Crime Writer in Italy:Week Two

Assisi is simply splendid!

Through the ages, all of its inhabitants have left their mark on it.  The site it occupies speaks of the Etruscans who built their stronghold towns on the tops of the steep thumbs of land that stick up high over the surrounding area, giving them a vantage point to warn them of an approaching enemy.

The Romans came next and built their town on the Etruscan site.  The Roman remains are visible in the temple of Minerva in the Piazza del Commune.  As with many other Roman temples all over Italy, this one was preserved by incorporating it into a Christian church.

Piazza del Commune

Closer look at the Temple of Minerva

But the Assisi one sees today is a medieval city.  It even lives within its old walls.  Its aspect makes sense since it owes its modern fame to St. Francis who was born there in 1182.  The son of a well-to-do draper, he literally gave up his goods to feed the poor.  His love of all living things pervaded the work of his followers and today makes him the patron saint of and his birthplace a mecca for environmentalists and peace movements.

The artists who came shortly after his death to build the basilica in his honor based their work on his reverence for nature, and in doing so they transformed western art.  The Renaissance reached its peak in Florence, but its seeds were first planted here.

The Rocca Maggiore, Assisi's medieval castle

Typical medieval hill street

The view from our room.

The Basilica of San Francesco

The cloister of the monastery attached to the basilica

The nave of the upper basilica

The upper basilica, looking toward the entrance

The Church of Santa Chiara

Detail of the facade of Santa Chiara, here because I love lions

Interior of Santa Chiara

Did I say that one eats extremely well in Assisi's restaurants and trattorias?  And its narrow streets are lined with marvelous shops with specialize in local sausages, salamis, and every form of the delicious black truffles of Umbria.  One sweet shop displays huge masses of chocolate that look like mortadella or gigantic Perugina kisses, but my favorite was this one--the Meteorite of the Mayans.  I assume the world did not end on 12-21-12 because the meteorite that was to have destroyed the planet was made of chocolate.  I bought a piece to take home.  Would it be too much to say that the Meteorite of the Mayans is to die for?

We arrived at home to see the full moon shining over the
Palazzo dell Signoria.  Here's the terrace view of it.

By the time you see this, I will have left for Rome.  Tuesday begins a three day sojourn there, only an hour and a half from Florence by fast train.  Stay tuned.

It Really Does Take a Village…

A writer may win all the top literary prizes and/or lug a suitcase filled with $$$$$ to the bank… but every successful writer owes that success partly to the team who have coaxed, nurtured, coached, embellished his/her work as soon as it saw the light of day.

A writer needs a village - agents, editors, artists, craftsmen, publicists, readers, fans. Like raising a child, you need a village to publish your book.

As 2013 writers research all available information on the current industry buzzword "platform", we must be like the proverbial Arab: "If you seek wisdom, explore every tent in the bazaar."

Whether we sign on with the Big Six/Five/Four or the Independents, we must know the basics of this everchanging business.This is their business: Selling your book - selling YOU!

We need to cultivate people outside our intimate circles of first readers and social media followers.

We need to create a name brand for ourselves and our product.

Fans? We gotta develop 'em! And fan the fan flames!

We have to be flexible and bend with the market trends. We need another proverb at this point, one from Africa. "You cannot turn the wind, so turn the sail."

We need to develop novel ways of communicating, of bonding with potential fans and readers. Many successful bloggers interact with their commenters.

For hints on method, pull out that wonderfully chatty volume from 1936 – Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. He wrote that book for 2013 Platforming! Especially for you and me.

Today we can't lean back and expect "the Company" is going to do our foot work.

We've poured heart and soul into our masterpiece - we've proved we can write a damngoodbook!

Now we need to create other layers and levels - blogs, websites, online chats, photos, above all, a solid core of loyal fans, who like OUR writing, like US and reallyreallyreally want US to succeed in this maelstrom of publishing!

Be sure to stop by my next blog post and meet a man who works with some of our favorite crime writers, a publicist at one of the biggest companies on the planet!

Thelma Straw

This Way Lies Madness – A New Book for Your Reference Shelf

Somewhere in my wanderings through the internet last week I came upon a book recommendation that I was moved to follow up on. The book was The Writer's Guide to Psychology by Carolyn Kaufman, Psy.D. Whoever recommended it said it would help writers to depict body language accurately. It won't do that, but that's something you can do for yourself, if you have any sort of eye at all. What it will do is describe psychotherapists accurately, describe therapy sessions accurately, and describe the behavior accurately of people who are suffering from mental disturbances. Or not suffering, some of them, but causing those around them to suffer.

