Sunburn by Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman is one of my favorite writers, so much so that I have to remind myself not to give away too much, so no spoilers here. 

Sunburn by Laura Lippman William Morrow, 2018 

In Belleville, Delaware, in 1995, a man and a woman meet in a bar. Both are just passing through, but each one for different reasons decides to stay. Polly gets a part-time job in the Heigh Ho bar, and Adam signs on as a chef who turns out to be creative enough to draw customers from beyond the small town. They are soon enmeshed in each other's life. 

But both are lying about who they are and why they are in that small town in the first place. Gradually their histories--or parts of them--are revealed, and at each stage one or the other faces the challenge of accepting this unexpected truth about the other. As the passions deepen, the seesaw increases. 

Told from multiple points of view, the story moves through Polly, Adam, Adam's secret employer, and Polly's abandoned husband. Each character is focused on one goal, and through that focused determination Lippman explores their character, the twists in a life that have brought them to this point. Polly, who at first seems the worst of the lot for abandoning her husband and three-year-old child, grows on every page into a complicated woman whose goal isn't fully realized until the final chapters. Her husband, Greg, also turns into someone he probably didn't expect to become. 

The writing is graceful, the pace steadily increasing, and the twists and revelations very satisfying. Highly recommended.

Memorable Moments in Crime Bake 2016

Crime Bake 2016 is behind us now, but it was, as expected, a solid event for writers and readers, with several memorable moments. I'll focus on two today.

We were happy to see the new incarnation of the Level Best Books anthology, now in the hands of four new editors. Kimberly Gray, Verena Rose, Harriette Sackler, and Shawn Reilly Simmons have edited thirty-two stories, arranged by state and New England, as the seventh category. They have continued the tradition carried on by Mark Ammons, Kat Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler, and begun by Skye Alexander (and later by Ruth McCarty), Kate Flora, and myself in 2003.

It is very gratifying to see something that began as a single anthology live on its current form. The new editors, though not living in the area, came to Crime Bake and continued the tradition of holding a signing for all the writers whose work is included. Windward: Best New England Crime Stories offers familiar as well as new names in the crime-writing world. The anthology also continues the tradition of publishing the Al Blanchard story, won this year by P. Jo Anne Burgh for "Bagatelle."

The guest of honor this year was William Kent Krueger, whose Cork O'Connor series mixes the local lore of the First Peoples of Krueger's beloved Minnesota with complex stories and deft investigation. At Crime Bake and other conferences, the guest of honor is usually interviewed by another writer, but this year Kent broke with tradition. He gave a lunch-hour talk that had many of us ignoring our lunches to listen better. I jotted down a few notes, but mostly I listened.

Kent opened with one question. The DaVinci Code is the best selling American fiction. But what did it replace? The names tossed out by the audience were many and varied, and almost everyone reading this now will come up with the same titles. But the answer was a surprise. Brown's book replaced The Valley of the Dolls. No one named that one.

The two best-sellers will be forgotten in the near future, Kent pointed out, because they reflect a moment in time. They depend on plot. The books that most of us thought of and called out--Tom Sawyer, Gone with the Wind, and others--will be remembered and read well into the future because they depend on character.

Mysteries, he said, allow us to talk about important social issues. We can explore current events and timely questions, looking at them from the perspective of the overarching question of justice and fairness. Kent also made the point that we no longer have social novels. We don't have writers like Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), or John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath) writing fiction around certain issues. These novels have been replaced by mysteries.

Kent's talk was one of the most interesting and stimulating I've heard in a long time, and I know I'll be returning to my notes, perhaps for another post.

Getting to Know Your Characters

Robert Frost wrote in the introduction to his Collected Poems (1939), “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” This doesn’t mean writers should be producing tear-jerkers. I take it to mean that the writer must know her characters, and this is the hardest part of writing for many.

Some writers rely on the standard character’s biography, creating an entire back story of education, family structure, coming of age experiences, and more. Some of this is very useful, but for me this kind of writing doesn’t get at who this character really is.

One of the most successful approaches for me is asking the character how he or she feels about a current social situation or crisis. How does she feel about it, and why? This is where I just start writing and wait to see what comes out. If I’m trying to discover a character who completed school some years ago, I might find myself writing about where she chose to sit in the classroom and why. Was she a good student but shy, so she stayed away from the front row, or was he someone who’d had a run-in with the professor and felt an ethical revulsion for him, so sat in the back of the room. Letting the character ruminate on these experiences tells me far more than a biography, no matter how long.

I also like to know why my characters do things. If one character has a hobby and practices it regularly, I want to know why. What is the character thinking while working on knitting or cooking or gardening or anything else? We are drawn to different things, and I like to hear the reasons for our passions. If someone is willing to spend hours every week on something for which he or she may or may not be paid, I want to know why. Our reasons run deeper than many of us realize, and this is where a character ruminating can generate fascinating revelations that deepen a story and even shape it.

In the quote above, Robert Frost was talking about the essential point. We care about those we know and understand. And that means more than height, marital status, number of siblings, the way we drink our coffee. It means all those things we know about our oldest and dearest friends from listening and sharing over the years. Only for writers, we have to get to all that listening and sharing in a matter of weeks. We have to let our characters talk, and then we and the readers will know them and care what happens in their stories.