What’s in a name? Well, a lot. I’ve been wrestling with an idea for a new mystery series–and I do mean wrestling. So far it’s gone through at least two major overhauls, but I think I’m finally getting it where I want it… except for one thing. The hero’s name. I keep changing it because it doesn’t feel right. It’s like an itchy sweater. It looks okay, but I know I won’t be able to live with it forever.

First, my hero was “Sean.” Then he was “Gabe.” Now he’s “Matt.” I think he’s going to stay “Matt.” So far that name seems like a good fit. But what’s the big deal? you’re probably saying. One name’s as good as another, right? Just pick one and start writing.

Well, not so easy. If the name doesn’t feel right, it becomes a speed bump in the writing process. It slows me down and makes me think about it every time I see it. I become like the guy who bought a metallic orange car because the price was right. Every time he looks at it, he feels a ping of regret.

I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. The great Elmore Leonard couldn’t start a new book until he’d named his characters, and the names had to feel right. Suppose he had gone with “Lester Godwin” instead of “Raylan Givens.” Dollars to doughnuts, it wouldn’t have been the same character. And I’m willing to bet he wouldn’t have been as good.

So here I am playing the name game, thumbing through Name Your Baby books and wishing I still had a paper telephone directory. (Strolling through cemeteries is another method I’ve used. I’ve gotten some good ideas scanning headstones. Except in my Philadelphia neighborhood, the closest cemetery has more “Jedidiahs” than “Johns” and I don’t write historicals.) But let’s hope “Matt” sticks. I want to get moving on this book. Fingers crossed, I’ll keep him around for a long time. Like a good sweater.

Fiction or non-fiction? This is a frequent dilemma for writers, like me, who write both. I will latch onto an idea for a book, always a crime-related story, something that really happened, something historical. I’ll let it ferment in my brain for a while to see if it still seems like a good idea after a day, a week, a few weeks. When I get one that won’t leave me alone, I’ll start to do some serious reading on the subject. If I’m still intrigued, I’ll do more reading. I’ll buy books and scour the Internet. Some ideas will fall by the wayside usually because there’s not enough available information or the information that’s out there is obviously unreliable. More often than not, what I had thought was a golden find isn’t as promising as I’d hoped.

But other ideas get better with time. The more I look into the subject, the more possibilities I see for creating a great read. I get excited. I can visualize my finished book, even the cover art. The source material turns out to be better than I expected. My vision for presenting it will make it spell-binding, a page-turner, a bestseller!

Then reality sets in. When the giddiness wears off, I start to see problems. (There are always problems.) The story in my mind is great, but the source material isn’t quite as complete as I need it to be. There are insufficient records of people and events to fill the narrative tapestry I want to create. Now I start to get nervous. I fear that, like Mr. Hyde, the novelist in me will take over. I’ll take too many liberties in telling the story. I then start to hear critics in my head roasting me over hot coals for making things up. It’s one thing to say John Wilkes Booth, for instance, drank his coffee with cream and sugar when there’s no record of how he took it or if he even drank coffee. In that case, no harm done. What difference does it make, really. It’s unlikely that his beverage preferences would have changed the course of history. But if the writer has Booth talking to contemporaries when there’s no record of such meetings, or thinking thoughts the man never wrote about or told anyone else about, the writer is skating on very thin ice.

This is when the BIG DECISION has to be made: do I write it as fiction or non-fiction? Now contrary to what many people believe, historical fiction does not by definition mean bullshit. Sometimes a good writer can reach deeper levels of truth using common sense and the probability of events to connect the dots he wishes he’d found in his research. If the writer can limit the what-ifs and concentrate on the things that probably did happen, he might produce a compelling and worthwhile read. BUT  in all likelihood it won’t be taken as seriously as a work of non-fiction. In fact it might be passed off as fanciful fluff no matter how much research and honest effort went into it.

