My Method for Research

 

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I was recently asked about my method(s) for researching the cultures of my characters, their settings, and the times in which they dwell. Although I’ll mention examples from more than one source, my focus will primarily be upon research into and decisions made regarding Wat Haggard & Prairie Wren.

The idea of a modern-day crime novel around an aging, rural sheriff was developed in discussion with my son, Tony, an actor seeking an idea for a script. When he bogged down in developing the idea, I decided to run with it. In order not to “steal” the story from him, I decided to move it far away from his California locale.

I chose western Nebraska for its prairie terrain, particularly around The Sand Hills. Working with a map, I chose two more sparsely populated, contiguous, north-south counties I then renamed. The southernmost county contained a National Wildlife Refuge, also renamed, which I decided to incorporate into the story. In the process, primarily online, I researched terrain, agriculture, population density, principal towns, town governance, policing, and seasonal climate, the latter important since the story was set in December. When uncertain, I allowed imagination to take over. For me, once a choice of location has been made, characters assume dimensionality.

Relative to antagonistic characters, I thought of the reality of workforce reductions in the Bakken Oil Fields after production cutbacks and where they might go for those that live peripatetic lives. The roughness of the antagonists I imagined from the impact the itinerant workers had upon the small, North Dakota towns where they settled, the kind of characters a sudden economic boom can draw – many good hard-working people, but some less than. The character of Prairie Wren was developed from my awareness of the abuse (and worse) of too many indigenous women, many missing, some even murdered.

If an informational gap remains after my online efforts or a clarification is needed, I will make a telephone call to an appropriate organization. Example: In Where Seldom Is Heard, the setting an unnamed Indian reservation on the North Dakota / South Dakota border, I made a call to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation’s governmental office. To my surprise, it was answered by the Tribal Attorney who hesitantly, but generously answered my pre-written questions.  Example: In Its Just Another Day, after I had exhausted my online efforts to research the Newport News, Virginia coal port, I placed a blind call to the port. I cannot recall the official I spoke to, but again, after an initial hesitance, he kindly answered my pre-written questions regarding the loading process of an ocean-going coal carrier.

Please notice the underlined “pre-written.” For me it was a necessity I’d recommend to others. When an opportunity presents itself, do not try to wing it; rather, be ready.

RJ Mcarthy Releases Another Crime Fiction Novel

 

Quis Auxilium Me (Somebody Help Me) is set in 1963. Shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Sean Thornton overhears a confession of an imagined crime by one of the town’s bumper crop of bullies, Rocky Corcoran. A week later, the crime – the violation of a friend’s mother – is committed. Suspended between the immediacy of his teen years and the onrushing responsibilities of a looming adulthood, Thornton struggles with the guilt-laden weight of his Catholic-bred conscience. Testing Thornton’s mettle, for reasons unknown, Corcoran has always nursed a particular dislike of Sean.

Torn between doing the right thing and avoiding Corcoran’s wrath, Sean turns to Police Officer Britt Clarity, one of the first female officers in the Suffolk County Police Department. Clarity is battling her own internal torment, attributable to the resistance of male officers to her presence. Her determination to succeed and her increasing self-defense mastery of aikido enable her to maintain confidence through the disrespect and to concentrate on doing her job well.

 McCarthy masterfully builds his characters as he creates windows into their souls so that the reader is torn between empathy for the antagonist and wanting him brought to justice. McCarthy weaves in glimpses of the backstory that made Rocky who he is. The struggle between good and evil keeps the reader turning the pages of Quis Auxilium right up to the end.

 When asked what inspired me to write this story I answered, "If inspiration is something that comes with the suddenness of a spring gust blowing off your hat, then that could describe the arrival of Quis Auxilium Me. It sprung from the idea of an overheard confession. What-ifs swiftly followed like the bits and pieces from which a bird builds a nest. In this case, I guess I was the bird, my bits and pieces drawn largely from scattered yet poignant childhood memories."

