Three-Way Smackdown; Hillerman vs Deaver vs Grisham

A Three-Way Smackdown.

I borrowed three paperback thrillers recently. Part of learning involves checking out other writers, seeing what they got and how they do things. I also like to read just before I go to bed and I had run out of books.

It helps me sleep, and so when I saw them I grabbed them.

I read Tony Hillerman’s ‘Dark Wind’ first, then Jefferey Deaver’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and now I’m working on John Grisham’s ‘The Client.’

The Client is also a film starring Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones.

All three are best-selling authors, and the writing is professional grade. It’s interesting to analyze between them. Deaver’s book has a sharp emotional shock right off the bat. The pyromaniac arsonist Sonny has a woman bound and gagged and he’s about to torch her apartment. That one got me in the guts in a way that Hillerman didn’t, although in his book the first body is a man who has had the skin removed from the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. There’s Hopi and Navajo religion, some witchery involved maybe, and I don’t know, it was all right in its own way. It’s a boy who sees him first. But it somehow lacks emotional punch.

For one thing, we didn’t watch him die. The writer left his body lying in the desert to be found. Also, the idea of death by fire in 'Hell’s Kitchen' is horrifying to pretty much any reader. Deaver had the first victim, a lady, bound and gagged and watching the guy get ready to torch the place.

Grisham had some tough choices when dealing with child characters. I saved him for last, as I had read ‘The Painted House,’ and ‘The Street Lawyer,’ and now this one. In ‘The Painted House’ there is a scene where a guy is killed in a knife fight. Grisham can write horror or terror or call it what you want. He can write it. I know that much.

I’m sure we’ve all enjoyed ‘The Pelican Brief’ with Julia Roberts at her best.

All three authors tend to use about the same amount of description, and they all weave short descriptive passages through the narrative. In many ways they are all equally competent. I rated Hillerman four stars on Goodreads. Deaver got five stars for that emotional level. Now, how in the heck can I give Grisham six stars for what is a superior book in a dozen ways?

You can’t really do it, can you?

This is a concern when rating books. Everyone wants a five-star review, but the question of how many of us actually deserve one is perhaps a contentious one…

Grisham doesn’t have quite so much the emotional impact as Deaver’s book. The kid Mark witnesses a suicide and almost gets killed in the process. At that point the justice system kicks in as he is a material witness in a federal case…the mob is involved, etc.

Deaver has a kid in his story as well, although in ‘The Client’ Mark is the protagonist. In Deaver’s book the kid plays a secondary role.

But that whole idea of emotional level is an interesting one and it’s why I read other people’s fiction when I can. Trust me, I see plenty of areas in my own work where the horror or love or whatever seems a bit flat. I try to punch that up whenever I can. The highest compliment I can pay a book goes something like this: there was this book I read when I was a kid...I don't remember the title or the author. But I remember that story...something about that story has stuck with me for forty-something years.

All three authors took a different approach to the negative emotions aroused by human violence, mutilation of a body, death by fire, or the kid slated for death by the mob for what he sees. I also think that’s why Grisham’s book is a bit muted on the emotional shock. He had to decide just how exploitive or graphic he wanted to be when the protagonist is a kid. The reader, no matter what age, totally identifies with Mark, another interesting observation.

'The Client' is highly entertaining, and the characters are sympathetic except for the obligatory politician and his entourage. Even some of the criminals get a little sympathy. The news hounds not so much.

I can’t reveal the ending because I haven’t finished it yet. For whatever reason, six stars for John Grisham’s ‘The Client.’

If you’ve enjoyed any of these authors before, the odds you will enjoy the next one you pick up are very good indeed. When I saw them I grabbed them and that’s saying something.

***

Virtually every film or book released into the wild is a commercial venture. It’s designed to make money, and the fact that ninety percent fail to make money changes nothing. That’s where the love of the genre, or even just the game, comes in. But very few of us are prepared to pour our heart and our soul, our limited time and capital into a project without any hope at all of recompense.