Even though Mario Puzo based many of the characters in The Godfather on real-life gangsters, no one reads that book as a treatise on the Mafia. It’s a great story, colorful and well told, but any glimpses of factual Mafia history are bonuses to those reader who recognize them, ingredients that not everyone tastes. Ideally I want my research to give me all the facts I need to to write non-fiction as tasty and satisfying as, say, Erik Larsen’s The Devil in the White City or Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

So that’s where I am right now and why I’m writing this blog entry to get it off my chest. I have a juicy idea, and I’m casting my research net every day, searching for more material to let me realize this idea as non-fiction. But I’m not coming up with a whole lot of new discoveries. Pretty soon it will be time to consider doing it as a historical novel. Or look for a new idea. Sigh…

Supposedly you never get out of high school. That might be true, but I think I never got out of elementary school. I suspect this is true of most writers, aspiring and professional. Nothing can match the glorious feeling of self-worth and accomplishment that came with turning in a paper and getting it back with a circled A and maybe a succinct comment of praise. “Excellent!” “Keep Up the Good work!” “Well done!” Unfortunately grown-up writers rarely get this kind of unqualified ego boost.

 Criticism and rejection come with the territory. Editors, agents, reviewers, and readers line up like a firing squad–or at least it can feel that way.  The competition is tough, and the marketplace changes with every new mega-bestseller. Writers are often urged to follow the trends, then later condemned for being trendy. Originality that sells is praised, but when it doesn’t sell–or when a publisher can’t foresee it selling–it gets the hook. The secret to success is to be totally original and exactly like everything that came before. Readers–as well as the gatekeepers of written content–want material that’s meaty, entertaining, and even startling as long as it comes in a reassuring form. Tell readers what they don’t know but in a way that they do know. Think about it. How many contemporary sleuthing duos hit the bookshelves every year following the blueprint laid down by Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories? Retellings of Shakespeare? Too many to count. And even the Bard borrowed freely from works he read and plays he saw. It wasn’t considered plagiarism back then; it was working within the tradition. And then there’s the Bible, which is the bible of relationships, conflict, hardship, hope, dreams, salvation, and retribution. Plot lines and characters galore to filch and rework for fictional purposes.

But I digress, as writers tend to do–got to fill up those pages after all. My original point was a nostalgic observation. By the time the writer is an adult, the sweet memory of turning in a school paper and getting praise has long evaporated. Publishing is a business, and businesses are about making a profit. If the content provider gets a good feeling from creating his work, all well and good, but the writer’s gratification is no one’s top concern. I understand that. I’ve been working these fields for a long time. But I still yearn for the giddy elation of getting an A on an essay and pleasing my teachers. And let me just point out that many of the no-nonsense nuns I had in Catholic school were not easy to please.  They could be merciless. Just like publishers. I’m just saying.

I’m reading Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, a non-fiction account of an American Olympian’s unrelenting ordeals as a POW in the Pacific during World War II.  The book is a genuine page-turner. Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse for this poor guy, they do. But what struck me as I was reading–and distracted me–was the kind of detail she provides. Where did she get all this information? The design of a B-24 bomber probably isn’t that hard to find. But the subject’s favorite foods? Incidents with his high-school chums? Verbatim messages he was forced to deliver for Japanese propaganda radio broadcasts? I can see how Hillenbrand could have unearthed some of this stuff, but page after page is full of wonderful material.

I turned to the Acknowledgments, hoping to find out how she’d done such amazing job. Well, right off the bat I learned that she was able to interview her subject who in his nineties was ready, willing, and able to share his stories. She also found others who had lived through that period willing to talk. Some kept diaries and scrapbooks and saved letters and newspaper clippings, which they shared with Hillenbrand. She also used various libraries and archives in the US and Japan. She was lucky to have found such rich sources of information, but luck doesn’t detract from her achievement in putting it all together to create an exciting read. She deserves all the kudos she’s received.

Researching a non-fiction book can be a full of traps. Fiction, not so much. (Settle down–I can hear the complaints already.) When a novelist says he’s researching his next historical novel, he’s like a shopper in the supermarket filling his cart. He knows what he wants to write about and already has a pretty good idea of how the plot will go. What he’s looking for is interesting details to give his story color and texture. Oh, I think I’ll have my protagonist wear these clothes, work at this kind of job, worship at that kind of church. It takes work–no question about that–but it can’t stop you dead in your tracks the way non-fiction research can. The only research trap for fiction is finding mesmerizing gems that distract you from the bigger story. A French foot soldier in the 14th century would drag his own dead goat to war for food, hacking off pieces of meat whenever his stomach growled and the enemy wasn’t trying to kill him. It’s a great detail, but if you divert your entire plot just to work in the dead goat, the narrative thrust might suffer and your novel could become like a dead goat–smelly and indigestible.

