friend, Freddy, is found dumped in the street, Erik gets the warning – what happened to Freddy was a Girl Scout demerit compared to what is planned for him.

But first, they have to catch him. One step ahead of Foley's thugs, Erik flies off to Mexico, thinking he has traded terror for a life of leisure. But it's not so easy: Lies and deceit become his way of life in the tropics. In no time losing his head becomes the least of his worries.

So, here's the thing, JB, in reference to Sharkdom, I'm already thinking about book five, the subject, the title, all of it – very different with Kristin doing some new things, big new things. But first, Kill the Gigolo, and then after that, a new Baby Shark story.

Be honest. Will slipping in the standalone book between Baby Shark books four and five make you totally bugnuts from the wait?

JB: Probably. But to paraphrase an author I know, talking about another author – "I'd read anything written by Robert Fate." Kill the Gigolo sounds like it'll be great too.

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today, Bob. It's truly a pleasure, as always, to be allowed to spend time picking that fascinating brain of yours!

Well, folks, that's the end of the Lunch hour for today. Don't forget to visit Bob's website to keep up with what's going on in Kristin's world, and we'll keep you posted on new Robert Fate books in the future. Thanks for hanging out with us today, and come back soon!

=) JB

P.S. - Read a book. It's good for you!

Let's Do Lunch! Interview with Timothy Hallinan

I'm just a little excited - our guest author today is the terrific Timothy Hallinan! Tim has stopped by the Lunch Room today to talk about his new series featuring travel writer Poke Rafferty, and to give away copies of the second book in the series, The Fourth Watcher!

About Tim: Timothy Hallinan has lived, on and off, in Southeast Asia for more than 25 years. He wrote songs and sang in a rock band while in college, and many of his songs were recorded by well-known artists who included the platinum-selling group Bread. He began writing books while enjoying a successful career in the television industry. Over the past fourteen years he has been responsible for a number of well-reviewed novels and a nonfiction book on Charles Dickens. For years he has taught a course on "Finishing the Novel" with remarkable results – more than half his students complete their first novel and go on to a second, and several have been, or are about to be, published. Tim currently maintains a house in Santa Monica, California, and apartments in Bangkok, Thailand; and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is lucky enough (as he puts it) to be married to Munyin Choy-Hallinan.

About the series: A Nail Through the Heart introduces Poke Rafferty, a "rough-travel" writer who has settled in Bangkok with a former go-go dancer named Rose, whom he's trying to marry, and an eight-year-old street child named Miaow, whom he wants to adopt. His Looking for Trouble books (Looking for Trouble in Indonesia, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines, and Looking for Trouble in Thailand) are designed for travelers who want to go beyond the temples and tourist traps and experience life at street level – including the streets no travel guide ever mentions. Writing these books requires skills that come in handy when life in Bangkok gets rough for Poke, as it frequently does.

The Fourth Watcher: Travel writer Poke Rafferty is ready to let go of his "Looking for Trouble" series of travel books and settle down in Bangkok with his fiancee, Rose, and his newly adopted daughter, Miaow. But trouble isn't ready to let go of Poke. Enter the one person Poke least wants to see in the entire world -- a person whose emotional hold over Poke is absolute. And with him comes a box of rubies, a wad of fraudulent identity papers and -- in pursuit of those things -- one of the most dangerous gangsters in China. Add to that Rose's innocent involvement in a North Korean counterfeiting operation and an off-the-tracks agent of the American Secret Service who's dying to put Poke behind bars, and Poke and his family find themselves in a complicated and potentially deadly situation. Getting them all out alive will take every skill Poke has.

JB: First of all, congratulations on the great press for The Fourth Watcher - a nice Kirkus review, a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and it's just been chosen as Mystery of the Month by Bookpage. It really is a terrific book. Of course, now I have to go back and read A Nail Through the Heart so I'll be caught up! So, tell me, Tim - who is Poke Rafferty? Where did he come from, and what makes him tick?

TIM: Poke first came to me on New Year's Eve, 1998. I was in Bangkok, and I essentially walked the city from about ten PM until it was time for coffee, maybe 9 AM. I walked through both the tourist areas and the little back-street villages that make up Bangkok, or used to, and it came to me that I might enjoy writing a character, a travel writer who specializes in the back streets, where the bright lights aren't, and writes about life as it's lived off the tourist itineraries. I sort of parked that in the back of my mind for a few years, and he developed into someone who had made a career of bouncing from culture to culture, sort of in a detached, wise-ass way, who suddenly falls in love with an entire country, as I did when I first went to Thailand. From there it was a small step to his trying to create a Thai family, and the story of that family runs through all the books. For a variety of reasons, the family is brought into especially sharp relief in The Fourth Watcher.

JB: Okay, let's get something cleared up right off the bat - for those of us floundering in ignorance (i.e., me), how do you pronounce Miaow's name? Is it mee-ow like a cat or my-ow (my-oh?) like I hurt my toe?

TIM: Miaow is my spelling of a common Thai nickname for girls that's usually spelled in English translation as Meaw. But it's pronounced exactly like the sound a cat makes. And you're the first person ever to ask that question.

And by the way, for those who haven't read the books, Miaow is the street orphan Poke and his fiancée-and-later-wife, Rose, adopt. She's eight, going on thirty (as one reviewer said) in the first book, nine in the second, and a perilously insecure ten in the third. I love to write her – I never have the slightest doubt what she'd say, feel, or do in any conceivable situation.

JB: Your previous series (featuring LA private eye Simeon Grist) consisted of six novels (with such fabulous titles as Everything but the Squeal and Incinerator) published each year from 1989 to 1994. After you put Simeon to rest, what brought you back to novel writing and the creation of Poke Rafferty 10 years later?

TIM: Well, I didn't actually put Simeon to rest. My publishers did. The books got great reviews, stars, lots of hyperbolic adjectives, predictions of breakthrough, and everything else a writer could want, except for sales. After book six, the people at William Morrow looked at the numbers and pulled the plug. I would have done the same – the series had been given six books to find its audience, and it hadn't. So poor old Simeon went wherever it is that the heroes of discontinued series hang out, probably carping all day long about the injustice of it all. Maybe someday I'll write a book in which three or four of them resolve to team up for a comeback and take over the consciousness of some poor writer. It could be pretty funny.

After the Simeon series went down in flames, I looked at my life and decided that I was devoting too much energy to making money and not enough to writing. So I spent about five years setting things up so I could write full-time, and then I sat down and wrote the first Poke book. And I put it into a drawer and left it there, and went on to write the second. When I wrote the Simeon books, I was given a three-book contract within about six weeks of finishing the first book, and there were aspects of his character and his relationships that I would have changed if I'd written another book about him before the first one was published. So this time I decided to write a book that I wouldn't even try to publish and then move on to one I'd give to an agent. As it happened, I wrote one and a half books before sending the third one to an agent, the one that was eventually titled A Nail Through the Heart. So there are one and a half Poke Rafferty stories that will never see the light of day, although I have to admit that I've cannibalized them pretty extensively.

JB: Bill Cameron recently did a piece on you for the ITW online feature THE BIG THRILL, in which he said you "[look] forward to writing about Poke, Rose and Miaow for the rest of [your] life." Do you have any ideas at this point where Poke, Rose and Miaow might end up in the years to come?

TIM: None whatsoever. In the book I'm writing right now, which is tentatively titled Misdirection, I actually kill a continuing character. I think that in this series, everything should be on the table, just as it is in life. I'd like to think that they'll be celebrating silver anniversaries and going to Miaow's wedding, but I have no idea. There's always the potential for disaster to knock on the door.

