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Angela Zeman did such a wonderful job creating the world that Roxanne lives in for “The First Tale of Roxanne” that by the end of the story you are ready for more. And the title indeed suggests a second, and a third . . . So we asked Angela to talk to us about her creative process when starting out a new series.

A few days ago I was thrilled to read in the NY Times section of Unrequested Advice that dark chocolate is now healthy to eat all you want. Yes! Then my copy of AHMM came in the mail and my story was on the cover. I forgot chocolate. Nobody from AHMM had mentioned “cover” to me, so I was shocked and thrilled. And reminded of my very first story sale—my first sale of anything—to the late Cathleen Jordan, the editor of AHMM at that time. She phoned me to buy it, too, which made the event all the more stunning. Then, in the throes of my euphoria, I exposed the enormous amount of water behind my ears and requested that my name be put on the cover. She kindly said, “maybe another time.” From that sale came the Mrs. Risk story series and a novel, all now re-published as e-books by Mysterious Press.

Fast forward, many story sales later . . . AHMM editor Linda Landrigan chose my story for May’s cover. I’m thrilled and gratified, and enormously surprised now that my ears are drier.

For this blog, Linda asked me if I could explain why I often write series. She asked how I plan them. Plan? Tough question. I don’t know.

Right now, I’m in the middle of the third entry to another series, nothing to do with Roxanne. I call it the Trueden Falls series because that’s its fictional location in the Adirondacks. Also now, another magazine is mulling over whether or not to purchase the second in a newer series, which I call the Pete Murphy stories. (Pete’s first story is in Robert Randisi’s anthology, CRIME SQUARE.) That action is 1956 post war harsh and hungry Times Square. My narrator is Petey, an eleven-year-old boy forced by his father’s death in the Big War to take on adult responsibilities, and who manages creatively. Not a young adult series.

My characters are so alive to me that last year I combined heroes from three different well-received stories to create a thriller novel. (The main protagonist came from, “Green Heat,” chosen by Nelson DeMille for Otto Penzler’s Best American Mystery Stories of 2004, from that year’s Jeffrey Deaver anthology.)

How do these things result in a series? I know only a few things. People fascinate me, but boring people bore me. So if anyone catches my eye as “interesting,” chances are good that something about that person will appear in a story.

I’m a listener and a watcher. I strike up spontaneous conversations. I see feelings. How you feel, how you express your feelings, why you feel this way. No one is simple (even if simple-minded), things hit the fan, and life is short. All of which makes a good story.

Another thing. My story characters don’t function in my mind as “characters.” To me they’re people. As are the others in the story. All vivid individuals in his/her own way. By the time the story ends, I have collected an ensemble. All ages, backgrounds, income level, talents, or non-talents. Just like the people outside my door. But then, in imitation of real life, some people just won’t go away. They become a series.

My first series was about Mrs. Risk. Many never realized it, but I used those stories to experiment using various people’s voices. So the POV would always be omniscient, limited by one viewpoint character. And I made that one character be whoever came to Mrs. Risk asking for help. It was educational and fun to do for a while, and incidentally created a love for experimenting when I write.

Gary Provost, a late mentor I still obey said, “You’re like me, you want to write everything.” He nailed me. That’s the explanation for my forays into the lives of unusual people, into history, villages, stark plots, cute plots, and this latest thriller book. POVs of all kinds. I just gotta try it. At least once!

When I write, my goal is always to write a stand-alone. True. Then some protagonists’ personalities somehow invite odd or crazy situations, and I start writing it down.

Wait until you see Roxanne’s dilemma in her Second Tale! The Emperor Vespasian takes advantage of her integrity and gift for languages to ask a private favor that would keep him from embarrassment . . . See? I couldn’t resist. Maybe her Third Tale should involve chocolate. Seems healthy to me.

AHMM congratulates B. K. Stevens, whose “Thea’s First Husband” has been named a finalist for the Agatha Award for best short story. “Thea’s First Husband” appeared in our June 2012 issue.

The Agatha Awards will be presented at Malice Domestic in Bethesda, Maryland, on Saturday May 4th. (Coincidentally, June will be the 25th anniversary of Ms. Stevens’s first story for AHMM in 1988, “True Detective.”)

Congratulations also to AHMM authors Margaret Maron, for her nomination for Best Novel (The Buzzard Table); Rhys Bowen, for Best Historical Mystery (The Twelve Clues of Christmas); and Dana Cameron, also a nominee for Best Short Story for “Mischief in Mesopotamia” which appeared in our sister magazine, EQMM.

More often than not, mystery novels end with a definitive solution to the puzzle; real life is not always so accommodating, perhaps especially when the mysteries in question are historical rather than criminal.

How delightful, then, to see a historical mystery resolved so thoroughly as that of the identification of the remains of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. Scientists have applied archaeological, osteological, and genetic analysis techniques to determine that the skeleton, discovered under a parking lot in August of last year, is “beyond reasonable doubt” that of Richard III. The BBC has an interesting interactive guide to the remains.

Undoubtedly, many readers will be moved by this news to revisit Shakespeare’s play, which has done so much to shape our contemporary image of the hunchbacked king (“My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, / And every tongue brings in a several tale, / And every tale condemns me for a villain”). Mystery lovers, however, may feel an additional impulse: to re-read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, in which Inspector Alan Grant, confined to his sickbed, investigates the longstanding charge that Richard murdered his two nephews to protect his claim to the throne. He comes to a surprising conclusion.

In 1990, the Crime Writers’ Association named The Daughter of Time the best mystery novel of all time.

What better excuse do you need?

