Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "mystery"

Back in the 1990s, although I had changed genres several times, I swore I didn’t write mystery and never could, not me. Mystery as I knew it was plotty and artificial, lavished with red herrings like ornaments on a Christmas tree. (Brief, dreadful visual of tree decorated w/ red herrings, suppressed.) Also it trivialized the loss of human life. So I wasn’t going there, thank you. As a writer I like to challenge myself, BUT. (Voice of Meatloaf: “I will do anything to get published, but I WON’T DO THAT.”)

However, one boring summer, feeling the urge to try something new, I decided to write a book for people who don’t care to read. Let’s make guns for pacifists, grow cattle for vegetarians, roll spitballs for teachers? Ah, but the marketing did make sense after all, because those teachers would thrust my product upon the reluctant readers, who were predominantly teenage boys. In order to seduce them (in a nonsexual way), my protagonist would have to be a male teen who was BAD. Ideally, he should be inner-city, but having never lived in a city, I didn’t think I could pull that off. However, I’d been in contact with a rather scary family living in an isolated, ramshackle trailer on the flood plain of the Susquehanna river. Tuff could live there. (Already my tough boy’s nickname was Tuff.)

And what would Tuff do? I knew he had to grab the reader from the first sentence and never let go. No problem: my kids had told me about one of their high-school classmates who had been riding his dirt bike when he ran into a trap somebody had set. A cable strung across a wooded trail at neck height had crushed his windpipe and killed him. I found this so disturbing and just plain mean that I needed to write about it. I couldn’t kill off Tuff, of course, but I could kill off his brother and Tuff could be right there on the bike behind him. Tuff would have a very, very hard time dealing with his brother’s death. Because he was “tough,” rather than grieving he would seek revenge. He would nearly kill an innocent man.

I wrote TOUGHING IT in first person viewpoint using Tuff’s voice. His mother was drunk as usual and unsupportive when he told her about his brother’s death. He had no father. His approximate stepfather was abusive. He ran away from home. By the time I got to Chapter Five of the novel, writing from my gut, I began to wonder whether the story was so sad and depressing that no reader, reluctant or otherwise, would be able to stand it. So I pulled back, trying to lighten up. I managed to finish the manuscript on a positive note.

Then, as is my rule, I put it aside for a while. But one day my daughter, fourteen years old at the time, wandered into my office complaining of nothing to do. I handed her the print backup of the manuscript. “Here, read this.”

Rather to my surprise she did so. Two hours later she returned. “Mom, the beginning is okay, but the ending is, like, lame. You never said who did the murder.”

To which I retorted, “It’s not a murder mystery. It’s about Tuff’s grieving process.”

“Whatever.” She meandered off.

The truth was, if the four stages of grief are denial, anger, depression and acceptance, I had pretty much skipped denial and depression. But in due time I finished (I thought) TOUGHING IT and sent it in. The first editor who saw it rejected it, but one of the nice things about being agented is they always tell you why they declined. The editor said that the manuscript was very strong through Chapter Five, but at that point the author had evidently chickened out. Also, the author needed to solve the murder mystery. If the author did these things, the editor would be interested in seeing the book again.

Well. Guess who should have listened to her gut. And her daughter.

I had utterly no idea who had killed Tuff’s brother. In the real-life case I was trying to exorcise, no one was ever prosecuted. In the book, I had turned the cable into a shotgun rigged by a trip wire, because Tuff wanted to have his revenge in kind, and it’s easier/more believable to tote a gun around than a cable. By the way, I am still ticked off at whoever in the pub house changed “triggers” to “trigger’s.” A double barreled shotgun has two triggers, for gosh sake.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I still needed a murderer. So I called my brother Ben, ex-cop, and he told me the guys growing marijuana in the state forest land on top of the mountain did it. I didn’t even know they were there before he told me. He also explained how to rig up the shotgun trap. This is why TOUGHING IT is dedicated to Ben.

Duly revised, it was eventually accepted by the same wise editor, and upon publication it became an ALA/YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA/YALSA Recommended Book for the Reluctant Young Adult Reader, and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. Better yet, I heard this from an English teacher: one of her students, a boy who had never read a novel in his life, finished TOUGHING IT in a day, then demanded, “Youse got any more books by this here lady?”

These honors, and good reviews, and the good news from the teacher, pleased me enormously, but I hope you will not think I suffer from an enlarged head if I say they did not surprise me. I mean, TOUGHING IT was my twentieth published novel, and I’d heard nice things about my books before. But I WAS surprised – indeed, astonished – when I received word that this book for reluctant readers was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. I was nonplussed, dumbfounded, and astounded, because I knew I didn’t write mystery.

