Haunted Halloween Bits from the SSA Authors

We're sharing our personal haunts this week. Feel free to share your own when you're finished reading -- if you dare.

Scariest book I ever read.....

The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith, and its sequel Passenger. -- Elle Cosimano



Salem's Lot by Stephen King - "I read it while visiting my aunt over Christmas in sixth grade. She had this old radiator that hissed when it came on and it was right under the window. I didn't sleep the entire time -- but I didn't stop reading the book either!" -- Laura Ellen



 It by Stephen King -- Deron Hicks 


The Hot Zone by Richard Preston -- Elisa Ludwig



The Sandman by Neil Gaiman - "I know it's not really straight-up horror, but some story arcs in that series are profoundly chilling and disturbing." -- Mary McCoy


A House in The Sky by Amanda Lindhout - "Nonfiction, but reads like a novel. Captivity narratives in general freak me out, but this one packs a punch." -- Diana Renn

 

 

 

 Spookiest place I ever visited...

St. Mary's

"I spent four nights in the St. Mary's Art Center in Virginia City, Nevada during the NV SCBWI Mentor Retreat. http://www.hauntedhouses.com/states/nv/saint_mary_louise_hospital.htm" -- Elle Cosimano

Holy Trinity Church

"In college I used to cut through a cemetery to get to work. I t freaked me out every time. I'd get jumpy and hear things -- I took to timing myself to see how quick I could get through." -- Laura Ellen

"Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. We were there on a cold, overcast day. The grounds surrounding the church are packed with ancient graves. If ghosts are real, that's the place you would find them." -- Deron Hicks

"The cemetery behind my college campus, when a few of us decided to visit at midnight with a Ouija board. " -- Elisa Ludwig

The Capuchin Crypt from debbzie.com

ParaPedia

"The Capuchin Crypt in Rome - each room is decorated wall-to-wall with the bones of friars. In one room, there's a plaque that reads 'What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.' In another room, a woman's heart is entombed in the wall." -- Mary McCoy

"Zelve National Park in Turkey. Lunar landscape, centuries of buried civilizations, caves, isolated hikes, creepy guys following my husband and I around." -- Diana Renn

The one thing that creeps me out the most. . . 

 

"I really, REALLY dislike spiders and scary clowns." -- Elle Cosimano

"I am with Elle on the clowns -- and dolls with porcelain faces. Just too creepy." -- Laura Ellen

"Snakes. Ugh." -- Deron Hicks

"Rats. And serial killers." -- Elisa Ludwig

"Anything having to do with demon possession I just cannot handle." -- Mary McCoy

"Spiders! I grew up in a house by a lake, and we always got supersize spiders on all our windows. They would spawn more spiders, and eat their dinners right in front of us, and fight -- I am truly traumatized by this." -- Diana Renn

 

The freakiest thing that ever happened to me . . 

"I used to sell real estate. One day, I was showing an historic property (an old farm house built in the 1800s on the edge of a Civil War battlefield) to a lovely couple who were considering a purchase. The house itself had some very strange features. The upstairs bedrooms on both sides of a long, crooked hallway had padlocks that locked from the outside, and the entire house had a very creepy, cold feeling about it. In the dining room, there was a hidden stair behind a door in the wall (an old servant staircase). While we were discussing the property, the door unlatched and swung all the way open, very, very slowly and all three of us felt we weren't alone. Needless to say, we left post haste!" -- Elle Cosimano

"I was staying with my sister in her rental house in Eugene, OR. Alone in the house and taking a shower, l I heard someone yell something outside the bathroom door. When I came out, no one was there, but the microwave was on and I heard a shuffling sound in the living room closet. To get out of the house, I would have had to pass the closet so instead I stood watch  in the hall with a kitchen knife, scared out of my mind, until mys sister and brother-in-law got back a few minutes later. When we checked the closet, no one was in it."  -- Laura Ellen

"My grandmother had a large old photograph of some distant, stern looking relative that she hung in the extra bedroom in her home. The house was old and constantly creaked and groaned. When I was young, I had to sleep in that room. It always seemed that the moonlight would illuminate that photograph. My creepy relative would stare down at me in bed from his spot on the wall as the house creaked and groaned around me." -- Deron Hicks

"I was pretty sure at the time that I saw a UFO during a high school Astronomy Club visit to a field at night. Not sure I'd be as convinced now." -- Elisa Ludwig

"My dorm room sophomore year may have been a little bit haunted. More than once, I saw a shadowy figure standing by the window that disappeared the moment I reached out to touch it. I did some research and found out that somebody had died in my room a few decades before. I might add that I relate this story as a person who doesn't believe in ghosts AT ALL." -- Mary McCoy

