Richard Wolkomir & Joyce Rogers Wolkomir

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Just published, When the Wasp Stings—it's the latest Cooper North mystery novel.

 

Cooper's a rarity among fictional women investigators. For one thing, she isn't young. She's 69 years old. She's formidable. She's tall, almost gaunt, with a falcon's penetrating gaze. She sees you, and she sees into you. On the hunt, she's relentless.

 

Cooper's summoned from retirement, back into the prosecutor's office. Her police colleagues need her, because only she can handle the bizarre events suddenly besetting this patch of the Green Mountains, from an alligator scaring shoppers on Main Street to Ninja-costumed psychopaths, rampaging with commando knives. It begins with a maple-syrup entrepreneur's murder, via wasp stings.  

 

Somehow—Cooper isn't sure exactly how—it all fits. Even the Ninjas fit, targeting people Cooper cares about, including a little boy. 

 

Cooper has fans of all ages, but for older readers she's a special delight—here's a strong woman who's been around. She knows some things.

 

I don't know where Cooper came from. She just sprang out of my mind, fully grown and seasoned. I admire her. I wish I could be more like her. I may be her biggest fan.

 

--Richard

 

 

I once worked at a zoo, as keeper of the bear-cub pit, overseeing twenty-eight orphaned baby bears, all roughhousing in their enclosure. I've been a bear fan ever since.

 

So the other day, on national public radio, I tuned into a Fresh Air interview with science-writer Mary Roach, author of a new book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. She got my attention right off, because she said "bears."

 

She talked about bear home invasions.

 

She said bears have learned how to use door handles to open doors. Sometimes they do break the door down, but they can be thoughtful about it. For instance, one bear knocked down a house's front door, then carefully picked up the fallen door and neatly leaned it against the adjacent wall.

 

My favorite bear crime was ice-cream theft. Mr. or Ms. Bear breaks into your house, bee-lines for your refrigerator, opens the freezer, and takes out the ice cream containers. However, says Mary Roach, the bears have become particular about ice cream.

 

They ignore supermarket-brand ice creams. If it's not Ben & Jerry's or Haagen-Dazs, or some other gourmet ice cream, they just leave it in disgust.  

 

Often, though, before lumbering out with their haul, they politely shut the freezer door.

 

Thanks for the bear uplift, Mary Roach. I'll be reading your book!

 

--Richard

 

 

My new novel, just published, is The Girl Who Got Her Tiger On (And the Dog Who Had Her Back)—it's a small departure for me, because it's a young-adult thriller.

 

It's not much of a departure since I'm unsure there's much difference between a young-adult novel and an adult novel, except the YA protagonists are youths.

 

In this story, the heroine is a 17-year-old telling about what happened when she was only 12, just after her father's helicopter blew up in Afghanistan, and her mother became deeply depressed. She felt she had "bad weather" in her head. Amidst all that, new neighbors move in, creepy people, she thinks, and she starts watching them—trying to do the right thing, she gets deep into danger.

 

 There's a new boy across the street, who wants to be her friend, but she avoids her classmates. With all her troubles, they seem shallow to her.

 

Virtually all my novels have a corgi character, and this one does, too. He's the heroine's best friend, William, a Pembroke Welsh corgi, who "helps" with her surveillance of what she calls "The House of Evil."

 

Novels are about characters—usually humans—going through difficulties. Maybe they're destroyed. Maybe they're changed. But, on that basic level, I don't think the protagonists' ages matter much.

 

--Richard

I’ve been thinking: what does a story mean?

It’s because I just published a new novel, Caliban Rising—it’s a thriller, and I hope it means: “Keep turning those pages!”

You sneak onto a mysterious Caribbean island. Nice beaches, but nasty murders. Maybe you get hurled out of a Black Hawk helicopter, or fed to the island’s feral Bengal tiger. Also, there are creepy robots….

Will you survive?

Every thriller, I think, underneath, means just that: danger besets us.

We lead thriller lives.  Read More 

Lately I worry a lot about who to kill off.

Don’t call the police—I’m talking about characters in the thriller I’m currently writing.

I don’t mind offing bad guys, because they fully deserve it. Every one of them, believe me. It’s the good characters who trouble me, imaginary people I’ve come to like and respect.

I’m writing this novel, so I suppose I’m Zeus, and I get to decide who dies and who lives. However, the truth is that the story itself is king of the gods, with its own wishes and demands and requirements. Authors are soothsayers. All we can do, really, is divine what the story wants and do its bidding.