But with non-fiction, the traps are more perilous. You can dig for months, filling notebooks, underlining stacks of books, photocopying articles, assembling your arsenal, but then one inconvenient fact can cross your path and stop your progress like a huge boulder in the road. This fact might call into question everything you believed about the story you wanted to tell. Your urge is to ignore it, but you know you can’t. Even if you get it by your editor, some reviewer somewhere will call you on it, embarrass you, and worse, discredit your work. You think maybe you can get away with adding a footnote explaining that this fact isn’t really that significant, but deep down you know it is and you can’t get around it.

Another potential pitfall is the trek through the desert. You search and search, but you can’t find enough good material. You want to believe it’s out there, but every day is just another useless slog. (Recently this situation has been exacerbated by the government sequester, which has closed or limited access to public archives. But don’t get me started on that.) I recently spoke to an author who told me he had spent nine months researching a book and ultimately had to abandon the project because there just wasn’t enough information for a book-length treatment on his chosen topic. When this happens, it’s time to starting thinking about downsizing to an article.

True crime has one advantage when it comes to research. Trial transcripts can be a treasure trove of information. They’re not always complete, and they’re not always accurate in cases where the defendant was wrongly convicted, but they’re a good place to start. The pertinent names and places are all there even if the interpretation of the facts is suspect. Trial attorneys, after all, are like novelists. Each side is selling a narrative to an audience, the jury. But at the very least, trial transcripts show you where to start digging.

Right now I’m doing research for what I hope will become a non-fiction book. It’s a World War II story that involves a partnership between the US military and organized-crime members on both sides of the Atlantic. No crimes were committed–at least from the Allied point of view–and therefore no trials or trial transcripts. It’s also an episode in US history that the military had tried to bury, and I’m finding that they largely succeeded. It would be great to be able to interview people who participated in this alliance or even their children who heard stories from their fathers and have diaries, letters, and photos they’d be willing to share. So I intend to keep digging. I know there are good stories out there–I just have to find them. Hopefully, I’ll strike a vein as rich as Laura Hillenbrand’s.

A few weeks ago I took a bus from Philadelphia to New York, and as we zipped through the New Jersey Meadowlands and the Manhattan skyline came into view, I realized that I was following my personal map of crime. Crime writing, that is.

The bus had just passed Newark’s Ironbound section, which reminded me of the mob hit man I had once met who had been involved in a beef between the Jersey faction of the Lucchese Family and the Philadelphia Family over Joker Poker video machines. It was a unique story because it wasn’t family against family, but the younger generation against the older. My partners and I pitched it as a documentary, but after some initial interest, no one bit. At the time The Sopranos was eating up the whole Mafia pie.

Newark is near the home base of Joshua Armstrong and the Seekers, a team of bounty hunters guided by their spiritual beliefs. Their success rate is better than the US Marshals’, but they use force only when it’s absolutely necessary. Joshua and I collaborated on the non-fiction book, THE SEEKERS: A BOUNTY HUNTER’S STORY.

The Pulaski Skyway, a vintage black iron snake that crosses the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers, reminded me of the junkyard in its shadow where cops dug hole after hole looking for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa’s remains. It’s one of dozens of Hoffa burial sites around the country that didn’t pan out. I once wrote a piece on Hoffa’s disappearance and listed all the locations where tipsters had told investigators they’d find his body. They still haven’t found it and probably won’t. The prevailing theory these days is that he was cremated soon after he was abducted. As the wiseguys say, no body, no crime.

The new World Trade Center tower is taking shape in lower Manhattan, a soaring monolith on the site where the twin towers had stood. After 9/11, I had written an article about the last two people rescued from the wreckage, both courageous Port Authority Police officers, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno.

