The
Gideon Marshall Mystery Series – John Janovy, Jr.
This series started
during one of our Friday Coffee sessions in the fall of 2012, when Johnica
Morrow, a new parasitology grad in Karl Reinhard’s archeoparasitology lab,
announced she was going to do National Novel Writing Month and generate a
zombie apocalypse novel to pay for grad school. I had never heard of National
Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an international, web-based program to
encourage writing and provide a forum for writers from all over the world. The
kicker was that in order to “win” the annual contest with oneself, you had to
generate a 50,000 word novel within the month of November; 30 days, averaging
1667 words, which amounts to about 5 or 6 double-spaced pages, every day for
the month. So, I said to myself, if a grad student can do that, so can I. The
first four came pretty easily, as described below; as of this date (June,
2017), I’m about 1/3 to 1/2 finished with the first draft of the fifth one, so
obviously it’s a little more complicated than were the first four.
The first of these
NaNoWriMo novels, Be Careful, Dr. Renner,
was easy, mainly because I’d been thinking about how workplace stress can be
such a powerful negative influence on one’s life, having witnessed it happening
first-hand when the University of Nebraska’s School of Biological Sciences was
formed, back in 1973, by the merger of three departments. The internal politics
were vicious; I’m completely convinced that one of my colleagues died early
because of this stress, and I witnessed purges, tenure denials, and degrading
behavior on almost a daily basis. So as a stage for this novel, I made up a
small, liberal arts, college, gave it massive amounts of endowment, sent the
best students from all over the world to this place, and stuck it in rural
Iowa. I also populated it with a bunch of people, some of whom would deserve
everything that they ended up getting. To do the fourth one, The Weatherford Trial, I spent two
months sitting in on court cases in Lancaster County District Court studying
how the legal system works at that level.
The next three of
these NaNoWriMo projects built on the first, so that they actually form a
temporal series. The one item that ties them all together is the theoretical
research of a reclusive faculty member who gets murdered at the start of the
second book. This research is reputed to provide certain individuals with
enormous power; think nuclear weapons level power, although from a geological
perspective. Each of these books was finished in first draft during the 30 days
in November, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. They all required about another four
to six months to flesh out and clean up. My agent declined to handle them as
traditional submissions to major publishing houses (evidently they didn’t
scream $$$$ loudly enough), but like many large agencies, this one had started
an e-book program and handled them that way, using a New York firm to promote
the digital editions. I subsequently did the paperback editions myself through
amazon’s createspace.com self-publishing web site. Covers for the first two
were designed by a gentleman in London; I did the last two covers myself.
Gideon Marshall
himself is modeled loosely after my father, who was a petroleum geologist in
Oklahoma. The petroleum industry is involved in all of these books, in a
related way. You may think that a small college in Iowa is not a legitimate
vehicle for a set of mysteries involving the petroleum industry, but remember
that if you have enough money, you can buy an entire college, and intellectual
property, unlike big machines, can be hidden away anywhere, ideally in a most
unlikely place. You may recognize some of the other characters, but that’s only
because their types are so common in academia and in big business. The fifth in
this series is taking longer for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it
involves serious white-collar crime connected to the murder that happens in The Stitcher File, and the literary
challenge is quite a bit greater than it was in the first four books.
Thanks for picking
these up. Feel free to recommend them to (or buy them for) your friends!!
JJ
No comments:
Post a Comment