NOTES OF A CONTRACT KILLER

by James Lincoln Warren

On Saturday I got a check and a contract in the mail from Penny Publications LLC, d/b/a Dell Magazines, for a short story I submitted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The check wasn’t huge, but it was certainly welcome: $720.00. Considering that the story it was paying for was less than 8000 words, that’s an excellent rate, about 9¢ a word.

The contract was my copy of the legal terms governing the publication of the story1 countersigned by Dell’s rights and licensing person, finalizing the sale. It’s a pretty brutal little story involving multiple murders, so I guess you could say that this document makes me a contract killer.

What’s in the contract is interesting. Nowhere does it say that it is paying for the story (referred to as the “Work” in the contract) by the word. Instead, it is paying for specific rights for the Work as a whole. The final amount is determined by two combined sums, the first English language publication rights and non-exclusive translation rights ($575.00 — about 7¢ a word, which is still pretty good) and non-exclusive license to allow others to reprint the work in its entirety, at 25% of the first amount ($145.00 — the remaining 2¢).2

There are a couple of restrictions. As far as first English publication rights are concerned, that includes electronic publication, since there is an electronic version of Alfred Hitchcock. The e-version, though, is restricted to nine months’ availability after the on-sale date, which is a good thing for the author. Most web-based e-magazines never remove a story from circulation, unless the website itself is discontinued for whatever reason. The non-exclusive licensing rights include all magazines and newspapers in the world not owned by Dell, in whatever language. So if Dell gets an inquiry from Tashkent to reprint the story in the Uzbek tongue, they can authorize it and I’ve already been paid for it.

Notice, however that I’ve been paid separately for the translation rights, which were included in the first sum, and the licensing rights, which were paid for in the second sum. This means that they can translate it themselves without licensing it, or conversely license it for foreign publication without translating it. But either way, these rights are non-exclusive, and I’m always happy to sell non-exclusive rights. After all, if I get an inquiry from Kampala to publish the story in the Luganda language, I can negotiate with the interested party directly and not worry about Dell at all.

Not that I should proceed with impunity in all my doings, because in the second section of the contract, Dell reserves certain rights without paying for them up front. That part of the contract indicates what Dell will pay if the reserved rights are exercised. What rights are they?

(1) First worldwide English anthology rights ($100) or first North American English language anthology rights ($75).

(2) Subsequent English anthology use ($50).

(3) Foreign language anthology rights ($30).

(4) 50% of royalties if the work is selected by a book club and published.

(5) First performance rights, i.e., movie, TV, songs, etc., payment to be negotiated.

(6) The right to license performance rights for a fee to a third party, 80% of the fee going to the author.

(7) The right to pay the author for performance rights if the author receives another offer, at that offer’s amount. So if Universal wants to buy the film rights and offers me 75¢ for them, Dell can buy the rights first at the same price, and Universal is out of luck.

(8) Merchandising rights, i.e., toys, T-shirts, calendars, paper dolls, action figures, theme parks . . . for 50% of the fees.

Lest you think that Dell is acting the part of a Sith Lord by insisting on these rights, please think again. I love all the folks at Dell and it is their policy never to interfere with the good fortune of one of their authors. When we here at Criminal Brief printed A Criminal Brief Christmas as a prize, we had to get permission from Dell to reprint some of the stories in the anthology. They cheerfully waived their rights when we told them what the project was all about.

As another illustration of their goodwill, in this last contract I lined out those four clauses mentioned above regarding performance rights, because I had been approached by someone else before I sent the story to Dell and I wanted to hang on to them. They agreed, without penalty or comment, to forgo those rights and initialed the contract where I had lined out the applicable language to show they were in concord with it.

Dell also reserves certain other rights, which you would have to be a fool not to grant, as they accrue to the author’s benefit: the right to illustrate the Work, and the right to publicize you, your bio, and your likeness in all advertising and promotion. Oh, throw me in dat briar patch!