It's no exaggeration to say that this book belongs on every writer's reference shelf. I had to interview my friend the psychiatric social worker for half an hour or so just to find out a small part of what is offered in this book, the description of one disorder. Dr. Kaufman talks about every sort of psychosis and disorder from schizophrenia to Martha Mitchell syndrome (that's when your therapist thinks you're suffering from paranoid delusions, but the fact is you're being persecuted). The approaches to therapy, the prognosis for various conditions, the drugs, if any, a short history of treatment for mental illness; it's all here.

My favorite is Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD). It makes you behave like a thirteen-year-old drama queen. We've all been there; most of us left.

Since Dr. Kaufman is also a writer, and reads a lot, every few pages she quotes from a book (or a movie, or a TV show) where the writer got it totally wrong, conflating two mutually exclusive conditions, for example, or having a therapist behave in a way that no reputable therapist ever would. Famous writers. That has to be embarrassing. So buy the book! Read it! Keep it on your shelf! The next time you have to write a character who is off the rails, you can do it with accuracy. Otherwise you might find yourself quoted in the First Revised Edition.

Kate Gallison

Crime Writer in Italy: Week One

Winter dawn from my terrace.

I was AWOL last week.  I spent last Tuesday night and all day Wednesday delayed in Newark and Amsterdam airports waiting for broken planes to be fixed and dealing with missed connections.  But Italy makes that kind of thing up to you, and fast.  A splendid dinner and good wines shooed away the blues lickety split.

Lots more eating and drinking interspersed with visits to splendid monuments and wonderful exhibitions and time alone with the manuscript of my next book are making this sojourn quite happy.

The highlights so far:

CELEBRATING OBAMA IN FIRENZE

On Monday, we invited our Italian friends to an American dinner to celebrate President Obama's second inauguration--mushroom soup, roasted turkey with all the trimmings (including cranberry sauce smuggled in in our luggage).  The dessert in the picture is a double brownie sheetcake topped with whipped cream and berries.  The Italians declared all delicious.  Whew!

A VISIT TO ORVIETO

This wonderful town in Umbria is very easy to reach from Florence by train.  The Duomo, its trophy church, was begun in 1290.  It took over a hundred architects, sculptors, painters, and mosaicists more than three hundred years to complete the masterpiece.  The weather was gloomy and photography of the interior not allowed, so the pictures here (most of them serruptitious) do not do the church justice.

The facade is remarkable for the color and richness of its design.  Lorenzo Maitani made the astonishing low relief sculptures that adorn the pillars.  They portray Genesis, the Jesse Tree, scenes from the New Testament, and the Last Judgment.  

Detail of the facade.  The lion, symbol of the Mark the Evangelist

Michelangelo admired these sculptures and wrote his father a letter about them while he was planning the Sistine Chapel.  When one sees the finger of God bringing Adam to life here, it is easy to imagine him in the lovely piazza of this church pondering these images and conceiving his unforgettable painting of the creation.

The interior is overwhelmingly elegant and powerful.  Take a look:

The town of Orvieto sits high above its surrounding plain.

 It is replete with historic buildings, artisans's shops, and wonderful food and drink.  In the dead of winter, the rain may pelt the visitor from time to time, but there are no throngs of tourists and the restaurants serve authentic Umbrian cuisine (wild boar---YUM!) and one of the best white wines in the world--Orvieto Classico.  Here is photo of the wall I faced while I enjoyed my lunch. 

We continue our travels, using Florence as our base.  Stay tuned for more.

Annamaria Alfieri 

William E. (Bill) Chambers Recalls MWA Times Past

I met Bill Chambers at an MWA dinner in 2000 or 2001. Later I discovered we both grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn but at opposite ends. Bill was the Executive Vice President (EVP) of MWA then, and a wanna-be mystery author never got a warmer welcome at our meetings than Bill’s smiling Irish face. Bill had been an installer for Bell Telephone and Chief Steward with Local 1101 of the Communication Workers of America.

Bill is a doer who employed vision and smarts as our EVP. Witness the fact he persuaded the management of the Grand Hyatt Hotel on 42nd Street to host the Edgars at half their usual rates. “I liked the class of the place,” he says, “and I promised to pack the Dinner with celebrities.” Mary Higgins Clark, Mickey Spillane and Jerry Orbach attended, among others, and we’ve been there ever since.

Bill has published three novels—‘Death Toll’, ‘The Redemption Factor’ and ‘The Tormentress’—and a score of short stories in mystery magazines and anthologies here and in the United Kingdom. ‘If I Quench Thee…’, his story of an interracial murder, was re-published in 2008 by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine as a Mystery Classic, and is required reading in the Middle Schools of Scotland and London.

