Getting the reading fire roaring, again...

 

Expectant, the fifth novel in a terrific, CWA Dagger-shortlisted series starring headstrong young female Detective Sam Shephard, is among my recent great reads

Craig, every second Tuesday. 

Kia ora and gidday everyone.

Have you ever been in a reading funk? I've been a lifelong reader, loving books and stories since my earliest childhood memories. Growing up in New Zealand I spent a fair bit of time outdoors and playing various sports, but I also loved curling up with a good book - whether on a rainy day, on the couch in the evening, or in bed at night. 

I devoured books from Asterix to Agatha Christie, from CS Lewis to Roald Dahl to JRR Tolkien and so much more. 

That's continued throughout my life. There are times where I've read a lot more than others, but I've always read. Even when having a very busy job, or at law school, or travelling around the world, a novel has never been far from my reach. Recently however, to end 2022 and begin 2023, I was in a bit of a reading funk. I hadn't stopped reading as such - like I said, I've always read - but I was glacial. A small handful of novels read in a couple of months, rather than multiple books a week like usual. There was a lot going on personally that played a part. Even the books I really enjoyed were taking days or weeks to get through, rather than tearing through them in a day or two like usual. 

A love of reading is passed from generation to generation in my family

I just wasn't reading for sustained periods of time, for various reasons. I knew (hoped) I'd shake it off at some point, and that point thankfully arrived in last month when I picked up a novel I needed to read for an upcoming interview for a magazine article. I just couldn't put it down. I tore through it in hours. Back to my old self. 

The next day I started another crime novel I'd been looking forward to, and that was done by the following day. Two more that week. I was back! Even though I was just as busy, or busier, with work and family stuff than I had been during my protracted reading funk, I was really loving reading again and making time for that rather than mindlessly whiling time away with re-runs, YouTube videos, or other 'not have to think too much' decompressions. 

So today I thought I'd showcase some of the new books I've devoured in recent weeks - each gripped me from start to finish in a day or two - starting with the one that hauled me back to my usual reading self. Thanks Liz Nugent! 

STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND: released last week in the UK and Commonwealth, the fifth novel from star Irish storyteller Liz Nugent is a real cracker, introducing us to a beguiling, unusual 'heroine' as the gateway to a disturbing yet riveting tale. Nugent has shown with her past novels (eg LYING IN WAIT, OUR LITTLE CRUELTIES) that she has a masterful touch for dysfunctional families and memorable main characters - along with killer first lines and twisting storylines - but in her latest psychological she throws in a twist: the protagonist is actually kinda likable! 

Sally Diamond is a ‘socially deficient’ lady in her 40s whose neurodivergence and occasional extreme outbursts could be nurture or nature. After an appalling childhood she can't recall, she's led perhaps a too-sheltered teenage and adulthood thanks to her ex-psychiatrist father. The man she cremates at home following his terminal illness, drawing all kinds of attention from the police, local villagers, and someone very dangerous who remembers Sally's childhood. Nugent takes readers on quite a ride, using a full palette of emotions. STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND is dark, and funny. It's got hope, and despair. It traverses some of the worst that humanity can offer (TW for pedophilia, sexual abuse, etc) - though we're usually not 'in the room' for that, just knowing it has happened - while smoothly telling a fascinating story about an unforgettable character. 

OZARK DOGS by Eli Cranor: the next day, I dived into an advance copy of this upcoming novel (out in April in USA and UK etc), one of my most highly-anticipated reads of the year. This too was devoured in <24 hours. 

Cranor, a former QB and high school football coach, produced for me arguably the best debut crime novel of last year with DON'T KNOW TOUGH, an extraordinary tale with evocative prose and the jagged voice of abused teenage football star Billy Lowe. So I had high expectations going on, while wondering how Cranor could match his first effort.

Somehow, he may have even exceeded it.  Jeremiah Fitzjurls is an old man with violence scratching at his soul; a Vietnam sniper with a Bronze Star, an armoury full of weapons, and too many bad memories. His days are spent crushing cars at his junkyard and trying to protect his beloved granddaughter Joanna from sins new and old. His son, Joanna’s father, is in prison for murder. Their town doesn’t forget, and neither have the Ledfords, a vicious concoction of white supremacists and meth dealers. So when Joanna disappears after Homecoming, a violent reckoning is coming, unless Craven County Sheriff Mona McNabb can stop it.

OZARK DOGS is the kind of book that burrows beneath your skin. Cranor’s crafted a gritty, epic tale of family burdens and long shadows cast by past misdeeds. Terrible people or good people making terrible choices; the awful impact may be the same. Superb.