And I never have any idea where a story is going as I write it, so it would be extremely out of character for me to know where the series is going. I've always seen plot as what characters do, and I let my characters reveal the story to me one book at a time. I'm sure they'll do the same with the series, if we're lucky enough to go into six and seven books.

JB: I sincerely hope it does. Poke has a sharp wit and a very dry sense of humor. (I've noticed in our correspondence that you do too!) Personality wise, is Poke a lot like you?

TIM: You know how, when you're in front of a mirror, and the light's just right, there's a certain way you can turn your head that makes you look, well, almost okay? I think all thriller writers are writing that guy in the mirror. It's them, edited down to the best bits, with a few admirable traits Photoshopped in. I'm not as brave as Poke or as witty in conversation, although I could be if the people I talked to would let me say, "Wait. Ask that question again," and then I could hit them with a better answer. Unlike Poke, I come from a highly functional family. But he shares my wanderlust and my fascination with different ways of looking at the world, whether it's the material world, the world of human relationships, or the world of spirit. And he's endlessly curious, which I am, too.

JB: The Fourth Watcher implies shades of violence, but it's really very subtle and toned back, which I think adds a lot to the suspense - there's not a lot we actually 'see' on-screen, and you leave a lot to the reader's imagination, which leaves us wondering what's going to happen when we turn the page. I've read others who seem to think the bloodier, the better. Was it an intentional tactic on your part to pull back the on-screen violence and concentrate more on the intrigue (which, by the by, I happen to prefer)?

TIM: It's very important in a thriller that the reader (a) likes the protagonist and (b) hates the villain. Violence is often one way to make the villain more despicable: the sort of boil-the-rabbit scene you come across once in a while. I like to write action but I don't particularly like to write violence. And I reserve a special loathing for the glib, giggling kind of sadism one gets in some serial killer books, especially since most real serial killers would be hard-pressed to hold up their end in a conversation with a toadstool. What I prefer is a kind of generalized dread that's caused by knowing that the protagonist and/or other characters we like are up against people who have absolutely no reservations about using any level of force. I think it's possible to write a villain who's capable of driving a spike through someone's tongue without actually writing the scene in which he or she does it. Colonel Chu, the primary villain in The Fourth Watcher, commits an act of unspeakable psychological violence in the book, and I think we can intuit on our own that anyone who could do what he does in that scene – without ever touching his victim – is capable of doing absolutely anything to anyone at any time. In general, with both heroes and villains, I'm more drawn to those who show me they're capable of violent or explosive behavior, than I am to those who demonstrate it at every opportunity.

JB: You spend half the year in the US and the other half in Southeast Asia, working on your novels. Does your wife travel with you? And how much get-out-and-go research do you actually do when you’re working on a book?

TIM: My wife is Chinese, and Asia doesn't hold a lot of interest for her. Also, since I literally write all day, I'm no fun to travel with on those trips. By and large, I've done my research before I leave, although I did some Cambodian research for one of the backstories in A Nail Through the Heart. Asia is not only the setting of the Poke novels, it's sort of a character, too. I want to write the books where, when I look up from the keyboard, I'm actually there. I can look around and borrow a face, a gesture, body language, the name of a business. (There's a shop in Phnom Penh called The Lovely Hours that sells clocks. How cool is that?) I'm in the climate, I'm dripping from the humidity, I'm eating the chilies in the food. I'm there, and that frees my imagination to work on characters and story instead of frittering away a bunch of energy on making the setting convincing.

JB: What are the biggest cultural differences you have to deal with in living on two continents (e.g., talk a bit about the food, the people, the general ambience, etc.)?

TIM: The things I love best about Southeast Asia are the relative lack of irony and the absence of "cool." I wrote a blog on my website a while back called "Irony-Free Zone" that focuses precisely on that. I hate a cultural attitude that puts air-quotes around emotions. I hate cool because it's based on an assumption of superiority to all that is not-cool. By and large, Southeast Asians say what they believe and do what they say they'll do. I suppose you can credit Buddhism with some of that, but I also think it's because they haven't grown up surrounded by all the greasy bounty of the West; they don't feel entitled yet. This is changing as the place grows more Westernized, but once you get past the moneyed elite and get to know actual people, most of them are – by contrast with some of the people in New York and California, at any rate – real rays of light.

JB: For writers who might be interested, there's a fabulous section on Tim's website called "Writers' Resources", with some very helpful information on finishing your novel. Tim, how did you get started teaching other writers, and where can we get more information on your course?

TIM: I started to teach because it occurred to me one day that I knew something most people didn't – how to finish a book. Anybody can start a book, but not many people ever actually finish one, which is probably good for those of us who attempt to make a living by writing. But finishing a novel is a transformational experience, and I wanted to help people get there. The class was eight three-hour sessions, or twenty-four hours in all, and it was absolutely jammed with information – how to get started, how to test-drive an idea, how to develop a character, how to learn to listen to the characters you've developed (or who have been nice enough to present themselves to you), how to shape a story, how to create a setting, how to rewrite, and, most important of all, HOW NOT TO QUIT. And that means, among other things, how to beat writer's block, how to get out of the corners you paint yourself into, how to revive a book that seems to have lapsed into a coma, and how to deal with the internal critics, the malign imps that tell you you haven't got it, you never had it, you never will have it, you probably wouldn't know it if it bit you on the calf, and all the rest of that.

The information on the site is all practical. The writing experience is woo-woo enough all by itself not to build some sort of metaphysical scaffold of creativity every time you sit down to check your punctuation. Virtually all the material I developed for the class is presented on the site in different form. But if you want to boil the whole thing down, it comes to: Write daily, or at least five days a week; write for a minimum of three hours or 500-1000 words each time (more if you can), trust your characters and don't expect the book you ultimately write to be the book you thought you were going to write. And don't quit, no matter what.

JB: What happened to the Dickens Challenge?

TIM: Ah, well, mea culpa. For those who don't know, the Dickens Challenge came about when I got caught in an online crossfire between planners – writers who work to an outline – and "pantsers," or those who write by the seat of their pants. Some people in the planner camp felt I was dismissive of their approach because I said something like, "Plot is what characters do, not a box you cram them into." I pointed out that Charles Dickens, when he died, was halfway through The Mystery of Edwin Drood and that there wasn't a single sentence or sentence fragment to suggest that he'd plotted out the rest of it. So he was pantsing – and, what's more, he was publishing as he went along. In other words, he had to live with whatever he wrote – there was no going back and tidying it up as we pantsers generally do. So I challenged people to write a novel online, a chapter a week, and to live with whatever came out. A bunch of fine writers accepted – in the States, Pakistan, South Africa, New Zealand, you name it. And I dropped the ball. First, a new novel, not a Poke book, presented itself to me and took over my life for six weeks, at which point I had 95,000 words and the beginning of a new series. Second, I went to Cambodia, where online speeds are slower than the rock cycle, and it became virtually impossible for me to read everybody's story. Third, I got into trouble on Misdirection, and it ate me alive for six weeks. So my Dickens Challenge book, which was called Counterclockwise, went out the window. The Challenge is still ongoing, but with a smaller number of writers, and they're doing it more privately, on a closed site where they can post their new chapters and critique them. They're writing great, and if they'll have me, I'll be starting Counterclockwise again sometime in the next month, once I finish Misdirection.

JB: Thanks so much for stopping by the Lunch Room, Tim. It's been a pleasure having you, and we'll see you in Nashville in September!

Now, as I've mentioned about oh, a thousand times (okay, maybe more like six), Tim has been gracious enough to offer up autographed copies of The Fourth Watcher for 7 lucky winners. So enter today! Just click on the link below to send me an email, and be sure to include your full name in the body text of your message. Deadline to enter is midnight Monday next (June 30, 2008), and we'll draw the 7 winners at random first thing Tuesday morning. I'll contact you for a mailing address if you've won, and we'll post the winners names here.

