AN ACCIDENTAL NOVELIST – Richard S. Wheeler

       It ain't the steak, it's the sizzle. I first read this sentiment decades ago as an insider's tip on how to pitch a book idea or even a completed manuscript to an agent or publishing house. It made sense at the time, cynical as I'd become with a file folder bulging with rejection slips. Thus, this sage advice prompted me to spend perhaps more creative energy than I had to spare coming up with clever titles and blurbs for my queries and cover letters.

    Amid a newspaper reporting career at the time, I'd gotten fairly good at snagging a reader's interest with the first sentence. And I knew a catchy headline when I saw one. Yet, despite my best efforts pimping my fiction with carnival come-ons, that folder of rejection slips kept getting fatter. My sizzle failed to entice anyone to try my steaks. Why? Well, to dance around the probable truth, the last thing a writer wants to admit is that he's fooling himself and that his steaks are merely gristle.

    Richard Wheeler had entered the writing game a few years before I did. We share some common ground. Both are Wisconsin boys (or were) and both were floundering in sputtering newspaper careers. We each ended up writing fiction, but Wheeler had more guts. He jumped off the creaking boxcar and headed for Fiction Junction without a map, while I rattled along to the end of the line. Today he has more than 60 published novels and a bunch of awards under his belt. Me? five books, self-published.
 

    I hadn't heard of Wheeler until recently. My favorite mystery writer, Ed Gorman, recommended his friend's literary memoir, An Accidental Novelist, which I immediately acquired. I read it raptly. Wheeler taught me a lot in this book besides introducing me to a man so much like myself it's scary--a distinct difference being his having more guts.

   Perhaps his most important lesson, which I happily share with all other aspiring novelists, is the secret of the other "Z" word. As I consider suspense a form of torture, I'll give you the word right now: Buzz.

   Buzz is the hipper version of the traditional "word of mouth." It's more effective for selling books than big-budget publicity by a big-name publisher that takes out full-page ads in literary magazines and sends an author on big-time promotional tours. Wheeler speaks from experience here, having enjoyed the luxury of big-time tours that stroked his ego, got him TV interviews and audiences with important literary lights, book-signings galore and nights in the best hotels. Despite all this, the expensive tours did little to stimulate sales of the touted books, he says.

   What did work, he claims, was the reaction of readers. If they like a book and recommend it to their friends, the sales will take off. How to get the buzz started, especially for an unknown author? Free books:

   "I believe that publishers should simply give away half of an obscure author's first printing at free bookstore signings, book festivals and other venues, and that this sort of pump-priming is the only type of promotion of obscure authors that will ultimately pay off."

   There's plenty more of value in this book for the aspiring novelist who's heading toward Fiction Junction without a map.

   I've since read several of his novels—historical fiction, under his own name, and the mysteries he publishes as Axel Brand. I've enjoyed them all. Richard S. Wheeler is a winner. 

 

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

 

SUN MOUNTAIN -- Richard S. Wheeler

I'm finding myself more and more fascinated with history the older I get. Maybe part of the fascination has to do with the fact that events I lived through, heard on the news, read in the newspaper or saw with my own eyes, have since become history. Looking at what is now history that was once part of my life gives my imagination a boost to move further back, to see events before my time differently than I saw them when I studied history in school. The context of living extends perspective in a way that reading about events as an inexperienced youngster never could.

Now, if the histories had been written by Richard Wheeler it might have been different. A masterful writer of historical fiction, Wheeler creates an illusion for the reader to feel he or she is in fact viewing events as they happened. The period in Sun Mountain was the last third of the 19^th century during the silver/gold mining boom and bust of Virginia City, Nevada.

 

The novel unfolds as the memoir of a fictional character—Henry Stoddard—but involves many actual people, including the young Samuel Clemens and other newsmen at the Territorial Enterprise. The newspaper gave Stoddard, one of its reporters, an ideal platform to observe the wild and fascinating milieu and personalities of the mining community made famous worldwide as The Comstock Lode.

Richard S. Wheeler

With this highly personalized device Wheeler spoons out his vast knowledge of the mining industry, the customs of the day and events great and small, locally, regionally and beyond in such vivid detail he held me spellbound throughout the story.

Had Sun Mountain been part of a course when I was in high school or even college I might have become a history buff much much sooner. 

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

 

THE HOMICIDAL SAINT – Axel Brand

Axel Brand is the nom de plume of award-winning historical-fiction novelist Richard S. Wheeler. He uses Brand for his crime/mystery series featuring Milwaukee Police Lt. Joe Sonntag. The Homicidal Saint, the most recent in the series, is the first Sonntag novel I've read. I have some catching up to do. (Incidentally, the 25¢ "price" on the cover is in keeping with the '40s look of the new Crossroads Press digital editions of the Lt. Sonntag series. The Kindle versions are $3.99.)

The Homicidal Saint is narrated in a lighter voice than the historical novels, which might sound odd considering it opens with a man shooting his wife to death in the basement of a Lutheran church during a potluck dinner. Lt. Sonntag and his wife witness the murder along with the rest of the congregation attending the dinner. The killer willingly surrenders. He is polite and accommodating. He tells Sonntag and anyone who is willing to listen that he killed his wife to protect others from her. He claimed she killed their four children. The killer claimed his wife was a religious fanatic who ruled the household while he spent most of his time in a laboratory making false teeth.

Sonntag, who is chief of detectives for the Milwaukee PD, enlists Frank Silva, one of his best investigators, to help him determine if the children are in fact dead. They learn one boy died of polio at age eight. They locate a daughter, married and living in Arizona, who claims her mother disowned her and sent her away when she reached adolescence. Two brothers, however, are missing. The investigation leads Sonntag and Silva to a mysterious “institute” where wayward boys are sent to “have the Devil beaten out of them” and turn them into God-fearing men.

Axel Brand (aka Richard S. Wheeler)

I especially enjoyed The Homicidal Saint because of its setting. I grew up in Wisconsin, as did Wheeler, and felt right at home in the tableau. The story is set during the Truman administration, a time I remember as a young boy. As Axel Brand, Wheeler brings to this novel the same eye for detail and commitment to accuracy as in his fictionalized histories.

Lt. Sonntag is a believable honest cop from this period. He and his wife, Lisbeth, who helps him think through his cases, are a loving couple with heartaches of their own. Living modestly on Sonntag's meager pay, their day-to-day concerns near the end of World War II will ring true to any reader who remembers those years. The Sonntags lost one son to polio and have another in the Navy. They're real people.

I found The Homicidal Saint a welcome break from the heavier noir mysteries that seemed most popular during that time.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]