My last blogpost was all about ignoring bad reviews and moving on.  Hah, if only I could!  We authors have trouble moving on.  We can quote verbatim that awful review we got in the Podunk Gazette back in 1982, while we forget all the good things that have been said about our books.  So in the spirit of looking on the positive side, I will steadfastly avoid mentioning the two Reviewers-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named who slimed THE BONE GARDEN.

Well, okay, you twisted my arm. They were Publishers Weekly and some guy named David Pitt who made the jaw-dropping comment that he didn’t see the point of using Oliver Wendell Holmes in the story when any fictional character would have served the story just as well.  Hello?  A book about childbed fever? A disease that the real Dr. Holmes almost single-handedly stamped out in America?  Yeah, and if I’d written a Revolutionary War novel, Mr. Pitt probably would have groused, “why use George Washington as a character when any fictional first President would have worked just as well?”

But I digress.

The point is, I’m obsessing over those two bad reviews when there’ve been many more great reviews of BONE GARDEN.  And now it’s time to mention them, if only to make myself feel better.  So here goes, with links when I could get them:

KIRKUS (starred review):  “Readers with delicate stomachs may find Gerritsen’s graphic descriptions of corpse dissection hard to take, but the story, which digs up a dark Boston of times long past, entices readers to keep turning pages long after their bedtimes.”

USA TODAY: “Lively dialogue and a pitch-perfect narrative make for a highly engrossing novel.”

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS (Colorado):  “Mixing the gruesomely bloody with the scientifically compelling, this time-traveling tale never misses its mark.”

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL (Oline Cogdill): “No matter how graphic the medical scenes are, it is the poignant stories of Gerritsen’s well-developed characters that make “The Bone Garden” one of her best.”

THE GLOBE AND MAIL (Toronto): “Gerritsen knows how to do historical detail: the plot, with ghouls and grave-robbers is great, and the mystery of the body in the modern yard is well done, too.  This is one of Gerritsen’s best.”

THE GAZETTE (Montreal): “I adore a historical novel, particularly a mystery, and The Bone Garden is one such book. It’s a ripping good read, and I learned something, too.”

OTTAWA CITIZEN (Canada): “An intriguing departure for Gerritsen… Shifting deftly back and forth between the present and 1830 Boston, she creates a compelling and historically detailed narrative about an earnest med student, illicit cadavers, brutal murders, and the state of medicine at that time.”

MADISON COUNTY HERALD (Mississippi): “A bold and unexpected new direction from the queen of medical suspense… The Bone Garden is as thrilling as it is horrific, combining a shameful time in American medical history with murder and intrigue a la Sherlock Holmes.”  

MAINE SUNDAY TELEGRAM: “Tess Gerritsen is a master technician whose specialty is cauldrons of blood, pus and treachery.  It may keep you up at night, but that’s the point.  It works.”

DAILY AMERICAN (Somerset County, PA): “This is a fascinating look at early medical science, as well as a good, character-driven mystery.  The murderer will come as a complete surprise.”

BOSTON GLOBE: “The medical practices that Gerritsen depicts are fascinating.  In addition to the well-drawn scenes in the hospital, she takes readers on grisly journeys with a procurer of cadavers, to be used in the training of medical students.  Here, too, she calls on her experience as a physician to render situations in excruciatingly horrific detail.”

MYSTERY NEWS: Tess Gerritsen tells her story beautifully, with just a smidgen of humor… Her own medical background is evident and her peering into a true historical past just adds to the enjoyment.”

WICHITA EAGLE: “Gerritsen brings 1830s Boston to life with vivid detail, from the stench and squalor of Rose’s rented room to the delectable opulence of the doctors’ parties… Aside from the chilling suspense and well-plotted mystery, THE BONE GARDEN certainly makes us appreciate how far medicine has come.”

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: “With realistic detail, Gerritsen describes the unimaginable living conditions endured then by the poor… Richly plotted, with superbly developed characters, it’s a suspense thriller likely to keep you reading into the wee hours.”

 

In the airport in Zurich, I bought a paperback novel for the flight home.  I wasn’t looking for heavy literature, just something to keep me entertained for the seven-hour flight, so I chose it based on the back-cover description, which promised a fast-paced thriller with an international setting.  Within the first chapter, bam, someone died a violent death.  About every other chapter after that, there was a gun battle or a car chase or a fist-fight.  The protagonists were chased across several countries, by a relentless cabal of bad guys, and everyone was after a piece of evidence that would change the world.  There was a fall off a cliff, some death-defying escapes, and countless ambushes.