For instance, this novel started as a pure thriller, set on a Caribbean island, but I’m about midway through now and—all on its own—it’s taken on a faint sci-fi tinge, although nothing that couldn’t actually happen in the world today. Let’s just hope it doesn’t.

Caliban Rising is the novel’s title. So far, at least. Even in titles, the story will have its way, so we’ll see.

Anyway, back to the question of good characters dying. For some reason, in our real world, we’ve lately had a rash of people we know dying. People not yet in their fullness of years. Brain cancers, heart attacks, prostate cancer, rare disorders with unpronounceable names….

I suppose that what determines who dies too young is not goodness, not badness. It’s just how our story wants to be told.

--Richard  Read More 

In "Spider's Web in the Green Mountains," just published, why do mysterious motorcycles roar past the heroine's house in the night?

Why is a biker threatening her corgi, Henry?

Generally, what's with all these Harleys and Hondas?

In this photo, we see the author doing serious, in-depth research for his mystery, sitting on a parked motorcycle to get the feel of the thing.

It felt pretty good.

--Richard
 Read More 

I took this photograph in the Vermont mountains and it led to the novel I’ve just published, a mystery.

It’s about the people living in a small town, tucked away in these Green Mountains.

Everyone is connected. It’s as if an invisible spider web crisscrosses the town, every resident touched by its strands: loves, grievances, envies, kindnesses, marriages, divorces, business deals….

Spider’s Web in the Green Mountains is the book’s title.

A murder perturbs the web.

It even affects a Pembroke Welsh corgi, Henry.

Another major character is Dill, Vermont, the town itself.

I know something about small towns, because I grew up in one, along the Hudson River. We live near a small town now. It’s just a five-minute drive down the mountainside.

It’s interesting to read the police report in the daily paper, lost wallets and domestics and hypodermic needles found in alleyways and wandering dogs.

No murders lately, but you never know.

–Richard  Read More 

Edmund Wilson, the eminent literary critic, said detective stories are junk.

Ouch—I've just published a mystery novel, "Spider's Web in the Green Mountains." More to the point, I’m a long-time mystery reader.

It was 1945 when Wilson huffed about detective stories. I just looked it up. That was when books still mattered, and literary critics, like Edmund Wilson, actually could be eminent. So attention must be paid.

Wilson cited an Agatha Christie novel, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," and posed a zingy question: “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” He also said that “…the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, resides somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.”

Actually, I also don’t care who killed Roger Ackroyd. Mostly, I’m in it for the adventure. In real life, I get edgy crossing a city street—I like virtual adventure, in which somebody else dodges .45 slugs.

I’m also drawn by the mystery ambience, the sense that, beneath the mundane, run strong currents, deep and dark.

Stories hinging on unlikely tangles are popular, but I’m more simple-minded. I like my stories straight up—Hey, that could really happen!

I wonder, too, if the mystery genre hasn’t evolved since Wilson’s day, when he complained the characters were “all simply names on a page.” Some modern mysteries seem less Roger Ackroyd and more Raskolnikov.

Besides, one of our greatest poets liked mysteries. So, I’m with you, William Butler Yeats.

--Richard  Read More 

I often think about Gaspode, the terrier-like street dog in Terry Pratchett’s brilliantly funny “Discworld” novels.

It’s because Gaspode is so disreputably clever at making his way in his world, which is similar to our world, except that it is flat and rests on four elephants standing on the shell of a vast turtle, swimming in nothingness. Discworld’s dwarfs and trolls despise each other, and its humans disdain all minorities, especially vampires and werewolves. Slums are super-slummy. And a filthy little dog gets no lunch unless he wangles it.

Gaspode has a wangling edge: one night he slept beside Unseen University’s High Energy Magic building, and magical seepage upped his IQ and enabled him to speak. Nobody suspects a dog can talk, so people believe they’re hearing their own thoughts—“Oh, look at that poor little orphan doggie! I should give him half my sandwich!”

Gaspode appears in seven of Sir Terry’s 41 Discworld novels. He’s a lot like Homer’s hero, Odysseus, the only Greek among Troy’s besiegers who demonstrably has a brain.

Besides, Gaspode looks just like our friend Murdock, the west highland terrier who occasionally stays with us, when his buddy Eric is traveling. Also, whether your world’s round or flat, amusement is good.

–Richard  Read More