Murder and Mayhem, March 17, 2018

By Margaret S. Hamilton

On St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago, I attended Murder and Mayhem, a crime readers and writers conference organized by author Lori Rader-Day and publicist Dana Kaye.  At nine in the morning, South Michigan Avenue was thronged with parade attendees attired in green. Simultaneously with the conference kick-off, the Chicago River was dosed with green dye. Let the party begin!

Eric Beetner was Master of Ceremonies for the one-day event. He kept up a lively banter as he introduced the five panels and keynote conversation between Jeffery Deaver and Gillian Flynn at the end of the afternoon.

Debut authors J.D. Allen, Danny Gardner, Steve Goble, Alexia Gordon, and Kristen Lepionka spoke about their books and publishing process, moderated by Heather Ash. I’ll review Goble’s pirate noir “Spider John” mystery in a future WWK blog. Lepionka is the Columbus-based author of the private investigator Roxane Weary books, which I’m anxious to read.

Series authors Raymond Benson, Jess Lourey, Nick Petrie, Patricia Skalka, Carrie Smith, and Susanna Calkins spoke about character and plot arcs in a series. How do their characters age? And what if a publisher drops the series? Lourey characterized writing a series as “clearing out the rusty pipes in an old house.” With each book in her series, she reveals more about her characters and their backstory.

Thriller and crime writers Jamie Freveletti, Michael Koryta, Mary Kubica, Isabella Maldonado, and Lori Rader-Day addressed how they use place as a real or fictionalized setting in their novels. Julia Borcherts, a Kaye publicist, moderated the panel. How does your perception of a real place change after you use it in your novel? Maldonado, a retired D.C. police captain who writes the Veranda Cruz police procedurals set in Phoenix, said she was “used to knowing where the bodies are buried.” She waxed eloquently about “the desert vibe” in Phoenix and how the intense heat assumes the role of a major character. Maldonado delighted in telling us Phoenix residents refer to themselves as “Phoenicians.”

Eric Beetner, Terri Bischoff, Cheryl Reed, Andrew Shaffer, and Jessica Strawser discussed various aspects of publishing, moderated by Adam Morgan. Strawser is a Cincinnati resident and Editor-At-Large for Writer’s Digest Magazine. I’ll write about her books in a future blog post. Terri Bischoff, Acquisitions Editor for Midnight Ink, made the chilling statement that she only reads a submission until she finds a reason to reject it. Every aspiring author in the audience gulped and chewed her nails.

Forensics specialists Thomas Halloran, Adam Henkels, Marcella Raymond, Luis Santoyo, and Cynthia Woods discussed various aspects of crime scene investigation and forensics, moderated by Tim Chapman. Santoyo is a certified sketch artist, one of two FBI-trained artists in Illinois. A law enforcement professional as well as a forensic artist, Santoyo explained how he uses investigative techniques to complete an accurate sketch of a perpetrator. He believes hand sketches are more accurate than software programs.

Over lunch, Sisters in Crime Chicagoland president Pat Skalka interviewed Gillian Flynn. In addition to having published three novels including the best-selling Gone Girl, Flynn is a Chicago-area, mini-van driving mother of two children. She’s tall and slender with a pleasant alto voice and perfectly blunt cut hair.

Flynn grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, the daughter of a film professor father and reading comprehension professor mother. Her father took her to the movies on a weekly basis, after which they would analyze each film. After obtaining a graduate degree in journalism from Northwestern, she wrote for Entertainment Weekly. She published her first two novels while working for EW. After she lost her job, she wrote Gone Girl and the screenplay adaptation. She currently is executive producer and co-writer of the HBO miniseries adopted from Sharp Objects, her first novel. She characterized the book as a “character story inside a mystery.”

Flynn focuses on the violence of woman in her novels, telling the audience to “own the darkness.” She creates female characters who display a full range of emotions from good to evil. Flynn noted that the majority of mystery writers are women, for whom creating fictional characters and plots is a safe way to deal with violent tendencies. She admires the writing of Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood.

Flynn is a journalist and writing is her job. She writes in scenes, claims not to plot, and routinely hits the hundred-page block. As a birthday surprise, her husband installed a wall-sized white board in her downstairs office on which she writes notes. She doesn’t have a problem writing from a male viewpoint, characterizing herself as “part dude”. Flynn’s beta readers are her lawyer husband and a close friend.

Flynn completed her interview with these admonitions: be stubborn, keep writing, and don’t settle for a first draft.

Cloud Gate (or "the Bean") by Sir Anish Kapoor, Millennium Park, Chicago

At the end of the day, Jeffery Deaver and Gillian Flynn held a keynote conversation about their respective writing processes and crime fiction. They agreed that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who look under rocks, and those who don’t. All 250 attendees agreed that they were the former.

The first horror/scary book Deaver read was “Hound of the Baskervilles.” He noted that the moor setting offered no place to run. Flynn’s first brush with horror was In Cold Blood. She described her first story, written about age eleven, “To the Outhouse,” which featured a pack of wolves and gory climax.

Sisters in Crime founder Sara Paretsky awarded Gillian Flynn the Paretsky Award. Paretsky noted that Flynn writes about the “forgotten places” of the Midwest—Kansas and Missouri, where readers live but unlike Chicago, places that are rarely used as settings in novels.

Readers and writers, have you attended an author panel event? Do you prefer a panel presentation or an hour-long in-depth presentation?

Dying the Chicago River green on St. Patrick's Day