Yet we are judged as artists by our success or failure in the commercial sense.

There are times when it is best to ignore such considerations and just to go ahead and make the book or film we want, and now it’s out there and can never be taken back.

Books like ‘Heaven Is Too Far Away,’ a fictional WW I memoir by Louis Bertrand Shalako, which can be found here.

END

Excerpt: Whack 'Em and Stack 'Em. A work in progress.



Hannes Grobe, Alfred Wegenr Institute.







Burgess stood up after the meeting and held up a hand to prevent the rapid out-flux of people from the room.

“What is it, Mister Burgess?”

He’d always been on thin ice with Gorman, but he had tenure and she observed certain limits.

“Yeah. Well. Suzie and I were attacked by motorcycle Ninjas this morning on our way to work. Luckily, with Suzie’s driving and my shooting, we managed to dissuade them.” He left the part about Tim’s out of the story.

What happened on the way to work stayed on the way to work but he was going to claim it as an expense anyway. A free cup of coffee, at almost any price, held its own logic.

“Oh, really.” As the staff settled into their chairs again, Gorman exchanged a significant look with Zed.

“So. It begins.” Zed frowned in contemplation.

“Any theories, Mister Burgess?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I think they might have been trying to kill us…or more likely me, as Suzie is new here and hasn’t had time to make too many enemies.”

Suzie coughed.

“I’ve been here eight years.” Her voice was low but confident. “Most of that on overseas assignment. Otherwise we would have met before.”

Burgess was impressed, although he hoped he didn’t show it.

Gorman gave a tight nod.

“All right people, keep your heads up. You can go.” Her eyes stabbed Burgess and then with a softer look regarded Suzie. “Zed will brief you on your current assignment.”

“So, um…”

“Mister Burgess, I would like to introduce you to your new partner, and I will tolerate no discussion on the matter. You and she will cooperate fully. No hazing, no pranks. No dumping her off twenty miles from home on a snowy night in Winnipeg. Got it?”

“Okay.” He knew when he was defeated.

It was his most charming trait, or so he had been told by Ludmilla Getonanov, the world-famous Russian secret agent, as old as the hills and wise before her time insofar as any mere woman could be said to be wise.

“Suzie Platonis is one of our best field agents. She has a great deal of experience, and I expect both of you to do your jobs with a professionalism that will do this department proud.” She stared at Burgess, willing him to comply. “Any questions?”

“No, ma’am.” So Suzie was of Greek descent then.

It helped to explain the Greek features…

“Then I leave you in Zed’s capable hands.” She got up and stalked out of the room without a backward glance, which with her thick neck and fuzzy pink basketball of a head wasn’t a good idea anyway.

That was one hell of a mouthful for a quiet Monday in southern Ontario but he let it lie as he had no wish to argue with the bitch.

“My eyes are a hundred and fifty megapixels. Arf! Arf! Guadalcanal.” The dog wagged its tail in melodramatic counterpoint to this foray.

“That’s nice.” Roscoe was just trying to be diplomatic.

So they were stuck with the dog, which bode someone no good, and it was probably him.

***

“All righty, then.” Zed’s lab was cluttered with the usual lovely bits and pieces of kit. They ducked under the spinning rotor blades and continued on to the back, carefully avoiding the hot jet exhaust and holding their hands over their ears.

Luckily there were several layers of security and an inner sanctum sanctorum to keep out the smell of burnt JP-4 and smoking ceiling tiles.

As they walked through to his personal bench, they were treated to the sight of all of the test subjects, fume hoods, bomb-assembly, cross-bows and all the usual apparatus and paraphernalia of the international spy game. The dog headed straight for a couch, hopping up on one end, even turning around twice, ramming its nose up its ass with an audible clunk, and pretending to sleep.

One man in particular caught Roscoe’s eye.

A slender young man with a face ravaged by abcesses and blood-red tumors, he seemed to move and then seize up in fits and starts, standing in place, starting off first on his left foot, and then the right, then going back to his original position.

