Those Bugs Are Everywhere

In Seattle, we have kiosks to take money for parking spaces. The other evening, I stood behind a man who was trying to coax a sticker out of one of those unarmed bandits. He pushed and pushed at the rubberized button with the point of a mechanical pencil, but there was no response. As his frustration grew, I mentioned that it might work better to use a fingertip. He shot a nasty glance at the button, then turned the look on me.

I understood. "Would you like me to push it for you?" I asked.

Ambivalence left him speechless. His jaw lowered, then raised, then lowered again.

"I don't mind," I said, then reached past him to push the green rubber button. A sticker dropped into the receptacle, the man raised the cover with his pencil point, gingerly removed the paper, nodded to me, mumbled a thanks, and walked off.

Living in what might be the best sanitary conditions in history, Americans are impressive germophobes. Every visit to a men's room is a nonstop show. The man who advances the paper towels with an elbow. The guy who turns the water on and off with a Kleenex wrapped around his finger. The gent who uses a paper towel to open the door to leave, then before the door closes, slings the towel in the general direction of the waste receptacle, and if he misses, well, that's someone else's health hazard. Let the washroom attendant get infected with whatever microorganism might be coating the door handle.

Hand sanitizers are everywhere. I watched a woman enterering a supermarket pull a moistened paper towelette from a dispenser to wipe the steering wheel of the little car her little boy would "drive" through the store. Then she took another towelette to wipe the handle on the back of the car. Then she pulled out several towelettes, walked inside, used one to sterilize the wrapper of a loaf of bread, and headed off toward the rear of the store. I couldn't help wondering how she'd ever managed to conceive that toddler.

There are people who wear face masks to go out into public. No, they're not on chemo, nor do they have immune deficiency conditions. It's just that you never know what's out there.

On the other hand, how about the guy in the men's room I overheard telling a friend about his terrific two-week trip to several primitive third-world countries - as he did everything he could to avoid having a square millimeter of finger contact the flush lever on his urinal? And how about the epidemic of whooping cough now raging through Seattle because so many people don't want their kids to be immunized? (I know about the autism argument, but I don't believe it's valid. What I do believe is that children are dying in my city because their parents have neither allowed them to be immunized, nor themselves received adult booster shots).

What's going to be the outcome of this dualistic behavior? Might we all become pushovers for infectious diseases, bereft of protective antibodies, with immune systems the equivalent of couch potatoes?

But it's an ill wind that blows no one some good, and writers are always tuned in to the world in which they live. One germophobe I watched in action several years back sent me directly to my little pocket notebook to write a description of him. In Scamming the Birdman, he became Fenton Dassidario, who always wore cotton gloves, and loved all things electronic and therefore non-infectious. He was deathly afraid of bugs that might invade his body and kill it, but was a master manipulator of bugs he could plant in someone's apartment to permit him to listen in on their activities.

As the pencil-point man hustled away from the kiosk, I didn't offer to shake hands.

Which Of Your Books Is Your Favorite

I'm in the process of relocating my web site, which is going to take a little while. In the meantime, I'll put any announcements regarding my new book, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, into these weekly blog posts.

My author copies for APC arrived this past week, and as always, I smiled as I looked at the lovely dust jacket the Poisoned Pen folks designed for the book. Some things never get old.

* * *

People often ask me which of my books is my favorite, then add, "I bet it's like asking which of your kids is your favorite."

Well, sort of. I like at least some things in all my books, and I don't dislike any of them. But no way can I select a favorite.

THE MUSIC BOX MURDERS, as my first mystery novel, will always be special on that basis alone. And its successor, SCAMMING THE BIRDMAN, a caper, not only was great fun to write, but Dick Lochte's comment in the LA Times - "Donald Westlake is the reigning master of this type of fiction. Karp isn't quite in his league, but his ending is one that's worthy of Westlake and then some." - was damn sweet icing on the cake. The third in the Music Box Series, THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, was satisfying, in that I felt I took a good step forward in exploring the disabilities and anxieties a person inevitably encounters in the process of growing old.

My medical-ethics standalone, FIRST, DO NO HARM, got the best reviews and sold more copies than any of my books. Hard not to love a success like that. But even more pleasing was the fact that I'd finally written a story I'd been incubating since I was a young boy, and had been working on for some twenty years.

The books in my ragtime historical trilogy were thoroughly enjoyable to research and write, allowing me as they did to enter a subculture new to me, and to play with the ideas of birth, aging, death, and renaissance, both literally and metaphorically. As a group and individually, I'm very happy with the way they turned out.