The rest are pretty straightforward, too: if you use copyrighted material in your work, you and not they are responsible for obtaining permission for its use; you accept legal responsibility for everything legally objectionable contained in the Work; you agree to give them credit as the original publisher of the Work.

What they don’t do is copyright your story for you. In fact, they will indicate that you own the copyright to the story when they publish it.

Other companies may—well, I should say almost certainly do—have different contracts reserving different rights (or not) at different rates, but as Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen are the standards in the mystery crime fiction world, I would call Dell’s contracts the standard as well.

My advice is, if you get one, sign it. There’s nothing like getting that check in the mail to make your day.

Kittehs

In case any of you are wondering about how the feline domestic situation has progressed since my report last week regarding the alienation between the sisters due to Lizzie’s trip to the vet, I am happy to report that since Lizzie got her stitches removed and no longer has to wear that stupid clown collar, Emma and Lizzie are as devoted to each other as before.

I love my cats.

1. I had earlier received two copies of the contract when I was informed by Dell that the story had been selected for publication, which I then signed and sent back to them. This was my personal copy of the contract being returned to me. [↩]
2. Actually, 25% of $575.00 is only $143.75, but I’m good with the extra buck and a quarter. [↩]

Picasso
Braque
Matisse
Manet
Vermeer
Rembrandt

ARS GRATIA ARTIS

by Leigh Lundin

The Pompidou

Three days ago, thieves stole €100 million (approximately $125 million) in art from the world’s second largest modern art collection. Missing from the Paris Museum of Modern Art are paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani.

I didn’t immediately connect the robbery with the Pompidou’s Musée National d’Art, but eventually the penny dropped: I knew exactly where it was. Le Centre Georges Pompidou recalls a striking glass and steel building with color-coded conduits in red, yellow, blue, and green on 11 avenue du Président Wilson. The building’s €15 million security upgrade was rendered impotent by missing alarm parts ordered a month and a half earlier.

Music and art survive over the centuries because it’s not only the best of its kind, it is the best of mankind. Art may be the finest contribution human endeavor leaves behind. Next year or next century, most of today’s pop art and music will be forgotten, but the classical lives on because nothing else compares.

The Gardner

As astonishing as the Paris art theft is, it was dwarfed by the $300-500 million theft from the intimate Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, devastating the museum’s collection of Dutch and French masters. It was breached not by a failed security system, but by a gullible guard following orders of ersatz police, thieves in disguise.

Twenty years later, the art remains missing, but more information has been released to the public. Unlike the meticulous Parisian thief, the Boston looters crudely cut and ripped priceless paintings from their frames. That carelessness led experts to think the thieves were inexperienced and subsequently consider if the paintings were properly stored and cared for.

Assuming the thieves didn’t destroy them in a panic, the paintings couldn’t be sold in the legitimate marketplaces of the western world. A few other countries have laws that allow unknowing buyers of stolen artwork to become legal owners, but it seems hard to argue any buyer could remain ignorant of the provenance of his purchase.

Where is the art?

A couple of fictional scenarios seem possible, not unlike the recovery of the Nederlands’ Noortman Gallery paintings which learned a middleman in Dubai was handling stolen art.

In one imagining, a Boston Irish crook might sit around his Southie flat in his sleeveless undershirt, drinking Killian Red and toasting hundred million dollar paintings tacked to his wall. Maybe, but perhaps Whitey Bulger’s New England mafia made connections with an Ian Fleming badman/madman who bought the paintings for a dime and mounted them on his wall, toasting the masterpieces with absinthe and chortling he alone has a prize no one else in the world can appreciate.

Do you feel a story coming on?

A SERIES SITUATION

by John M. Floyd

Over the past couple weeks I’ve had something take place, writingwise, that hasn’t happened often. In fact it hasn’t happened to me since maybe 2002.