Quis Auxilium Me (Somebody Help Me) is available on Amazon.com in paperback and in Kindle e-book versions: Quis Auxilium Me: (Somebody Help Me): McCarthy, RJ: 9798878637824: Amazon.com: Books

 

Blog 48 Who is Tony Quarry?

 

With the release of Quarry Steps Between, the fourth in the Tony Quarry / Carolina Mystery crime novel series, someone asked me about the derivation of the Tony Quarry character. Who is he? How was he developed? In retrospect, I believe he’s an amalgam of my son, Tony, and me.

Physically, Quarry is similar to my son in his twenties and thirties. Massive at six feet, two hundred thirty pounds, my son was quite strong, a weight lifter and martial arts practitioner. As important as physical strength is to the character I envisioned, it was ultimately potentiated by moral strength. One without the other, in my mind, equals an incomplete human being.

I’ve also been a weightlifter, have seriously practiced karate, Quarry’s primary method of self-defense. As a convicted felon, Quarry is not legally permitted to carry weapons.

That said, life for me, among other things, is a battle to retain moral strength, to remain dedicated to trying to do what’s right. Hence, Quarry. For me, doing the right thing is not a relative decision; we know what is right. Sometimes, some of us may choose to do otherwise, but we still know. Morality is something that can too easily slip away, succumbing to the never-ending temptation toward moral laziness. It’s about seeing honestly what lies before us. It’s about constantly renewing self-honesty. Without that, how can one ever be honest with others?

Moreover, morality is about having a sense of where you stand on human issues. From a platform of strength, it’s about offering empathy and mercy to the world around you, if nothing else then through small, individual acts as opportunities present themselves to you. It’s about trying to do good. It’s about a never-ending struggle for forgiveness, both giving and accepting. Above all, it’s about a willingness to try, a protection against giving up. All of the above thread through plotlines of the series, providing Quarry compass as he faces his challenges.

Crucial to my fiction, to my protagonist, Quarry, he cannot be a one-dimensional figment of my imagination. Otherwise, he could just be another Marvel Universe super-hero. No, pre-eminently, he must be credible. I’ve got to be able to believe that he can exist, all over the world and in my neighborhood. Maybe, even in my house.

And in the end, perhaps ironically, my protagonist succeeds by just doing what he’s supposed to do – what we’re all supposed to do.

Available on Amazon!

Blog 47 A Return to the Issue of Banned Books

 

With the reader’s indulgence, I’d like to return to the central issue of last month’s blog – book banning. As a resident of Virginia, I believe Governor Glenn Youngkin serendipitously latched onto an issue that carried him to the governorship, i.e. parental involvement in the public education of their children. The upside has been exactly that – parents seeking increased awareness of what their children are being taught. Of a concern (my opinion), a vocal group of parents protesting specific books found in school libraries relative to content of which they disapproved, have pressed to have those books banned. The books in question appear most often to have addressed issues related to sex, race or LGBTQ life. My sense: More often than not, the material objected to has been separated from a more complete contextual understanding.

Am I questioning the sincerity of parental concern in these matters? I am not. Do I fear a good, if misguided, intention gone awry? As I stated in my last blog, I do not believe banning a book is the answer to valid parental concern. Unless a child’s mind has been adulterated by the “adults” in charge of his or her development (all too common, I fear) or unbalanced by a genetic flaw or environmental injury (rare to my knowledge), I believe this recent uptick in concern that a particular book will warp a healthy child’s mind is imbedded in adult fear and its co-rider, ignorance.

As I did in the previous blog, permit me to use myself as an example of a legitimate concern distorted by ignorance. In my professional career, I was a Clinical Psychologist, a believer in knowledge gleaned from, among many things, hundreds of books I devoured. And yet, I fell prey, in a way, to this issue, allowing concern and ignorance lead me to make comments to my son in his early teens regarding his love for and pursuit of science fiction. For years, he’d read voraciously, but narrowly as it appeared to me. I pressed him to broaden his reading experience. In subsequent years, I was humbled to learn what a broad and deep swath of learning he’d extracted solely from sci-fi, including ideas about sex, race and the necessity of living with others different from him.