THE TWYFORD CODE by Janice Hallett: The next day I began my third in book in half a week - unheard of in recent times, but lovely to get back to that kind of reading habit. Having heard great things about Janice Hallett's debut THE APPEAL, an epistolary take on classic puzzle-style murder mysteries, I was curious to try THE TWYFORD CODE, which came out in the UK last year and was published in the United States in January.

THE TWYFORD CODE continues Hallett's  ‘found documents’ approach; this time readers are given semi-accurate transcripts of audio recordings aging ex-con Steven Smith has made on an old iPhone given to him by his estranged son. Looking for redemption, or perhaps just purpose, Steven tries to find out what happened to his remedial English teacher forty years before. Miss Isles vanished after an unauthorised field trip to the countryside haunts of Edith Twyford, a forgotten children’s author whose old-fashioned mysteries may have contained a secret code to solve a real mystery, along with their racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Was Miss Isles disappearance linked to the Twyford Code? Shadowy figures seem determined to stop Steven, who cajoles some old classmates into the hunt, with mixed success, and is joined by young librarian Lucy for what becomes a dangerous mission entwined with wartime secrets and London gangs. But how much can we believe?

Hallett deftly keeps readers guessing throughout an entertaining tale that's an original, intricate mystery. A few pacing issues, perhaps, and at times the conceit threatens to overwhelm the story or our connection to characters, but Hallett brings it all together brilliantly at the end. A very good read.

Four further great reads I tore through in a day or two recently

I also ripped through EVERYBODY KNOWS by Jordan Harper, an extraordinary LA-set noir tale, that same week I'd read STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND. Four books in a week, that's more like the old Craig! Since then I've read several other novels, and seem to be out of my reading funk. For now, at least. Other highly recommended new books I tore through and loved: I WILL FIND YOU by Harlan Coben, DON'T FEAR THE REAPER by Stephen Graham Jones, and EXPECTANT by Vanda Symon, aka 'the modern Queen of New Zealand Crime'. 

Have you ever found yourself in a reading funk? How'd you get out of it? Was it a particular book that helped get you back on track? Do you have go-to-authors that can re-light your reading fire? Let me know in the comments. 

Until next time. Ka kite anō. 

Whakataukī of the fortnight: 

Inspired by Zoe and her 'word of the week', I'll be ending my fortnightly posts by sharing a whakataukī (Māori proverb), a pithy and poetic thought to mull on as we go through life. 

Ahakoa he iti he pounamu

(Although it is small it is a treasure)

I'm not a spy. I just read books.

Here's another favorite film and it's to do with reading. In fact the inciting plot point in the story stems from reading a book. In the story (based on a book) the characters read books for living. It's high stakes,
people's lives are in danger and time is running out. Can you guess?
Here's the movie taglines:

His code name is Condor. In the next seventy-two hours, everyone he trusts will target him for death.
The CIA knows him as Condor. What he knows about them has just made him an endangered species.

Oui, you're right it's from the film, Three Days of the Condor, based on James Grady's book Six Days of the Condor with a young Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. It's on Netflix so treat yourself and give it a watch - really holds up!

Here's the clandestine CIA office masked as American Literary Historical Society in New York City where Redford works. He and seven others work for the CIA reading books and searching for hidden meanings that they feed into a computer.  Redford goes out to get lunch in Manhattan for his colleagues and comes back to find them all dead. He's next.

There's obscure elements of Frenchness, maybe only to me, but Redford rides a moped

And wonderful Max Von Sydow who plays a villain with extreme panache

Not to mention the elusive mysterious Faye Dunaway, the photographer who takes minimalist photos of nature

And who the Redford character must convince in desperation to hide him in Brooklyn after he kidnapped her in a sports store:
"Listen. I work for the CIA. I'm not a spy. I just read books. We read everything that's published in the world, and we-- we feed the plots-- dirty tricks, codes into a computer, and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. I look for leaks, new ideas. We read adventures and novels and journals. I-- I can-Who'd invent a job like that? I-- Listen! People are trying to kill me!"

Who'd invent a job like that? Sounds very much like what mystery and crime fiction writers do to me - aren't we always looking for ideas, new ways to commit crime based in reality and get away with it?
Cara -Tuesday

When Writing Series, Third Time's the Charm

Sujata Massey

Daisy's checking up on the day's progress

Did anybody ever tell you that it’s easier to raise three children than two? 

I am fine with the two that I have, but I’m beginning to believe the saying could be true.

Especially when I think about books.

If each book a writer births is like a child, I have fourteen. I am like the old woman in the shoe, and all my children are troublesome in different ways.

But this week it’s been a lot easier. Every day that I’ve powered on my laptop to write, I’ve had an idea of the next sentence.  The words have been flowing now better than they have in years. That is because the book I'm writing is Untitled Perveen Mistry, the third book in a series.

