“How did you come up with that story?”

As an author, I hear this question a lot. So I thought I’d give a little insight into how my two mystery novels came together.

The idea for my first book, Swinging for Power, began with a single line. 

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series of detective fiction. But Spenser is a tough guy, an ex-cop who’s a boxer. I wanted to write about a private investigator who’s much less physically imposing, a former journalist like me. When he’s faced with real danger for the first time, I imagined him saying to readers: “What was I gonna do, hit those crooks outside my door with a well-placed metaphor?”

That was the inspiration for a story I wanted to tell about an average guy who’s taking on a powerful, yet corrupt political figure—sort of an allegory for our current reality.

I knew the arc of the story I had in mind. I knew how I wanted it to end. I just had to come up with a plot that would fit that story arc—like designing a puzzle whose pieces fit together in a certain pattern.

I came up with much of the plot on hikes in the woods. (Maybe that’s why forestry featured so prominently in the story!)

Baseball is also mentioned a lot in the book, and the title is a baseball phrase that applies to the story’s action. For my second novel, I wanted to continue this same naming convention, so I chose a hockey phrase (Cross Checking) that would relate to its plot as well. In another story that echoes current reality, the hero takes on a fundamentalist church leader bent on punishing the “wicked” in our society … and the inspiration came directly from this hockey phrase.

For this second book, however, I wanted to incorporate two mysteries that would somehow converge. I’ve always loved treasure hunts that involve solving clues or riddles, like in the National Treasure movies with Nicholas Cage—so I thought I’d create a treasure hunt for this second plot.

That was really fun as a writer, because I got to design clues the protagonists had to solve. I hope it was as fun to read as it was to write.

I thought a lot about how the two mysteries in Cross Checking might converge. I ended up rejecting a number of ideas because I couldn’t make them work elegantly; I wanted the convergence to seem natural or inevitable. Finally, I hit upon how those separate plot strands might come together in the figure of a mob boss who stands in the way of solving one of the mysteries—but could be the key to deciphering the other.

For my third book, which I just started writing, I’ve continued the same naming trend. I was already committed to the bit, as they say in comedy—so what choice did I have? 

I looked for a basketball phrase that could suggest the plot of my third novel, and I found the perfect choice in Full Court Press. Once again, my average-guy hero—aided by his female ex-Army Ranger neighbor—takes on a corrupt system much larger than he is. In this case, it’s a state judicial system that’s suspected of taking bribes to influence court rulings. (And once again, the plot seems like it could be ripped straight from the headlines of today’s news.)

Happy reading!