James W. Bennetts is an author, consultant, and Minnesota native. His newest novel, Catechisms, has been critically acclaimed, as has his previous work The Name Game. We were thrilled to be able to interview him, and we hope that you find his answers as thoughtful and enlightening as we did.
TSM: To start off, tell me a little about yourself. What have you written that our readers might know of?
JB: So to start off with introductions, I think your readers, if they do know me, would know me from my latest book called Catechisms, a story about a young man who has been abused by a priest, putting him on a path of murderous revenge. But more broadly it’s about a whole series of characters, including a police detective and an ambitious leader of a prestigious school, who each seek redemption for serious, tragic mistakes they’ve made in the past.
I also have another book called The Name Game, which is currently out of print, but I’m preparing to reprint later this year and pair it with Catechisms. It’s a simpler, slightly more lighthearted book about an identity thief who inadvertently steals the identity of a man who is being hunted by killers. So of course he becomes the killer’s next target. Mayhem ensues.
Those are the two books I have. In addition to the reprint, I am also working on a novella and a series of short stories, all mystery/suspense stories set for publication later this year or early next year, as well as a third volume in the series that follows up The Name Game and Catechisms. Both of my novels took a few years to write because I was still a working stiff until just last year when I retired. Now I’m picking up my writing pace.
TSM: From your novel Catechisms, it’s clear to see that you are well-versed in the mystery/crime genres. Can you tell us a little bit about Catechisms specifically? What was your biggest inspiration behind the novel?
JB: Catechisms began as one kind of murder story and developed into another, growing out of a question I had many years ago while reading David France’s Our Fathers. That book is about the complete breakdown of institutional responsibility in the Boston Archdiocese before and during its own abuse scandal in the late 1990s. Tragic as the story was, I left wondering what was it personally like for those who chose to look the other way once confronted with the abuse, to just cover it up. How did they deal with the aftermath of their actions? How does anyone? Out of the question grew the story that is Catechisms.
Beyond that, the book is influenced by a number of writers I admire and read regularly, some well known: James Joyce (my favorite), Dashiell Hammet, and Raymond Chandler. I do like a number of current writers, too, such as William Kent Krueger, Walter Mosley, and Brian Freeman. There’s another writer from Minnesota named Jess Lourey, who’s come into her own recently. She writes somewhat along similar lines to my current book: stories about the dark underbelly of childhood trauma. Oh, and Mick Herron is a great author I follow, too. They all influence me in a general way just through the general good quality of their writing and storytelling.
It’s unusual takes on typical mystery and suspense stories that attract me. I also like the classics. I like hardboiled writing, so I think that probably comes across in what I have written. And I like stories that involve not only the nuts and bolts of a mystery but also the drama in each character’s life that brought them to this point. Not so much stories that have pages of characters reflecting on themselves, but that we do see their struggles and how their struggles affect the larger story.
TSM: As an aspiring mystery writer, I often find it hard to maintain intrigue and suspense all the way to the end of a story. For a novel such as Catechisms, how do you keep the tension high right from page one to the end of the novel?
JB: Well, as a fellow writer, you know that’s not always easy. It’s easy to get sidetracked in a story. But I do this by writing each chapter as a story within the story itself that has an introduction, describes what is happening at the moment, and then builds to some sort of climax and cliffhanger. It could be something as simple as waiting until the very end of the chapter to reveal that a key piece of evidence has been discovered. And if that indicates that the course of the investigation up to that point has been off track, then that makes it even better. It’s also each chapter’s interaction with the white narrative itself; they’re all moving to some sort of climax in their own right, which is going to affect the story, and you just have to take that step by step.
TSM: Catechisms has a really engaging opening that truly envelopes the reader right away. How do you go about creating an interesting opening to your novels?
JB: There’s an old term in storytelling called in media res, you know, “in the midst of things.” So whatever it is, I look for something that immediately creates mystery and tension, and it encourages the reader to move on to find out what’s behind all this and what’s going to come out of all this.
In Catechisms, it was pretty easy because I put the young man, Simon Peters, in a tense, suspenseful situation which I realize might be slightly difficult for some readers because he meets his abuser right away. He’s an innocent boy, and he’s completely taken in by his assailant and he has this horrible experience. By opening in the midst of the encounter, you wonder what will come out of it
In my first book, The Name Game, I took a slightly different track. That’s the story of that turns on the results of a friendly fire incident the First Gulf War. I was fresh out of the military at around the time that occurred, so I kind of understood what was going on, and they had a number of such incidents in that war. And so I just took that as a starting place for a story of survivor’s guilt that the one survivor carries with him and how it changes him.
