Writing a Series: The All-Important First Novel

Je suis Albert… (with many thanks to news worlds of Paris and New York!)

I often get a good sense of a novel by reading the first and last lines. Recently I revisited Al Ashforth's superb spy novel The Rendition.

Page 1: "It was just before 2400 hours, and it was the kind of chilly night you get in the Balkans in late March."
Page 334: "Her mascara was smudged and there might have been a tear on her right cheek."

Al capably blends the shadowy world of black ops, gutsy men and terrorism—with the deepest human emotions in this novel of suspense. A rare gift!

If you have not read this prize-winning novel—do. It packs a wallop on many levels—and makes you feel a foot taller.

Amazon ranks it # 1 in the Historical Thrillers category.

A distinguished member of MWA and ARIO (Association of Retired Intelligence Officers), Al's short stories have appeared recently in Crime Square, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Hardboiled and KWIK KRIMES.

I am proud to welcome back an old friend and colleague of Bob Knightly and myself to Crime Writer's Chronicle.

T. J. Straw

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I am writing a follow-up to my novel The Rendition. One interesting challenge is finding a role in the second book for some of the people who helped out Alex, the hero, in the first book. Events in the second book kick off in Afghanistan while events in The Rendition began in the Balkans. Is anyone around in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, who was around in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo? These countries are so disconnected that it’s unlikely, but if so, I’d like to hear from you. Maybe I can fit you into the new story. In uncovering a complex international conspiracy in The Rendition, Alex had help from his partner and fellow case officer, Buck, and from an old girlfriend, Irmie, who was a homicide detective in Germany.

Is it too much to again ask Buck to come to the aid of his old sidekick? Buck now works for a defense contractor and Alex is an old friend, so maybe he can swing it. But to ask Irmie to take time off from a demanding job and travel all the way from Europe to Afghanistan seems more than a little unreasonable.

“The first book in a series is crucial,” Reed Coleman, who has created half a dozen series characters, said when I asked. “That’s because you have to create your protagonist’s universe from scratch and you have to live with the decisions you make for the remainder of the series.” Reed, who has written 22 books and is the author of series featuring Moe Prager, Dylan Klein, Jesse Stone, Gulliver Dowd, Joe Serpe and Gus Murphy, speaks from wide experience.

Another critical factor that Reed mentioned is “the manner in which time will elapse.” I became aware of this when it seemed that some of the events that tangled up Alex’s life in The Rendition, were very nearly simultaneous with events that are taking place in Afghanistan in the second book. A famous critic, Samuel Coleridge, once said readers will grant a writer a “willing suspension of disbelief,” but I think there are definite limits to what authors can ask of their readers—and having one’s character existing in two places at the same time would definitely be high on that list.

A writer who is very precise where time and her heroine are concerned is Patricia Gussin, the author of four books about Laura Nelson, who is introduced as a student at medical school during the 1967 Detroit riots. In Shadow of Death, the first book in the series, Laura’s first patient involves her in a life-changing situation that shows her to be a resilient and able to handle the tough decisions she will face not just as a doctor but in the succeeding books in the series. In the second book, Twisted Justice, Laura is seven years older, married to a TV newscaster and already has five children. Despite these changes in her life, she is very much the same person readers came to know in the first book.

“In the final two books in the series, Weapon of Choice and After the Fall,” Ms. Gussin said, “I jumped ahead seven years between each. So Laura, a twenty-seven year-old medical school graduate in Shadow of Death, is now a forty-eight year-old pharmaceutical vice president of research and development in After the Fall.”

Ms. Gussin is not contemplating a fifth book in the series. “Following the seven-year scheme,” she says, “Laura would be fifty-five in the next book. A bit on the older side, so I think she’s phased out.” Fifty five old? I recently learned that Vanna White, the glamorous and vivacious star of TV’s Wheel of Fortune, is fifty seven.

Only time will tell whether Laura Nelson is really “phased out.” As a fan of Laura’s, I hope she isn’t. In any case, I’m reminded of Conan Doyle’s feelings toward Sherlock Holmes, who Doyle hoped was phased out but wasn’t. After letting Holmes perish at the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem,” the roar of disappointment from readers was so great Doyle was obliged to resurrect Holmes for more stories and another novel.

There is no question that Conan Doyle got everything right in A Study in Scarlet, the novel which introduces Holmes. Watson first encounters the detective in a laboratory where he is working with blood stains. Right away readers learn that science can be employed to fight crime, an insight that is fundamental not just to the stories but to our modern way of thinking. When Dr. Watson, recently returned from Afghanistan, discovers both he and Holmes are looking for living quarters, they take rooms together in Mrs. Hudson’s Baker Street lodgings, and the all-important relationship between the two men is established. It would not change over the course of four novels and 56 short stories, nearly all of which are narrated by Watson.