Coupled with my embarrassing admission that I’d avoided science fiction as a reading interest and therefore had rendered myself ignorant of it, I’d committed the same error in prejudgment I’m writing about here. Concern without knowledge could be a starting point leading to an option to educate oneself. Conversely, concern leading to emotional reaction without knowledge would seem premature at best, subject to diminishing parental effectiveness or worse.

So then, what is one to do when faced with a valid concern regarding the books our children might read? I do not believe the answer is to begin banning books. Beyond ourselves and teachers as sources for discussion about books our children read, one option I’d like to reiterate is to turn to the members of our society we’ve educated and trained to curate the books our children are exposed to for direction – our librarians. They can either appropriately guide us to the reading experiences we seek or to materials that offer in-depth reviews of the books we’re concerned about. When in doubt, let’s put our heads together with them.

           

Blog 46 - Banned Books

 

Blog 46

The frustration has ebbed, for now. I can think more calmly, a personal requirement whenever I attempt to address a sensitive issue with political overtones. In this instance, the issue is book banning.

Sometime in the late 1950’s, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in the United States, although bootleg copies published in newspaper format had been available years before. The sexual content was considered pornographic by American censors, primarily the Catholic Church. My mother, a college-educated progressive (in selective ways) obtained a copy, but asked me not to read it, even as she did. Her rationale, as best as I can recall: She wanted me to be able to discover my own emotionally-satisfying sexual life without having it scripted for me. I’m putting it that way to be kind toward and respectful of her intentions, although in retrospect I question them.

I was fourteen at the time, my thoughts and dreams often sexually driven. In some ways, she was too late. I hungered for anything that might further reveal or clarify this veiled fundament of life, the thing in fact that propelled it. The more knowledge of it was hidden, the more obsessive the impulse to know became.

An irony: My mother was a believer in books. At eight, she’d given me a thin pamphlet describing the biological facts of sex, shorn of any accompanying emotional explication. When it came time to give me “the talk,” she quailed and left me with the book and her faith in it. My father remained in another room during. Another irony: At eight, I had no conscious interest in sex and, therefore, was unable to formulate the questions she avoided. I was able to detect her odd discomfort in discussing the issue. A year later, at nine, my interest in females began, but the opportunity was gone and I wasn’t about to reintroduce it.

From these incidents, I became more aware than ever that, as a whole, it’s the adults who struggle with books, not children. As if banning them could ever erase the curiosity the issues arouse. Want to create a best seller? Ban it. You’ll send it underground to become a “cult” classic. Look at the samizdat industry in Soviet Russia. The communists could never extinguish it. I only wish most adults who seek to ban a book would read it first, in its entirety, the parts they object to in context, prior to.

It appears it’s never enough for some parents to object to a book out of concern for their children, their concerns often framed in religious or moral terms. I could accept it if they would act on their beliefs for their children and leave it at that. When they want to extend the impact of their personal concerns to ban what your children or mine read, then I have a problem.

This is the basis for cultural war. Do it loud enough and you may capture political attention. Politicians are always casting about for an issue that might strike a note among constituents. Once found, they’ll stir it to see if it bubbles up into a potential campaign plank. If it does, they’ll proceed to flog it. For them, it is foremost about getting elected. Whatever works, right? The problem? The rest of us are left with the aftereffects, including the unintended consequences, e.g. the right to decide for our children narrowed, eliminated or criminalized.

Currently, there are those who want to protect our children from anything historical that might make them uncomfortable and from anything that might help them understand their own emerging sexual feelings before we’re ready for them to. Our solution: To start by banning books which make us uncomfortable.

The Nazis took it a step farther and burned books, turning the act into a political spectacle. My mother knew this. In retrospect, I believe she was simultaneously trying to do something and not do it, i.e. trying to protect me from something she could not bring herself to fully explore, much less explain.

