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An Open Letter to John Sandford from Leigh Neely

by | Jun 1, 2015 | Books, Fan Corner | 1 comment

This is part of a series of fan letters I am hosting in the hope of introducing some of you to authors other readers are passionate about! If you have a favorite author (living or dead) you’d like to write to or about, please let me know.

Gathering PreyDear John,

Though your fans are legion, I wanted you to know how much I appreciate your writing and even your comments on Facebook. It probably helps that I agree with your political views, but in my book, that just makes you a better writer.

You are at the top of my short list of writers I buy in hardback. I’ve read all your novels. In fact, I always put your release dates on my calendar when they’re announced. I even looked up some of your articles. Guess what. I enjoyed those too.

Your writing style appeals to me in so many ways. It’s clear, concise, and at times, breathtaking. You write with a journalist’s eye for the big questions: who, what, when, where, and best of all, why. Your writing had an intuitive air I envy so much. You obviously understand the psychological elements of your characters and the inner motivations for their actions. Your humor keeps me laughing. Life is nothing without humor, and as the cousin of a homicide detective, I truly appreciate that he’s one of the funniest people I know.

I’m sure you do extensive research for these books, but that doesn’t get in the way of a damn good story…ever. When I read the Facebook posts, yours and your son’s, I’m always baffled by those party poopers who want to point out what you did wrong. There are errors in all novels, but I seldom notice them in yours because I’m so anxious to find out what’s going to happen next. I recently read Gathering Prey in a day and a half. Thank goodness I work from home so I was able to read until the wee hours without worry.

I met Lucas Davenport through an audiobook. Unlike Lucas, I don’t listen to music much (but when I do, my list is similar to his), I listen to audiobooks in my car. Normally I’d listen to these books, and then I’d trade them for others at the used bookstore. But after I listened to my first Prey novel, I headed to the bookstore to start at the beginning, Rules of Prey, which features an appropriately named killer called Mad Dog. Is there anything more chilling than a crazed killer contemplating his latest murder by thinking, “She had never seen her sixteenth year” with absolute pleasure?

Lucas is a close friend to me now. I love his reckless way of hunting the bad guys and his impeccable taste in clothes and cars. He’s intelligent, charismatic, and damned good looking. In spite of his need to take risks, I believe he enjoys life. Like any good hero in a novel, he’s neither completely good nor completely bad. That’s the beauty of a character that stays with you. However, there’s one thing you know for certain—when Lucas gets a bad man or woman in his sights, he’s relentless until justice is served. He may serve his own kind of justice, but it’s never a disappointment for me when he does.

I love Dale, Shrake, Jenkins, and Sandy, but I have to say my favorite supporting characters are Letty and Weather. I seldom cry when I read books, but the ones that have featured these two prominently brought me to tears on more than one occasion. It has been wonderful to watch the resourceful Letty grow up with Lucas and Weather. What Lucas feels for his adopted daughter is very special, and the relationship between him and Weather is just plain great. I especially like that they have added the two babies to the household. The fact that he has never cheated on her is amazing in this age of adultery being almost in vogue.

To write these rich, compelling stories time after time is a gift, and apparently yours is boundless. Here’s one of my favorite scenes from Gathering Prey.

He made the cabin by three in the morning, stopping once at an all-night gas station in Hayward for gas, Diet Coke, a quart of milk, and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. The cabin was dark and absolutely silent as he bounced up the driveway, until he triggered the motion-sensor floodlight on the garage. The only other visible light was on his neighbor’s porch. He was unlocking the front door when the neighbor came out in a T-shirt and underpants and yelled, “Lucas?”

 
“Yeah, it’s me.”

 
“Good, I don’t have to shoot you. How long you up for?”

 
“Just overnight,” Lucas yelled back.

 
“Have a good one.”

 
He went inside and had a bowl of cereal, the moon hanging low out over the lake, putting a long streak of silver on it. It was cool, almost cold. He got a spinning rod from a closet, went out on the dock and spent five minutes casting a Rapala into the moonshine, trying for bass or pike, but not trying too hard, smelling the North Woods night, looking at all the little dots of light from the cabins around the lake; then he went inside and tried not to dream about Skye, and what might have happened to her.

I was there with Lucas, smelling the clean, crisp night air, feeling my muscles relax because I was in a good place, and trying to avoid thinking of the reality for a young girl with rash judgement. I can find scenes that touch me like this one in every one of your books, John. Every time I finish one, I have a great fear there won’t be a next one.