When I spoke with Bob Knightly, the author of two well-received books about NYC cop Harry Corbin, he voiced sentiments similar to those of Conan Doyle toward Holmes. “Pretty much all I had to say about Harry got put into the first book, Bodies in Winter. The second, The Cold Room, revolved around the NYPD’s reaction to him and Detective Hansen Linde, Harry’s new partner.” According to Bob, “The plot alone dictated what was new. I didn’t want to write another book just for the sake of developing the character, so I have begun a series of legal thrillers about Frank Borowski, a lawyer working in the NYPD’s Advocates Bureau.”

Another problem an author of a series might face, subsequent to the first book, is repetition. Parnell Hall tells a story of what happened during the writing of his fourth book in the Stanley Hastings series. While working as a detective for a negligence lawyer, Stanley calls on a prospective client in Harlem and finds the man strangled.
“I’m writing this,” Parnell said, “and I suddenly realize I’ve written the exact same scene in my second novel, Murder. I’m devastated. I’m repeating myself. So what can I do? Do I throw it all out and start again? Instead, Stanley being Stanley, I had him say, ‘Wow! Déjà vu…. A case two years ago exactly like this one. I think we’re dealing with a serial killer.’”

Although Stanley knows his theory is laughable, when Sergeant Clark calls him into his office in Chapter 8, he says he believes a serial killer is on the loose. How Stanley wiggles out of the jam he creates for himself becomes a major plot line of Strangler. Mr. Hall’s twentieth book in the Stanley Hastings series, A Fool for a Client, comes out later this year.

I once remarked to mystery writer Shelly Reuben how much I’d enjoyed her novel Julian Solo, and when I asked why she hadn’t made Dr. Solo into a series character, she said, “Dr. Solo was destined to be his own victim. If you kill off your main character, your series is over before it begins.”

Although that is mostly the case, it is not always the case. Ask David Morell, author of First Blood, the book that introduced Rambo. Rambo dies at the end of First Blood, but when the book was made into a film, the original screenplay was rewritten so that Rambo could survive and fight on. Because Sylvester Stallone gave a memorable performance as the traumatized Green Beret vet confronting his personal demons, audiences wanted more. As a result, three more Rambo films followed the first.

Not only does Rambo live on in films, he lives on in books as well. After the success of First Blood, Morrell resurrected Rambo and wrote two subsequent books about him. The only guy harder to kill than Rambo is Dracula.

When writers consider how involving for readers some series become, they realize why they should try to get all the details of their stories right—and, of course, to make the all-important first book as good as they can get it. As Reed Coleman says, “It’s hard to get anyone to pay attention to a second or third book, if they didn’t pay attention to the first.”

© 2015 Albert Ashforth

No Easy Year

Welcome to Al Ashforth…

I'd met Al at many MWA-NY functions. Thought he was a cool cat, enigmatic, a still waters run deep kind of guy .But little did I know - til I read his highly acclaimed The Rendition, which recently was voted by the illustrious Military Writers Society of America as one of the year's best books in the Thriller/Mystery category!

Al has a distinguished academic, military and writing career. He advises writers: "Think about your topic before you sit down to write… our conscious minds seem to present and define problems for us, but our subconscious minds do the hard work."

For his bio of Thomas Henry Huxley, Al did much of his research at the Imperial College in London. Then St. Martin's Press published Murder After the Fact. Both books are available through Amazon.

Recent publications also include "One Person's Clutter" in Kwik Krimes, "Bad for Business" in Hardboiled Magazine, "Incident in Kabul" in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and "His Times Square Princess" in Crime Square, a Vantage Point Anthology.

Other credits include a Doctorate, university level teaching, news reporting for two NY newspapers. He also trained NATO Officers for the German Military Academy, was an instructor at the 10th Group Special Forces Headquarters in Bad Tolz and, as a military contractor, served tours in Bosnia, Macedonia, Germany, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Al's thoughts on his recent book The Rendition: " Renditions... are becoming more significant politically... the most famous was the operation to take out Osama bin Laden. I don't think we have felt the last of the reverberations that will follow as a result of that rendition…"

I've taken the liberty of including a recent definition on the term here: "Rendition is the practice of sending a foreign criminal or terrorist suspect covertly to be interrogated in a country with less vigorous regulations for the humane treatment of prisoners."

