Summer Music: In Search of the Lost Corpse

By Guest Blogger Steve Liskow

For me, summer music still means rock, and I still consider summer 1966 the peak of the rock/pop era. AM singles were still the order of the day, and lots of them appeared that year from artists we would learn to love.

That summer, I worked nights in a sheet metal plant that disrupted radio signals so badly that we could only listen to a local station that played the same dozen singles over and over from midnight to dawn, broken up by reading the news and weather.

Now that I often use song titles as mystery/crime titles, I realize for the first time just how many of them came from 1966. Spring brought the Rascals, and two sure-fire best-seller titles, which I don’t think anyone has used yet: “You Better Run” and “Come On Up.” It also brought us Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Kicks,” which had the first guitar riff I learned to play when I bought a guitar later that year. They followed with “Hungry,” and that great crushing bass line should have worked for a vampire story, too, but was 30 years too soon. I don’t think anyone has written a mystery about a robbery at a food bank, either.

The Beatles released Revolver (A perfect title). The LP featured the great gloomy chamber mystery “Eleanor Rigby” and titles like “For No One” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which Lee Child should have snapped up years ago. Aftermath is the Rolling Stones’ first great collection of all original material, and the American version offered “Paint It Black,” a light-hearted funeral story. The British version gave us “Under My Thumb,” “Out of Time,” “High and Dry,” and “Take It or Leave It,” all of which scream to be plotted.

So does the first—and only—Standells record to get airplay in Michigan. “Dirty Water” mentions the Charles River in Boston, even though the band was from LA. What could make that water dirty…or bloody?

By summer’s end, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels gave us “Devil With A Blue Dress,” and Walter Mosley recognized the possibilities in that one for his Easy Rawlins series.

For obscure stuff, later to be God of All DEE-troit Bob Seger and the Last Heard offered “East Side Story,” a concise little ditty—only two minutes—about a poverty-stricken teen who is killed trying to commit a robbery. The chords sound like Van Morrison’s “Gloria” with enough fuzz on the guitar to make a shag rug. Great song that nobody else seems to remember.

Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs hit big with a great stalker song that I still have penciled into my unsold series: “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Finally, in the summer of 1966, Tommy James & The Shondells had their first massive hit, and over a dozen books (one labeled as a mystery) use the title already, which means someone else thinks the way I do.

“Hanky Panky.”

STEVE LISKOW won the 2009 Black Orchid Novella Award for “Stranglehold,” which appeared in the summer issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Who Wrote The Book of Death? is his first published novel. Currently, he is trying to sell a PI series featuring the characters in “Stranglehold.” His Web mistress daughter is Captain of the Queen City Cherry Bombs, so he is also writing a mystery that involves Roller Derby.

Let's Play -- The First Five Lines

By Pat Remick

When you open a new book, what makes you continue reading it?

Where do you make your decision that the book is worth the investment of your time -- first line, first five lines, first page, first chapter? Are you the type of reader who will keep going until you reach the end, no matter what? Or do you stop reading when you become bored, confused, disgusted, etc.?

As you know, the answers to these questions are important to book publishers, literary agents, bookstores and, of course, we authors because we want people to keep reading -- and buying -- our books.

I recently entered a blog contest judged by author Sophie Littlefield on the basis of a manuscript's first five lines. As I was typing in mine, I realized I needed a bit more punch in those first sentences -- something I hadn't been able to see as clearly while I was working on the entire manuscript, but important if my potential agent/publisher/reader makes decisions based as quickly as five lines.

Sophie ("Bad Day for Sorry" and "Bad Day for Pretty") Littlefield received a number of entries for the contest (grand prize -- her agent will read the winner's first 30 pages) and it was fascinating to see how much you could learn about a book -- and what piques your interest -- from just the first five sentences.

Want to see what I mean? Look at the first five sentences of the works below by the Sisters in Crime New England members joining me to discuss "Beach Read" recommendations at a July 29 event at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH --and see if you can match them with these mystery titles:

"Drive Time" (Hank Phillippi Ryan)

"Red Delicious Death" (Sheila Connolly)

"Under the Eye of Kali" (Susan Oleksiw)

"Who Wrote the Book of Death?" (Steve Liskow)

"Murder Most Municipal" (Pat Remick)

Now here are the first five sentences of each author's work:

A."They're all dead."

"What?" Meg Corey dragged her gaze from the orderly row of apple trees that marched over the hill. Almost all were past bloom now, and some of them had what even a novice farmer like Meg could identify as apples. Small, maybe, but it was a start. She turned her attention to Carl Frederickson, her beekeeper.

B. I can't wait to tell our secret. And I'll get to do it if we're not all killed first.

We're 10 minutes away from Channel 3 when suddenly the Boston skyline disappears. Murky slush spatters across our windshield, kicked up from the tires of the rattletrap big rig that just swerved in front of us on the now slick highway. Eighteen wheels of obstacle, stubbornly obeying the Massachusetts turnpike speed limit.

C. KC Dunham pointed toward the large erasable white board announcing the Question of the Day in precise black lettering: “Who invented peanut butter? Winner gets a free muffin.”

“The Incas, although most people think it was George Washington Carver,” she said without hesitation. “You can keep the muffin."

The woman holding a steaming pot of coffee behind the cracked Formica counter laughed. “I was beginning to think I'd never find anyone in this town who appreciates the long and glorious history of my favorite food, after chocolate that is, though they're damn fine together too."

D. No way in Hell her real name is Taliesyn Holroyd.

Everything else about her strikes Greg Nines as unreal, too, from her energy level—which could eclipse a heavy metal band even if she were unplugged—to her clothes, Sex And The City meets Pirates of The Caribbean.

"I need to do this,” Taliesyn—“call me ‘Tally’”—says. Her stiletto boots make her Nines’s six-one. He’s offered her a chair twice, but she keeps pacing, her strut turning her calf-length leather skirt into a major event. 

E. Guests from various foreign countries began filling up the Hotel Delite dining room, taking every seat at the main table--this was a small hotel,only eight rooms, with the owner's, Meena Nayar's, suite on the top floor, and that of her niece, Anita Ray, above a separate garage.

Tired after being woken in the middle of the night by festival drumming from a nearby temple, Anita sat at a small table along the wall and only half-listened to the guests placing their orders and asking the usual questions. "What is this?" "What does it taste like?"

To see the answers, click here: Did the first five sentences give you enough information to make the correct choices? Is it important that they reflect the title? Does some word related to death need to be in the first five lines? And most of all, does an exercise like this make you want to go back and review the first five sentences of your latest work?

To learn more about the authors, visit:
www.sheilaconnolly.com/
www.steveliskow.com/
www.susanoleksiw.com/
www.hankphillippiryan.com/
www.patremick.com/