No, I didn’t write a story without committing a comma error, and no, I didn’t come down with an attack of writer’s block. What did happen was that two of my short stories appeared in back-to-back issues of Woman’s World magazine (the May 17th and May 24th issues). And what’s really odd about it is that this time they’re both “series” stories, but they’re each part of a different series. Not that it matters, but the first story is called “The Quilt Caper,” the second one “The Gospel Truth.”

South of Mayberry

For several years now, I’ve written two sets of small-Southern- town mystery stories, one of them starring self-professed crimefighter Angela Potts and her long-suffering former fifth-grade student Sheriff Charles (Chunky) Jones. The other series features retired schoolteacher Frances Valentine and her daughter Lucy, who also happens to be the county sheriff. Both Angela and Fran annoy the hell out of their sheriffs and manage to publicly correct them on matters of both grammar and police procedure; in Fran’s case, she’s also on the lookout for a suitable future son-in-law for Lucy. The biggest thing they have in common, though, is that both of these crafty but bossy ladies usually figure out how to solve whatever mystery is afoot before their law officers do. (One fan wrote me to say that Angela and Chunky remind her of Bea and Andy Taylor, on TV. I was pleased to hear that, but in truth Angela’s smarter than Aunt Bea was and my sheriff isn’t nearly as smart as Andy was.)

So far, twenty-five of the Angela Potts stories, including “The Gospel Truth,” have appeared in Woman’s World, and one in Amazon Shorts. Thirteen of the Fran and Lucy Valentine stories showed up in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine under the series name “Law and Daughter,” one story was included in the Seven by Seven anthology by Wolfmont Press, one was featured in the now-defunct Mouth Full of Bullets e-zine, and the aforementioned “The Quilt Caper” come out in Woman’s World. The entire Fran and Lucy series is also upcoming in future issues of Mysterical-E, edited and published by my friend Joe DeMarco.

Reservoir puppies?

Most of my mystery stories are standalones, not installments in a series. Why, then, would I create a series in the first place? Well, for one thing, they’re fun to write. Ask JLW or Rob. Another advantage, in my case, is brevity. With short stories — especially the 600- to 700-word mini-mysteries that WW publishes — a writer doesn’t have a lot of room for character development, and when you’re doing a series you already know these people: how they look, how they talk, how they act. And readers know them too. There’s no need for backstory; you can hit the ground running.

Also, there’s a lighthearted mood that plays a big part in these mystery series of mine. It’s a chance to include a lot of humor, not as a byproduct of the storyline but as a main ingredient, and that’s great fun for me as a writer. If I’ve done my job properly, readers expect Angela to order Chunky around and call him by his dreaded nickname and embarrass him in front of the mayor and interfere in just about everything he does, and they expect him to hate that. But they also know that he knows how lucky he is to have her around, although he would never admit it — even to himself.

Keeping up with the Joneses

The disadvantage of series stories? For me, it’s the fact that I have to keep everything straight, like the names of friends, neighbors, stores, restaurants, etc. Especially when I have two currently-running series that are fairly similar in terms of structure, characters, and setting. It’d be pretty easy, in a period of brain-lapse (and I have plenty of those), to put the wrong deputy or the wrong landmark in the wrong story. For that very reason, I keep a long list of characters, major and minor, who have appeared in each series, along with place names. And I do a lot of double-checking.

The other disadvantage is that it would be really easy to get lazy and keep writing similar versions of the same story, time after time. In order to avoid that, I try to open each story differently, vary the crimes and the settings, and even have the “solution” present itself in an unusual way now and then. Once I even had Sheriff Jones solve the case, an outcome which surprised him as much as it surprised Angela.

To those of you who have written series mysteries: Do you find it more fun, or less, than writing standalone stories? More work? Less?