I believe you will find Al's comments below of great interest.

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

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It has not been an easy year for the author of No Easy Day.

According to a recent issue of the Army Times, Pentagon officials are still considering legal action against former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette for writing a book describing his part in the raid on Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden. Although Mr. Bissonnette’s book, No Easy Day, was published by Dutton over a year ago, on September 11, 2012, legal action continues to be threatened.

But hopefully, none will be undertaken.

I found the Army Times article mildly surprising because, as time goes on, it’s beginning to seem less and less likely that Mr. Bissonnette will go to jail, or even to trial. Since Mr. Bissonnette has gone through the difficult training required of all SEALs and participated in thirty deployments, his patriotism can hardly be questioned, and I doubt that a jury would convict him of knowingly revealing information harmful to the United States. He might then only face civil litigation for violating the confidentiality agreement he signed in 2007, which required him to let the Pentagon review anything he’d written prior to publication.

One reason he might not have wanted to submit his book to the Pentagon was the experience of Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer. Shortly before publication of Operation Dark Heart, Colonel Shaffer’s account of his work as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, the government bought up 9,500 copies of the book and destroyed them. Certainly Dutton, Mr. Bissonnette’s publisher, was happier publishing No Easy Day, rather than destroying it. The book is reported to have sold well over 500,000 copies.

Despite No Easy Day’s commercial success and the fact that Mr. Bissonnette has provided a truly valuable account of an important military action, this last year has probably not been an entirely pleasant time for him. It has to be more than mildly disturbing to know that, as the newspaper article states, a number of Pentagon officials continue to be “ticked off” and would like to see him deprived of his royalties and maybe even behind bars.

For his part Mr. Bissonnette contends that he abided by his agreement when his publisher vetted the book and found no information that would be harmful to the United States. The government contends that in No Easy Day, which he published under the pen name Mark Owen, Mr. Bissonnette may have leaked classified information. It also maintains that only the government can determine what is or is not harmful to our country. But since information does not arrive with the label “classified,” it is not easy for anyone—a writer, a publisher, or even the government—to know exactly what should be classified and what should not be. And because “classification” is a largely arbitrary process, many people feel the government inclines to overuse the “classified” label.

Whatever some Pentagon officials may think, the mood of our country now is to give Mr. Bissonnette the benefit of the doubt. Having read the book, I have to agree with Mr. Bissonnette and his publisher. I can’t see that any of the information contained in the book has been harmful to the United States. And since so many other people have been talking freely about the raid, it would seem logical, and even desirable, to hear about the raid from someone who actually took part in it.

Among the people who have talked openly about the bin Laden raid are members of the SEAL brass who have provided information about what happened to Hollywood, specifically to Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, who made the movie Zero Dark Thirty. Another is President Obama, who reported bin Laden’s death the day following the raid and who described the raid during the last election campaign as one of the significant accomplishments of his first term in office. Yet another information source was the White House itself, with many officials over an extended period leaking facts about the capture of Osama bin Laden to the press. Unfortunately, one of the leaks has led to the arrest and imprisonment of Dr. Shakil Afridi for having helped determine the whereabouts of bin Laden. Dr. Afridi’s role in the bin Laden rendition should definitely have remained classified—with a capital “C”.

Yet another reason, and perhaps the most significant one, not to take action against Mr. Bissonnette is the widely held belief among members of the American public that the government reveals much too little regarding what’s happening in the War on Terror. Many Americans feel that, as citizens of a democracy, they are entitled to know much more of what’s going on overseas than they are being told.

To me, it seems incredible that despite these many mitigating circumstances there continue to be DOD officials who maintain that Mr. Bissonnette is “in material breach of his confidentiality agreement” and should be hauled into court.
Maybe Mr. Bissonnette should have done what authors of espionage thrillers do—fictionalize. In No Easy Day Mr. Bissonnette hardly deviates from describing his career as a SEAL, beginning with the intense training he received and then moving through the various deployments he was involved in. The final nine chapters deal with the raid on Abbottabad. He hardly ever mentions people apart from his fellow SEALs, but what he could have provided, along with the accounts of his training, is a detailed description of a master terrorist. The terrorist could be an individual whose career spans decades and who is suspected of being behind some of the bloodiest and most gruesome terror attacks perpetrated since 9/11. To make him seem menacing, he could be known by the name of a particularly ferocious animal—not a jackal, lion or tiger since they’re been used—but perhaps a wolverine or a puma.