Keep in mind, even if you've entered one of the drawings here at the Lunch Room before (and even if you won!), that doesn't disqualify you from entering this one - but only one entry per person for each giveaway, please! Good luck!

Click to register: I want to win The Fourth Watcher!

You can learn more about Tim and his books at www.timothyhallinan.com.

Let's Do Lunch! Interview with Sheila Lowe

I've been more than a bit fascinated with all things British since I discovered the Beatles when I was in about the 3rd grade - I have very little recall from that point in time, but I do remember a few years later being able to mimic a British accent pretty well by the time I hit 6th grade, thanks to John, Paul, George and Ringo, and a Monkee named Davy Jones.

Not that that has anything to do with anything, but my Lunch Room guest today is a native Brit - a transplant to the States some years ago, she still has that token British charm, and I know you'll enjoy getting to know her as much as I have. She's a delightful lady and a pretty darn good writer to boot.

Sheila Lowe is a court-qualified handwriting expert who testifies in forensic cases. She has more than thirty years experience in the field of handwriting analysis and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology. The author of Handwriting of the Famous & Infamous and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Handwriting Analysis, her analyses of celebrity handwritings have appeared in Time, Teen People, and Mademoiselle. Her articles on "Personality Profiling and Handwriting Analysis for the Attorney" have been published in several bar association magazines.

Sheila's clientele includes a wide spectrum of corporate clients, mental health professionals, attorneys, private investigators and staffing agencies, among others. Her award-winning Handwriting Analyzer software is used around the world, and her profiles help uncover important information in background checks and pre-employment screening. She enjoys analyzing handwriting for individuals, too, helping them understand themselves and others better.

I invited Sheila to the Lunch Room to talk about her foray into fiction with the first book in her Claudia Rose series, Poison Pen, and its follow-up, Written in Blood, due out in September, as well as her fascinating career as a handwriting analyst, and as we got to chatting I discovered a lot more about this very entertaining and interesting lady ...

JB: You have something like 40 years experience in handwriting analysis. How did you get started?

SL: Back in the Dark Ages, when I was in high school, my then-boyfriend's mother analyzed my handwriting — she'd read a book about it. I was astonished by what she told me about my personality, so when I saw a 25-cent Dell pocket book on handwriting analysis at the supermarket, I bought it and immediately immersed myself in my studies. Okay, so there wasn't much immersion to be had in those few pages, but it did get me started checking out library books on the subject. Suddenly, I was sought after at parties — all the girls wanted their boyfriends' handwritings analyzed.

JB: You've had the opportunity to analyze over 10,000 handwriting samples over the years. Can you explain to our readers what role your analysis plays in the different spheres in which you work (i.e., legal, medical, mental health)?

SL: The biggest part of my practice is my work with employers who are hiring. They send me their top applicants' handwriting, along with a job description, and I focus the report on how the applicant stacks up personality-wise with their requirements. I don't have to recommend whether or not to hire the person (thank heavens!), but just provide an objective personality profile. On the legal side, I analyze handwriting for authenticity. In other words, did Mr. X sign this will, or was it really the bimbo stepmother who wanted her kids to get all his money and cut his kids out? I also analyze couples for compatibility, to help them understand what motivates them and how they might head off potential problems. Stuff like that.

JB: You mentioned to me that you often speak in interviews about your daughter - would you mind sharing your story with us?

SL: No, I don't mind at all. Jennifer was 26 in 1999 when she met and fell madly in love with Tom. He worked as a special agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, teaching border patrol agents hand-to-hand combat, etc. He wanted me to analyze his handwriting, which I found contained some alarming red flags. I saw in the handwriting a controlling person with the potential for explosive behavior. There were also indications of possible head trauma. When I asked if he'd had a head injury, Tom said that he had suffered a blow to the head on the job, which resulted in violent headaches. We discussed the problems the two of them might encounter in a relationship — Jen was headstrong and would not allow him to control her. I hoped she would pay attention. Okay, she'd never listened to me before, so why would I expect her to now? Tom moved in with her shortly after they met. Less than a year later, Jen was dead, the victim in a murder/suicide. So, while I was able to see the potential for problems, I was unable to prevent a tragic end to her story.

JB: I really admire how you've accepted what happened and are so willing to talk about it. Did that experience have any impact on your decision to write your series? Does it continue to influence your writing?

SL: I had begun writing Poison Pen long before Jennifer's death, but until then, just meandered along. It seemed as if what happened to her impelled me to get it finished and start sending it out. Maybe I needed something to concentrate on that would take the focus off the waking nightmare of her death. As far as the experience influencing my writing, the character of fourteen-year-old Annabelle in my second Claudia Rose story, Written in Blood, is in some ways a lot like Jen, to whom I've dedicated the book.

JB: That's so touching. Now, you also have two sons, right?

SL: Yes. Erik is 33, a tattoo artist, and Ben is 30. He was a Chippendale's-type dancer, but he's just changed jobs and is now a bartender at Universal Studios. They're both 6'3" with shaved heads. I'm 5'6" and feel dwarfed between them.

JB: I have that same problem with my kids. Let's talk about Claudia - she's a great character, not too flawed, not too perfect, and very easy to like. Other than your profession, what do you and she have in common?

SL: Um ... lessee ... we're both handwriting analysts, both bull-headed, independent women who often do things that are probably not in their best interests. But on the other hand, Claudia is far braver than I am, and she likes coffee. I'm glad you find her easy to like.

JB: Do you often get the same kinds of skeptical reactions in your line of work that Claudia does in Poison Pen?

SL: Skeptical reactions are less common now than when I started analyzing handwriting in 1967, but occasionally people ask do me to read their palms, or they'll ask if I'm going to give them their horoscope, which is really annoying! An example: I worked at a San Francisco medical convention, analyzing the handwritings of hundreds of doctors (no, it's not true that all doctors have bad handwriting). [She's right - I used to work for doctors, and one of them had the most beautiful writing I've ever seen!] Most were stunned at what their analysis revealed, but one doctor made a comment about it being "quasi science." I guess I gave him an earful, as he said, "I think I've offended you." I suggested he download the Annotated Bibliography of peer-reviewed handwriting research from my web site, after which he apologized. Okay, so it was defensive of me, but most people don't have to explain why their career is not part of the occult sciences (she said, leading with her chin).

JB: Good for you! There's a darker element at the heart of this otherwise seemingly cozy mystery. Was that your intention when you started writing it?

SL: Actually, I never intended to write something cozy, so I'm glad the darkness shone through ... in a manner of speaking. But I did want the story to have a meaningful theme, and what emerged dealt with childhood sexual abuse and Claudia's evolving view of a woman she had strongly disliked. As she uncovers some of the experiences that molded this woman into who she became, the message hits home for Claudia that behind every handwriting is a human being.

JB: Talk a little about Written in Blood. What do we see Claudia up to next? Are we going to see more of the sexy Detective Jovanic?

SL: Jovanic is definitely back in Written in Blood. He and Claudia butt heads again (and other parts) when she becomes involved in the life of Annabelle Giordano, who is a student at a girls' school run by Claudia's client, Paige Sorensen. Annabelle comes on scene already having been in trouble with the law. She's lost her mother at a young age and has a distant father, and has recently attempted suicide. Claudia, who is unable to have children of her own, reaches out to Annabelle and loses her heart to this prickly kid. Written in Blood really is Annabelle's story, but it also centers around Paige, the trophy wife of a much older man who has died. His children have accused her of forging their father's name on his will, giving most of his estate to Paige, and that's how Claudia enters the story.