Having been in print for more than a couple decades, I’m starting to draw some conclusions. Don’t hire me to teach any writing courses yet, but I'll tell you that the third book is the magical point when a writer finally gets comfortable writing a series. 

Okay, I'll admit the first book is usually the most exciting part of writing a series. Book One is totally novel. A first book lays out the protagonist's backstory and introduces me to her family, lover, friends, career, and the world where it all takes place. 

Book One for Perveen Mistry!

Because it’s a first book, there is plenty of time to flesh the characters and build the location. Editors don’t usually accept Book One without it being written in totality, so there’s not so much pressure (this was completely different for The Widows of Malabar Hill, which was written on spec for Soho Press. But the pub date stretched so I could revise it to my heart’s content). 

My very first Book One was published in 1997 and had the typical lifestyle for such a creature. I wrote it over the course of four years of suffering and was thrilled beyond my imagination when The Salaryman's Wife was accepted by HarperCollins. I will take off my hat to everyone who has finished writing a first novel, whether or not it made it to print. 

After writing this first book in my Rei Shimura series, I discovered that the second one, Zen Attitude, came surprisingly slowly. Even though I had a due date to motivate me and could reuse characters from the first book, I still felt stalled. I remember trying many drastic

behavior changes to push myself to be someone stronger and capable of writing Book Two.  I changed my diet to avoid meat (it lasted two years). I ran daily around the Hopkins track. I went on research trips, not just to Japan but to a Buddhist monastery in update New York. I was thirty-three, childless and without the curse of a day job. I had no real pressures in life outside of the book ... yet  I stared at my desktop day after day and wondered if I really could write more than one book.

The first three books of the Rei Shimura series

Rei Shimura’s Book Three, The Flower Master, was—ha, another story! I don’t remember much about the process, except I began the book in India when I was staying there due to delays with my daughter's adoption. I did not have so much as a laptop with me, so to work on Book Three I had to go to my grandfather's office where there was an old desktop with viruses galore where I could ply my trade. I had a lot on my mind—but I still was able to proceed at a reasonable pace with this book. Frankly, it was kind of mental retreat. 

I have enjoyed writing the Rei series, but as time passed, I wanted to try something new. I had spent all that time in India--and I wanted to go back. In 2006 I began writing a long historical suspense novel titled The Sleeping Dictionary. That first-book process lasted more than four years, and the book was hard to sell. By the time it came out as a Simon&Schuster paperback in 2013, I felt all the work I'd done made it a natural opener for a new series. I figured that Book Two would occur several years later, when the daughter of the protagonist in Book One could grow up to be a moody teenager caught up in the horrific violence after India’s partition. I knew my characters well and felt the plot was sound, but as I worked on this book, showing my agent revision after revision, I never got farther in than a few chapters.

Writing a second book is always a struggle, and during that time, I was busy with two children and had no energy for tricks like changing my diet or starting a new sport. Also, there was no contract for the unwritten Book 2, which translated into no time pressure to press on with it. I also understood the book’s themes of violence against women and religious intolerance were darker than anything I’d ever written. Would my longtime readers be willing to spend so much time in sadness, when I thought writing this could put me into depression? 

This "book of my heart", first in a series that might never be. 

The second book in the Daughters of Bengal series was simply too daunting for me. I chucked it. Although I did not give up on the idea of revisiting it someday.

I'm working on my third series now. It's about Perveen Mistry, Bombay's first woman lawyer working in the 1920s. I’ll admit that while The Widows of Malabar Hill (Book One) was very exciting to work on, Book Two was a pain to write. This time I could partially blame my struggles on a health issue. Lyme Disease was diagnosed after nine months and I bucked up with medicine, acupuncture, and Ayurvedic herbs. Heck, I got so excited about Ayurvedic herbs I worked them into Book 2 (because it’s set in the mountains of India, it’s not such a stretch). And this Book Two, The Satapur Moonstone, had a deadline. I turned it in a month late, it still needed serious revision, but I'd done it!

I've come to understand that only when I slay the dragon that is called Book Two can I get to the love affair with Book Three. And while it won’t be a romance that makes writing every series book feel like fun, it feels like being on honeymoon this week.

Book Two of the Perveen series slated for May 2019

Upcoming events: I'll chat writing with fellow author William Kent Krueger on Saturday, Oct. 13 at 11 a.m. at the Morristown, NJ Book Festival. I will also appear on an author panel on Wednesday Oct 25, 7-9p.m. at Towne Books in Collegeville, PA. Finally, I'll discuss The Widows of Malabar Hill at a holiday signing party with many Maryland mystery authors 1-3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 3 at the Miller Library in Ellicott City, MD.