TSM: In a similar vein, how do you create a satisfying ending to your novels?
JB: That’s an excellent question. I’m not sure how I do that. In my first book, I left it hanging in the final chapter. Detective Paige McGraw, who has been chasing our identity thief, receives a phone call that indicates that he isn’t even who she thought he was. But I left that as a cliffhanger at the end of the book, so that maybe it wasn’t an entirely satisfying ending; it was just to encourage readers to look for a resolution in my next book.
In Catechisms, the resolution, and I won’t it give all away, is how one of the main characters, who has been an enabler himself, finds some redemption by taking on an unexpectedly heroic role. I wouldn’t say it entirely resolves the story, but it provides closure of a sort; he realizes that what he didn’t do at the beginning is what must do in the end.
TSM: In your opinion, what are the elements of a good mystery/crime novel? Similarly, what are some traps that beginning mystery authors often fall into, and what are the best ways to avoid those traps?
JB: Some of what goes into a good mystery, and I’m probably still sorting this out myself as a writer, is building good narratives, which sometimes are important and sometimes aren’t, and a good mystery always has an amount of misdirection to it in some way. And then I think another thing is that the mystery involves something more than just what is immediately apparent in the book. A little bit of the mystery in Catechisms is “Who is the mysterious killer?” But there’s a deeper mystery in it in terms of the killer’s motivation. I think that some readers pretty early on can figure out the identity of the murderer, but the motivation and his slow descent into madness is really the mystery there. And I do have a confession to make: Catechisms is a mystery; I call it a mystery/suspense/thriller. It’s probably slightly lighter on the mystery, but it is there in the suspense and the thriller, which I really try to hook the reader with.
TSM: Right, so there are multiple layers in the novel, and it’s not just a mystery novel, but it’s also other things as well, right?
JB: I think that’s what attracts me to the mystery genre, which is a very broad genre; there can be so many levels to it. The mystery novel has changed a lot over the decades. It’s not strictly a whole story, like the locked-room mystery or a simple detective story. Those are all very good stories, but it’s much more dynamic now.
TSM: Since Catechisms is your second novel, how was writing it different from writing your previous novel, The Name Game? Did you find it easier since you had more experience, or did new challenges arise?
JB: I think the difference is that I just felt more comfortable in my skin as a writer. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have a lot of challenges; Catechisms was many different stories until I found within those stories the full story that is today. But when you first write, especially write on the scale of a novel, you’re a newbie. I’ve even talked to journalists about this, journalists who also write novels on the side. It’s a different kind of writing than it is not strictly journalistic writing. And you’re learning as you go. I think I knew the basic format involved. But feeling comfortable with structure is really important. With my second novel, Catechisms, I at least understood how the story should develop, and what would keep readers connected to it.
TSM: Structure is always something that I struggle with, too.
JB: It doesn’t matter. You can probably have ten novels under your belt and you’re still struggling with structure on some level. I think that’s very true.
TSM: I was also just wondering, when you’re writing your novels, how you decide what information to give the reader and what information to keep from the reader if that makes sense.
JB: I think that’s an excellent question. First and foremost, it’s editing. Especially when I wrote my first novel, I was very detail-oriented. And, you know, I was way deep into description, and now I keep it tighter. You have to trust readers, and that they will see what you’re getting at. One thing that I heard a few years back is that you have to allow the reader to build the story world in their own head. Say, for example, you have a door. You don’t have to go into a lot of detail about the door. Maybe what happens most often in writing is going into a lot of detail about what somebody is wearing. Maybe in an initial description, that’s okay and maybe it’s really important to the development of a character at that point in the story. You can just say “He was wearing a suit,” and let the reader create their own image of it in their mind. That’s the thing.
But I’ll go back to editing, too, because when I’m building a story, I go into really lush detail about everything. And for example, there’s a university library in the current version of Catechisms because that’s where the murder and additional action takes place. In my first draft, laughably, I must have spent 40 pages, it seems like, just on a description of the library because it’s a bit unusual in its construction. So I really got deep into that. But in subsequent drafts, I knew I needed to cut a lot of that. Just lightly describe it, make it unusual, and end it there.
TSM: So just let the reader fill in some of those gaps?
JB: Right, yeah.
TSM: Lastly, what do you wish you knew about writing/publishing before you started writing?
JB: I wish I was better at marketing and just getting my name out there. I’m very grateful for a magazine such as The Strand which helps authors in that regard. I don’t think that I have made a lot of terrible missteps, but I certainly have learned a lot, especially with Catechisms, because I’m basically my own marketing director, whereas my first one was published in Germany, and there were people who dealt with it there. I’m hoping with the next book I’ll be an even better marketer.