Never Ask Your Mother for a Review

I wrote my first novel on my lunch hours. Every day I took my lunch to an empty office and wrote on the computer there. The finished novel was too short. The characters were undeveloped. There was no sub plot. The murder was implausible. The good things about it were the setting, and the fact that I finished it. I still have a copy somewhere.

I chose mystery because my mother had hundreds of mystery books, and I read them avidly each time I visited. I met Sherlock Holmes when I was in high school and I couldn’t resist. I read all the cannon except Valley of Fear. I couldn’t stand Conan Doyle’s take on the Molly McGuires.

I worked my early stories around other people’s characters, not fan fiction exactly. I would take another author’s creation and change the name, but little else. No one ever recognized them because no one ever read them.

When my mother suffered a prolonged illness I made the eight hour train trip in each direction once a month. I used that time to create my own cast of characters. I put them together in small groups and they began to interact. I wrote in long hand on yellow pads; the handwriting varies in response to the smoothness of the rails.

My mother was in a hospital across the street from the Cambridge Public Library. I would visit her for half an hour, do two hours of research in the library, and go back for a second short visit. I added the historical background to the characters as they interacted on the page.

By the time my mother was moved to a nursing home I had the bones of a novel. There was a lot wrong with it. No murder for one thing. I knew I would have to add a murder if I was going to sell it.

But I had enough to put in a red binder and give to her before she died. To my knowledge she never read it.

I have reworked it a number of times since I bound it up in red. There is a murder, more police procedure, more complex characters. Members of the cast have appeared in print in short stories.

It took me a while to realize that I had written it to please myself, not her. It was enough to have given her the red binder. She didn’t have to read it or to comment on it. She died before any of my short stories were published.

She never knew how she inspired me. Or perhaps she did.