JB: Okay, let's switch gears a bit. How long have you lived in the States, and how difficult was it for you to adjust after moving here from England? How often are you able to visit your hometown of London?

SL: I was fourteen when my family came to the U.S. to stay. At that age it was a tough adjustment, leaving my grandparents, school friends, and everything familiar. But I got by with a little help from the Beatles, who showed up on the Ed Sullivan Show shortly after we arrived in Los Angeles. We all know what happened next — anything British was "in." It just so happened I'd brought the first two Beatles albums over from England, so I was now in big demand at Fremont Junior High. My fishnet tights were a big hit, too. In the more than forty years (Yikes! can it be that long?) since then, I've gone home only three times, most recently in May of this year, when I was invited to lecture to handwriting analysts in London. While we were there, I visited the ancient church in Somerset where my ancestors got married about 250 years ago — fab!

JB: Fab, indeed. What's your favorite thing to eat when you go home that you can't get here?

SL: Scones with clotted cream and jam. They're just not the same here. On this last trip, we ate our way across England, so I got to taste all my favorites — bangers and mash, steak pie, and my old favorite sweets, Smarties (which are like M&M's, but not quite). The sticky toffee pudding with Bird's Custard was also memorable, and spotted dick, and ... I think I'd better stop here, I'm getting carried away.

JB: By all means, carry away! After all, this is an eatery. You're making me hungry, and I've had to get clarification on what half the stuff is you're talking about - certainly not anything you could get in the Lunch Room without special ordering it! ;) For those of you not familiar, here's a rundown of what all these delightful dishes she's talking about are, straight from the source:

SL: Clotted cream is like a cross between cream and butter. It has an indescribably wonderful flavor, and when you put it on a scone with raspberry jam - okay, I'm drooling. I don't think there is an equivalent here. It's also called Devon cream. I guess that's where it comes from.
Bangers and mash - bangers are large pork sausage links that have a lot of breadcrumbs in them. Mash is mashed potatoes. You have them with onion gravy or Bisto (a gravy brand that everyone uses there) and peas.
Smarties look just like M&Ms, but the shell is a bit more delicate and the chocolate has a different taste.
Sticky toffee pudding - Dessert in general is referred to as pudding. Sticky toffee pudding is a pie-like dessert. Also, steamed pudding could be any number of things. A steak and kidney pudding, for instance, is like a stew with a steamed pudding on top - like spotted dick, only savory instead of sweet. It's always made with suet, which is probably equivalent to Crisco or could be beef suet (suet being fat). Yes, kidney really means the organ - ugh! Spotted dick is a [sweet] steamed pudding. The way my nanny (grandmother) made it was a steamed very moist suet cake with raisins (that's the spots). The batter is put into a heavy mixing bowl with muslin tied over the top, and that's put on a double boiler until it's cooked - if I remember correctly, that could be a couple of hours. It's then served with a creamy pudding called custard. It's also known as spotted dog.

JB: Yummmmm ... argh! Where is that no-account kitchen help?? Ahem. Okay, moving on. I love Flare, Claudia's neighbor's German Shepherd, and the part she plays in Poison Pen. Are you a pet person?

SL: Flare was a real dog belonging to my first husband's family (the husband who gave me the "Lowe" name). She was a fierce guard dog, but she tolerated me, even though I'm really a cat person. As for my own pets, one day, I came home to find two tiny kittens playing on the stairs in my apartment. One had a light brown back and pure white tummy, with blue, blue eyes. The other was grey all over. Jen had brought them home knowing there was no way I would make her take them back. Sugar, the brown and white one, who was as sweet as her name, lived for fifteen years. Fritz will turn 18 in July and is still going strong.

JB: How sweet! Thank you so much, Sheila, for dropping by the Lunch Room - it's been a pleasure having you!

SL: Thank you, JB, I love an excuse to go out to lunch, and the chance to combine it with such good company makes it a true pleasure.

JB: Aw, thanks.

To learn more about Sheila and her books, visit her professional website at www.sheilalowe.com and her Claudia Rose series website at www.claudiaroseseries.com. Written in Blood will be released in September, and Poison Pen is now available in paperback from your favorite bookseller.

Let's Do Lunch! Interview with Bruce Cook (aka Brant Randall)

Welcome to another Lunch Room chat session. We're delighted you're here! Pull up a seat and we'll get you some iced tea, and please be sure to throw your name in the hat for the drawing before you leave - details below.

My guest today is author Bruce Cook, whose first novel, Philippine Fever, is the story of an ATF agent trying to track down a missing cargo container full of terrorist weapons in Manila, smuggling capital of the world, after his main suspect is murdered.

Bruce has adopted the pseudonym Brant Randall and penned an amazing story called Blood Harvest, which we're talking about (and giving away) today. Thanks for stopping by, Bruce.

Bruce: Thanks for inviting me to lunch, JB. I love diners. One of my favorite restaurant books is Diving Out in LA.

JB: A guide to great dives, I get it. Wait, does this qualify as a dive? Okay, never mind. Before we get to the main course, let's talk a little about what else you have on your plate. Will there be more Sam Haine in our futures or are you working on other projects?

Bruce: Sam Haine will return in a story about gun smuggling by the contemporary IRA in Ireland, using treasure recovered from a payroll ship of the Spanish Armada that sank off the coast of Ireland. It was an idea I invented, then researched and now believe to be true. It is probably not the next book.

Currently I am working on two novels. The first is Feral Frankie, a story about the orphaned child of a meth cooker in northern California. At 13 he takes his daddy's car and heads for Los Angeles, where he believes he still has a living grandmother. Sort of like a young Mad Max takes a trip on Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

The second novel is titled Snapshots from Hell, and is a darkly comic look at the moral bloodbath that is Hollywood. Having worked in the film biz for 39 years I have a few crime tales to tell, some skeletons to unearth, gossip to relate, and a few heads to crack.

You may be wondering why I have adopted a pseudonym, having begun a series under the name Bruce Cook. After Philippine Fever was published I discovered four other authors named Bruce Cook, including two who write/wrote mystery series. I have been asked to sign some of those other author's books at signings, which is a little embarrassing for the customer. Since Blood Harvest was meant to be a very different kind of novel from Philippine Fever I decided to devise a pen name - Brant Randall.

However, response has been so positive to Brant's first book I have decided that he is going to collaborate with Bruce on the next book.

JB: Now there's an idea. Let's talk about Blood Harvest - a highly unique story told from the first-person point of view of a number of different characters, with the narratives overlapping each other with respect to time and location. Did you set out from the get-go to write it that way, or was that something that sort of fell into place as you were writing it?

Bruce: Blood Harvest began as a first person short story, the chapter that opens the book, as told by Marshal Lawe. Once it was complete, I realized that I wanted to continue to explore the historical reality of lynchings in New England, and that I wanted to tell the story from multiple points of view.

I decided each chapter would be told by a new first person narrator, sharing his/her version of the events surrounding the lynching of the Italian immigrant, Nick DeCosta. I am a screenwriter and film director, so I was familiar with the Kurasawa classic Rashomon. I knew that each voice needed to have a unique perspective on what life in the town was like, but that it must also add new information about the events for the reader, so it wouldn’t just be a tiresome rehash.

In other words, no character telling his piece of the story actually understands the full extent of what has happened. Only the reader, with knowledge gleaned from all the narrators, knows the full truth.

The challenge was to create voices that were so individual or idiosyncratic that the reader would instantly know that a new character was speaking. I had first seen this done well in Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. After I had finished a draft of the novel I happened to read Wilkie Collins' Woman in White, written in 1859, which also used the same approach. This only goes to show that no writer can invent anything truly new, either in content or technique.

