Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

When I decided to turn my short story ‘The Rise and Demise of Fat Kenny’ into a novel, the biggest consideration, literally, was how to turn fifteen hundred words into sixty thousand. I knew there was a novel in there somewhere. I just had to find the key, the way in. I read and I re-read. And the same paragraph kept jumping out. It wasn’t about Ronnie Swordfish and the blood-doping scam, or how Fat Kenny had made it into the big time overnight. It wasn’t even about how he walked into the river at the end and never came out. It was this:

‘Kenny was the lad we never picked for football, but who stayed to watch anyway. Who’d turn up on me doorstep, out the blue, askin me mum if I could come out and play. I’d tell Mum to tell him I was doin me homework, or something. It weren’t just me. I’d see him knock up and down the whole street. One door after another shuttin in his face. In the end, no-one bothered to even open the door to him. Poor bastard. His old man used to beat the shit out of him for bein fat. So did we.’

That was the heart-breaker. That was the key. The childhood. (more…)

I’ve never been much for outlining. Respect to those who can do it, but writing from a treatment has always seemed a little too much like work to me. Anyway, I like being surprised. Usually it’s my characters doing the surprising. Sometimes, though, writing off-the-cuff can lead to some spectacularly unintended consequences for me, the writer, as well.

I sat down to write The Professionals, my debut thriller, with a basic idea. A group of kidnappers set loose on America, kidnapping rich businessmen at high volume, for low ransoms, from sea to shining sea. I didn’t know who my kidnappers were, or where they came from, or even how many they numbered. I knew their MO, and I figured they’d tell me the rest.

I set the first scene, somewhat arbitrarily, north of Chicago. A kidnapping at a commuter train station, seen from the point of view of the victim. By the second chapter, my kidnappers appeared. Arthur Pender and three friends, disenfranchised college grads from Seattle who’d turned to crime in the face of a shrinking American job market.

Pender and his gang were nomadic by nature. They’d crossed the country pulling kidnapping scores for nearly two years. They needed somewhere to go after Chicago, and I closed my eyes and pointed at a map and—voila—sent them north to Minnesota. It seemed like an innocuous decision at the time, but two and a half years down the road, it’s turned out to have a pretty big influence on my writing career. (more…)

Five Shots of the Good Stuff: Why You Should Love Short Story Collections (Including Mine!)

Short stories are the underdog of fiction. They have been called “dead” so many times they might as well be zombies, because they won’t stay down. They refuse to give in. They continue, as Henry Rollins might say, to rise above.

I think they’re due for a renaissance, myself. The novel is still king, but with ebooks on the rise the need for fat novels to dominate shelf space in bookstores and convince people they are getting “the quality of quantity” is no longer a bullet proof stance. And through the cracks, I hope, will come a short story revolution to rock you with tales akin to a knife fight in a phone booth: short, sharp and deadly.

So, in honor of the release of my first ebook short story collection KNOCKOUTS: TEN TALES OF FANTASY AND NOIR, featuring the bona fide knockout Debbie Rochon on the cover and an introduction by acclaimed horror writer Norm Partridge, I’ve made five cases for you to read short stories and collections, especially mine! Each of my stories noted here are included in KNOCKOUTS, so you can’t lose.

1. Short stories are cool little labs of experimentation that give the reader a quick and dirty dose of fiction. Example? The late magazine Brain Harvest, who published quirky stuff that was so short you were finished before you knew it, published my story “Grudge Match”, a two-fisted fable inspired by Bruce Lee and a thousand bad action flicks. It’s a Jäger shot of adventure with zero room to get boring! (more…)

Private Investigator Joe Geraghty is the undoubted star of my two published novels, Broken Dreams and The Late Greats, but it’s also a fact that he was the consequence of failure. A police procedural, Black and White, featuring Detective Sergeant Coleman, a minor character in the Geraghty books, pre-dates them. Looking back, the novel has obvious flaws. I didn’t know the police culture or live it. It was hard to effectively toss a year’s work in the bin, but it was clear to me that I had to step away and start over.

