We are delighted to welcome back author Barry Knister to Omnimystery News.
Earlier this month we had a chance to talk with Barry about his new series mystery Deep North (July 2015 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we invited him back to tell us more about his work. He titles his guest post for us today, "Saving the Planet One Person at a Time: In Praise of the Small-Footprint Crime Novel".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Barry Knister
If you're like me, you still read a daily newspaper. It's easier to manage than scrolling through screens, especially for those of us who grew up with newspapers as our principal source of what's happening now. We also grew up watching nightly network news, but those days are done. Now, cable stations develop the news to suit the political leanings of their viewers.
But people who still read newspapers are a dwindling breed. As far as content goes, though, the delivery system hardly matters: what's on offer these days, in any form, is more and more horrific.
You know what I mean: random mass murders in churches and mosques, people turning themselves into bombs, hooded figures cutting off the heads of people they've convinced themselves aren't human. Countries weaving and dodging in diplomatic wrestling matches, in order to get their hands on nuclear weapons. The buzz is that the new documentary "Cartel Land," about the drug wars in Mexico will eclipse everything that has come before in terms of horror and brutality.
But other than knowing in general terms what I'm talking about, can you honestly say you know much if anything about those involved? Can they be more to you than ciphers and fleeting images?
In his very well-done debut novel, The Trident Deception, Rick Campbell offers up a nail-biting what-if story, in which the captain and crew of the deadliest thing on the planet — a nuclear sub equipped with enough lethality to kill most everything that exists — has been tricked into preparing to launch its missiles. The story tells in precise detail how the sub is being frantically sought out for destruction before it can initiate the final world war.
It's a story that fits well with the scary reality of today's news. It joins the ranks of other big-footprint thrillers, stories in which a country, presidential election, the world economy or — as in Campbell's novel — the world itself is at risk. In such stories, the reader is caught up by a deadly cat-and-mouse game, with the highest possible stakes.
These stories necessarily emphasize plot and, in The Trident Deception, technology (the author served as a nuclear-sub officer). The characters may or may not be rendered in convincing terms, but like the real-world victims and criminals in each day's news, they are secondary to the events themselves.
For me, my ability to give attention to the enormity of news events has begun to crumble under the weight of sheer scale. It's all too much, and mostly too anonymous. One disaster is quickly followed by the next, and the next. When today's outrage is promptly replaced tomorrow by another, how can anyone or anything matter?
Maybe that's why I write small-footprint stories.
And that's why such novels — in my case, crime novels — may be fairly thought of as preservers of humanistic values. What this means is that small-footprint stories take humans and what they do seriously. Instead of tracking the hectic effort to prevent world destruction, the writer twists the story's lens adjustment to close-up range. Calamity always figures, but character comes first.
That's what I've tried to do in my recently released suspense novel Deep North.
In the story, four women go fishing in a remote region known as the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. Much of the area is devoted to the least-visited of our national parks, Voyageurs National Park.
Although Brenda Contay, the central character in Deep North is a Pulitzer-Prize winner, neither she nor the other three women are famous or powerful. What happens to them wouldn't have much ripple effect beyond the cold, beautiful waters and islands in which the story takes place. The crimes committed in the novel wouldn't reach beyond the local news in International Falls or Duluth. Except for the handful directly involved, the details would probably sink out of sight before the end of the week.
But if I've done my job well, my readers will remember each of the four women. Each will be an individual, with her own voice and mannerisms, habits of dress, tastes in food and drink. None of them will think or sound like the others, and the same holds true for the three men in Deep North: one good, two bad, each with a backstory that humanizes even the worst of them. But no one in the novel acts out newsworthy or world-threatening events. The only people their actions will affect will be themselves. And my readers.
In other words, if I've gotten it right, Deep North will occasion for readers the opportunity to know characters to a degree that's rare in actual experience. In our techno-driven life, where hand-held devices support more and more "likes," and birthday greetings from people we've never met, how many people can any of us claim to know as well as we know, say, Harry Bosch in Michael Connelly's beautifully told police procedurals? Who will ever forget the jaded, perverse characters populating Philip Marlowe's world in Raymond Chandler's pitch-perfect noir novels? Or Hannibal Lecter, a case of criminal pathology rendered by Thomas Harris with scarifying precision?
Like good literary or mainstream stories, successful small-footprint mysteries, thrillers and suspense novels help to keep alive in readers what is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in a technologically-driven, news-swamped world: the firmly rooted sense of the importance of persons, of the individual. To the degree stories about crime and punishment bring alive the perps, victims and crime-stoppers, the actual world we live in becomes more valuable.
Best case scenario? Good crime novels make us more able to actually see and appreciate our fellow man and woman.
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After retiring from college teaching, Barry Knister returned to fiction writing. He lives in Michigan with his wife Barbara, and their Aussie shepherd, Skylar.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at BWKnister.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Deep North by Barry Knister
A Brenda Contay Novel of Suspense
Publisher: Barry Knister
Journalist Brenda Contay seems to have it all: a Pulitzer Prize, plenty of money and lots of friends. Just one thing is missing: a relationship that counts.
That seems about to change when lawyer friend Marion Ross invites Brenda to go fishing in northern Minnesota. But they won't be roughing it: they'll be staying on a big, comfy houseboat. Charlie Schmidt has a cabin nearby, and before long, Brenda is thinking a lot about Charlie's gracefulness and good looks.
But two other men have followed the women. Louis Rohmer knew Marion in college, and has an Internet scheme to steal everything she's worth. Jerry Lomak is much more dangerous: Marion's legal skills destroyed him in court. He's headed for prison, but Lomak has no intention of doing time, or of letting a woman lawyer get away with her "crimes."
It's a beautiful place, northern Minnesota. Cold, clear, unblemished. But none of it will count when Brenda Contay must choose between losing her chance for happiness, or committing a terrible crime.
— Deep North by Barry Knister