On Route 3, on the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, there’s a Motel 8 wedged on a strip of land next to a wall of jagged rust-colored rocks. It used to be the York Motel where mass-murderer Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski had murdered one of his underlings with a cyanide-laced hamburger. When I interviewed Kuklinski in prison in 1992, he explained to me that he had to mix the poison with ketchup to hide the taste. He recommended mixing cyanide in a tasty sauce of some kind, something “gooky,” otherwise the victim might not eat it. This was one of many tips he gave me about the killing trade.

On the winding road to the tunnel, I looked to my left and saw Manhattan spread out on the other side of the Hudson, like a reclining giant about to sit up. I looked toward Greenwich Village where the boss of the Genovese Family, the late Vinny “Chin” Gigante, would amble along the sidewalk in front of his apartment building in his slippers and bathroom, mumbling and talking to the parking meters, maintaining the mental disability act he’d started in the 1960s to avoid prosecution. The Feds eventually proved that it was a ruse and put him away. Gigante was the inspiration for one of my favorite villains, “Sal Immordino,” in my thrillers, BAD LUCK and BAD MOON.

Using the slanted top of the Citigroup Center as my guide, I estimated the location of East 50th Street next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral where a crucial scene in the TV movie adaptation of my novel, BAD APPLE, was filmed. In the scene, the hero, FBI Special Agent “Mike Tozzi” (played by Chris Noth) is kidnapped and thrown into a van with the girl of his dreams (played by Dagmara Dominczyk). I was on the set that day and was tickled pink to see dozens of people working on a film based on an idea that came out of my little bitty head. Sweet.

A few blocks north and west on 57th Street, I met disgraced FBI agent John Connolly who had handled Boston’s two most notorious gangsters, James “Whitey” Bulger and Stevie “the Rifleman” Flemmi. While protecting them as “top echelon informants,” Connolly also ran interference for them as long as they fed him inside information about the Mafia. It was a win-win for everyone involved–Connolly made high-profile mob busts that furthered his career, and Bulger and Flemmi had the best friend a gangster could ever want.  When I met him, Connolly was looking for a co-writer for a proposed book on his mob-busting adventures, but there was something fishy about him. Part of it was his flashy John Gotti style. I followed my instincts and politely declined to be considered for the project, and it turned out that my gut was right. Connolly was later convicted of second-degree murder for providing information that led to a gangland slaying in Miami ordered by Bulger and Flemmi. He’s now serving a 40-year sentence.

Looking uptown, I was reminded of the long weekend I spent with Harlem drug lord, Leroy “Nicky” Barnes, perhaps the most interesting criminal I’ve ever interviewed. He had served his time, gone into witness protection, and was living a life very different from the supercharged high life he had once known. But the leopard hadn’t lost his spots even if they weren’t obvious anymore. I’ve met a lot of convicted felons, several of them murderers, but none had Barnes’s razor-sharp criminal instincts. Unfortunately I didn’t get the opportunity to write his book, but I don’t consider the time I spent with him a waste. It was a graduate-school level education.

My bus slipped into the shade of the Lincoln Tunnel, and I was quickly mesmerized by the dancing, streaming reflections of red tail lights on the tiled walls. Tail Light River is a book title I’ve been holding onto for decades. I don’t know what the book would be about–I just love the image. But who knows? Maybe one of these days I’ll meet someone whose story will go with the title, and he or she might be another pushpin in my map of crime.

I’ve finally figured it out. Characters in TV shows are always going back to their pasts for revelatory clues about themselves, trying to find out why they are the way they are. So after watching an episode of Girls the other night (which by the way features the most self-analytical characters ever) my wife and I somehow got on the topic of our favorite songs from childhood. I recalled liking Burl Ives singing “I Know an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly” and, of course, Fess Parker’s “Ballad of Davey Crockett.” We reminisced about the toddler idol, Raffi, whom our daughter adored in the 1980s. (Sooooo many car trips with the Baby Beluga album on the tape player. “Baby Beluga… Baby Beluga… Baby Beluga.” Raffi’s oh-so-mellow and soporific voice over and over again when what I really wanted was just a few minutes of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band or the Mahavishnu Orchetra or really anybody but Raffi.)