“What…huh. Where was I—oh. Yes. No. Yes. No…” His hands lifted and then fell back to his side two or three times as the feet moved spasmodically but ineffectually.

“What up with that guy?” Suzie caught Roscoe’s eye and Zed turned to look.

“Oh, yes. There’s nothing sadder than a speedo with attention deficit disorder. But when he comes down a bit, he does a bang-up job of cleaning the place. If only we could get him to work during daylight hours…”

Roscoe nodded in comprehension.

“…the only thing worse is a crack-head with Turettes…” Apparently they couldn’t house-clean worth a shit as they needed both hands for crack-smoking and cost anything up to two grand a day from Molly Mutt’s, the well-known franchise which more usually employed the horizontally-challenged, as long as they had sufficient security clearance.

Since the only thing they read was Twilight, or Fifty Shades of Gey, that usually wasn’t much of a problem.

Roscoe wasn’t sure if that was a joke or not, but he laughed anyway as Zed kept going.

“Dang!” Zed stopped and Suzie almost rammed into him, and Roscoe made a point of ramming into her…she elbowed Roscoe and he stepped back.

“What?”

“I’m going to miss Curves this week…again.” Suzie wondered who exactly cared what Zed did on his day off.

“Isn’t that for women?”

“Yeah!” He gave no other explanation, but that thirty-minute circuit was doing wonders for the cellulite in his inner thighs.

These days it was like he couldn’t walk in corduroy pants without announcing it from half a mile away. If the truth be told, it was the same even without the pants.

Suzie grabbed Roscoe’s arm and led him to the back, and a big long bench in front of Zed’s palatial cubicle, where he kept his tea kettle and a box of stale old water biscuits, which Roscoe had never understood. What in the hell was a water biscuit? But he was afraid to ask as he might get an actual explanation. And with Zed that wasn’t always a good idea.

“Okay, here’s your exploding IUD.” This was for Suzie’s benefit. “And Roscoe, your anti-personnel suppositories. Hmn, hmn, hmn.”

He issued them their plastic cards pre-loaded with a million each in expense money.

Zed opened up another package. Those anti-personnel suppositories were known to blow the balls off a charging rhino at a hundred paces, and had been invented by an admirer of rock star Ted Nougat.

This reminded Roscoe that there was in fact something sadder than a speedo with ADD—and that was a fan of Ted Nougat.

Suzie’s eye was caught by the long window where in behind the Ouija girls sat at their boards, with blank looks on their faces trying to prognosticate just how much the bourgeoisie would take in the matter of declining incomes and an inability to retire before the age of ninety.

“So about this assignment.” Roscoe was impatient to get out of the office.

“Oh, yes. Well, it’s very simple, actually. The pop singer known as Twila, that’s the one with the underwear…”

Roscoe nodded vigourously.

“I’m a big fan.”

Suzie gave him a look.

“No, seriously, any woman that parades around on stage with midgets and clowns is a friend of mine. In their underwear, I mean…”

“I didn’t know she did that.”

“I think he is referring to the band.” Zed held up a hand. “But that’s not important right now.”

The sound of a power drill came from not far away and a lot of screaming.

Zed sighed inaudibly and beckoned them to come into his cubicle, which smelled rather strangely of hair gel, which was a bit weird as Zed was as bald as a cucumber.

The door closed with a firm click and they huddled uncomfortably close as he went on with the briefing from two inches away.

Suzie grunted and gave him a jab. Roscoe took his left foot off of her toes.

“Anyway, her daddy is King of the Maruba people in sub-Saharan Africa. And he wants her back. She’s gone into hiding, and it’s our job to find her and return her to her people.”

“Oh, really.” An overseas assignment!

“Yes, she ran away and came to America as a very young girl. As you know, she made it big, and now she has a billion fans all over the world. Not all of them are fake Twitter accounts. They can’t be.” Zed plugged in Suzie’s data-pad and loaded it up with full briefing notes. “I guess she doesn’t want to go back, not even to be given away in marriage to another warlord.”