My agent encouraged me to attend the award ceremony, a very dressy affair in New York City, if only for the sake of mingling, and she convinced me by promising to go with me. But I felt sure I could not possibly win. For something to wear, I borrowed from my daughter the long black standby she wore when playing violin solos. I enjoyed the trip to New York, and hobnobbing with my agent, and the parties, and how nice everybody at the Edgars was to me, and the dinner, European style, salad served at the end.

As for receiving the award, I was stunned. I went up to the podium and dithered. I had no speech prepared, because I did not write mystery. My agent informed me, “Now you do,” but I still didn’t believe her.

Not until I won another one the next year, for LOOKING FOR JAMIE BRIDGER.

Then I got serious, wrote some short stories for the mystery magazines, and eventually wrote the ENOLA HOLMES series, thanks to the two Edgars I won by mistake. But I haven’t received any since I began writing mystery.

Oyez, oyez, a bunch of novels of mine are back digitally! Open Road Media recently went live with them, half YA, half mass market fantasy. And regarding the YA novels, they requested the usual information: describe the book, the characters, how you got the idea, any backstory behind the title of the book or why it was written – aaaaak, for so many books? As the task was so daunting, I cheated. I tried to group the books. At first I just wrote about the horse books. But then this came up:

When my kids were in high school, one of their classmates was riding a four-wheeler along a trail when he hit a cable strung at neck height; it crushed his windpipe and killed him instantly. The cruel person who hung the cable was never caught. This incident traumatized me to my core and haunted me so much that it took two books, years apart, to exorcise it.

One was SKY RIDER, in which the dead boy reappears as an angry ghost to care for a horse that is about to be euthanized. Dusty, the girl who owns the horse,can no longer ride because of a painful back injury she sustained when her alcoholic father was driving drunk. She, her father, and the boy Skye all require healing.

The other book is TOUGHING IT. In the first draft, Tuff and his brother Dillon are riding their dirt bike up a mountain trail; Dillon is killed by the cable. For plot reasons, I later changed the cable to a gun trap. This book, again, is about grief and the healing process. And a river. The river goes on flowing.

So I ended up grouping by trauma. Another mystery book of mine, BLOOD TRAIL, is based on a truly horrific murder that stunned my community. A teen boy killed his brother with a knife, as was made all too evident by the blood trail throughout the house. I needed to exorcise the crime from my mind, and also to address the small-town reactions of denial, disbelief and incomprehension. The story is told from the point of view of Jeremy, the murdered teen’s best friend. The mystery is not who did it, but why, and it is a question without any satisfactory answer. Again, there is a river, and it goes on flowing.

And yet another trauma: SEPARATE SISTERS was written as my way of dealing with the problems of a messed up family I knew. One girl lived with her father and was a total rebel. I met her through horseback riding. She wore black skinny jeans, black paddock boots, a black Desperado hat and an austere long-sleeved shirt, sometimes with a tie, all year long, no matter how hot the weather got. I would give her rides home when she ran away from school, and she became just about the only groupie I’ve ever had. Her father would bring her to my book signings, and she would sit with me behind the table to keep me company. For hours. Her sister and mother I met at musical events at the high school; the other sister took singing lessons, wore dresses, was popular and lived with her mom. My groupie, the rebel girl who lived with her father, despised both her sister and her mother. I liked everyone in the divided family, and I wanted so badly for this family to heal that I wrote a book about an artistic sister and a brainy sister, similarly divided, who finally bridge the gap.

But the most influential trauma started way back when I was an intelligent, obedient kid who was bullied. Ever since then I have been daydreaming about a dark hero who is a poet, a musician, a visionary, and who is terribly wronged. This figure appears repeatedly in my fantasy novels for adults, but also he is Nico, the rock star betrayed by his fellow lead singer and best friend, in THE FRIENDSHIP SONG, a contemporary fantasy novel for middle-grade children. And he is Kamo in SECRET STAR, a YA novel I can’t quite call realistic because there’s so much mysticism, music and heart in it. SECRET STAR is told from the viewpoint of Tess, a teen girl who live in rural poverty, wears old jeans and Red Wing work boots, and is such a misfit she is physically endangered. This is a gritty, tough, yet lyrical book. THE FRIENDSHIP SONG's protagonist is Harper, a girl whose dad is about to marry a weird woman named Gus, who does folk art and plays a twelve-string guitar with magical qualities. Harper and her friend Rawnie worship the group Neon Shadow, and when dark, handsome Nico falls ill to the point of death, the girls venture down a twelve-string tunnel to rock&roll hades in order to save him.

Whew.

I discovered that, out of all the YA books just published, there were only a few that didn’t evolve out of some sort of personal trauma in my life. Those few include DUSSSIE, my pubescent-Medusa fantasy, and POSSESSING JESSIE, horror, and LOOKING FOR JAMIE BRIDGER, Edgar-winning mystery.

Open Road Media also released about an equal number of my fantasy titles for adults. I wonder: might they, also, sort themselves into groups by trauma? Stay tuned.