with James Hayman
We are delighted to welcome mystery writer James Hayman to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of Partners in Crime Tours, which is coordinating his current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find his schedule here.
Jim's third "McCabe and Savage" thriller is Darkness First (Witness Impulse; October 2013 ebook formats) and we asked him to tell us more about character development, which he does in a post titled "Imaginary Friends, Imaginary Fiends".
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Photo provided courtesy of
James Hayman
As a mystery writer, almost by definition, I spend more time with imaginary characters than I do with real people. With the possible exception of my wife, even the real people I know best.
Because my books are written from multiple points of view, I don't just spend time with these imaginary characters, I live inside their heads. I see what they see. I feel what they feel. I speak in their voices. I always know when they're upset or angry or sexually excited. I know what they're plotting and planning in ways I never could with real people, not even those I'm closest to. For some period of time, I become them which for me is one of the great joys of writing fiction.
Creating the character of Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe, who appears in all my books, was relatively easy because McCabe is my alter-ego, the character most like me. We're both native New Yorkers. We both enjoyed successful careers in New York before moving to Portland, Maine. We both like good Scotch whiskey, old movie trivia and the New York Giants. We both live with and love beautiful women who are talented artists and we're both fathers of gorgeous daughters. More importantly, we have similar values. McCabe thinks, feels and reacts to things that happen in Darkness First or The Cutting or The Chill of Night as I would react and that makes it easy to put thoughts in his head, words in his mouth and emotions in his heart.
Making characters who are less like me feel genuine is harder. Darkness First is the first of my three McCabe/Savage thrillers that is told primarily in a female voice from a female point of view. My key protagonist is McCabe's partner, Detective Maggie Savage of the Portland Police Department, a young attractive, woman, devoted to her career but also interested in finding a guy who's right for her before she's too old to have kids and raise a family. I think I found an authentically female voice for Maggie, though I must admit writing the sex scenes from a female point of view required more than a few mental (and emotional) contortions on my part.
Occasionally, living inside the head one of my characters can be disturbing. Especially when it's someone as evil as Conor Riordan, the sociopathic killer in Darkness First. I spent a lot of hours inside Riordan's head when he kills. I'm there when he murders his male victims, which he does coldly, efficiently, without emotion or regret, thinking only of how he can benefit from their deaths.
I'm also there when he kills women. It's these murders that Riordan truly gets off on, especially when the victim is young and beautiful. He kills his female victims savagely and sadistically. The pleasure he takes in their deaths is clearly sexual. As my Medical Examiner Terri Mirabito remarks while examining the body of Tiffany Stoddard: "This creep used his knife like a substitute penis. Must have gone in and out of her twenty times. I'm just wondering if he actually came." One of the hardest parts of creating a character as evil as Conor Riordan is getting him out of your head after he's been there most of a day or even several days. Living with evil can be disturbing.
You can find an excerpt of how Riordan kills his first two (male) victims in Darkness First on the Killer Instincts Facebook site.
A character utterly different from Riordan, who I really enjoyed writing, is Tabitha Stoddard, a "semi-fat and wholly nerdy" eleven year old girl. Tabbie is the younger sister of murder victim Tiff Stoddard. It was challenging but fun trying to capture the voice a child like Tabitha would use both in her words and thoughts . Here she is, sitting alone in her room, and trying to come to terms with her sister's death:
Tabbie had a hard time thinking of Tiff as dead. Everything about her big sister had always seemed so alive. Tiff was everything Tabitha always wanted to be but knew she never would. She was beautiful. Smart. Fun and funny. The idea of someone like Tiff being dead seemed crazy. Ridiculous.
Tabbie told herself to stop being stupid. Anybody could be dead and at eleven years old a person really ought to understand what being dead meant. Dead was dead. Just like Terri was dead and had been for three years. Just like Grammy Katherine was dead. And their old dog Lucy. She was dead too. Tabbie'd gone to the vet with her mother when they gave Lucy the shot. The vet put the needle in and just like that Lucy went from being an alive thing to a dead thing. At eleven years old a person obviously knew what dead meant.
What she wasn't all that sure about was what happened after you were dead. Were you just not there anymore? Gone. Poof. Like you never existed? Just a rotting lump of meat in a box underground being eaten up by bugs and worms?
Or was dying more like what they said in church? Tabitha was by no means certain it was, but if it was, well then there was a distinct possibility Tiff was flying around somewhere in either heaven or hell. She was in what Mrs St Pierre who lived up the road called a better place. Mrs St Pierre came over with some cupcakes after she heard on television about Tiff being murdered. Tabbie didn't know why she thought cupcakes would help.
"Donnie," Mrs St Pierre said, "I know this is hard for you to accept but please believe me when I tell you she's in a better place. They both are. Both Tiff and Terri. Together again. Safe in the arms of Jesus."
Tabitha thought her mother might throw Mrs St Pierre out of the house along with her cupcakes because she knew her mother not only didn't believe in God but also thought Mrs St Pierre was pretty much full of shit about everything. But to Tabbie's surprise her mother didn't say anything except thank you.
Tabbie tended to think her mother was right on the religion thing. But if it turned she wasn't and Mrs St Pierre was right, well Tabbie thought that might make a pretty good argument for killing yourself. Heck, who wouldn't want to be in a better place?
There are other characters I like in Darkness First. There is Maggie's father, John Savage, the seventy-four-year-old four-term sheriff of Washington County, Maine, who is "A lean six-four with a grey mustache and a weathered face, Savage looked more like a sheriff in a John Ford western than one in a rural county in Maine. He was even armed like Wyatt Earp with his pride and joy, an original 1873 long-barreled Colt .45 Peacemaker strapped to his waist." Finally there is Maggie's brother and Tiff Stoddard's lover, Harlan Savage, an ex-marine, who returned home from service as a sniper in Iraq with a head wound and a severe case of PTSD and who makes his living, such as it is, doing odd jobs and hustling pool in a dive bar called the Musty Moose.
All I can say is I hope readers will enjoy getting to know these characters as much as I enjoyed creating them.
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James Hayman is a native New Yorker having been born in Brooklyn and raised in Manhattan. Like many city kids, he was sent off to a New England boarding school at fourteen. Eight years later he graduated from Brown University and returned to New York where he spent the next twenty-five years working as a copywriter and creative director at some of Madison Avenue's biggest ad agencies, creating print and TV advertising for clients like the US Army, Lincoln Mercury, Merrill Lynch and Procter & Gamble.
After deciding that the New York agency business was "no country for old men", Jim left Madison Avenue and moved to Portland, Maine where he worked for several years as a freelance business writer, publishing dozens of articles and two non-fiction business books.
In 2007 he decided to follow in the footsteps of other former "Madmen" (James Patterson, Stuart Woods, Chris Grabenstein and Ted Bell to name just a few) and begin a new career writing suspense/thrillers. Jim lives in Portland with his wife, the artist Jeanne O'Toole Hayman.
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Darkness First
James Hayman
A Michael McCabe and Maggie Savage Thriller (3rd in series)
The mutilated body of a young woman. The town doctor lying comatose in the road. A hundred and fifty tablets of Canadian OxyContin. This is the havoc that a merciless killer has wreaked on a sleepy Maine seaport.
As detectives Maggie Savage and Michael McCabe investigate, they realize the man they are after does not exist. Nobody knows his real name. Nobody has seen his face. But everybody fears his blade.
The only one who may know the murderer's true identity is an eleven-year-old girl — who has vanished into thin air.
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