Series possibilities

Who knows, I might one of these days arrange for my two sheriffs, Chunky and Lucy, to meet, maybe at a state law enforcement conference. I don’t think I’ll kindle any kind of romantic interest between them, though. For one thing, Chunky’s already married — I doubt Lucy’s mother, matchmaker though she is, would stand for that. Besides, Lucy Valentine is pretty darn attractive, in an overworked, disheveled kind of way; Chunky Jones is not only lazy, he’s . . . well, he’s chunky.

Who knows, I might even have him go on a diet at some point and lose a hundred pounds or so. It could work; I would just have to figure out a way to adapt.

Maybe Angela could start calling him Skinny instead . . .

TEMPUS FUGIT

by Steven Steinbock

Your mirthful missivist is feeling languid after a long, busy week. Tempus tends to fugare, as the face of my clock reminds me. And it’s already time for further adventures in word play.

Are there any words that you never seem to remember? The kinds of words that you feel are moderately common, highly useful, but when you need them they flutter away just like time. The harder you try to remember them, the farther away they go. And it’s doubly frustrating because when you want that evasive word, no other synonym is capable of doing the job quite so well.

Exploit is one of those words for me. It’s the verb I’m referring to, and not the adventurous noun. When you want to describe the act of selfishly using someone or something for nefarious gain, no other verb quite does the trick. I can’t explain why I always forget this word. It may be that on some level I realize that the word itself was never intended to carry such a negative meaning. Exploit and it’s offspring, exploitation have gotten weighted down with negative value to the point that their actual (i.e. original) meanings are lost. To exploit is to use, as one would use a toothbrush. But if I said I wanted to exploit a toothbrush, you would probably look at me funny.

I never have trouble remembering manipulation, which has suffered the same negative valuing. Like exploitation, it once had neutral meaning, in this case, the act of handling something, or modifying something by hand. In the world of prestidigitation (sleight-of-hand) manipulation is a very positive word. But everywhere else it seems to have been twisted (even manipulated) into the legal meaning of “to change by artful or unfair means” or “to affect artificially in order to deceive or mislead.”

Flank is another of those words that tends to fly from my consciousness whenever I need it. A few weeks back I was trying to write a caption for a photo in which I was standing with William Link on my right, and Mary Higgins Clark on my left. What did I want to say? That I was bracketed by William Link and Mary Higgins Clark? No, that wasn’t right. That I was bookended by them? Urgh. That they had me surrounded? Way too strong. Flanked is the right word for the job, but I couldn’t remember it then, and I often forget it when I need it most. I think this may be because I think of the word flank, first and foremost, in its anatomical and culinary usage. A flank is a cut of meat. Just as a shank is a lamb’s leg, a flank is a loin of beef. (It’s funny that one never finds lamb flank or beef shank on a menu). If I’d had a better education in military history, I might have an easier time remembering flank.

As it is, I now have flank and shank jumbled in my mind, and can’t rid myself of the image from “Blade Runner” of Daryl Hannah with her thighs wrapped around M. Emmet Walsh’s neck. The poor guy was flanked by her shanks. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad way to go.

BLOODY WORDS

Next week I’ll be traveling to Toronto for the aptly named Bloody Words Convention where I’ll be moderating a panel on the short story (“Short & Sweet, Fast & Deadly”) and will be handing out the Dashiell Hammett Prize.

Time isn’t the only thing flying these days.

ALOHA SUMMER

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

It’s been nine months, but feels like only weeks since my intern and I got together to discuss writing, writers in general, and how to make the obsession we shared into a career. Summer is graduating high school and will be on her way to college this fall. She’ll be living away from home in a dorm and finding her own way to new adventures in seeking out her Muse. I almost feel left behind.

Two other local writers shared Summer’s mentoring with me. Jennifer met with Summer on Tuesdays and Jodi on Thursdays. Wednesdays were mine.

In the fall we were invited to an afternoon Meet and Greet session at the school to see how our intern was doing. Her project was like the other students’, in that everyone had filled three poster-sized boards with information about their chosen careers.