I was bored out of my mind.

I wanted to stuff the book in the seat-back pocket for some other hapless airline traveler, but I still had five hours left in the flight and nothing else to read, so I persevered, more as a writers’ exercise than for entertainment.  When I finished the book, I thought about why the book didn’t work for me.  On the surface, you’d think it should be exciting, with all the chases and derring-do.  Yet it lacked tension.  It was all action, and no suspense.

I have the same reaction while I’m watching films.  I find that the most boring part of a thriller movie is often the car chase.  That’s when I yawn and glance at my watch, waiting for something more interesting to happen.  During the most recent James Bond film, I thought the action sequences were okay, but what really got me to perk up was the dialogue between Bond and the Eva Green character on the train ride.  The verbal sparring, the double entendres, the undercurrent of sexual tension — that’s what I call suspense.

When it comes to books, I’ve come to realize that action on the page is sometimes the least interesting part of the whole story.  Real suspense lies in the buildup toward conflict or danger, the threat of something terrible happening.  When it finally does turn into action, all that tension is released and leaks out of the story like a deflating balloon. 

A lot of writers confuse suspense with action.  They think that for a book to be thrilling, it needs lots of fights and gun battles and falling bodies.  Well, let me tell you about four books that kept me riveted to the page, books that were loaded with heart-pounding suspense, yet weren’t overstuffed with action.  NO TIME FOR GOODBYE by Linwood Barclay and REMEMBERING SARAH by Chris Mooney were by male authors who managed to inject amazing suspense just by the conflicts and crises of their characters.  Once I’d started these two books, I couldn’t stop.  They didn’t need action scenes dripping with testosterone.  Instead, they relied on something far more difficult to achieve: characters whose lives are in such crisis, you have to keep reading to see what happens. 

I can think of two other books that managed this feat.  One is an older book, KILLING ME SOFTLY by Nicci French.  I can’t even remember any violence in the book, but I remember almost unbearable tension toward the end, as the heroine finally discovers the truth about her lover.  Another memorable book (not yet released), is ICE TRAP by debut author Kitty Sewall.  It has no violence that I can recall, yet the author manages to set up so much psychological conflict and that I didn’t really care if it was a thriller, a murder mystery, or just a novel about twisted characters in the far north — I had to find the answer to the puzzle that the author introduces within the first few chapters.

I think it takes far more skill to write a suspenseful novel with no action.  Action scenes are easy.  Anyone can write a chase scene or a murder scene, and less skillful writers confuse action with suspense.  They think a gun battle is all you need to make a chapter exciting.  Instead it may have the opposite effect.  It may bore readers like me, readers who just flip past all the running and shooting and screeching tires. 

Pay attention the next time you read a thriller novel.  When does your heart pound, your hand go sweaty?  Is it during the gun battle?  Or is it during the pages leading up to the gun battle?  Is it the dread and impending doom?  Or is it when the bullets actually start to fly?

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COMMANDER RIKER AND ME

As a lifelong Trekkie, I was tickled when actor/director Jonathan Frakes and I were asked to be judges for a local talent show here in town.  Here we are, along with third judge David Grima (editor of our local paper) and emcee Slim Goodbody (in the tuxedo.)   We took our jobs seriously — and it wasn’t that easy a job, considering the talent we had to choose from.  I just wish there could have been an extra prize for the amazing 12-year-old boy who played the piano, sang, AND played the harmonica to Elton John and Billy Joel tunes! 

(And in case you’re wondering, Frakes is both utterly charming and outrageously funny in person.)

This month marks a milestone for me.  Twenty years ago, my first novel, CALL AFTER MIDNIGHT, was published by Harlequin Intrigue.  Back then, Intrigue released only two books a month, and I vividly recall the moment I walked into Waldenbooks and saw my book displayed on the romance rack beside the other November Intrigue title, Jasmine Cresswell’s CHASE THE PAST.  For a long time I just stared at it, amazed that I was finally a published author. 