Since novels are primarily about people and their relationships, Mr. Bissonnette could have introduced early on in the story a young woman who loves the hero but who feels his career is too dangerous for a man who wants to be a husband and father. When she asks him to make a choice between her and his SEAL career, he decides, reluctantly, to resign and get married.

However, just as he is about to announce his retirement he receives a summons from his team’s master chief to a top secret meeting in a secure conference room on a North Carolina military installation. At this meeting The Wolverine or Puma is described in terms that would fit Osama bin Laden, and the CIA reveals it has located the master terrorist living at a small city in Pakistan.

Since the hero knows this is the mission he’s been training for all his life, he changes his mind about resigning from the service. Something else Mr. Bissonnette could have imagined are tensions within the SEAL team’s ranks. He could have built suspense by describing other problems. At some point, for example, the SEALs could begin to fear the plans for the mission have leaked and the terrorist knows they’re coming. During the landing, besides the downdraft which caused the helicopter to crash, they could encounter other problems. Maybe the Pakistani Army could show up at the moment of their arrival, guns blazing. Maybe his hero could have been wounded and subsequently nursed back to health by an attractive nurse who replaces his original girlfriend in his affections.

Like most people, I like happy endings.

While large portions of such a book would have been fiction, most details of the story would have been accurate. For some readers separating the facts from the fiction could have been a challenging undertaking. If Mr. Bissonnette had written a fictional account of a rendition aimed at capturing a prominent and influential terrorist hiding in Pakistan, he would have been joining the legions of writers who write about espionage within a fictional framework—and he would probably not have to worry about DoD officials threatening to haul him into court.

Washington D.C. has more than its share of leakers, and certain details of the bin Laden raid which have been divulged should never have been divulged. This information was revealed, not by Mr. Bissonnette or members of SEAL Team 6, but by government and military officials for their own reasons. Although I can understand the Pentagon’s initial unhappiness with the book’s publication, I now find the continuing unhappiness with Mr. Bissonnette to be an overreaction. Mr. Bissonnette, who in writing No Easy Day made a genuine effort not to reveal any information that might be damaging to the United States, has provided the public with a faithful and historically valuable account of what happened during the fateful early morning hours of May 1, 2011, in Abbottabad.

© 2014 Albert Ashforth

The Espionage Thriller: Post-War and Post-9/11

Al and I have been friends for two decades; we met in a writer’s group (where else?) along with Theasa Tuohy. Being a newspaper man by profession, Al’s a fast writer and with an imagination that works at warp speed, he already has a back list awaiting publication. 

After serving with the Army overseas, Albert Ashforth worked for two newspapers. He is the author of three books, numerous stories and articles. His espionage thriller, THE RENDITION, was described by a reviewer as "smoothly written, fast-moving and suspenseful." He is a professor at SUNY and lives in New York City. -Robert Knightly

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The espionage novel is a relatively narrow literary genre, and as the world political situation over the last 70 years has gone from bad to worse and back again, the fortunes of the espionage novel have also see-sawed up and down – but with a difference. When the world’s political situation takes a turn for the worse, the situation of espionage novels takes a turn for the better. And vice-versa.

During the 1920’s the State Department established an office responsible for breaking codes and reading messages sent between other nation’s embassies and their capitals. It was our country’s first attempt to establish an intelligence agency. But when Henry L. Stimson, then Secretary of State, learned what the office was doing, he immediately had it closed down and famously said, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail!”

Espionage novels could hardly be written in a time when national leaders regarded one another as gentlemen. Needless to say, things changed with the arrival on the world stage of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, both of whom began throwing their weight around during the 1930’s. It was hardly a coincidence that three early and successful writers of espionage novels, Eric Ambler, Helen MacIness and John Buchan, also emerged around this time.

Before the 1930’s, very few espionage thrillers were written, and it is easy to see why. In order to have spy novels you have to have spies, and the United States didn’t establish the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, until 1944. Something else you need is a tense international situation. You need a foreign government readers really dislike in order to make the gritty, distasteful job of spying acceptable. First Nazi Germany and then Communist Russia filled that bill very nicely. The Cold War provided both spies and a fierce rivalry, and as the United States and Russia competed against each other with every means at hand short of going to war, espionage – the KGB versus the CIA – was the obvious way to try and beat out your rival. The result was that the last six or seven decades have been a truly great time for the writers of international spy thrillers.

Although Ian Fleming’s charismatic James Bond is the best known intelligence agent of the Cold War years, John le Carré’s rather drab George Smiley is the most realistic.