Geraghty was conceived as the mechanism to tell the story of Broken Dreams. I was making decisions that would have consequences I couldn’t foresee. He was to be a small-time Private Investigator who worked to pay the bills. Unlike a lot of other investigators, Geraghty was to be human. If he was hit, he went down. He was to be some way off being a hard man. I also wanted him to have a sporting background which was ripped away just as he was on the brink of success. I wanted him to know what the death of a dream felt like. (more…)

When Lucifer’s Tears, the second book in the Kari Vaara series, came out you did a guest post here in which you reflected on how much of you is in Kari and vice-versa. You also spoke about a serious health issue you were having with severe headaches. As the third book in the series, Helsinki White, is poised to launch, how are your headaches doing, and have you and Kari gotten closer or farther apart?

The headaches aren’t gone, but have gotten much better. I spent a horrid few months playing guinea pig while my neurologist tried out different meds on me. It wasn’t his fault; he’s truly an excellent doctor. Note that he received thanks for serving as a consultant for Helsinki White. He loved the book, by the way. He checked it for accuracy in neurological matters and their behavioral consequences and told me I hit the nail squarely on the head. That was important to him because there are so many misconceptions about trauma-induced neural disorders (his specialization), and he hopes the book will raise public awareness.

Anyway…apparently I have very sensitive brain chemistry and even small doses of drugs that affect most people not at all made me physically and/or mentally ill. For instance, once, when the EMTs came in an ambulance to take me to hospital, I couldn’t tell them my name. I spent a fair amount of time in the emergency room during that time. We finally struck upon a meds combination that both keeps me in pretty good condition and my system can tolerate. I tire a little more easily than I used to. Other than that, I’m doing well. I thought for a while, after a straight talk from my doctor, that I was going to die with my head in the toilet. The sequence: uncontrolled vomiting, dehydration, shock, cardiac arrest, and goodbye. Interestingly, it made for a good incentive to write. Thinking I might have limited time made me want to produce more while I could. And on the practical side, writers are worth more dead than alive—as Larsson so graphically demonstrated—and I wanted to leave my wife financially secure. (more…)

I don’t know quite where Charlie Fox came from. She just arrived one day, climbed off her motorcycle, sat down and started to talk. I knew from the start I’d be a fool to ignore her. Charlie had the watchful wariness of somebody who’d been through life’s grinder and was still putting herself back together again. She’d been a victim and worked hard never to become so again.

When I began to chart her story, in Killer Instinct, Charlie’s ill-fated military career was several years behind her. She’d separated herself from her family and was living in a northern UK city and teaching self-defence classes to women. I knew right from the start that she wasn’t going to stay an amateur sleuth for long, but that point in her life felt like the right introduction. Charlie had been to rock bottom and hauled herself back up again, but the events of this book marked the moment she discovers just how much her experiences have changed her. As the title suggests, she is tested again and this time she discovers her personal killer instinct. From that moment forwards, her life is never going to be quite the same.

I felt it was important to show Charlie’s evolution, her reactions to the urban battlefield of race riots in Riot Act, where she once again encounters Sean Meyer, the army training instructor she fell for – with disastrous consequences for both of them. He is now a professional bodyguard, something for which his mindset, training and abilities make him perfectly suited. And something which Charlie proves she has the guts for, too. (more…)

Writing “The End” felt great. The story felt good. Seemed I’d pulled off the rather odd inspiration. I was watching The Maltese Falcon (which I do often) and wanted to tell a variant of it. Not the nuts of bolts of it, but the twists and turns and the costly pursuit of something that is revealed to be a lie. I certainly had false starts trying to craft the story, but there I was, done, with a tight narrative around a single character. A sometimes nasty crime novella.