The current (July 23) issue of The New Yorker includes an article by Jack Hitt on forensic linguistics. I loved the description: “If ‘forensic linguist’ brings to mind a verbal specialist who plucks slivers of meaning from old letters and segments of audiotape before announcing that the perpetrator is, say, a middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far from the truth.” The field had its fifteen minutes in the ’90s, when its techniques helped identify Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber and Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, but it continues to play a role in courtrooms.

A passage that particularly struck me was: “Most people assume that meaning is embedded in the words they speak. But, according to forensic linguists, meaning is far more vaporous, teased into existence through vocalized puffs of air, hand gestures, body tilts, dancing eyebrows, and nuanced nostril flares . . . And context is crucial; when we try to record a conversation, we are capturing only part of the gestalt of that moment.”

This got me thinking about dialog in fiction. Of course, dialog is never realistic: it mostly excludes the uhms and ahs, the hesitations and repetitions of speech, let alone the puffs and gestures of the linguists. Nevertheless, I think that effective dialog makes some efforts to hint at these behaviors. I often encounter long, hyper-articulate exchanges of dialog in stories that attempt to manifest that assumption that meaning is fully embedded in the words spoken. But I think it makes for better writing, and better story-telling, when the author displays greater sensitivity to the non-verbal portion of the conversation.

Apparently, there is a mystery novel that turns on linguistics, by the way: Double Negative by David Carkeet, who is himself a linguist. I’m afraid I’ve not read it, though I hope to do so someday. But the title reminded me, by association, of an anecdote told about Sidney Morgenbesser, the influential philosopher at Columbia University, a man about whom many anecdotes accumulated. It’s said that he attended a lecture once given by the linguist J. L. Austin, the founder of speech-act theory. In the course of the lecture, Austin noted that in English and a number of other languages, a double negative implies a positive: the negatives are considered to cancel one another out. But in no language that he could find did a double positive imply a negative. Morgenbesser piped up from the back of the room, “yeah, yeah.”

And since the double negative is an example of that underappreciated rhetorical figure litotes, I will leave you with a link to this prose-poem by Charles O. Hartman, which I have always enjoyed.

Rob Lopresti recently posted his own version of a How’d That Happen piece over on the SleuthSayers blog, describing the genesis of his story “Brutal” from the current (September 2012) issue.

Also, on SleuthSayers, Leigh Lundin offers some commentary (taking time from an amazing-sounding trip) on that same September issue.

And Diana Deverell has announced the e-publication of Run & Gun: A Dozen Tales of Girls with Guns, most of which first appeared in AHMM. Diana’s character. Dawna Shepherd, is an FBI agent, but her experiences as a college basketball star for the University of Texas help her to process information quickly and to land on her feet when the unexpected is thrown her way.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing a Short Story, which originally appeared in his collection Bagombo Snuff Box, are a perennial favorite of bloggers because of their blog-friendly humor and pith, so I would probably be well advised to stay away from such familiar material, but I think they are worth sharing and discussing because they are specifically rules for writing short stories.

(Among other places, you can find them here, here, and here.)

Rule One is “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” I love the fact that Vonnegut foregrounds the duty of the writer to the reader. In fact, he goes on to declare that this is the only inviolable rule.

I read a lot of short stories that don’t work, and one characteristic that many share is that they feel as if they were written with no reader in mind. Of course, I don’t know what’s actually going on in the brains of those writers, but many of the stories I see feel as if they are simply the rote execution of an idea. The author came up with a clever plot or gimmick and sat down to work it out on paper, with no sense of how an eventual reader would experience the unfolding of the story, of whether she would feel that her time reading it was wasted.

It seems so appropriate that Vonnegut, whose work was so concerned with the problem of solitude and our responsibilities to one another as fellow creatures, should make his first authorial concern the responsibility of the writer to the reader.

Story-telling presupposes an audience – else, why bother? – and this fact imposes obligations on the writer.

By the way, Vonnegut’s eighth rule is a particularly chewy one for mystery writers to grapple with:  “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

Finally, I’ll leave you with this: Vonnegut recently received the Library of America treatment, which produced this appreciation in The Nation.

B. K. Stevens has written a nice guest post about her AHMM story “Adjuncts Anonymous” at Schooled in Mystery, a blog devoted to academic mysteries. You can hear her read the story by downloading an audio file from iTunes or PodOmatic.

Over on the Dorothy-L list, there’s been a discussion recently about the use, or over-use, of weather in mystery novels (and, by extension, fiction in general). If I must give an opinion, I’ll say that weather is like many of the other tools available to the writer: it may be used well or poorly, depending on the skill of the author. The Dorothy-L discussion has highlighted many fine examples of its effective use.

But I welcome the discussion mostly because it gives me an excuse to post a favorite bit from a favorite writer, Mark Twain, which at least shows that discussions of the deployment of weather in fiction have been going on for some time. The preface to one of Twain’s books reads:

THE WEATHER IN THIS BOOK.

No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood.

Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author’s progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.

Of course weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience. That is conceded. But it ought to be put where it will not be in the way; where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative. And it ought to be the ablest weather that can be had, not ignorant, poor-quality, amateur weather. Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article of it. The present author can do only a few trifling ordinary kinds of weather, and he cannot do those very good. So it has seemed wisest to borrow such weather as is necessary for the book from qualified and recognized experts–giving credit, of course. This weather will be found over in the back part of the book, out of the way. See Appendix. The reader is requested to turn over and help himself from time to time as he goes along.

I first encountered this in The Unabridged Mark Twain published by The Running Press in the ’70s, but thanks to the miracle of the internet, I now learn that it first appeared in his 1892 novel The American Claimant, which apparently was something of a sequel to The Gilded Age. I’ll leave you with this link to the library of the University of California Berkeley, which has a PDF of the first page of Twain’s handwritten manuscript of this preface.