Alex Klear, the hero of my novel, The Rendition, also began his career during the Cold War, and he is closer to Smiley than to Bond. He recalls spending much of his time doing the same gritty, dangerous job that many of our intelligence people stationed in Europe did during those years: recruiting and running spies behind the Iron Curtain. Although governments sanctimoniously maintain that the spies they recruit from the other side are motivated by ideological beliefs, the truth is that most come over because they’ve had their arms twisted – in other words, they’ve been blackmailed. Alex and his partner, Buck, often acting on information supplied by the National Security Agency, did the twisting, first recruiting and then running their agents for as long as they could provide useful information. But Alex, who is fluent in German and knows some Russian, finds he is an anachronism after November 1989, the month in which the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. With Russia no longer an enemy, Alex realizes he is no longer needed, and decides to retire.

Although the world cheered the disappearance of the Wall, which was the perfect symbol of Communist oppression, espionage writers didn’t. One espionage writer, Len Deighton, was forced to make last-minute changes to a novel about Berlin, Spy Sinker, but he wasn’t the only espionage writer caught by surprise by this sudden development. The blunt truth is, when world tensions decline, so do the fortunes of spy novelists. During the 1990’s, with borders now open and old rivals becoming trading partners, there were no jobs for spies and no enemies to justify the betrayals and dirty tricks which are part and parcel of espionage thrillers. During the 1990’s, espionage writers had to find new topics to write about.

But with the attack on the World Trade Center things changed yet again. Not since the demise of Hitler and Stalin have espionage writers had such a hated figure as Osama bin Laden. Once again, the end could justify the means, and we could again start opening each other’s mail.

In the years since 9/11, one development in particular has helped make espionage thrillers more popular and more significant. Our government has become tight-lipped. Although the public knows we are fighting a war on terror for which we are spending hundreds of billions, there is very little information about it in the newspapers. Savvy readers are discovering that one of the best sources for finding out what’s going on is the spy thriller, which can take them places even newspaper correspondents can’t go.

For example: Let’s suppose the American ambassador to Afghanistan were to meet with President Karzai to discuss some kind of crisis. If news people are denied access, they can only report that the meeting took place. They can’t make up quotes or write anything they don’t know to be true. The writer of fiction, however, can imagine what the two men might have spoken about and describe a stormy exchange with the president raising his voice and the ambassador storming out of the palace. If the writer has done his job well, he might well have given a roughly accurate representation of what actually happened, and there is nothing to prevent him from connecting the meeting to a subsequent real political development which might involve his hero and heroine. And he could go on from there. The thriller writer is limited only by his imagination and his knowledge of the topic.

And believe me, most thriller writers are experts in the areas they write about.

Since the publication of The Rendition, I have had any number of people ask me, “Say, what is a rendition anyway? Isn’t that when somebody sings a song?”

Well, it used to be, but now the term has an additional meaning, one coined by our intelligence agencies probably because of its lack of either good or evil connotations.

Since 9/11, our government has unleashed a bag of dirty tricks aimed at making life miserable for those who would do us harm. One trick involves kidnapping a terrorist from a foreign country where he might be strolling around openly and enjoying life to the fullest, secure in the belief he is beyond the reach of the American government. A “rendition” takes place when the terrorist, against his will, is snatched off the street or perhaps even grabbed in his home, as one target actually was. In all likelihood, he is transported to a nation friendly to the United States, where he is subjected to “enhanced interrogation,” which means his captors use methods for extracting information that are not permissible in the United States or under the Geneva Convention. Probably the friendly nation passes this information back to us, and we go after more terrorists.

Although Secretary Stimson would be in shock were he to see what’s going on today, we thriller writers are in seventh heaven. In addition to carrying out renditions, our government attacks other nations with drones, hacks into other nations’ computer systems and conducts “black ops.”

When the government doesn’t want to be held responsible for undertaking certain kinds of dirty tricks, it sometimes sanctions a “black” operation, in other words an operation that lacks all traces of government involvement. This is fine as long as things go smoothly, but when they go awry and the government invokes “plausible denial,” it’s nearly always our intelligence officers who find themselves holding the bag. In such cases, they have roughly the same standing with a foreign government that a bounty hunter might have -- in other words, none -- and this is the predicament in which Alex finds himself when the rendition he is involved in goes off the rails.

In the course of the story, Alex bugs a phone, breaks into someone’s home, helps a guy escape jail and of course takes part in a couple of renditions. Although under Secretary Stimson’s definition, he would hardly qualify as a “gentleman,” he makes the grade as a warrior and a survivor.

Albert Ashforth