JB: Talk a bit about the research that went into this book. Did you have prior knowledge of the history and activities of the KKK in that period of time, or did you learn way more than you ever wanted to know from doing your research?

Bruce: I knew next to nothing about the history of the KKK before writing this book, other than having seen the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation when I was in film school.

This novel grew from an incident related to me by my grandmother when she was in her nineties. She was a Scotch-Irish girl from rural New England, one of twelve children, though two died in infancy.

I knew she had married young, perhaps at sixteen, though she sometimes claimed she had been eighteen. She said that after her wedding day she had never returned to her home town. I had assumed that she eloped or otherwise angered her parents. At one point I asked if her parents had disliked my grandfather, who I remembered as personable and charming.

She claimed that they liked him very much. He was a perfect example of the immigrant success story. Came to America from Greece at sixteen, without any English. Started working the next day. Within five years he owned his own restaurant, within ten a chain of candy shops and drug stores.

"So why didn't you ever return to your home town?" I asked her.

"It was those dumb clucks." She used this expression only when quite angry. "My brother-in-law didn't think it right for a white girl to marry a non-white European."

This was new territory to me, but when I read my grandfather's immigration papers I found that southern Europeans — the Greeks, Spanish, Italians, and Turks — were classified thus until 1912. But it was her next revelation that stunned me.

It wasn't dumb "clucks." It was dumb "klux." The KKK had driven my grandparents from the town. This wasn't consistent with what I had learned in my history classes, and so I began to research.

The KKK had been moribund for thirty years when it was revived in 1915 as an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movement, though with plenty of racism left over for blacks. It came to be centered not in the South but in the Northeast, with a large contingent in the Midwest.

Since I still have family alive who recall these incidents and live in the area, I changed the location of my story and the names.

I spent about six months researching the klan's activities during the 1920s, finding great primary sources in local newspapers, photographs, and court records. I found a collection of souvenir postcards of lynchings that is the most troubling thing I have seen in the last decade.

And then I found the present day klan. I discovered that my daughter-in-law's sister cannot visit her husband's home town because his family is still in the KKK and they disapprove of her religion. The family is in Ohio.

At the peak of membership in the mid-1920s the klan had between six and eight million members in 45 states. They swung elections in the mid-West. They controlled several state legislatures. They stalemated the nomination of a presidential slate at the 1924 Democratic convention for 103 ballots, because they opposed the nomination of Al Smith, a Catholic.

If there were that many members in that many states, the odds are that someone in your family was a member ... or a target.

I could go on, but I think you get my drift.

Besides, my salad is wilting.

JB: Yeah, it's the humidity around here. What an incredible story. And an incredible book. Thanks so much for sharing your time with us today!

Bruce (or Brant, if you prefer) has been gracious enough to offer autographed copies of Blood Harvest to 10 lucky Lunch Room visitors. We'll draw the winners at random next Friday, May 30, 2008 - click here to enter, and be sure to include your full name in the body of your email. Winners will be notified for address confirmation.

In the meantime, happy reading!

=) JB

Robert Fate Returns to the Lunch Room!

Remember I said I was working on a very special announcement? Well here it is, and I am dizzy with excitement - my dear pal Robert Fate has dropped in for another visit to his favorite online lunch place, and he's brought surprises with him!

I'm very pleased and honored to announce that his newest book in the Baby Shark series, BABY SHARK'S HIGH PLAINS REDEMPTION, will be officially released in the next couple of weeks, and Bob has brought a few copies to the Lunch Room, which he will autograph and send to five lucky people - just enter to win! Details are below, but for now, grab a seat, settle in, and enjoy a few minutes of banter with Bob.

JB: We're so excited to have you drop by the Lunch Room again, Bob - welcome back! While we're waiting for your order of fried okra, let's chat about what you've been up to since you were here last (March 9, 2007) ... a new book ready for release, obviously, and Kristin has grown up quite a bit. You hinted at more adventures for our Baby Shark heroine - are those in the works?

ROBERT FATE: Yum, fried okra. Okay, let's see. It is May 1957 at the beginning of book three, Baby Shark's High Plains Redemption. So, yes, Kristin has grown up some. She will be twenty-two in July. She and her boyfriend, Lee, the Dallas Police Detective she met in Baby Shark's Beaumont Blues, are on again, off again. The problem they are having is one of full disclosure. She doesn't want to lie to her lover, but on the other hand how can she be totally honest with him? He has sworn to uphold the law and she and Otis are compelled by circumstances, from time to time, to work just over the line. That is to say, they occasionally bend the law in order to see justice done for their clients. But Lee and Kristin are crazy about each other, so it's a thorny issue that may not get settled for a book or two more.

JB: That's great - I really like Lee and Kristin together. And I do note that there is a fourth Baby Shark book scheduled to be released next year - yay!

I have to ask about HIGH PLAINS REDEMPTION - when we talked last, BABY SHARK'S PANHANDLE CARAVAN was the working title. Although I love the one it's actually being published under, when did it change (most of our writer buddies know that happens all the time - but for the benefit of our non-writer members, you might throw in a brief explanation of the 'why')? Please give us a brief rundown of what Kristin's up to this time around.

RF: Titles, huh? My understanding is that different publishers handle the decision in reference to titles differently. At some publishing houses, I hear that authors have little or nothing to say about their titles. At my publisher, Capital Crime Press, the authors do have some say so about their titles. So, I alone was responsible for the confusion surrounding the title for book three in the Baby Shark series.

Here come all my excuses – I thought at first I would call it Sooner Weekend as a tongue in cheek stab at what turns into a weekend from hell. Everyone said it sounded like a travel book. Next, I thought Panhandle Caravan was a good idea because of the locale and the time Kristin spends in her car. Sounds like a musical comedy, I was told. I admit my stories are like cozies with a few brutal murders, but musical comedy? So, finally, I settled on High Plains Redemption. It sounded a little snooty to me, but everyone liked it and it does honestly address the subject of the book. So, as that TV detective used to say, "Dat's da name of dat tune."

And what is Kristin up to? You're really nosy for a lunchroom owner, you know that? I'm going to allow the reviewers to answer that question, but I will say that Kristin has some moments of hard-edged self-reflection about what she is turning into. She begins to question how easy it has become for her to kill. Nuff said.

JB: Yep, Nosy Nellie, that's me. And as I said, I love the title High Plains Redemption. It's perfect for the story. And I think you've given enough of a teaser to get folks interested in reading it - trust me, people, this is his best yet.

Now, what about that standalone you were contemplating?

RF: I am still contemplating a standalone. Here is the look I get on my face when I am contemplating. See? That proves it.

JB: How are things with Fern and Jenny? And who could forget Pharrell the sunbathing turtle. Is he still around?

RF: How kind of you to ask about my wife and daughter. Fern, as you know, is a ceramic artist. She is entering stuck-up shows these days in which you must be "invited" to display your pieces. Uh huh. Her hat size goes up with each invitation, but Jenny and I still love her. Jen is finishing her sophomore year at USC. We live fifteen minutes from her apartment near campus, but we only see her when she runs out of laundry, needs her refrigerator restocked, or comes home to sleep like the dead for a couple of days. She says it's all that studying. Well, I guess it could be all that studying ... "Sure," her father says, "It's because of all that studying."

The turtle? You ask about the turtle? What's the matter with you? He still wants to bite me and only shows his personality to Fern and Jen. I threatened to plaster a turtle soup label on his house, but Fern won't allow it.

JB: Sorry. Forgot that was a touchy subject. ;)

Thank you so much for coming back to visit with us, Bob. I'm thrilled and honored by your generous offer to give away brand spanking-new autographed copies of BABY SHARK'S HIGH PLAINS REDEMPTION to five lucky Lunch Room visitors.