Among her classmates, one student was being mentored by a TV sportscaster, another by an equine veterinarian, and another by a park ranger. All the boards listed the expected income from their profession. Summer had typed in a number slightly in excess of $50,000 as an expected writer’s salary. Jennifer and I exchanged amused expressions. “We’ll have to ask her where she got that figure,” Jennifer said. Summer’s answer was it was an estimate she’d found on the Internet. I suppose if you add together those writers working for free and the Tom Clancy type salaries and average it with the number of people claiming to be a writer, there are surely some who are paying Uncle Sam their fair share of that $50,000. I’m not so sure about a beginning writer making that much, but it could happen – there are a lot of those people writing their true stories that make it to the New York Times bestseller list the first time out. I’m not so sure about fiction writers, though, and definitely not a short story writer.

This past week, we met again at the high school to see how our protégé had progressed. Jennifer and I both remarked how we wish a program like this had been in effect when we were in high school. Obviously, we believe we made a difference in her goal to become a published author and mentally patted ourselves on our backs. Summer gave a PowerPoint presentation detailing how a novel travels from idea to a sold commodity. I leaned close to Jennifer and whispered, “Our baby girl’s all grown up.”

Watching Summer’s presentation regarding how a story is born, nurtured, and thrown out into the world where some editor somewhere may one day adopt it and love it as much as she had, was a revelation to many in the room. For some unknown reason, people think you write a book and alakazam, it’s on the bookstore shelf. If only.

Summer’s mother had thanked us for helping her daughter so much during the year, but actually, our intern had given us something in return. True, she helped me edit some short works of fiction, assisted Jodi with her web blog, and taught Jennifer how to work a PowerPoint presentation, but it was more than that.

Jodi had been freed from some of the business end of writing to ensure she finished her 30th novel on deadline. Jennifer learned up-to-date teen slang and terminology she needed for her young adult book. Still, I think I may have received more.

Summer and I had several conversations about life, probably not what Mrs. Cook expected from our meetings. I knew what color her prom dress would be, her hopes to be on a missionary trip to Peru between graduation and beginning college, and how she imagined her future would turn out. By listening to her goals, I learned a lot about myself. I had kept so busy I was allowing some of my dreams to wander just outside my peripheral vision. It was time to yank them back into the limelight.

At the closing ceremony, all the mentors were thanked in turn by their interns and presented with nice plaques. I was pleased by Summer’s kind words because I knew she had thought about what she was saying. There was no prepared speech; she spoke from the heart. Before we knew it, the festivities were over and Summer rushed off to a Scholarship Awards Ceremony where she was being awarded with a scholarship.

Jennifer, Jodi, and I sat munching cookies and drinking the mystery punch (we knew it was made with pineapple juice, but what else?). There is always a mystery to be solved!

“Do you think you’ll do this mentoring again?” Jodi asked us.

“I had a lot of fun,” Jennifer said.

We all nodded agreement.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure we’d ever get another Summer.”

The mentoring hadn’t been what I had expected. I don’t remember a time where I thought anything Summer and I worked on together was anything more than fun, even when we worked on the dreaded synopsis. Sharing information with someone who seemed as interested as me was a joy. Every week, I was surprised when her cellphone alarm went off and we were done. It never seemed like a job, even when I was tired from other duties. It all happened so fast, but such are the good times in life.

I told Summer I was writing a book about our experiences titled 9 Months of Summer. I’m not sure why, but she looked a little scared. I think she knows me too well.

I’ve decided not to say goodbye to Summer, but borrow from my Hawaiian friends and bid her Aloha. We’ll meet again. I hope it’s sooner rather than later, but definitely someday we’ll both make it to the better end of the pay scale. It’s where our dreams dwell and friendships thrive.

THE PAYOFF

by Rob Lopresti

I don’t know if you have been watching the TV series Lost, which is sailing to a conclusion this spring. It ain’t a mystery (although in one sense it is nothing but mysteries). But if you have been following it you might appreciate this recent comic:

Made me laugh, anyway. What Betty is referring to is the payoff. This is not necessarily the climax, although they can be the same.