“What about this other warlord?”

Zed regarded Suzie with respect. Even Roscoe picked up on that.

“Well, it seems he’s got a piss-pot full of oil, too.”

“Go on.” That sounded intelligent.

Right?

“The young lady in question heard daddy was looking for her. A couple of his minions tried to grab her off the street…Rodeo Drive, actually. She’s gone into hiding.”

Just what the doctor ordered, if only there were any doctors available in Ontario since the government had clamped down on backseat dispensaries in cabs run by unlicensed doctors from other countries, most of whom were practically useless due to the execrable accents some of them affected in an effort to get you to trust them...

“So, ah, the prophecy must be fulfilled. You know?”

Suzie’s shoulders slumped. All these damned prophecies. It was a sign of the times they lived in.

Roscoe didn’t know and didn’t care as Zed always provided them with something on paper, the edible kind, which, while it bound you up pretty good, would give them something to read on the plane. And something to eat.

“Yeah, but why?” Suzie’s question was a good one, and if there had been room, he might have been tempted to kick himself.

“Oil, my dear, oil. He says if he doesn’t get her back, he’s going to open up the taps and cut the price, thereby making our oil sands prohibitively expensive to subsidize.”

“Ah. Of course.” The federal government of which they were a part would have no choice but to gouge the money out of the hides of the disabled, the mentally ill, and the working poor women of Tim Horton’s and while Roscoe could see the justice in that, there was always the possibility of social upheaval as many of them were the children of the middle class whose blind, mindless self-delusion wouldn’t last forever.

The truth was he’d lied his way through the psych assessments, every six months or so since his first day of employment. He could cheerfully admit that to himself in an unguarded moment.

There were a few more items of interest, including several gallons of body paint, a g-string for both of them and an old pickup truck to be mailed on ahead, and right about then the freaking dog came in and cocked a leg and they all piled out of the cubicle rather than get their expensive shoes wet with whatever was going to come out of there.

“He opened that door up himself!”

“Read the manual when you get a chance, please, Mister Burgess.” Zed sighed deeply because he probably wouldn’t.

***

The Death of Society.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Victor Vasnetsov

The death of a society is an ugly thing. The end of the Roman Empire, first in the west about 476 A.D. and then the drawn-out agonies, lasting well into the second millenium, of the eastern Empire, Byzantium, make this clear.

The Empire stopped expanding and began to contract. Men bemoaned Roman rule. The weight of Roman taxes weighed heaviest on the poor, and made small farms and home industry untenable. The methods of collection were mean and miserable, yet fortunes were made by tax farmers and the Empire lost about thirty percent of its potential revenues to peculation. Garrisons were withdrawn, troops went unpaid. The roads fell into disrepair. When the Britons asked for Imperial assistance, they were released from their oaths and advised that no help could be forthcoming and to look to their own security. Fifty or a hundred years later, Britain—Roman Britain, had ceased to exist and the darkness closed over her bones.

When Barbarians invaded, Imperial authority conceded the loss, adopted them as allies, and eventually as new levies for the armies, and admitted new kingdoms where the conquerors, the Caesars, had once planted their foot.

The past is a foreign country. We may never know what really happened, but scholars have argued that the burden of taxes in the Empire was kept deliberately low, so the aristocrats could siphon off the profits of prosperity. Society failed because too many individuals failed, or simply could not cope with its harsh conditions. The rich got richer right up to the bitter end. There were still aristocrats when Empire died its much-deserved death.

Whether or not economic mismanagement happened in ancient times, it sure seems to be happening now.

We have some modern parallels. When the McGuinty government delisted chiropractic care for ODSP clients, that was a withdrawal of service. Not an enhancement. It caused suffering, it did not alleviate it. When the federal government stopped building low-income housing, that was a retreat. It was a failure of purpose. It was an abdication of responsibility.

State propaganda always stresses the positive. The real question is why anybody would believe it.

Governments are setting up for-profit prisons, and yet the injustices and abuses are well-known. They have private armies now. They’re cheaper than a national standing army in all of its complexity—and cost. They are also not nearly so professional, for what that may be worth.

The modern government would prefer not to take responsibility, for anything under government auspices is subject to close scrutiny, and rightly so. A private company submits to no such scrutiny. In Russia, they seem to get this, that’s why a strong-arm like Putin can make headway.

It’s not so completely alien to them after serfdom and the appalling social load imposed by nobility, which is of course a completely false concept. Merit is conferred by actions and not by birth.

The right to govern is conferred by the people.

When the government of Ontario takes $469.00 a month from 300,000 disabled people and then tacks $100.00 onto the cheques of 114,000 Ontario Works clients, then those disabled people will almost inevitably end up on the street and in homeless shelters, none of which are prepared or can be prepared for the huge numbers that are coming. Our local shelters have maybe a hundred beds between two shelters, one of which is not properly zoned and a thorn in City Council’s side. People are not going to like 500 to 1,000 homeless people a day (or more) being booted out into the streets and their neighbourhoods. The ‘not-in-my-backyard’ syndrome will become downright hysterical. Yet who will speak up for the disabled and help to prevent this tragedy, this ‘social cleansing?’

Not one member of the bourgeoisie will speak out, that’s my guess.

Where the other estimated $1.025 billion the province plans to rip off per month from ODSP clients is going is still a mystery, but in my opinion it will be used to buy another election by bribing Canadians, Ontarians, with their own money—money which the government has just stolen from their own sons and daughters in the name of fiscal responsibility and deficit-reduction. It’s true, ladies and gentlemen—the government believes the disabled can pay off our alleged deficit, last pegged at $11.9 billion. This is much-reduced according to discredited former Liberal Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, last seen furtively boarding a banana boat to Panama.

The disabled should be able to pay that off for you in about a year. Will we get our pensions back then?

Never. Never, and they know it, we know it and you, the reader know it.

Incidentally, the government claims the ODSP and OW programs cost $8.3 billion per year. Their numbers are always untrustworthy, which is unfortunate for Ontarians. This government claims the Conservatives left them a $6 billion deficit, which the Conservatives hotly deny. How are we to know the truth?

Here is an interesting graph. It shows the ratio of debt to capital, i.e. a deficit of $37.5 billion.

My question for this government is first, why can’t you pay it off? It’s your deficit. Also, why in the hell should we do it? We are forced to live within our means, or pay a very steep price. Otherwise we end up in the street.

This government will not live within its means, and it would prefer to shove disabled folks out into the cold rather than accept responsibility for their own excesses, their own failures, and their own abdication of the trust of Ontario voters.

And they go on closing schools, doubling the price of electricity over ten years and the pay of police officers over fifteen years--but then I guess they understand that they are going to need them, especially their political loyalty. This government doesn't just have the power to give 22 year-old cops a starting rate of $156,000 a year, it also has the power to tax. If only it could tax someone other than those least able to pay.

This government should be shoved out into the street. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of Liberal policies in the Province of Ontario.

***

When you think about it, the penny was the last coin made of precious metal. The penny has been discontinued in Canada. It cost 1.4 cents to make a penny.

By calling in all that precious metal, the federal government has made a premium of forty percent on that currency. How badly they needed that money they will never tell.

The Roman Empire devalued its coinage many times over its decline. People knew that, and preferred not to do business with them any longer.

My guess is that the federal government is still in denial, although it should be intimately aware of just how bad the economic picture is. They have fallen into the trap of believing their own propaganda, and have no choice but to lie to Canadians and to themselves.

To tell the truth would be their doom and they know it.

Those Pesky Pen-Names.

Morguefile.

by Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff



I’m in the mood for a rant but I’ll leave that for another time.

Those pesky pen-names. It doesn’t take very long to realize that with four or five pen names, something is going to suffer. One pen name has been publishing stuff every two months or so.

Well, he’s got nothing on the go right now, because all of his time is spent developing the social networks for all those other names. None of them can possibly be as active as he (I) used to be on Twitter, where I used to tweet out relevant links, the sort of thing my audience might be interested in. But now I have five different personalities, who might tweet out to five different audiences. Those audiences require unique content to fit with their needs or expectations. Just finding and reading that stuff before it got tweeted out would be a big enough challenge.

The bigger any one audience gets, the more attention it merits and the more time it takes to serve it well.

I can’t really write one generic blog post and put it up on five blogs. For one thing, the opportunity presented by five different audiences is a stupid thing to waste, and secondly, it might not make much sense in terms of that particular pen-name. My erotica writer would have no reason to blog about the state of the economy, and her audience can find far better stuff elsewhere anyways.

What happens is that I tend to devote so much time to getting each and every one up and running. But then results begin to skew. My erotica writer has almost a thousand friends on Facebook. Yet another pen name has struggled to get a hundred, another has maybe two hundred, and the latest one has yet to get his first half-dozen. All this doesn’t even really ask or answer the question of whether being on a social network actually helps to sell books or any other product.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that it does, and some of the biggest names in the business are on social networks, blog regularly, et cetera.

The erotica writer gets dozens of friend requests a day. She confirms them unreservedly. She gets that chat box opening up as soon as she does something that registers and pops out on the wall. She can’t talk to three or more people at once, every time she goes on there. That one is a source of frustration, and yet she gave away eighty-seven copies of one title from Smashwords this month and we haven’t seen that with any of our other names, at least not for a while.

The analysis is fairly simple. She clicked on someone that was presented to her, and they are from another culture. And they told two friends…

A white woman, a pretty one, is more than they can resist. In their culture, there is restricted access to women, who would never be tagged, ‘available.’ Or worse, ‘single.’ That’s an untouchable person for a respectable young man over there. They have arranged marriages, or strong restrictions of a faith-based nature on the relations between unmarried young people.

You want to be careful who you talk to and how you talk to them in that culture.

Why did she click on that person or type and group of person/people? For one thing, setting up a new pen name needs a new e-mail address to set up on your publishing and social platforms. There has been no traffic through that e-mail address. The pen-name has no friends and family, no contacts, no list. When you skip through that part on Facebook, when opening up a new account, it presents some hurdles. There will be a list of ‘do you know?’ sort of people presented on Facebook. Being young and eager for success, I think she just basically started off by clicking unthinkingly on a few names and now we have to live with the results.

Now, trying to produce new products for five pen-names, with new titles coming at regular intervals, is another challenge. In addition to five blog posts a week, there is the need to create new material.

Inevitably something (or someone) is going to suffer. On the plus side, a couple of the pen-names are selling small numbers of books. One author gave away eighteen books and has not sold a copy on any platform, and as for the newest one, so far nothing. He’s had eleven samples on Smashwords and is linked in one library, which may or may not translate into a sale sooner or later.

Now, Smashwords founder Mark Coker regularly states that Smashwords authors will sell ninety percent of their books through the Premium Distribution Catalogue. My guys have been making it in with no problems although some minor fixes, which I found myself without waiting for the human vetters.

Once all those new titles, ten or eleven of them, dribble down through all the distribution channels, the next challenge is when, or how often, or especially how, to promote each individual author on each individual platform, whether it’s Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes, whatever.

One of the things I can safely say is that I have never sold a book in Japan, or in Brazil. The challenges of exploiting the distribution system as it exists right now are many, and all we can do is to continue experimenting and of course making new books, new stories and new products.

If a person had a professional or traditional publishing deal, they might be asked to go on social networks, or to blog regularly, or just feel it is a necessity. So I don't think the challenges are unique to any particular approach.

Other than that, the stuff you just read is a hell of a lot better than some stupid old rant.

Right?

Right.

Running pen names.

Setting up pen names.

How to set up a pen name.