Conferences for Writers—Part II, ThrillerFest

By Kay Kendall

Many differences make ThrillerFest stand out from other conferences that are offered to crime authors. This annual conference of International Thriller Writers is held at the same time every year and in the same hotel. It begins right after Independence Day at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City and includes a full six days of activities, each one priced separately. If you attend everything that is offered, then your conference fee will be much higher than any other in your whole year.

Rambo's creator, David Morrell

While ThrillerFest stands out because of its cost, it is also worth every one of your hard-earned dollars. You will see more star power on one stage or at just one of the many cocktail parties than you will ever hope to see in your whole life. The literary energy and brilliance just zing. What’s more, all those big-name authors are helpful and supportive to hopeful writers.

If you are a debut author and get published by a press on the approved list, then you can join the ITW Debut Author program in that year and receive even more support and applause. I was urged to participate in 2013 when my first book Desolation Row launched. I figured I’d go once and be done with such a pricey gathering. I was wrong. I returned in 2014 and again this year. Here are just a few of the reasons why—bestselling authors who participated in this year’s programs.

Spy novelist Gayle Lynds

• 2015 ThrillerMaster Nelson DeMille plus 2015 Silver Bullet Recipient Kathy Reichs
• 2015 Spotlight Guests Mark Billingham, Charlaine Harris, and Greg Iles
• 2014 ThrillerMaster Scott Turow and 2014 Silver Bullet Award recipient Brenda Novak
•  Lee Child interviewed Billingham--they both grew up in Birmingham, England.
• Rambo’s creator David Morrell interviewed DeMille—they both have long and stellar careers.
• Gayle Lynds introduced her newest thriller THE ASSASSINS
• Anne Perry flew over from the UK to talk about her historical mysteries.
• Steve Berry moderated several panels.

Other favorites were Catherine Coulter, Clive Cussler, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Heather Graham, Laurie R. King,  CJ Lyons, Daniel Palmer, Chris Pavone, Hank Phillippi Ryan, MJ Rose, Karin Slaughter, and RL Stine. Each has at least one huge bestseller, and most have many more.

This conference is only ten years old. The genesis came from successful authors who wanted to help budding writers learn the ropes and get ahead. Co-founders David Morrell and Gayle Lynds both attended this year as usual and remain always supportive to other writers. The learning opportunities at ThrillerFest are endless. If you are an aspiring or newly published crime writer and have not yet attended this magnificent event, I encourage you to save up so that you too can attend in 2016. I hope to see you there!

*******

Kay Kendall is a long-time fan of historical novels and writes atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit and turbulence of the sixties. She is a reformed PR executive who lives in Texas with her husband, three house rabbits, and spaniel Wills. Terribly allergic to her bunnies, she loves them anyway! Her book titles show she's a Bob Dylan buff too. RAINY DAY WOMEN published on July 7--the second in her Austin Starr Mystery series. The audio-book will be out soon. 

http://www.amazon.com/Rainy-Day-Women-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00W2X5SCS

*******

Cars, Rats & Anne Perry

By Kay Kendall

I don’t give a fig how a car works. Or electricity. Or a computer. They all might as well be black boxes, as far as I’m concerned. Inside mysterious things happen. Poof! The car turns on. Poof! Electricity powers the air conditioner. Poof! The computer recalls everything you write.

What I do care about is how people work. Why they do the things they do. I discovered this passion one teenaged summer when my boyfriend dumped me and I drooped into churlishness. After a week my mother tired of my moping around the house and suggested I work at one of her charities.

I ended up volunteering at the county’s psychiatric clinic, helping with rudimentary clerical tasks. As I typed up forms and patients’ reports, I was shocked to see so much pain appear on the pages. But later I was gratified to see the clinic’s psychiatric social worker help some of those patients whose woes I’d typed up. Sometimes the patients left our office with springier steps. I fancied I could see their anxieties and depression lift, if only a little.

That same summer my favorite cousin began exhibiting behavioral problems. Merle was super bright but troubled. I never saw him act out or be mean to someone, but I began to hear stories.  I wanted to help him but didn’t have the skills. Ah-hah, I thought! I’d study psychology in college and become a psychiatric social worker so I could fix him.

Please note that I never aspired to be a psychologist or psychiatrist. Perhaps that was because I’d only seen a psychiatric social worker in action and therefore could imagine being one. But also note the date was 1962, the year before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.  And eight years before I became an ardent feminist.

When I entered college in 1963, most courses I took fascinated me, including for a short time even geology and astronomy, subjects taken only to fulfill liberal arts distribution requirements. Psychology, however, was a letdown, a huge bore.

All we studied were rats. I wanted to learn about people. While two friends in my class did manage to cope with rodentia behavior, I couldn’t.  These women went on to earn their doctorates in psychology and help countless people. For me, however, the gap between the actions of rats and people was too great a leap. I never took another course after Psych 101.

I toyed with various majors, but English literature was my mainstay. Fiction encompassed everything about humanity, and I’d always been a ferocious reader. Writing was a joy. After getting a graduate degree in history—real crimes that happened in the past, I now say—I fell back on writing and developed a solid career as a corporate communicator.

I never felt I’d found my niche, however. My heart did not sing.

When I began writing fiction a decade ago, I finally responded to an inner compulsion. What I had to explore is why people do the things they do. Character development and plot are almost synonymous to me. It’s like attending another high school reunion and seeing old friends again after ten years. I’m reading the newest chapters in their lives. People are walking, ongoing stories. Curiosity drives me to learn everything I can and then fictionalize it—showing their behavior and uncovering their motives.