Over the past twenty years, I’ve had twenty books published.  My career has been a see-saw ride, and there’ve been times when I thought my career was, if not dead, then headed for oblivion.  My first nine books were paperback romantic thrillers, eight published by Harlequin, one by Harper.  None of them earned out more than $12,000 in their first printings.  Since I’m a slow writer, and couldn’t turn out a book any faster than every eight months, I knew I’d never get rich as a writer.  But I loved what I was doing, so I stayed with it.  I was — and still am — proud of every book I’ve ever written.  I don’t care if certain readers spit on my romance novels.  I don’t care if the mystery purists consider them dreck.  I still think they’re good reads, each and every one of them.

Then I got the idea for my tenth novel, a medical thriller that was radically different from the romantic thrillers I’d been writing up till then.  I’d also signed up with a new literary agent named Meg Ruley, who was wildly enthusiastic about my partial manuscript for HARVEST, and she managed to snare a substantial book contract with Pocket Books.  In 1996, the hardcover edition of HARVEST managed to pop onto the New York Times bestseller list for one week, at #13.

I thought my career was all set.  Little did I know.

For the next three books, I watched my sales flatten out and even decline, although I did manage to hit the list again with the paperback of BLOODSTREAM.  By the time GRAVITY was released, it was clear that my sales were in a downward spiral.  Despite publisher enthusiasm and rave reviews, GRAVITY could not find an audience among women readers.  That doomed it in the marketplace.  And once your sales start to slip, the pre-orders for your next book, and your next, begin to plummet.  Just as depressing were my foreign sales, which had been so bad that I was having trouble finding anyone to publish me in the UK.

I took off a year to re-group.  I wrote my next book entirely on spec, without a contract.  This time, I was writing just for myself.  By then I’d been pegged by the industry as a “medical thriller author,” and once you’ve been categorized, you’re trapped.  No one wants you to change.  But I longed to do something completely different, to get out of that genre cage and write a truly frightening crime story that would keep me awake at night.

By the time THE SURGEON was published in 2001 by Ballantine, two years had gone by since I’d released a book.  I was writing in a new genre, I’d been out of sight for two years, and my last book had sold poorly.  Everything seemed to bode ill.  But Ballantine managed a miracle.  With a great cover and amazing in-house support, my fourteenth novel THE SURGEON hit #13 on the New York Times list its very first week out.  

Then September 11 happened. 

And yet, that autumn, THE SURGEON kept selling.  In the midst of tragedy and chaos, readers seemed to crave stories about good vs. evil, stories that offered emotional catharsis. 

Since THE SURGEON, my six subsequent books have all been New York Times bestsellers.  And in both the UK and Germany, where my sales had once been moribund, I recently hit #1.

So what have these two decades taught me?

SUCCESS TAKES TIME

I didn’t hit the bestseller list until book #10.  I didn’t start to sell consistently well until book #14.  When I hear new authors complain that they haven’t found success after two or three books, I can only shake my head at their impatience.  It may take another seven books.  Even then, it doesn’t mean the media’s going to pay any attention to you.  Oprah isn’t beating on my door, either. 

Bestselling romance author Linda Howard recently wrote a terrific column about her career, and she revealed that it wasn’t until her 25th book that she hit the bestseller list.  Twenty five books!  How many writers have the patience and fortitude to wait that long for success? 

I hear bitterness in the voices of so many new authors who haven’t yet achieved bestsellerdom.  Bitterness gets you nowhere.  What you need to do is roll up your sleeves and write the next book.  And the next.  And maybe twenty more.

GREAT BOOKS SOMETIMES GET IGNORED.  LOUSY BOOKS SOMETIMES HIT BESTSELLER LISTS.

Life — and publishing — can be unfair.  I’ve read many a wonderful book that never found its audience because of bad timing, bad luck, or bad publishing.  The opposite is also true — that laughably bad books can go on to sell like gangbusters.  For that, I blame a reading public that tends to behave like mindless sheep.  But that’s the subject of another blog.

NOBODY REALLY KNOWS WHAT MAKES A BESTSELLER

I’ve gotten good advice and bad advice over the years. I’ve been told that medical thrillers were my brand and I shouldn’t deviate.  I’ve been told that writing a series character would make my books “smaller.”  I’ve been told that mysteries were dead, romantic thrillers were dead, and religious thrillers would never sell.  Sometimes I’ve heeded the advice, sometimes I’ve ignored it.  The point is, you have to use your own judgment — because you know just as much as anyone else.  Whether you realize it or not.

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And now, another snapshot of my traveling books, this time from Vojtech in Prague: