E________, first draft: 62,000 words
Very excited about the upcoming publication of my second novel, A Quiet Teacher, which is due out on November 1! But also feeling that, as the saying goes, I have some ‘splainin’ to do. How has it come about that a writer of science fiction has turned his hand to a murder mystery?
The answer, I guess, is because I couldn’t stop myself.
The SF writer, Harlan Ellison, when asked where he got his ideas from, reputedly answered, “Schenectady.” Speaking for myself, the ideas that flash out of the atom-smasher of fact, memory, and emotion that is the Oyebanji subconscious tend to be about things, or situations. Fermi’s paradox, for instance (The Wrong Shape To Fly in Baen’s upcoming Worlds Long Lost anthology), or “What would happen at the end of a generation ship’s voyage?” (Braking Day). But A Quiet Teacher wasn’t like that at all. I literally (literarily?) woke up one morning with the character of the protagonist, Greg Abimbola, fully formed in my head. Well . . . I didn’t know his name at the time, and it was a while before I realized he’d lost his left eye in something other than an accident. Still, apart from that, I knew everything about him.
It was, to say the least, weird.
But there was nothing I could do with him. I was an aspiring science fiction writer (I don’t think Braking Day even had an agent at the time, never mind a publisher). Outside of high school English assignments, science fiction was all I had ever written, and Greg was very much a character who belonged in the “real” world. He was absolutely, most definitely not for me.
And yet he wouldn’t go away. Bit by bit, flashes of a mystery novel built around him would appear while I was buttering toast, or riding my bike, or (please keep this to yourselves) during conference calls at work. I kept ignoring it, but the flashes kept coming until I had something close to a complete plot just floating around in my head with nowhere to go. At which point, I stopped ignoring and got scared instead.
I don’t know how to write mysteries, I told myself in an increasingly panicky internal dialog. I don’t know enough about the genre. I’ll be a laughingstock. Well, why don’t you read some? See if you can get the feel of it? Can’t be any harm in that, surely?
So, I did. I read Shroud for a Nightingale by P.D. James, The Witch Elm, by Tana French, Broken Promise, by Linwood Barclay, and a bunch of others. And then, thinking it need never see the light of day, I had a crack at what became A Quiet Teacher. It wasn’t called, A Quiet Teacher, of course. I called it Varsity Reds. No one, and I mean no one, liked that title. As related elsewhere in this blog, my titling expertise is so poorly regarded, I expect that I will soon be contractually forbidden from naming my own books.
Having written it, and really enjoyed writing it, I put the manuscript to one side because I wasn’t sure it was good enough. No. That’s not quite right. I thought it wasn’t half bad. I thought it had pace, and great characterizations, and a really cool mystery at its core. But here’s the problem: I’m a science fiction writer! When it comes to mysteries, I can’t tell the difference between a Roche limit and an event horizon.
Enter R. R is my wife’s very good friend, not mine. R, unlike my tactful, circumspect better half, is blunt to the point of rudeness. R is also a retired police officer and, most importantly of all, a fanatical consumer of murder mysteries. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen her read anything else. With some trepidation I handed her a copy of the manuscript (printed out, the old-fashioned way). It came back covered in red ink. On closer inspection, though, they were nits, easily fixed. R even went so far as to say she had to force herself to slow down and give feedback because she kept racing on to find out what happened next. Pleasantly surprised, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and called up my agent, the estimable Brady. Brady’s interests are adult science fiction, the UNC Tar Heels, and world peace (in that order) and here I was, asking him to sell a murder mystery by a science fiction writer with one not-yet-published book under his belt.
He did, too. A Quiet Teacher comes out on November 1, 2022, courtesy of the fine folks at Severn House. Please give it a try. If you like it, I’ll write some more. If you don’t, you, me (and Brady) will pretend like it never happened.