I define the payoff as that part of the story that justifies what the reader or viewer has been put through. It could be an explanation. It could be a big explosive finale. It could be an emotional turnabout or a big surprise. But it has to make the reader feel that the journey was worth the trip.

Spoiler warning

I’m going to talk about some payoffs, and that means giving away some endings. But I will stick to some pretty old stories. (Surprise! Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca!)

Think back to The Bridge Over The River Kwai. Did the bridge get blown up at the end? If you say yes, you are remembering the movie. If you say no, you are remembering the novel. Both were perfectly logical payoffs in their media.

Pierre Boulle, the novelist, followed his character’s journey to its logical conclusion. He had gone off his moral path, lost track of what his goal should have been, and the result was that the bridge didn’t get destroyed. It was a psychologically satisfying payoff

But the makers of the movie felt they had to show us the bridge go boom and that made sense in the visual media. A visceral payoff.

(And by the way, Boulle also wrote the novel Planet of the Apes, another case where the ending of the book and the movie parted ways, although in that case the filmmakers simply chose a more cinematic way to draw the same grim conclusion. And I highly recommend Boulle’s book of short stories Because It Is Absurd.)

You can say that the boom of the bridge is an application of the law known as Chekov’s Gun: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” Whatever you set up, you have to pay off.

Hitch’s hitch

Have you noticed that suspense novels often have a big climax (hero wrassles bad guy away from the nuclear parakeets), but don’t end there? Instead a chapter follows in which the hero embraces the parakeet-keeper and you know that everything is going to be okey-dokey.

(I can think of one dramatic exception. Dick Francis ends Flying Finish true to its title, at the moment the plane lands. Neither the hero nor the reader know whether the heroine is alive or not.)

But if the novelist gets lucky and her suspense novel is turned into a movie that last chapter is pretty much sure to vanish. As I said, the appropriate payoff for a movie and a book are often different.

And here’s an example that may explain why. What’s the payoff in the movie Psycho? The climax is the heroine’s encounter with Norman’s mother in the fruit cellar. But this is followed by an end-of-the-suspense-novel type chapter in which a psychologist tries to explain what we have just seen.

Most viewers love the fruit cellar, hate the shrink scene. Critics have been arguing for fifty years about Hitchcock’s decision to put that scene in, his uncharacteristic attempt to explain what we have just seen. Some have even argued that the scene is deliberately unsatisfactory, put there to suggest that psychological explanations are inadequate.

Me, I think Hitch simply felt the tricks he had put over on the audience needed their own payoff.

Brain bogglers

Philip José Farmer wrote a series of science fiction novels known as the Riverworld saga. In the first pages everyone who ever lived on Earth wakes up at the same moment on the banks of a long river on a giant planet. As you read through the four books – and they are fascinating – you can’t help thinking, boy, he better come up with a good explanation of what the hell is happening. And to his credit, he does. Whether it is a good enough explanation every reader has to decide individually.

But the more of a puzzle the story is, the more the reader demands a satisfactory explanation for what has gone before. Fireworks and razzle-dazzle are not enough.

In that regard, the creators of Lost have a big job left to do. To justify our six-year trip, they have to convince us that this adventure was not random, that the creators knew all along what was going to happen. They are trying to tie up their loose ends now. (Who would have guessed that C.J. Cregg was the cause of all the trouble?) But if the explanations aren’t satisfactory then, as Betty says, we may feel we have been wasting our time.

It may seem like the rule is: the more elaborate the set-up the more elaborate the payoff has to be, but that isn’t necessarily true. I have mentioned here before the weekly competition that Mary Ann Madden ran in New York magazine back in the seventies. One week the set-up consisted of a lengthy statement a psychologist’s wife supposedly made in divorce court. She had walked into her husband’s office and found a half-clothed woman lying unconscious, while the shrink, holding half a grapefruit in one hand, attempted to stamp out a small fire on the rug. I forget the other details but I believe there was also a stuffed owl in the room.

