Trace Evidence

The writer who sets her mysteries in an historical era must “translate” the customs and assumptions of the past to make them accessible to the contemporary reader. The writer who sets her mysteries in a foreign culture must also translate the cultural milieu for (at least in AHMM) an Anglo-American readership. I. J. Parker, who sets her Sugawara Akitada series in 11th-century Japan, faces the daunting prospect of double translation. But as this How’d That Happen post reveals, the tales and traditions of a world well removed from ours can also provide a rich source of inspiration.

As a writer of historical novels and stories I do a great deal of reading in early Japanese literature.  Not only do such works provide useful and necessary background for setting and culture, but they frequently suggest ideas for stories and novels.  While there are no detective stories among the varied types of fiction by the early Japanese, crime seems to have been both common and violent. Usually, the original story does not go beyond the telling of the shocking event, though occasionally it attaches a religious moral to it.  This offers a challenge to the author of crime fiction.  We not only want the crime solved and the killer punished, but we are also curious about motives and the psychology of the characters involved.

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For such verbal creatures, writers often identify the genesis of a particular story in a compelling image, whether sought out deliberately or serendipitously served up by the universe. In this “How’d That Happen” post, Shelley Costa  discusses a disturbing photograph that helped give rise to her story “Strangle Vine.”

A few years ago, I came across an account somewhere about Leo Frank, a Jew who was lynched in Georgia in 1915.  At that point, I wasn’t looking to create a new story from those old materials, but it’s what led me to the next piece of story-history: lynching photography.  The photo of Leo Frank, lynched, led to other photos – appalling pictures of hapless victims dangling from tree limbs.  Strange fruit, indeed.  No due process, no rule of law, but plenty of murderous mobs and smiling spectators in straw boaters.

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In our second “How’d That Happen?” post, Rex Burns describes keeping the balance between logic and emotion in his story “Constable Smith and the Lost Dreamtime,” which appears in our October 2012 issue (on newsstands now)

The story “Lost Dreamtime” had its beginning in a feeling about place: the empty Northwest Australian coast that gazes across a stretch of Indian Ocean toward the Lacepede Islands. I wondered what Constable Smith would do if he was called to a death at such an isolated spot in this Aboriginal Reserve.

That question led to the familiar litany of queries that contribute to the structure and population of a story: Who died? How? Continue reading →

There’s lots of good general advice out there for fiction writers, but I particularly like to hear authors talk about the creation of specific works. Our series How’d That Happen features AHMM authors discussing the composition of specific stories. These posts will always discuss stories appearing in the issue that is current when the post goes up. Here, Martin Limón on the alchemy that transmutes life experience into fiction.

“Alert!”

A word which struck terror into my heart when I was a young soldier in the 2^nd Infantry Division in South Korea.  In the middle of the night, a siren sounded or a cannon boomed or sometimes another G.I. banged on my door and notified me that I was required to report to my unit, “Immediately if not sooner.”  And then the mad dash to throw on my uniform and run to the compound or to the firing battery orderly room; to make sure that my presence was noted and then stand by with the other G.I.s to receive orders.  Sometimes those orders were shouted immediately and sometimes they were what we dreaded:  a “move out” alert.  And then we had to load wooden crates of high explosive artillery rounds into the backs of our two-and-a-half ton trucks and hook up the 105 mm howitzers to the rear stanchions and mount 60 caliber machine guns atop the front cabs.  And then when the engines were fired up and the smell of burnt diesel swirled in the cold morning air, we formed a convoy and barreled out the front gate heading across Freedom Bridge north of the Imjin River toward the wilds of the Demilitarized Zone; for hours if we were lucky, for days if we weren’t.

Experience.  This is the stuff fiction is made of.

The writers I admire most wrote their greatest stories based on their personal experiences:  Herman Melville as a young Continue reading →