Dark of the MoonAlas, I’m a woman with no morals when it comes to your men for I am also deeply in love with Virgil Flowers. Again, I can see him as easily as if he were standing next to me. The long, blonde hair, the sinewy body, the wolf’s gleam in his eyes, and the smile that makes every woman wish she looked like Jennifer Anniston so she’d be worthy of sleeping with “that fucking Flowers.”

I love Virgil’s thoughtful nature and how he wishes he never had to use his gun. The characters he deals with in the little towns that fill Minnesota are priceless. The humor makes me laugh out loud.

In this scene where I first met Virgil Flowers, I felt a kinship I’ve never felt with another hero. I was raised in the South and though I’m a liberal thinker, I grew up in a nest of independent, fundamental, premillennial, Bible-believing, missionary Baptists. When I began thinking for myself, I realized I no longer wanted to blindly accept what my parents and my pastor had always told me. That’s why Virgil is quite literally my soulmate.

Every night, before he went to bed, Virgil Flowers thought about God.

 
The practice was good for him, he believed, and saved him from the cynicism of a cop’s life. Virgil was a believer. A believer in God and the immortal soul, though not in religions—a position that troubled his father, a Lutheran minister of the old school.

 
“Religion is a way of organizing the culture, your relationship to God and the people around you,” his father argued the last time Virgil went back home. “It’s not a phone booth to God. A good religion reaches wider than that. A good religion would be a value in itself, even if God didn’t exist.”

 
Virgil said, “My problem with that is I don’t believe God cares what we do. Everything is equally relevant and irrelevant to God. A religion is nothing more than a political party organized around some guy’s moral views, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, like conventional political parties are organized around some guy’s economic views. Like Bill Clinton’s.”

 
His father disdained Bill Clinton, but he took the shot with appreciation.

I absolutely love this scene. If I told my mom I disagreed with her political or religious views, she’d be so upset she’d cry for days and spend the rest of her life trying to get me to admit I was wrong. So I just keep my mouth shut and enjoy my personal relationship with God and politics.

Virgil and his dad, however, do it the right way.

Virgil had been raised in a church, and the problems his father dealt with, he thought, would have driven him crazy. It’s relatively easy to solve a problem with a gun and a warrant and a prison; but what do you do about somebody who is unloved?

 
Better, Virgil thought, to carry a badge, and maintain your amateur status when it came to considering the wonders of the universe.

There are all kinds of writers, but you, John Sandford, are one of those rare ones—a consistently good storyteller. Just wanted you to know I appreciate it and hope you can keep writing forever.

Sincerely,

Leigh Neely

Leigh Neely writes paranormal fiction with co-writer, Jan Powell. A former newspaper and magazine editor, Leigh is also a prolific nonfiction writer. She is the author of “A Vampire in Brooklyn,” featured in Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices, and “My Brother’s Keeper,” a short story in Murder New York Style: Family Matters.

Possibly a New Story?

by | May 8, 2015 | Writing | 10 comments

Gothic

This afternoon, I sat down to start working on a short story I owe my friend Tommy for a charity anthology. I have no idea what it’s going to be about, really, but most of my short works are heavily mood-influenced, and I don’t think this will be any different. This may or may not be the beginning of the story. It may be something entirely else. It may be nothing at all. But it’s what I wrote today, so I thought I would share it with you.

It began with a dress. A white cotton affair with a tight bodice trimmed in eyelet and a full skirt that belled out around my knees when I pirouetted in the great hall at Rockhaven, it was the first newly store-bought item of clothing I’d ever owned. My mother gave it to me for my birthday that March. Fifteen was time to grow up, she said, to learn to be a lady rather than a ragamuffin. Mrs. Smithson, owner of the grand old Victorian ramble where my mother was housekeeper, had laughed at the comment. I think she quite liked my tomboy ways, but she bought me a string of lustrous pearls nonetheless, the most purely beautiful thing I had ever seen, to go with the dress.

 
We were a household of women. Male gardeners managed the small crop of fruit trees that blessed us with peaches and plums in the summer and apples and pears in the fall. Men tended the flowers, too—in the large cutting bed of annuals populated by geranium, snapdragon, larkspur, gladiolus, and zinnia—and kept the lawn and hedges neatly trimmed. But the separation of church and state had nothing on the separation of house and garden. The men rotated through, but the women in the house were my sun and moon.