So I got to thinking about other favorite songs when I was a tyke. The Nestle’s chocolate song sung by Farfel, the puppet dog, was a definite fave. I loved it when he clapped his jaws shut at the end–who didn’t? And I remember my Aunt Kat playing Elvis 45s downstairs in my grandparents’ apartment and really liking “Hound Dog.” (“You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time…”) But the two songs that stand out in my mind are “Love and Marriage” and “High Hopes,” both sung by Frank Sinatra. While most kids my age were heavily into whatever they were hearing on Ding Dong School, I was grooving to Old Blue Eyes. Just imagine him singing those catchy ditties in the studio–sharp suit, tie loosened, fedora tipped back, cigarette going, glass of Jack Daniels in his hand, one take and out. Not exactly squeaky-clean Raffi.

Now you have to understand that in Italian-American households back then, there were usually three portraits hanging in a cluster in every kitchen: Jesus, JFK, and Frankie. Jesus for obvious reasons, though sometimes a picture of the sitting Pope served as a stand-in. John F. Kennedy because he was the first (and only) Roman Catholic President of the United States. And Sinatra because there’s no other like him, a Manichean embodiment of soaring talent and bad-boy swagger. In my world you weren’t allowed to merely prefer Sinatra, you had to like Sinatra. His picture looked at me whenever I sat at my grandparents’ kitchen table, staring through the rising steam of Grandma’s gravy pot. He got into my pores and seeped into my consciousness. The guy with the golden pipes, the phrasing that spoke to you and only you, the man who hung out with mob bosses and chased down the Manchurian Candidate, the lucky fella who seemed to have every luscious Hollywood piece of tail he wanted without even trying. Screw Ding Dong School. I was into ring-a-ding-ding.

So, duh. Is it any wonder I ended up writing about mobsters, cops, and detectives for a living? It wasn’t a direct one-for-one cause and effect, but I guess when the voice you grow up with is so decidedly adult, you tend to seek out what’s in the shadows. Well, so be it. I’m not a “Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah” kind of guy, and frankly I’m glad I’m not. As Frank used to say, “That’s life

I’ve been writing books for a long time, and you’d think I’d have it down pat by now. Ha! There are some things I still stubbornly resist even though I should know better. Like writing description. For me it’s like having someone tell you to eat your peas (even though, for the record, I like peas). I just don’t like doing it. I get so involved with unspooling the plot, I don’t want to stop and smell the roses. I’m more interested in what my characters are doing than what they’re wearing, seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting. I have to force myself to write that stuff because those paragraphs feel like road blocks, downed trees and live wires. On first reading they seem clunky and obvious. I want to be on the motorcycle riding it, not telling you what color it is, how big the engine is, how it sounds, and what the exhaust smells like.

Funny thing is, I don’t feel that way when I’m reading someone else’s work. I enjoy well-written descriptions that let me experience what the characters are experiencing. But when I write that stuff, it doesn’t feel right. It feels awkward and, in a way, too easy.

But that’s the odd thing about creative endeavors. Very often the easiest things get the best audience response. Think of a guitar god who wails away at top volume and gets wild cheers when all he’s playing is the same note over and over. Sometimes craft gets in the way. Most audiences tend to like it simple, raw, and from the gut: three chords and a driving beat. Sometimes the more intricate the song, the fewer fans. If people really wanted a steady diet of complex, challenging, and experimental music, we’d have dozens of top 40 jazz and classical radio stations on the dial.

Writers who labor over clever phrasing, precious word choice, and nuanced construction might get high praise from the critics but snores from readers. A minimalist writer will forgo descriptions, judging them conventional and passé. But if that’s what readers want, why should the writer deny them? (Unless, of course, you believe that reading a novel shouldn’t be entertainment first and foremost. But that’s another kettle of fish we won’t get into here.)

The way I see it, just because I don’t like writing descriptions, I shouldn’t shortchange my readers. Look, if Eric Clapton can hang on a single note and repeat it until it cries and his fans roar, and then do it again night after night, I can certainly describe clothes and rooms and meals and landscapes and facial expressions even though it feels like I’ve done it a hundred times before. After all, if you want to keep working, you have to please the fans. Right?