"I can't think of one single freaky thing, but I've often felt that I have a vague psychic connection. I will think of someone, or dream something, and soon after find my thoughts or dreams are true, something really happened to that person (nothing horrific), or I will run into that person somewhere. Unfortunately I have not been able to channel this vague, intermittent psychic vibe into anything useful like predicting lottery numbers." -- Diana Renn

12 Days of Mysteries: Day 7

Welcome back to 12 Days of Mysteries! It's Day 7, and on deck today we have suggestions for two YA mysteries that might be a little . . . incognito. That is, stories that might not be packaged as mysteries, yet they deal with crime or detective work in a way that's appealing to mystery fans.

Mary McCoy suggests OUT OF THE EASY, by Ruta Sepatys. "Some mystery elements and a whole lot of crime in this one, one of my faves of 2013," says Mary.

Until she was 11, Josie Moraine was raised in a Big Easy brothel by a house full of prostitutes - one of them her own mother. Since then, she's more or less raised herself, nurturing a dream of attending Smith College and crafting a plan to escape her city, her past, and her mother's reputation. However, when Josie's mother flees town with her gangster boyfriend on the heels of a murder, Josie finds herself sucked back into the underworld she's trying to escape. Set in 1950s New Orleans, Out of the Easy is a feast of a book: there's mystery, romance, scandal, crime, and a winning heroine who's got book smarts and street smarts to spare.

Diana Renn says, "I recently read  Just One Day,  by Gayle Forman, looking for a diversion from mystery and a tale of adventures abroad. There were adventures abroad, all right -- it's a really compelling story about a girl on a post-graduation tour of Europe, who meets a guy acting in a Shakespeare play and impulsively follows him to France for twenty-four hours. But it's there's also a healthy dose of mystery here. When the guy disappears after their one night together, Allyson spends the next year of her life -- at college and then back in Europe-- trying to find answers to her unresolved questions about those twenty four hours. She also tries to find the guy himself. Allyson turns into an amateur sleuth in her personal missing person case, roping in appealing sidekicks and making friends along the way. And kudos to Forman for making online sleuthing so interesting!"

Allyson Healey's life is exactly like her suitcase—packed, planned, ordered. Then on the last day of her three-week post-graduation European tour, she meets Willem. A free-spirited, roving actor, Willem is everything she’s not, and when he invites her to abandon her plans and come to Paris with him, Allyson says yes. This uncharacteristic decision leads to a day of risk and romance, liberation and intimacy: 24 hours that will transform Allyson’s life. A book about love, heartbreak, travel, identity, and the "accidents” of fate, Just One Day shows us how sometimes in order to get found, you first have to get lost. . . and how often the people we are seeking are much closer than we know.


Have you ever read a book that wasn't packaged as a mystery, but you secretly suspect that it is? We'd love to hear about it!

We Are All There for the Same Reason

If you’re the sort of person who’s inclined to stop by a blog like this one, there’s a pretty decent chance you’re the sort of person who’s interested in libraries and what happens to them.

But in case you haven’t heard, what’s happening to libraries right now is not very good.

This week, along with many other people, I rolled my eyes at an article that does not bear linking here written by a man who had not set foot in a library in many years and yet was completely convinced that they were musty old relics, well past their usefulness, that would not be missed if they were all shuttered tomorrow because there is Google.

I have been fighting for libraries for many years now, and of all the eye-rollingly dense arguments against them I have heard, that is certainly the least original one, and yet, it never fails to drive me crazy.

Oh, you don’t use, value, or understand libraries, so OF COURSE, you are very qualified to speak about them.

When somebody like me speaks out in defense of libraries, an uncharitable person might think, Of course the librarian and YA author doesn’t want cuts to her precious libraries for she knows what side her bread is buttered on. But that’s sort of a backwards way of looking at it.

The truth is, I’m a writer and a librarian because of every library I ever set foot in between the ages of 8 and 18, and because of every librarian who ever helped me find a good book or track down an answer, or left me alone because they knew I was feeling prickly and wretched and teenaged and wanting to be left alone. But they let me know that I could do that in the library because it was my place and it belonged to me and I was welcome to be there, prickly or not.

That is a nice story, and I daresay it is a common story, but it is the kind of story that makes someone disinclined to support libraries shrug their shoulders and say, “Why should my tax dollars support that?”

But it is also a story that I have in common with the kids who spend every single day at the library over the summer and the families who check out giant bagfuls of books every week, and the people learning English, learning to read, learning to knit, writing books, doing homework, figuring out how to prepare legal documents, registering to vote, volunteering, and job-hunting.

My library is up the street from Skid Row, and the thing that the staff and social workers and mental health professionals tell the vulnerable populations they work with is the same thing Paul Krugman told his readers last week on his New York Times blog:

We go to the library because it is a nice place and it improves the quality of our lives.

No matter where we come from, we are all there for the same reason.

Right now, the New York Public Library is facing $47 million dollars in cuts to their libraries, cuts that would close branches, reduce hours, and eliminate staff. Library visits, program attendance, and circulation of materials were all up in 2012, but still, the cuts are threatened.

The slogan for the letter-writing and outreach campaign to stop these cuts is “No place does more for more New Yorkers.”

I think that’s putting it modestly.

This is the time of year when library budgets are decided by city councils and boards of trustees. Some of those people understand why it is important to adequately fund nice places that make our lives better. Some of them do not. Of this latter group, I believe that most of them maintain a view that the library is a noble, if outdated institution that froze in time at precisely the moment they last set foot in one, which was sometime around 1975.

That is why, when people who don’t use, value, or understand libraries start cutting their budgets, it’s important that the rest of us stand up and tell them exactly what they’re cutting.

If you’re a New Yorker, take a minute and write a letter on behalf of NYPL. And even if you’re not, it’s a good time of year to check in with your local library and ask what their funding situation looks like. Will they have to cut hours, materials, or staff this year? Ask what you can do to help.

I keep coming back to two sentences I wrote before:

We go to the library because it is a nice place and it improves the quality of our lives.

No matter where we come from, we are all there for the same reason.

That seems like a small and simple and insignificant thing, but I don’t think you could say those words about any place other than a library.

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Mary McCoy is a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, and has been a contributor to On Bunker Hill and the 1947project, where she wrote stories about Los Angeles's notorious past. Her debut novel, DEAD TO ME, will be published by Disney-Hyperion in 2014. It's a YA mystery set in Golden Age Hollywood about a teenage girl investigating the attempted murder of her aspiring film star sister.

Somebody Call the Police!: Fridge Logic and Baby Jane

When I was 14, I became obsessed with the 1962 Robert Aldrich film What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, a cult classic starring Bette Davis as an unhinged former child star named Baby Jane Hudson who terrorizes her invalid sister, Blanche, played by Joan Crawford.

Bette is ghoulishly terrific, cracking her thick, pancake makeup every time she smirks at her own wickedness, and even though Joan looks like a 19th century Sunday school teacher, it eventually becomes clear that she’s no saint either.

It is a weird movie, too harrowing, dark, and studded with Hollywood royalty to be as campy as it is (Blanche's supper tray! The doll! “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy!”). This either works for you or it doesn’t, something I realized when I dragged a friend to a revival screening. He was quiet when we left the theatre, and when I finally asked what he thought of it, he said, with some dismay, “Why didn’t somebody just call the police?!?”

This struck me as hilarious because it is true. What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? would be over in 45 minutes if some responsible party - the maid, the nosy neighbor, her daughter, the creepy pianist who shows up to help Baby Jane with her “comeback,” or even Blanche herself - had just tried a tiny bit harder to get help. However, as someone who had seen the movie half a dozen times and totally bought into its grotesque, wonderful world, this point had never once occurred to me.

There’s a term for this: fridge logic. Alfred Hitchcock allegedly coined it when explaining that audiences probably wouldn’t notice a plot hole in Vertigo until they were home “pulling cold chicken out of the icebox.”

To me, the “plot hole” that ruined the film for my friend didn’t bother me at all because, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t one. It made sense to me that the neighbors, the maid, and even the creep acted just the way they did.

And now, I must force myself to stop writing about What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, about which I could go on all day, and get to my point.

When writing mysteries and thrillers for teens, you will likely have young protagonists who are in over their heads, who are dealing with adult problems, and who probably stand a chance of falling into real peril. One of the challenges of telling this kind of story is keeping readers from thinking, “Why doesn’t she just call the police?” or “Why doesn’t he ask for help?”

If you can anticipate those moments in your writing, you can find ways to make your readers believe in them, and in your characters.

Maybe she can’t go to the police because social services would get involved, or because they’d be considered a prime suspect, or because the police can’t be trusted.

Maybe the person your character trusts most in the world is too far away to do them any good, or asking for help would involve breaking a trust, or endangering a friend, or destroying a relationship. Maybe your protagonist only thinks it will, but if that belief is compelling, readers will buy into it, too.

Like most right-thinking people, I am fond of Harry Potter. However, one thing about the series that drove me nuts was the way Harry was always was wandering off into grave danger without telling his teachers and friends, who had on numerous prior occasions shown themselves to be trustworthy and capable, what he was up to.*

Of course, J.K. Rowling has her reasons. Harry has his reasons, because for all of his winning qualities, Harry can be headstrong, stubborn, myopic, narcissistic, and he has a little bit of a hero/martyr complex. So, when he wanders off to save the day all by himself against impossible odds, I don’t like it, but I believe it. And the reason it drives me nuts is because it reminds me that Harry’s not perfect.

Your characters don’t have to do what’s logical or reasonable or likeable. But they do have to earn it. Otherwise, your readers are going to reach for the cold chicken in the icebox and realize that your story could have ended on page 75 if only some sensible person had just called the police.

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* A teen at the library where I work once shared this observation with me: “Did you ever notice his scar hurts every time he’s about to do something really stupid?”

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Mary McCoy is a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, and has been a contributor to On Bunker Hill and the 1947project, where she wrote stories about Los Angeles's notorious past. Her debut novel, DEAD TO ME, will be published by Disney-Hyperion in 2014. It's a YA mystery set in Golden Age Hollywood about a teenage girl investigating the attempted murder of her aspiring film star sister.

Tracking Down Sarah Skilton!

Yesterday one of our own sleuths, Sarah Skilton, launched her debut novel, BRUISED!

BRUISED is an action-packed YA novel that explores the consequences and psychological effects of a crime. Here's the lowdown:

When Imogen, a sixteen-year-old black belt in Tae Kwon Do, freezes during a holdup at a local diner, the gunman is shot and killed by the police, and she blames herself for his death. Before the shooting, she believed that her black belt made her stronger than everyone else—more responsible, more capable. But now that her sense of self has been challenged, she must rebuild her life, a process that includes redefining her relationship with her family and navigating first love with the boy who was at the diner with her during the shoot-out. With action, romance, and a complex heroine, Bruised introduces a vibrant new voice to the young adult world—full of dark humor and hard truths.

Sarah's a busy debut author this week, but we've managed to track her down here and there. Follow her footsteps and learn more about BRUISED! 

Sarah's blog
Fellow Sleuth Mary McCoy's interview with Sarah at One Four KidLit 
A glowing review at The Nocturnal Library 
Even more praise at Bookshelvers Anonymous
An interview with Sarah at BookYurt

And here's a link to BRUISED on Amazon.

Congrats Sarah! We're proud of you!!

Fresh Blood: Mary McCoy

There are a few things about the me who writes and finishes books that are different from the me who didn’t.

Like most people who make the leap from “I’d like to write a book” to “I wrote a book,” I’m more self-disciplined about writing than I used to be. I have confidence I can finish the manuscripts I start, and I’ve become shockingly unsentimental about making revisions.

But there’s another difference I wanted to write about for my first Sleuths, Spies, & Alibis post, and it’s this:

I ask better questions now.

Since my debut novel, Dead To Me, is a 1940s YA crime noir set in Hollywood, it probably comes as no surprise that I’m a sucker for a true crime story. If it happened at least fifty years ago in Los Angeles and involved a celebrity, BONUS.

At the height of my true crime jones, I wanted to track down the craziest, most notorious, most shocking crimes, and Los Angeles history is full of them - just open up any newspaper. We’ve got vengeful teen lovers, creepy secret attic boyfriends, mysteriously missing starlets, and a rash of celebrity misdeeds.

I ate all of it up, but the more I read, the less interested I was in who did what to whom - or even why they did it. Increasingly, I wanted answers to the kinds of questions that weren’t going to be answered by old newspaper articles or Hollywood Babylon.

I wanted to know what it was like for Lila Leeds to be famous not for her considerable talent, but for a stupid thing that happened in 1948, and why Los Angeles’s most famous murder victim, Elizabeth Short, was so alone during her lifetime. I wanted to know about the people who lingered at the edges of the stories: the kid sisters, mothers, best friends, and favorite uncles. I wanted to see these people as more than the sum of their most notorious parts.

Realizing I felt this way about true stories did wonders for my fiction. When I started asking deeper questions about the characters in my stories - questions that had nothing to do with them being a criminal or a victim - that’s when they turned into the kind of people I wanted to spend an entire book with. That’s when the stories that I wrote began to have something like a heart.