When Snubnose Press picked it up, I knew it was in good hands. The releases to that date were strong and everything since then has been top notch. All in all, it was a great feeling. Then Brian, the editor at Snubnose, made a little comment. He simply notes that there was a good amount of action and that an exploration of some of the other characters would probably work if done well.

That’s was where “The End” vanished. Working with Brian, I added almost the full length of what I had done again. Subplots grew, minor characters were explored, a few plotting changes were made to accommodate the new material. It was in lots of ways more work than the initial writing. But it was all worth it. The novel that emerged was stronger, deeper and more satisfying than the initial work.

It wasn’t what I initially set out to write, but it’s what I would have written had I thought about it. Thankfully, I had an editor that helped me see new things and then left me to explore the things I felt were fitting.

When I reached “The End” again, it felt great.

It’s funny that my first officially published work is a collection of short stories. I know that’s how it goes with a lot of writers – they start short and work their way up. You got Frank Bill, who’s critically acclaimed collection Crimes in Southern Indiana precedes his soon to be critically acclaimed novel Donnybrook. I know that Lou Berney, whose debut novel Gutshot Straight is one of my favorite reads of the past few years, he first published a collection of short fiction. Of course, his stories were nominated for Pushcarts and such, so I got no business comparing myself to him.

But intuitively, it makes sense. A novel is the writing equivalent of running a marathon. You might want to build up to it, at least stretch some.

Nobody ever accused me of making sense, though.

I’ve always had the fiction writing bug, toyed with it here and there, but I was cursed with making a good living from writing pretty early on. Strange curse, I know, but the thing was I developed a pretty good freelance business writing for professional service firms, mostly accounting firms, accidently drifting into my niche as a tax writer.

In terms of compensation, it was a great gig. I usually got paid a dollar a word or so, COD. No waiting for sales, praying the next book gets picked up, just cash the check and move on.

But I let the paychecks supplant my dreams. (more…)

“The last time a private eye solved a murder was never.” -Ed McBain *

Like many of you, I love a gritty, fast-paced private eye story where the shamus solves a grisly murder or two. Investigating death makes for compelling storytelling rift with bodies, suspects and clues. In my current novel The Zen Man, the private-eye protagonist must solve a murder in thirty days or face a life sentence behind bars.

But how true is it in real life that private investigators solve murders? Is Ed McBain right that the answer is never? I compiled a few popular theories on this topic — some from the Internet, others my PI-partner-husband and I have heard over the years – with analysis for each.

Theory #1: In stories, private eyes are often effective because they are less constrained by government rules than law enforcement. But in reality, law enforcement must be wary about endorsing a PI’s evidence because 1) it’s unknown what methods the PI used in obtaining that evidence (if the PI obtained the evidence through illegal means, it would be thrown out at trial), and 2) by accepting a PI’s evidence, the police could be seen as using the PI as a state agent (“acting under color of law”) and any improper behavior by the PI could be imputed to the police department. (more…)

That Dante guy was onto something.

See, I grew up in a Catholic family. Catholic families know from punishment. From month-long groundings to wallopings to threats of violent murder, I’ve heard it all. (My personal fave was my mom’s common refrain of “Come here so I can smack you.” Seriously, is that like some kind of aptitude test? Who snaps to when they hear that ol’ chestnut?) But when it comes to scaring kids straight, the best most Sunday Schools can muster is the old lake-of-fire routine. And sure, it don’t sound good exactly, but for a kid raised on Stephen King and A Nightmare on Elm Street, that hell didn’t hardly impress.

Then I read Dante’s INFERNO. Suddenly, hell had my attention.

Sometime during middle school, this must’ve been. Yeah, I know: I was kind of a morbid kid. But I’d yet to discover punk, so I was all about Poe and King and Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and I figured “Dude gets lost in woods and wanders into hell” was just the sort of thing I should be reading.

Turns out, it was just the sort of thing I should be reading. And, impressionable child that I was, it messed me up a tiny little bit. (more…)