–Robert Knightly

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I want to thank Bob Knightly for giving me the opportunity to share some of my experiences as a mystery writer and an MWA member. My first encounter with MWA was in passing its headquarters at 151 West 48th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue with my then girlfriend—now wife of 48 years—Marie, back in 1962 or 63. It was a blistering Sunday afternoon in July and as I looked up at the second floor window bearing the caricature of Edgar Allan Poe and the insignia Mystery Writers of America, I said something like, "I hope someday to be able to belong to that organization.”

Little did I dream that I would one day be Executive Vice President of MWA: 2000-2002. Marie believes in destiny and skeptic though I am I suspect she might be right. If fortune does deal us a hand I think freewill allows us the right to choose whether we play it or not.

It wasn’t until 1968 that again something fateful occurred to put me back on the road to MWA. A neighborhood friend who displayed a similar interest in fiction writing as I did took a clipping from the New York Times Classified Section and showed me a fine print ad concerning a short story course offered by the Mystery Writers of America. The price back then was I believe $25 and you received a three month, once weekly, two hour evening course conducted by novelist, short story writer and former MWA President Herbert Brean. I couldn’t wait to sign up. But my friend dropped out so I went to MWA’s West Side headquarters nervous and alone.

My first evening in that class dispelled any and all jitters. Then like now the atmosphere was warm and friendly—Mr. Brean put everyone at ease—and by the end of the night all 12 or so of us students had become relaxed and well acquainted.

I took that course three years in a row because it took Mr. Brean that long to hammer the art of understatement so necessary to successful short fiction into my dense skull. But my instructor had hopes for me. When I showed up on year three he said, “Bill I know you’re going to succeed because you’re too dumb to quit.” He laughed, I laughed and I got published at the end of that course. My short story “Don’t Kill A Karate Fighter” was published by Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine and my membership was upgraded from Affiliate to Active before the year was over.

Back then the whole Times Square Scene was rough. Crime, prostitution, drug dealing and Three Card Monte games flourished openly. Cops played streetwise whack a mole; they would pull one bad guy off the street and before they reached the station house two replacements would show up. When I went to Haaren High School—now John Jay College—on 10th Avenue and 59th street I followed my curiosity about Manhattan through every neighborhood East Side/West Side from Hell’s Kitchen to Battery Park and I was quite familiar with the culture or lack of it permeating the West 40’s. So I had no qualms about attending the monthly parties at MWA Headquarters and neither did anybody else. We knew that if you avoided the bad guys—had no commerce with them—they generally left you alone.

The parties in those days had a two dollar entrance fee that helped support the organization and whichever member volunteered to bartend received free drinks all night long. Besides that the costs of the drinks were so cheap they barely paid for the bottle they came out of. While my nerves no longer rattled like the night I became a student they flared once again when Marie and I walked into our first MWA party after Mr. Brean explained to us that as aspiring mystery writers we were welcome to attend with or without our significant others.

Well the first person to greet us as we walked through the door was an MWA legend named Chris Steinbrunner. Chris worked for WOR TV Channel 9 as executive producer to the television show Journey to Adventure; published a science fiction series; wrote non-fiction; and long before MWA adopted Roberts Rules of Order and became a 501C3 corporation with stringent by-laws to guide board regulations Chris was our perennial Executive Vice President. He quickly advised me that if I wanted to really meet people I should tend bar.

“They all end up there,” he said. I immediately followed that advice and it paid off in network connections, close acquaintances and some lifelong friendships.

But getting back to that first party: It was with butterflies that I shook hands with the legends of the time. Michael Avallone—whose Ed Noon series rivaled Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer in the 1950’s—was second to greet us after Chris. When he found out my wife’s middle name is Antoinette he called her by the queen’s full name ever after. Next greeter was Ed Hoch, even at that time a legendary short story writer. We remained friends until his death in 2008. Then came Aaron Marc Stein who wrote best selling mysteries under the nom de plume George Bagby; Also Hillary Waugh, pioneer of the Police Procedural, most notably Last Seen Wearing. While there were too many others to mention in this blog I must say Marie and I left that party feeling we had gained a new family. True enough: That was 44 years ago and I’m still a member.

While I can probably recall more factual stories I believe I’ve already exceeded my word total. But I’ll try and squeeze in another anecdote. Gloria Amory was MWA’s secretary during the 60’s and 70’s and one night after a party I was walking her to the subway when she stopped to point out an incident on the opposite corner. Some John must have financially stiffed a hooker because he was imprisoned in his car surrounded by ladies of the night who were rocking the vehicle and screaming curses and threats. Meantime a few feet from us a beat cop was earnestly engaged in conversation with a charming young lady. I approached the enthralled young officer and said, “Pardon me. I think someone is being murdered across the street.” He ran right over but we didn’t stick around to watch the melee. So the ending to this tale will have to remain a mystery.

Bill Chambers