"Oh what a tangled
web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
Sir Walter Scott
Winter 2003
Volume I,
issue 3
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"Oh what a tangled
web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." | Winter 2003 |
| Jeffrey
Marks' first book, Who Was That Lady?, a biography
of mystery writer Craig Rice, encouraged him to write mystery fiction.
The Ambush of My Name is the first mystery novel by Mr. Marks to be published although he has several mystery short story anthologies on the market. His work has won a number of awards including the Barnes and Noble Prize and he was nominated for an Edgar (MWA), an Agatha (Malice Domestic), a Maxwell award (DWAA), and an Anthony award (Bouchercon). Today, he writes from his home in Cincinnati, which he shares with his dog. Mr. Marks began collecting mysery first editions at age sixteen. Direct correspondence to Jeffrey Marks or to editor@lifeloom.com. |
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After spending three years doing extensive research for my biography of mystery writer Craig Rice, I decided that fiction would be a welcome change. In my naïveté, I assumed that the world of make-believe would involve sitting down at the computer and moving my characters around the page at will. In the words of those old romantic-suspense authors, "Had I but known ..."
My first published novel took 18 months to complete between frantic bouts of writing and the research needed to make it historically accurate. I’d written a short story about Ulysses Grant for the collection of Southern mysteries that I’d edited, entitled Magnolias and Mayhem. Since I live in Ohio, the Civil War was about as far south as I knew. Fortunately, I hail from the same hometown as Grant, so I thought I had an “in” for a mystery short story.
The collection sold well, and I decided to write a full-length Grant adventure. The differences between writing short stories and novels are extreme. I chose to set my first Grant novel, The Ambush of My Name, in our shared hometown of Georgetown, Ohio. That decision in itself made for three weeks of research on what my small farming village looked like in 1865.
It’s not that I dislike research. I think perhaps I enjoy it too much. Perhaps I should have been a scholar, but I get lost in the details and descriptions of a place and time. Every detail that I stopped to locate took a day or more of research, mostly because I would read an entire book or find an interesting detail on the web that might come in handy three books from now.
The experience certainly grounded me in my Civil War era facts, but it also taught me a great deal of how I should research for my writing. In my third book, Some Hidden Thunder, I’m practicing what I’ve learned and the process is moving much more smoothly.
The first difficulty is to make sure that Grant did not have any life-altering experiences during the time that he’ll be solving the crime. It wouldn’t do me any good to have him in Ohio for a problem in deduction when he was rallying troops in Washington, D.C. or dealing with freedmen issues in Tennessee. Adding real people to mysteries means that you have to coordinate their real lives with the one you create for them. Fortunately with U.S. Grant, this isn’t a problem; his life is extremely well documented.
For each topic that I suspect will be in my book, I locate materials in advance. The latest book is set in Cincinnati and features two characters who served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the war. As dissimilar as it sounds, I also need to know about spiritualists and iron works in 1865. I found a mountain of materials (as my office will attest) on these four subjects and have spent the last three months reading voraciously on all manners of these topics.
From that base of knowledge, I begin writing. A first draft for me goes fast. I’m the type of writer who lets his plots and characters simmer until they boil over into my conscious mind and I have to get it down on paper immediately. I spend anywhere from two week to two months on it. Then I begin to polish, which consumes the better part of a year.
If the first draft doesn’t flow for some reason, I will go back and read more of my topic books. I’ve found that it’s usually a sign that I’ve missed some area that I need to know in order to finish the draft.
That doesn’t mean that I have to know every detail to write the first draft. For instance, in the latest book, I needed to have a few details about the decor of the home where an apparition appears to Grant. I merely put a pair of brackets around the made-up details to ensure that they are correct at a later point in time.
The brackets are easy to locate in my draft and I have learned from experience if I stop during the writing process to research each needed detail, I lose all the momentum I’ve built and all the rapport with the characters. It’s easier to know what I need when I’m finished and find it then.
Or so I thought. In each book, I’ve had one niggling detail after I’m finished writing. One crumb of a fact that I’m forced to leave unanswered. In the first book, it was trying to find a sketch or photo of the Georgetown newspaper editor. I searched through records, genealogies, and a number of resources only to come up with a blank. He hadn’t been physically recorded during his life. While it may not be noticeable to the reader, I see it each time I open the book.
In this book, it’s going to be the exact distribution of an estate following the death of the well-known parents. I just wanted to know which of the heirs lived in a particular house in 1865. I know when the people passed away and who inherited, but I’m having a difficult time in finding out why the probate lasted over three years, a period that includes the date I’m interested in. At this point, I’m not sure that I will find out, but it’s one of the details that I want to have complete for the book.
After the writing and rewriting is complete, I usually ask a few trusted readers to read for the details. One thing to be careful of when writing about the past is anachronisms. These are details that may be correct for the period, but people associate them with a different time period or a more current era. It’s amazing how many words that are associated with today’s culture actually date back over 100 years. Even though you might have the word or situation correct, it brings the reader out of the story and they will let you know about it.
I just finished a contemporary mystery and I must say that the research was minimal in comparison to the historicals, but it continues to get more difficult as technology meets crime scene investigation. The science of DNA and Crime Scene Investigations changes and improves rapidly. People see so much of these new forensic tools on television that a writer doesn’t dare make a mistake. While it’s good for real crimes, it makes the writer’s life more difficult by taking so much of the mystery of detection out of the murder.
Even with all the difficulties that lie in writing fiction today, I still love what I do. I’ve just started a follow-up biography of Anthony Boucher, the New York Times mystery critic. Indiana University has over 20,000 pages of material in its library regarding Boucher. So I figure at this rate, it will be a year or two before I can see out over the stack of books in my office, but the results are well-worth it.
Copyright 2003 by Jeffrey Marks
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"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." |
Copyright 2003, lifeloom.com