And now we come to the one book I can exclude, where the analogy of books to children breaks down entirely. Who ever turns thumbs-down or even thumbs-neutral on their newborn baby? But a current release is never a contender for favorite. It always seems full of sharp, jagged edges that could make me bleed if I were to expose myself to them. I've learned, though, to give a new book a little time. With distance, and the intervention of a newer story, the nasty points in a book smooth out, and I come to think, well, maybe it's not so bad after all. Let a year or two pass, then ask me how I like A PERILOUS CONCEPTION. But for now, I'll leave the covers closed and just admire the lovely dust jacket.

Playing The Name Game

Naming characters is not always easy. You never can be sure you've got it right.

In one of my earlier books, I'd slapped the moniker Dennis onto a character, and the howl out of my editor could have been heard in Zanzibar. "That's a very strong character," she snapped. "A Dennis would be a wimp." I'd never imagined Dennises as being at all wimpish, so I ran the matter past my wife. She shook her head. "I'd think of someone wishy-washy if I read 'Dennis,'" she said. I shrugged, and Dennis became Will, which satisfied both editor and wife.

The biggest snafu I ever got into over a character name came out of SCAMMING THE BIRDMAN, my second mystery novel, a caper. I'd seen a faded painted ad, probably from the '30s, on a brick building beside the Alaskan Way Viaduct here in Seattle. It advertised a meat company named LoPriore brothers. The villain in STB was definitely arch, the nastiest person I've ever invented. Right off, Vincent LoPriore struck me as the perfect name for him. It seemed to ooze menace.

So imagine my surprise one day, after the book came out, when I opened my email and in my inbox saw I had a message from Vincent LoPriore. I could not bring myself to open it until I'd finished dealing with all the other messages, and when I opened the scary email, I found it was from a man named, yes, Vincent LoPriore, who lived in Pennsylvania. Someone had seen a synopsis of my book on the web, and called it to his attention. He asked where I'd gotten the name from, so I told him, said I hoped he wouldn't be upset, and that I hadn't imagined there was any real person anywhere named Vincent LoPriore. Fortunately, he thought the whole thing was very funny, and said he liked being cast as the bad guy in a murder mystery. So I sent him a signed book, and that settled the matter.

Just in case you think you ever have all bases covered in this game.

How Do You Think Up Names For Your Characters?

Roadside signs have been great sources of names for characters in my books. Many of these signs have been along freeways, bearing names of two nearby cities or towns. A surprising number are reasonable people-names, often with just that little twist that makes a character stand out. I scribble them onto a page in my pocket notebook, and wait for characters to claim them.

Some years back, on my way from Malice Domestic to the Mystery Lovers Bookstore Festival in Oakmont, PA, I noticed a sign telling me I was approaching Irwin McKeesport. It took a while, but Irwin finally made the jump into fiction as "Iggy the Key," a locksmith and detective's sidekick in my current project, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION (due out from Poisoned Pen Press this coming December). Can you picture him?

My two favorite character names went into the same book, SCAMMING THE BIRDMAN, my second Music Box Mystery. I was driving from Seattle to Chicago on Rt. 94, bored out of my mind, when I saw the sign on the left above this post, and Cleveland Gackle popped into my mind, full-grown, a 70-something weed-smoking lockpicker with bushy white eyebrows and a perpetually-bemused expression. (Rt. 94 in North Dakota was a particularly rich stretch of road. 76 miles east of Cleveland Gackle, I saw the sign on the right above. I still haven't found a character for Buffalo Alice, but I hope to. Somehow, I don't think she smells very good).

The second sign that launched a character in STB was a faded painted ad, I'd guess from the 1930s, on a brick building beside the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle. It advertised a meat company named LoPriore Brothers. The villain in STB was the nastiest person I've ever characterized, and right off, Vincent LoPriore struck me as the perfect name for him. It just seemed to ooze menace. So imagine my surprise one day, after the book came out, when I opened my email and saw a message in my inbox from Vincent LoPriore. I could not bring myself to open it for over an hour, and when I did, I found it was from a man by that name who lived in Pennsylvania. He asked where I'd gotten his name from, so I explained, and told him I hadn't imagined there was anyone anywhere in real life named Vincent LoPriore. Fortunately, he thought it was funny, and said he kinda liked being the bad guy in a murder mystery. So I sent him a signed book, and that was that. Just in case you think you've ever got all bases covered.