No, seriously. Read bad books. If you want your writing to improve, pick up a few. They’ll teach you a lot. Great books will teach you little or nothing about the craft. They’re so good they’re mesmerizing. It’s like trying to learn how to be a magician by watching Houdini. He was so adept people never saw what he was doing. His tricks were smooth and seamless. Audiences never suspected the mechanisms behind the curtain, the devices he used to pull off his amazing stunts. But a lot can be learned from a bad magician whose slow card handling, clumsy distractions , and less-than-perfect apparatus shows you how it’s done and more importantly how it fails. Reading a wonderful book is like watching Houdini. But reading a bad book is like watching the Infrequently Amazing Shlumpy. In a bad book, the curtain is falling down and you can see what goes wrong and why. Hopefully you’ll learn not to repeat those kinds of mistakes.

I’m not alone in this opinion. This fall I was on a panel at Noircon in Philadelphia with mystery giant Lawrence Block who said he had learned a lot about writing as a young man evaluating manuscripts for a paperback publisher. He saw what worked and what didn’t in unpublished manuscripts and thus learned what not to do. I had a similar experience working for two small book publishers in New York in the 1980s. I read a lot of manuscripts from the slush pile as well as manuscripts submitted by literary agents. I saw many common mistakes and came to understand why they were mistakes.

Writing a novel is a matter of choices. Will your hero be like this or like that? Will you write in the first person or third? How fast or slow will you dole out information to keep the reader engaged? How much description will you include? Will your writing be spare and punchy or florid and expansive? How will you handle dialogue? Will you be able to strike the right balance between realistic speech and uploading information needed to further the plot? A poor choice can wreck a novel. It will ripple through the entire work, getting bigger and more problematic as it goes along.

So this is why I say, if you want to write a good book, do yourself a favor and read a couple of bad books. You might learn a few tricks.

I have a compulsion. I have to write. No, I have to write. If I don’t write at least five double-spaced pages a day, I feel as if I’ve failed. Fallen behind. Wasted the day. It’s the curse of the scribe. If I don’t put words on paper (okay, on the screen), then I’m not working. And if I’m not working, I have no reason for being. I’m just taking up space. I write therefore I am.

But this, I know, is a bad attitude. But knowing the problem doesn’t always help the situation.  I have to force myself to sit still and not write. Why, you ask? There are many benefits to not writing. I’m not talking about doing nothing, just not writing. Reading, researching, making notes, collecting my thoughts, figuring out what to write, accumulating substance–that’s what I’m talking about. A lot of writers are long on style but short on substance. The author doesn’t have a whole lot to say, but he or she strains to say it beautifully. The result: empty reading calories. I know very well how this happens, and I’ve been guilty of it myself. But the compulsion takes over. Gotta make the daily quota whether I have something to say or not. The assembly line keeps chugging along, and I have to keep up. I have to make those damn widgets!

I’ve started working on a new book, a historical novel, and right now I’m at the hardest and, I’d say, most important stage, the Not-Writing Stage. I’m reading, surfing the web, gathering books and articles, taking notes–and it’s killing me. I want to dive right in, get the show on the road, put the pedal to the metal, and kick out my five pages a day so that I’ll feel that I’m really doing something. But I must plug my ears to this siren song and not open up a new file and type out “Chapter 1.” Not yet.  I have to stockpile my ammo first. There’s nothing worse than getting to the middle of the manuscript and having nothing else to say. Style will fill only so many pages.

It has been a LONG haul.  Twenty years to be exact. I started researching and writing THE ICEMAN, the story of killer Richard Kuklinski, back in 1992. It was published in hardcover and paperback in the US, then in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. Like most books, its popularity petered out after a few years, but I did my best to keep it in print, even offering it to a publisher for free once (they said yes, then changed their minds–their loss). One way or another I managed to keep it alive. Thank God. Director Ariel Vromen discovered it online a few years back, and to make a long story short, it’s now a major motion picture, starring Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, Ray Liotta, Chris Evans, James Franco, and David Schwimmer. The film will be released sometime in 2013, but the trailer is available now. Take a look.