 
Mrs. Smithson had hired my mother fresh off the boat to care for her infant son, Matthew. As long as wealthy American women had babies, my Aunt Eileen used to say, Irish girls would never want for work. But little Matthew Smithson died in a polio outbreak at only three years old and Mr. Smithson was shot in the back six months later walking home from his job on Wall Street. Mrs. Smithson sold their apartment in the city and retired to Rockhaven, their big, empty house in Roaring Brook, New York, an hour and a half north of the city she could no longer stand. She brought my mother with her to serve as housekeeper and companion, and gave her private quarters at the back of the house.

 
I was born after all those tragedies. After my mother’s own tragedy—the death of my father at the hands of Germans in a country so distant that even Mrs. Smithson’s money could not bring  him home for burial—had bonded the two women in a dark sisterhood. The two of them were my guides, my co-mothers, and they agreed on almost everything except when it came to me.

 
“Be careful,” my mother would warn as I tore through the house on my way outside to dig for the elusive treasure hidden by one of Mrs. S’s ancestors. “Remember your place. This is not your house.”

 
“But of course it is,” Mrs. S. would say. And once, when I was about twelve, she went even further. “One day,” she told me when we were alone in the sitting room, “this will all belong to you. You must promise never, ever to sell it; it has been in my family for generations.”

 
Naturally, I promised. For I knew nothing, then, of taxes or maintenance or the responsibilities of my own calling.

Friendship in the Digital Age

by | Apr 19, 2015 | Stuff!, Writing | 15 comments

Two girls with laptopRecently, I was talking to a woman I met several years ago at RWA. I don’t remember who introduced us or how we became friends, but even though we rarely see each other, even though on the surface we have little enough in common beyond being writers, we follow each other on Twitter and Facebook and chat now and then about writing things and regular life stuff. On Twitter, in Direct Messages, I said to her that I was really glad we were friends.

It was a strange moment because not too long before that, there had been one of those incredibly unhealthy things that happens in the publishing world in which the whole definition of “friendship” came into question. What makes someone your “friend?” How much communication, how many secrets do you have to share? What are the limits on friendship? How much can a “friend” go against your ethical code before you no longer consider yourselves friends? Is it possible that I am your friend, but you are not mine?

I’ve made some of my closest friends online. I started working for AOL in 1993, when I was living a very isolated life in a tiny town where I had no friends. In those days people were writing and talking about “Internet Addiction,” but most of the people I knew who spent hours and hours online weren’t addicted to “the Internet,” they were addicted to the relationships they found there. Depressives, insomniacs like me, we found support systems and communities of people who understood us as no one in our everyday lives did.

Even today, I am friends with the people I met on the night shift at AOL more than twenty years ago. I don’t see them often, but we are absolutely friends. In 2007 when I was really sick and needed someone to stay with me, one of my AOL friends lived with me for several months since he was on disability. Yes, when you meet your friends digitally, you can put your trust in the wrong people. But that can happen when you meet them in person, too. Still, friendship is a bit like porn—hard to define, but you know it when you feel it.

In all the years since I started at AOL, the Internet has become more and more social. And I, well, I have gotten less so. I moved from jobs where I dealt with the public to jobs where I see almost no one. I am a writer in the world of publishing which, as I discussed with someone on Twitter just yesterday, is an extremely unhealthy ecosystem. My friendships develop in that world, the world where insane levels of arrogance are set off by the deepest insecurity and even self-loathing, where sometimes it seems that the “happy medium” does not, cannot, exist. I have found good friends in the writing and publishing communities, people that I met in person. But I have met more of them online.

In a discussion online about the most recent brouhaha, someone told me that “exchanging a few emails and direct messages doesn’t make you friends. Friends are people you show pictures of your children to.” I left it alone because I knew we were not going to agree, but it raised a question for me. I don’t have kids. Although I am private and don’t share pictures of my lunch on Facebook, I don’t have secrets in the way most people think of them. What would I share with a “friend” that I do not share with the public?

I would contend that friendship is defined not by the quantity of communication but rather the quality. My conversations with friends go deeper, last longer. Which means that, indeed, that you can give your friendship to someone who is not your friend. You can believe that someone is your friend because you communicate freely and openly with them on the assumption that they are doing the same with you. The things they are hiding are things you don’t think to ask about because you don’t notice the absence. And yes, the Internet makes this easier. But liars and cheaters were around before the Internet, and they’ll be here when our computers crumble into dust.

Friendship, however, lasts forever.