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Mary McCoy
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Mary is a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, and has been a contributor to On Bunker Hill (http://www.onbunkerhill.org/) and the 1947project (http://1947project.com/), where she wrote stories about Los Angeles's notorious past. Mary grew up in western Pennsylvania and holds degrees from Rhodes College and the University of Wisconsin; she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her debut novel is called DEAD TO ME, and will be published by Disney-Hyperion in 2014. It's a YA mystery set in Golden Age Hollywood about a teenage girl who uncovers some sinister business while trying to get to the bottom of her aspiring film star sister's disappearance.

Fresh Blood!

Happy New Year! We're back from our holiday break . . . and we're bigger! (And not in the ate-too-many-holiday-desserts way). (Though some of us might have done that too). (Oops).

Well. We are thrilled to announce some big changes here on the Sleuths Spies & Alibis blog!

1. We're expanding our subject matter to include THRILLERS. 

You'll still find plenty of mystery talk here -- blog posts about the craft of mystery writing, recent and forthcoming books we're excited about, and interviews with new and established authors. But there are so many books where the mystery and thriller genres converge, we decided not to limit ourselves. If a book's mysterious, thrilling, or dealing with crime, we'll consider it on our beat. Besides, there are just so many great thrillers out there now for younger readers, and many more coming in 2013 and 2104. We can't wait to share our reading lists -- and find out what you're reading too! (You can click here for a previous discussion of mysteries vs. thrillers on this blog).

2. Fresh Blood: FIVE new authors joined our blogging team!

These fantastic YA and MG authors have recently published their first books or are soon-to-debut.

This brings our total to 13 authors on this blog, which seems particularly auspicious for 2013!

Starting tomorrow, we'll be blogging every Tuesday and Thursday, as before, with Interrogation Room interviews and guest posts added at whim. We'll let our new recruits introduce themselves more fully in their first posts, but for now, here are some mug shots and rap sheets! (Oh wait, these are the good guys -- here are their dazzling author photos and bios!)

ASHLEY ELSTON lives in Northwest Louisiana with her husband and three sons. She spent ten years working as a wedding photographer but quit to focus on her writing. She has been in cake withdrawal ever since. Her YA debut, THE RULES FOR DISAPPEARING, will be published by Disney/Hyperion in May 2013, and the sequel in Spring 2014.

ELLE COSIMANO is the daughter of a prison warden and an elementary school teacher who rides a Harley. As a teen, she spent summers working on a fishing boat, baiting hooks and lugging buckets of bait. She majored in Psychology at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and set aside a successful real-estate career to pursue writing. She live with her husband and two young sons, and divides her time between her home near Washington, DC and a jungle tree house in the Mayan Riveria. Her YA novel NEARLY GONE will be published by Kathy Dawson Books/Penguin in Winter 2014, with a sequel (NEARLY LOST) coming in 2015; she is also working on two other YA thrillers.

DERON HICKS is a lifelong resident of the state of Georgia who currently resides in Warm Springs, Georgia with his wife and children. Deron is a proud graduate of the University of Georgia, where he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting. Having obtained a degree in painting, Deron took the next logical step in life -- he went to law school (more specifically, Mercer Law School, which he loved). Deron currently serves as the Inspector General for the State of Georgia. His first MG novel, THE SECRETS OF SHAKESPEARE'S GRAVE (Book 1 in the Letterford Mysteries series) was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.

MARY McCOY is a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, and has been a contributor to On Bunker Hill and the 1947project, where she wrote stories about Los Angeles's notorious past. Mary grew up in western Pennsylvania and holds degrees from Rhodes College and the University of Wisconsin; she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her debut novel, DEAD TO ME, will be published by Disney/Hyperion in 2014. It's a YA mystery set in Golden Age Hollywood about a teenage girl who uncovers some sinister business while trying to get to the bottom of her aspiring film star sister's disappearance.

SARAH SKILTON After growing up in the suburbs of Chicago and graduating with a TV/Radio degree from Ithaca College in upstate New York, Sarah moved to sunny Los Angeles, where her blood promptly thinned out, preventing her from returning to either location. Kicking around Hollywood for ten years, Sarah worked as a movie-of-the-week production assistant, a TV extra, a freelance writer, a film reviewer, and a blogger at a Japanese marketing group. She currently reads TV and film scripts for a company that streamlines the casting process for agents and actors. She and her husband, a magician, live in Santa Clara, CA, with their young son. Sarah is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, a fact that came in handy while writing her martial arts-themed debut YA novel, BRUISED (Amulet Books, March 5, 2013). Her second book, HIGH AND DRY (Amulet, 2014) is a YA mystery about corruption in high school.



To find out more about their books (as well as those of the other eight sleuths here), please see the "Our Books" tab at the top of our blog!

And please join us in welcoming our new Sleuths!