The contestant’s job was to speak in the husband’s voice and offer a simple, innocent explanation for these circumstances. Many of the entries were bizarre, complex and wildly improbable. But the winner was magnificent. I quote it in its entirety:

“She’s lying.”

Now, that’s a payoff.

William Minter is a writer and analyst on African and other international issues based in Washington, D.C. He edits the on-line AfricaFocus Bulletin, as well as the websites No Easy Victories and Mystery Places, and has kindly agreed to share his expertise on the international mystery scene. We’re running his essay in two parts.

IS THE MYSTERY NOVEL GOING GLOBAL?
Part One

by William Minter

Sweden’s Lisbet Salander and Botswana’s Precious Ramotswe may have little else in common. But these fictional detectives created by Stieg Larsson and Alexander McCall Smith are both harbingers of a trend which is gathering force: the globalization of the mystery novel. Along with the familiar scenes of English villages, London and Manhattan streets, and Los Angeles freeways, airport kiosks around the world feature books set in cold Nordic landscapes and African cities, in the high mountains of Tibet and in Brazil’s Amazon.

English-language readers can now sample mysteries and thrillers quickly translated not only from French, German, and Spanish but from a score of other languages. And although the authors are still much less diverse than the locations, and many countries are still unrepresented in the international marketplace, China’s Qiu Xiaolong, Cuba’s José Latour, and South Africa’s Deon Meyer, for example, have established outstanding mystery series with many loyal followers. And Kwei Quartey and Mukoma wa Ngugi, to cite only two younger writers, have published their first novels in what we hope will be ongoing series set in their home countries of Ghana and Kenya.

British and American authors still retain their numerical dominance among mystery writers, as befits their role in the origin of the mystery genre in the 19th century. But as G. J. Denko documents, the genre soon spread not only to the British dominions such as Canada and Australia, but also to continental Europe, Latin America, Russia, China, and Japan. British novelists in particular have also often featured “foreign” locales, from the interwar continental Europe of Eric Ambler to H. R. F. Keating’s more than 20 novels featuring Inspector Ghote of Bombay (Mumbai). And there were prolific non-Anglo-Saxon writers such as Belgian-born Georges Simenon, who wrote more than 70 novels featuring Paris police inspector Maigret, translated into English and more than 40 other languages.

Still, the variety of new settings and authors now available to readers is unprecedented, defying summary description or even enumeration. For my website, I have compiled a database of mystery writers with a strong sense of place, with authors linked to their accustomed settings, with 268 authors, 55 countries and multi-country regions, 44 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. If this were a full-time endeavor rather than a very part-time effort guided by my own reading preferences and suggestions by readers, the numbers would be much larger.

One may or may not have visited a place, or even rank it high on the list of places one would want to visit. But when a novelist convincingly links character and place, even non-natives can feel they are there. To my mind, this ranks as high as character and plot in deciding whether to add an author to my “must-read-the-next-book” list. Fortunately, the number of territories available for such arm-chair traveling is expanding, although only a few of the new authors have established more than a token presence in the international marketplace.

The mystery novel is definitely becoming more “global.” But its global reach still lags substantially behind that of economic globalization or the “world music” phenomenon. The Nordic countries now seem the most prominent new entries on the international mystery scene. In contrast, Asia (except for Japan) and Africa are only sparsely represented, with much room to grow. And while Spanish, French, German, and Italian-language authors are numerous, there still seem to be few that have made significant breakthroughs to English-language readers.

Next week, I provide a small selection of mystery authors and places, some already well-known and others in my view deserving of more attention, that will reward any reader seeking to journey beyond the more familiar terrains of Great Britain and North America. For a much wider array, visit Mystery Places’ list of countries and places.