Anne Perry, author

The mystery comes in when good people do bad things. Anne Perry was the first mystery author I noticed whose killers weren’t thoroughly evil, but I didn’t know what to make of this. And then the film Heavenly Creatures came out in 1994, exposing her secret. As a teenager she had helped murder a friend’s mother. Maybe Anne Perry has been trying to fathom her motives ever since? No wonder the killers she devised—especially in the first half of her career—are complicated, unfathomable people, jolted into acting horribly in bad situations.

Each of us is a mysterious black box. Inside are so many factors all jumbled up—memories, desires, hurts. How can other people ever hope to understand us? How can we hope to understand ourselves?

Yet still we try. We must try. I was never able to decode what caused my cousin Merle to derail. I did solve part of the puzzle but was helpless to alter his sad trajectory. Alas, after living for twenty years in a hospital for the criminally insane, he wandered off into a field while on furlough and simply lay down and died. He was forty.

As a mystery author, though, I can put characters into extreme peril and see if they’ll sort out their own complicated lives as well as the sometimes vile things that others do. Solving the puzzles of people living only on pages (or in E files) is a full-time job. After I figure out one set of interconnecting lives, then I go on to develop another set, another, and another. This is a job I relish. You can call me a contented Sisyphus.

*******

Kay Kendall is an international award-winning public relations executive who lives in Texas with her husband, four house rabbits, and spaniel Wills. A fan of historical mysteries, she wants to do for the 1960s what novelist Alan Furst does for Europe in the 1930s and 1940s--write atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit of the age.

Discover more about her at

http://www.KayKendallAuthor.com

Death by Stiletto

By Kay Kendall

Earlier this week I was brainstorming with my manager (AKA my husband) about topics for my next piece here on the Stiletto Blog.

“Eureka,” he said. “Today on the radio I heard about a woman who’s charged with murdering her lover using her stiletto. At first I figured it meant a stiletto knife. But no, it was a shoe.”  

Kay & bunny Dusty

“Perfect,” I said. “I hope I can find the story online.”  And so I began to search, typing in only these words—stiletto murder. Up popped pages and pages of articles. Naturally many citations were from local media outlets, but also from major media like CNN, Huffington Post, and People magazine.

For lots of detail about this murder, you can Google it yourself. But here is the story in a nutshell:  

Prosecutors say Ana Trujillo (age 45) was out of control and stabbed her boyfriend Alf Andersson (age 59) at least 25 times, holding him down until he bled to death. The defense says Andersson was an alcoholic drug user who was drunk and attacking Ms. Trujillo, and she “did the only think she could do.”

At least 25 times!

As luck would have it, the murder took place in Texas. Do you realize how many interesting (read bizarre) murders occur in this state? Remember the cheerleader mom contracting out a hit on her daughter’s rival for a place on the cheerleading squad? Yep, that was Texas all right.

In fact, both the stiletto wielder and the cheerleader mom inhabited my crazy, fast-growing city—Houston. Oh, it doth make one so very proud. Yes indeed. (All jokes aside, but I really do love living in Houston.)

I once read an article that said if you want to publish a bestseller, then just throw the name Texas into the title. That state name outsells any other. Again, I am so proud. Texas Chain Saw Massacre anyone? 

Seriously, it’s a good thing that I enjoy unusual human behavior, since I live where I do. There is so much material just lying all around, material for a mystery author like myself to pick up and use.

Now, I’m not going to claim that Texas has a lock on unusual behavior. Immediately other states come to mind—like California and Florida. Or cities like Chicago and New Orleans. Places where unusual behavior is more commonplace then where I was born and raised—Kansas. When all people can say about your state of birth is that a fictional character named Dorothy wore sparkly red shoes and had a little dog named Toto, you know they think your state is boring.

No one ever says Texas is boring. For good or ill, I cannot argue that fact.

Here’s why I’m telling you all this. It’s because mystery authors have a warped sense of interest in some things. I am totally curious about all human behavior, what makes people tick, as we used to say all the time. I could care less how a car runs or anything else technical. Just bores me to tears. But people, oh how endlessly fascinating they all are—we all are.

That’s the kind of mystery I like to write—when the person "who done it" seems to be a perfectly normal human being, but then snaps. I don’t care for the serial killers who everyone admits are out and out crazy. Where’s the interest, the mystery, in that?

The British writer Anne Perry has produced endless streams of who-done-its, now numbering more than 60 books that have sold more than 26 million copies worldwide. At least the first half of them featured killers who were actually nice people, driven to do the ultimate evil deed, murder.

When I first began reading her books in the early 1990s, I noted that quirk in her fiction right away. Then in 1994 a film was released—Heavenly Creatures, an early feature directed by Peter Jackson, who went on to direct the hugely successful Lord of the Rings trilogy—that let the cat out of the proverbial bag. 

As a teenager, Anne Perry had helped a friend kill her mother in 1954. Both teens were imprisoned in their home country of New Zealand, and then released five years later under the condition that they never see each other again. Ms. Perry had gone on to adopt a pseudonym and make a new life for herself. I myself sat beside her during a luncheon at which she was going to speak. (Of course we were in Houston!)

Now if that doesn’t tell you truth is stranger than fiction, I don’t know what would.

========

I wonder if any of you are as fascinated by this tale as I am? The teen killers did not use a stiletto. Do you know what weapon they did use to murder the mother in NZ?

For more on Anne Perry (real name Juliet Hulme, played by Kate Winslet in the film), I recommend reading these:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/7367284/Perry-biography-breaks-silence

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/when-anne-perrys-dark-past-was-revealed/article4592201/

*******

Kay Kendall is an international award-winning public relations executive who lives in Texas with her husband, five house rabbits, and spaniel Wills. A fan of historical mysteries, she wants to do for the 1960s what novelist Alan Furst does for Europe in the 1930s during Hitler's rise to power--write atmospheric mysteries that capture the spirit of the age.

Discover more about her at

http://www.KayKendallAuthor.com