I see a parallel with book banning – parents trying to do something they believe will protect their children and not doing it by failing to understand what a book can and cannot do, and ultimately, by failing to trust our teachers and librarians. Beyond embattled teachers, our librarians represent a group educated to curate for us the books time alone will never allow us to read – which is most of them.

To me, the risk that a child will be adversely affected by a book is miniscule when compared to the increasing risk that same child will be slaughtered by a military weapon in a place that values book learning – a school.

Your thoughts?

 

Percolating

 

Blog 45

Currently, I’m sitting on a story idea while it evolves in my mind. When I say “sitting,” I don’t mean anything akin to idling. Percolating would be more apt. My process for original writing is in motion as several pages of notes would suggest, if not attest.

The development of the idea appears to be emerging slowly, perhaps more so than usual. As such, it has afforded me an opportunity to examine aspects of my writing process. I’ve read of writers who claim to allow their story to come forth “organically.” I interpret this, correctly or not, to start writing and see what transpires. Contrast that to the crime writer I met at a workshop years ago who tightly plotted his efforts down to an anticipated number of chapters and pages per.

If those examples represent the extremes, I’d locate myself somewhere in between. I typically have a plot in mind, nebulous as it might be, with a beginning and an end. Whether I can get there or not, I need to have a sense of destination. While it is not inlaid in stone and is ever subject to alteration, I feel the need for a vision of the story’s conclusion even as I begin.

In my present state, an aspect of my “percolating” relates to an unusual struggle with the decision to narrate from a first-person point of view or my generally more comfortable third person perspective. I’ve found myself pondering what this might be about. Though I have no answer, since I’ve found myself tilting toward first-person this time, I’m wondering if there’s a lurking concern with interjecting too much of myself into the main character.

Feel free to laugh. Of course, there are always pieces of me scattered throughout my fiction. As with any writer, how could there not be? It (all of it) issues from my head. That said, my experience suggests the closer a character approaches me (or I him), the greater the possibility that fiction is edging into autobiography. I’ve also noticed that the nearer my path attenuates toward the protagonist’s, the more my writing slows. Am I now entertaining decisions to withhold in order to maintain privacy? And if so, is honesty being sacrificed for my comfort?

Weird? Silly? Your thoughts or experiences?

Blog 44 Wee Geordie

 When I was a young boy, I tended to see myself as puny, wished I was larger, stronger, more capable of standing up to the bullying world I inhabited. In retrospect, I wasn’t as diminutive as I imagined, but, correctly or incorrectly, our brains tell us what our eyes see and the malformations of self-perception loom.

In the midst of those formative years, I saw a movie, Wee Geordie, about an undersized Scottish lad who built himself into a behemoth through years of diligent exercise. Geordie went on to win an Olympic gold medal in the hammer throw. The movie, a thunderbolt to my heart, touched my uneasy sensibilities. I loved it. From my late teens through my thirties, I worked dedicatedly to building strength. To this day, at eighty, my exercise regimen includes resistance training.

For reasons unclear to me at the moment, I recently thought of the movie, recalling the joy it brought me at a time of self-doubt, found myself wondering if it was based on a book. It was. A brief online search revealed Geordie, a novel, was written in 1950 by a Scottish writer, David Walker. I knew I wanted to read it. More research revealed several copies were available through Biblio, a British seller of antiquated books. With the help of my considerably more computer savvy son, a copy was procured at a reasonable price. The first edition copy arrived in far better condition than I’d anticipated by Biblio’s description, down to an intact original dust jacket.

All that aside, I read the story (192 pages) in two days, the book even more enjoyable, more moving than my memory of the movie. More than the unidimensional, triumph-of-might tale I recalled, Geordie was (is) an almost magical love story, the love propelled and enabled by Geordie remaining true to himself despite worldly temptation.

Sound like a fairy tale? In some ways it came close. Today, it would probably be viewed as a YA novel, although I would demur in that categorization. I found the author’s deceptively simple writing almost poetically beautiful, his control of the story he wrote masterful.

            The wonder of books! How lucky I am!