RF: Thank you for the invitation (see, Fern, I get invitations, too). It was my pleasure to join you, and the books? I am happy to think they will be read (and hopefully enjoyed) by visitors to your kitchen and stool set up. Finally, my fried okra has arrived. I will say J.B., you’re pleasant enough, but the service around here is really sloooow.

JB: Yeah, I know. I gotta have a chat with the hired help.

Okay, folks, here's the deal. We're giving away five autographed copies of BABY SHARK'S HIGH PLAINS REDEMPTION in a random drawing. All you have to do to enter the drawing is click here to send me an email. (Please be sure to include your full name in the body!)

The drawing will be held on Friday, May 9, 2008 here in the Lunch Room. The winners will be notified by email and a list will be posted here. Good luck, and thanks for stopping by - your order will be ready soon ... if I can get the kitchen help off her ... never mind. Have some iced tea ...

=) JB

Robert Fate is the author of the Baby Shark series featuring Kristin Van Dijk, who is one tough little cookie. You can read my reviews of BABY SHARK and BABY SHARK'S BEAUMONT BLUES by following the links to the right under "Periodicals to Peruse". Visit Bob's website at www.robertfate.com.

Let's Do Lunch! Interview with Mark Arsenault

This 240th post is brought to you, fittingly, on my 40th birthday, and I consider myself so lucky - most people get flowers, cards, and candy on their special day. I get Mark Arsenault. I hope you enjoy my conversation with this very personable, very kind, very insightful gentleman ...



Mark Arsenault is a reporter for The Providence Journal, Providence, Rhode Island. His first novel, Spiked (2003), about a murder inside the Lowell, Massachusetts heroin trade, was a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best First Mystery. His follow-up novel, Speak Ill of the Living, was inspired by two years of jailhouse interviews inside Rhode Island's more notorious prison. Gravewriter is the first in a new series featuring obituary writer Billy Povich.


JB: You've said that nobody outside the newspaper industry has ever wanted to hire you, but did you know from the time you delivered that first paper that you wanted to be a reporter? How did your journalism career evolve from that point?

MA: Growing up, it never occurred to me to be a reporter. I thought reporters were the people who followed families in a pack after tragedies and yelled rude questions after them. That's true, of course, but that's just one ugly slice of the business. Real reporters are the ones who go where the pack does not, finding the stories nobody else gets. Very late in my college career, I decided I might like to be a writer. Taking a newspaper job was, I thought at the time, a way into the writing business. I didn't expect to stick with it, but I didn't know how satisfying journalism could be. My meager résumé lacked academic pedigree and elite internships, so I had to spend several years near the bottom of the profession, writing for small daily papers nobody has ever heard of, in Massachusetts. The work was hard, there were few editors who could help you improve, and the paycheck could actually make you laugh. But I wouldn't trade the experience. In 1994, I caught a break and got a job at The Sun, in Lowell, Mass. That was my first mid-sized paper with editors who could help me improve. I joined The Providence Journal in 1998.

JB: Tell us a little about what made Lowell, Massachusetts the inspiration for the setting and characters in Spiked.

MA: During my time at The Sun, in Lowell, I was dispatched to cover a body found under a railroad bridge, just outside of downtown. By the time I got there, the action was over, but it was obvious that people had been living under that bridge. There were makeshift tents, piles of clothes and blankets, crates of canned food, and all varieties of trash. Working with the local homeless shelter, I tracked down the girlfriend of the man who had just died under the bridge. Her name was Julia. She was a heroin addict, like the rest of the community who lived under the bridge. I interviewed her at length. People who have nothing to lose are the most honest people you'll ever meet. She told me all about being addicted, and how much it hurt to lose her common law husband to an overdose. I remember she told me, "We weren't hurting anyone but ourselves … why couldn't we just have our little lives?" Heartbreaking.

I raced back to the newsroom with thoughts of the story (and the Pulitzer banquet) in my head. But my editor was not impressed, and he killed my story – spiked it, in the language of the newsroom. Why? I don't know. He just didn't want to hear about heroin addicts in his city, I think.

This was around the time the political book Primary Colors was in the news, which was originally published anonymously. I thought maybe I could write a mystery book, telling the story of the addicts under the bridge, do it anonymously, and get around the shortsighted editor without getting fired. So I started to write fiction. The project quickly outgrew my original intentions, and became a new career for me. By the time my book was published in 2003, I was already working in Providence.

I never knew what happened to Julia. I don't even know if she is alive … or if she ever realized my first novel, Spiked, is dedicated to her.

JB: On writing novel-length fiction, you've been quoted as saying, "Writing a novel is a matter of mind over ass. You have to put your ass in the chair and type." You've also said it's like long-distance hiking, "like walking fifty miles. No one part of the walk is itself very hard, but taken in total it's a tremendous amount of work." Great philosophies, and dead-on accurate. When and why did you "shed the myth of the muse" and stop waiting for inspiration? Is this strictly a by-product of your being trained as a deadline news writer?

MA: There is no muse. I am the muse.

When I come back with the results of the gubernatorial election, I can't tell my editor that I'm blocked ... and I need to take a long walk among the lilac and wait for inspiration. No, no. They'd have to peel the poor guy off the ceiling.

If I have 45 minutes to write a story before deadline, it has to be there in 45 minutes. If you can't do that ... then you can't do this job.

Writing is not alchemy. Writing is more like carpentry. This is the lesson of deadline writing. Bang it out, push the button.

Now, when I write off-deadline profiles or news features, I write them slowly. I'm a pretty slow fiction writer, too. But when I sit down to write, I never, ever get up with nothing done. When it's time to write, that's what writers do. [I think I may have said that very thing recently ...]

JB: Last year you did an interview with your friend Andrew Galarneau with the Buffalo News, and I'm borrowing a bit of what you posted on your blog back in August. Tell our readers about your personal rules for writing thrillers – the Message in a Bottle Rule, the Taunting Rule, and the Hindsight Rule.

MA: In order:

The Message in a Bottle Rule. One coincidence per novel, and it has to be at the beginning. Such as, your hero finds a message in a bottle that opens the story. That's the coincidence: that the hero happened to be at the beach to find the bottle. Or your detective gets assigned a routine investigation that turns out to be the case of the year ... the coincidence is that YOUR detective got assigned the case, and not some other plainclothesman.

No Taunting Rule. Don't taunt. If your character looks inside the moldy old cedar chest and sees the clue for which he or she had been searching, then the reader gets to see it, too. Don't you hate when writers taunt? Such as: "And as she threw back the creaky lid and looked inside, all became clear and she knew who was behind the murder of the 16 polo players!" Then the chapter ends, and some other scene begins. GAAA!!! What was in the blasted chest?? I hate that.

The Hindsight Rule. Clues should be scattered in plain sight. If someone were to read the novel a second time, the identification of the killer, in hindsight, should be head-slappingly obvious.

Occasionally, smart readers will figure it out ahead of time. That's okay. The irresistible human need to see how things end will pull them through the story.

JB: Speaking of your blog, what happened to "Smart Mysteries"? Do you blog somewhere else now?

MA: The blog was on hold as I finished another manuscript. But it's coming back. I'm starting a new regular column on mysteries for The Providence Journal, and I'll shortly be posting them on the blog, too. Please bear with me.

JB: What's next for Billy Povich? And is there a chance we'll see Eddie Bourque again at some point in the future? How did the decision to pursue a different series come about?

MA: The next Povich adventure is done. Billy, Bo and the Old Man will be back to figure out who paid off the shooter of a well-known judge.

I was a little burned out on the Eddie Bourque character after two books, maybe because that character is more autobiographical than Povich. I switched publishers after my second book, Speak Ill of the Living, was published in 2005. It was just easier to start with a new character.

I have plans for several more novels in my head, and Eddie is not among them. Who knows, though? I would never rule out a third Eddie Bourque book. My fiancé is after me to consider that character again.

JB: Let's talk a little more about your work at The Journal. The paper was honored as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2003, in part due to the series on the fire at The Station nightclub and the overhaul of the Rhode Island state fire code, of which you wrote two of the eight installments. Can you share your thoughts on that experience with us?

MA: The Station fire in 2003 killed exactly 100 people. In a small state, nearly everybody has some personal tie to someone who was killed or hurt, or to the families of a victim. I remember working some crazy amount of hours the first few days after the fire, just chronicling unimaginable pain and suffering. On maybe the third or fourth day, I was sitting on a bare concrete floor at a National Guard building, waiting with maybe 100 other journalists for the governor's daily press conference to begin. I could barely keep my eyes open and I didn't know how I'd be able to write. I just wanted to go to bed. But then the governor came in, the action started, I instantly popped awake and I said silently in my own head: "There is no place I'd rather be right now than here, doing this work."

I covered the fire and its aftermath, full-time, for 10 months. There is no place I would have rather been.

JB: You also wrote a three-part series on Craig Price, the maximum-security inmate in the Rhode Island prison system who murdered four people in the late 1980s, when he was a teenager. [The series, entitled "Into Another World", was published in The Journal in March 2004.] What kind of influence did delving into the mind of a killer have on your fiction writing? Did it also affect you personally?

MA: I met about 50 times with Price over two years in preparing that story. We also exchanged long, long letters. It's hard to explain to somebody outside Rhode Island how despised Price is in this little state. He committed his crimes in the late 1980s, but if you say his name out loud in a crowded restaurant in 2007, you will get dirty looks from all the locals.

He is widely considered to be the embodiment of evil; easily the most hated person in modern state history.

He never told his story to anyone, and I was surprised in 2002 when he responded to my letter and agreed to tell his story to me.

I wrote my piece for the newspaper in 2004. The stuff left over in my imagination became my third novel, Gravewriter.

In the newspaper series, we started with a real-life character who had done something monstrous, and who, in telling the story, was trying to reclaim his humanity. He was the monster who wanted to be a man.

The book is the mirror image: We start with a character who is basically a good person (though flawed). My character, Billy Povich, is consumed with fantasies of revenge, and he wonders if a monstrous act could somehow be considered justice.

If the experience at the prison taught me anything, it's that characters (both real-life and in fiction) are complicated, deeply layered and evolving.

From a technical standpoint, the prison escape scene in Gravewriter is based on conversations with Price, as he told me of a legendary escape from that SuperMax facility.

JB: Fascinating stuff, Mark - thanks for sharing that with us. Okay, that's probably enough of the heavy, probing questions – we can move on to something a little lighter. What do you like to do when your tail [ahem] isn't in the chair?

MA: I hike. My soon-to-be wife, Jennifer, and I collect U.S. national parks. We have backpacked above 14,000 feet, and my collection of hiking guidebooks probably weighs more than I do. Establishing the national parks was the second-best idea this country ever had, after the First Amendment.

JB: Let's say you and I are going to meet at your favorite hole in the wall for lunch. Where would we go and what would you recommend off the menu?

MA: We'll meet at AS220 on Empire Street, downtown Providence, after 1:30 p.m., when the rush slows down. I'll pay the extra dollar to have chicken added to the vegetarian burrito. We'll sit outside on the sidewalk. A waitress with a British accent will call you "my love" and "my darling," as if you had been dining there all your life. [Sounds fabulous. I can meet you and Jennifer there by 1:30!]

JB: Last question, Mr. Reporter. If you could have covered any event in history, which one would you pick and why?

MA: Interesting question. I've thought about this for a while. What is the better story? Victory or tragedy? The Wright brothers or the Lincoln assassination? The Hurricane of '38 or the moment of inspiration in which Einstein discovered that time was flexible?

What I like best are stories of hope. So I'll pick July 1939, at the New York World's Fair. My Polish grandparents have arrived on their honeymoon at the park themed "The World of Tomorrow." They don't realize a world war is about to begin, or that my grandmother would lose a brother in it. They're just two children of immigrants, both shop workers with little schooling, newly married, with $100 in wedding money in their pockets, and they have hope.

JB: What a great story that would have been. Congratulations, Mark, on your upcoming wedding, and thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us in the Lunch Room!

MA: My pleasure.

A Massachusetts native, Mark Arsenault has been a reporter since 1989, working at The Gardner News, the Marlboro Enterprise, and The Sun (Lowell, Mass.). He currently lives in Rhode Island and has been at The Providence Journal since 1998. Visit Mark's website at www.markarsenault.net.

Let's Do Lunch! Interview with Robert Fate

Yes, I know ... it's been too long. If you're dropping in after having been gone for a while, welcome back! The decor has changed a bit here in the Lunch Room, so feel free to have a look around.

I'm very excited to have Robert Fate as my guest today, and I know you're going to love him as much as I do. So find a seat, order a glass of iced tea, sit back and enjoy ...



Robert Fate, author of BABY SHARK and BABY SHARK'S BEAUMONT BLUES (May 2007), is a member of The Writers Guild of America – West, Mystery Writers of America, the Los Angeles and National chapters of Sisters in Crime, and the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers.




JB: So, here we are at last! First, let me congratulate you on BABY SHARK and BEAUMONT BLUES – these are fantastic books.

You've written poetry, short stories, magazine articles, journals, stage plays, and TV and Motion Picture scripts, and if I may quote, you've said "it was a long, scenic road to novels." Can you share a little of that journey with us?

BOB: For you, JB, anything. Let's see. I have made up stories as long as I can remember. My older sister encouraged my imagination by taking me to two double features on most Saturdays as I was growing up. Writing plays and skits started early, too, and seemed a natural thing to do. Acting was a part of that, too. I was in so many school plays I am amazed that my peers didn't rise up and put a stop to it – enough of him, already. So, I have always been a writer – and it has taken different forms. Here's an example. A friend of mine became head writer for a soap opera – and that's not an easy feat, let me tell you. Anyway, he called me in L.A. and asked if I would come to New York and write scripts with him. I requested a week to watch the show (since I had never seen a soap) and called him back. "It's all middle," I said. "No beginning. No ending. All middle." Anyway, I did it. And I gained a lot of respect for the writers of soaps during the time I did it, too. Just like anything else, it's all work, work, work. I guess my point is that each time an opportunity to write something has presented itself, I have seriously tried to meet the challenge. You know, learn the form and write. And then, finally, came the novel – a format that had always frightened me. My good friend, Bruce Cook, told me to stop whining and get busy. Uh huh, well, it still scares me, but as usual I will stick with it until I learn how to do it.

JB: Tell us a little about Kristin Van Dijk – you do such a wonderful job of portraying this 17-year-old girl from her own point of view – what made you decide to take this approach with your protagonist?

BOB: Who knows where ideas come from? But I think Kristin grew from a desire I had to do something different. I wanted to write crime stories. I was sure of that, and it seemed to me there were enough well written burned out cops, hard drinking P.I.s, and rogue assassins, so maybe a young woman – nice working class background, but with a few issues. It might work – if she could somehow be dangerous enough to take her adversaries off guard. So then it was a matter of approach, wasn't it? Since I value realism I wanted Kristin to become a believably tough customer right before our eyes – high school girl grows up fast, but remains vulnerable. If the young men we send off to war can be trained to kill, why can't a young woman be trained in a similar fashion? But why would she learn to kill? What would give her the desire, the resolve? Thus was born the story Baby Shark: a woman's worst nightmares, the recovery, and the revenge. And, from that, a protagonist for a series – well, there was the part about how does a guy my age write for a young woman. That was the most exacting work, but putting an ear to it got it done. Growing up, I knew my mother and two sisters were strong, intelligent women. My wife and daughter are strong and intelligent, as are my women friends. You're a writer, JB. You know. It's research and rewrites until it meets the standard you've established.

In reference to the point of view – I like the idea of Kristin and the reader moving at the same speed, hearing, seeing, smelling – experiencing everything together. I like the urgency that it creates. And besides, one head is plenty for me to be into.

JB: Why set the books in 1950s Texas?

BOB: The 50s and Texas – well, I knew that I didn't want drug dealers or cell phones or computers in my stories, so that was part of why the 50s. Also, I liked that period after WWII when women were being asked to go back home and be wives and mothers, after Rosie The Riveter has just shown them how to earn the same money as a man doing the same kind of work. It wasn't all Ozzie and Harriet like TV and movies would have you believe, although women still had doors opened for them, and men took off their hats and stood when a woman entered the room, etc. The 50s were a time of decision for women, an edgy time, when many believed the bounds of convention needed some pushing around, while others thought women should "stay in their place." I wanted Kristin to be a woman ahead of the curve, and the 50s seemed perfect for that. Women were growing wings, but they weren't flying yet – the 60s and 70s would see women breathing oxygen.

And Texas? If you have traveled the state you know the drama that exists there in the geography alone. From the eastern forestland to the western prairies to the high planes of the Panhandle – the state has it all, and also it's just big. Big in an anything-is-possible kind of way. It's seriously wild and woolly there. People carry guns in Texas. Don't think they don't. They especially carried guns in the 50s. If you will recall, national public figures were being assassinated in Dallas in the mid-60s. I rest my case.

JB: You've studied extensively, including at universities in Greece and France. How did living in a different culture influence you?

BOB: It made me sooo sophisticated. Uh huh. I suppose I could carry on about being humbled by the art and architecture, but the fact is I was eighteen and nineteen when I was living in Japan, Korea, and China and in my early twenties when I was living in London and Paris and not that much older when I was living in Greece. So, rather than being humbled, I was mostly blown away – or maybe stunned would be a better way of putting it – by environments and situations that could not have been more different from those I knew as a boy in Oklahoma. The people, I came to learn quickly enough, were pretty much the same everywhere. That is why a good story works universally. I am asked how proficient my French is, since I lived in Paris for two and a half years and studied at the Sorbonne, and I remind folks that until they have heard French spoken with an Oklahoma accent, they haven't lived. Once in Paris, a butcher shop owner had me wait a minute while he called his wife from the back room. When she appeared, he asked me to ask for the chicken again. He either thought an accent as bad as mine deserved a larger audience, or he knew that he would never be able to imitate it.

JB: Among the various jobs you've held over the years, you list an oilfield roughneck and a TV cameraman in Oklahoma, a fashion model in New York City, and a chef at a "chi-chi" L.A. eatery. What was the most interesting or unusual job you ever held and what made it so?

BOB: Hands down, writing novels is the most interesting work I have ever done. I not only love doing it, it involves everything I have ever experienced, everyone I have ever known – as well as fictional characters. I have never been more challenged, never taken my work more seriously, and never been as anxious to sit down and get to it. Now, unusual – that's a different matter. Helping to develop an underwater vehicle? Dubbing English dialogue onto the sound tracks of French films? Working on the construction of a 13' tall animated Tyrannosaurus Rex? Filming Hawaiian waterfalls from a helicopter. Shoveling wheat in a Kansas grain elevator? Acting in a film with Penn & Teller? Frankly, JB, I don't know.

JB: Let's talk about the Oscar. As a Hollywood F/X technician, you received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Sci-Tech Award for Technical Achievement (1984). Our readers would love to know more about this impressive honor. Without giving away any trade secrets, can you tell us a little about the screen design that earned you and Jonathan Erland this award? Is it being used today?

BOB: The screen design and construction that earned us an Academy Award was part of a projection system that was developed to accommodate objects that were widely different in size. An example would be the huge worms and the normal-sized actors in the film Dune, or actors working against a backdrop of outer space, as in 2010. My wife, Fern, and I spent a wonderful year in Mexico while I oversaw the construction of two screens that were 38' tall and 104' long. They were built in place on sound stages at Churubusco Studios. It was an honor to have the Academy's recognition, and the evening John and I received our awards was quite memorable. I particularly remember how lovely Fern looked in a beautiful silk dress.

No, the technology is no longer in use. It has been replaced by CGI, computer generated images.

JB: I love the story about Penn Jillette's nickname for you. Would you share that with our visitors?

BOB: Sure. It is quintessential Penn. In 1984 or so, Fern, and I met with Penn & Teller, the Bad Boys of Magic, in advance of doing a theatrical project with them. At that meeting Penn asked me which I preferred being called, Bob or Robert? I said that I didn't care what he called me. And he said, "All right then, I'll call you Fluffy." So "Fluffy" I have been all this time. It teaches a lesson about being wishy washy, I'll tell you that.

JB: Okay, the dog and four cats I understand, but how is it that a turtle helps with the empty nest thing while your daughter is away at college?

BOB: What a life Pharrell, the turtle, has at our house. He owns a heat lamp, a delightful waterfall, and a piece of flat-topped furniture on which he suns himself between swims. Who ever had it so good? But let me tell you about this guy. He is all personality when my wife and daughter approach him, but hides under his furniture when he catches sight of me. So, that would imply he is a good judge of character, as well as being a Riviera bon vivant, would it not? So, naturally I want to be his friend. So, you see, the challenge of getting on the guy's good side is a full-time job for me now that Jenny is away at school. I think I'm making progress. However, my wife said recently, "I wouldn't put my hand in the water, if I were you." Stay tuned.

JB: You're hard at work on the third installment of the Baby Shark series, but you say you're "being a fussbudget about the title"? Are you having trouble deciding on it or agreeing on it?

BOB: It was back and forth with friends and publisher, but I ended up getting what I wanted. My disaster or my success, as it turns out. The discussion centered on the second word in the title. No one argued against Panhandle, it was what followed it that caused the heat. Caravan was considered too soft. The fear was the book would be mistaken for a cozy. "Too many brutal murders for a cozy," I pointed out. "Oh, go ahead then," I was told. "You'll see." I don't know. What do you think, JB? Does Baby Shark's Panhandle Caravan sound like a cozy or just a musical comedy? We could up the number of dead bodies if that would help.

[Personally? I think anyone who's read the books will picture a line of vintage 1950s midnight blue Cadillacs with pistols hanging out the windows, heading for north Texas ...]

JB: What's next for Kristin? You've said you're going to stick with the novel writing for at least the immediate future – are you planning to continue the Baby Shark series a while or do you see yourself writing something different in the coming years?

BOB: Kristin has some more adventures in her cue case, but there is a standalone I have in mind, too. Maybe I can slip it in somewhere over the next year or so. I would like to. It's a story that contains some woo woo, as a marvelous online mystery group likes to call the paranormal. But, for right now, as long as Kristin has something new to say, I think I'll stick with her.

JB: Bob, thanks so much for stopping by the Lunch Room. It's been a pleasure having you here!

BOB: It has been my pleasure JB – but one question for you about what you served at lunch today.

JB: Yes?

BOB: How did you know that I liked fried okra?



Robert Fate's BABY SHARK is available from Capital Crime Press through your favorite bookseller. BABY SHARK'S BEAUMONT BLUES will be released in May. Visit Bob's website at www.robertfate.com.