Why Tessa Has my Heart by Julia Heaberlin

Copyright Jill Johnson

Julia Heaberlin is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Detroit News and The Dallas Morning News. She has edited numerous real-life thriller stories, including a series on the perplexing and tragic murders of girls buried in the Mexican desert and another on domestic violence. She lives with her husband and son in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, where she is a freelance writer and is at work on her fourth book.

I was twenty-eight years old the day a stranger saved my life.

It sounds dramatic, but to me, a novelist, it is only in the retelling.

I was born with an electrically nutty heart that goes back in our family to the Civil War. My great-grandmother was told she would die at a very young age (and lived until she was 70). Without pacemakers, our hearts are slow, sometimes beating in the 20s at night.  They carry the risk of going into atrial fibrillation. Sometimes when my heart “flips out,” it is clocked at 180 beats a minute. It’s like a popcorn popper in my chest. Because there are only a few families in the world with the same congenital condition, we are a bit of a curiosity. My grandfather and great-uncle were studied at Duke and are diagrammed in a medical journal.

A guy named Igor (really) at Harvard once asked my extended family to give blood samples to try to isolate the gene.

For a long time, I was always the youngest person in the cardiology waiting room. So people have always wanted to know “what it’s like” when they learn I have a heart condition. They look concerned.

“Ask my husband,” I sometimes say. While we were dating, he’s the one who led me out of a church service after I turned to him in the pew, about to faint, and said, “I can’t see. Everything’s gone black.” He’s the one who still married me anyway and then didn’t complain when I went into atrial fibrillation on our wedding day, messing up our honeymoon. He’s the one who stood by at a restaurant in Detroit two years later, while a nurse who happened to be at the next table pumped on my chest.

My eyes were open. He didn’t tell me that until years later.

I was flat on the floor of the restaurant when I started breathing again. There were no bright lights. No otherworldly experiences. I was there, and then I wasn’t. When I came to, it felt like a truck was sitting on my chest. I learned later that wasn’t because of my heart. It was because of the pressure necessary for effective CPR.

I don’t remember the face of the woman who breathed into me. My husband, a journalist, has said the best reporting he ever did was getting her name and address that night while waiting for the ambulance. She lives in northern Michigan. She was an out-of-towner, a neo-natal nurse, in Detroit for the theater that night. I was supposed to be in a car with my husband on a ride to appreciate the turning of the autumn leaves.  We changed our minds.

Her name is Nan. Every Thanksgiving for more than twenty years, I have sent her a card. My son, born four years later, exists because of her.

Like most people with chronic conditions, I don’t talk about it much. There are little things, of course. I don’t like watching when a show like Grey’s Anatomy has its defibrillator paddles in overdrive. I have to turn my face away or change the channel. I’ve been shocked out of atrial fibrillation more than twenty times, maybe thirty. My husband once told me, while I was in a high-pressure journalism job, that I couldn’t treat the ER like a drive-through McDonald’s.

I don’t talk about my heart much because I know how lucky I am. That night, I rode in an ambulance to one of Detroit’s biggest hospitals, nicknamed the “Knife and Gun Club.” I was rolled next to a man handcuffed to a gurney. Later I was moved near a young boy who was having a convulsion while his parents stood there in panic. I saw a child, bald, with cancer. Or maybe that was another time.

Too many times.

Things have settled down now.  At the hospital in Detroit, I was treated by a good Jewish doctor named Michael Lehmann. I don’t care if that’s a stereotype. He was kind and brilliant and stuck a pacemaker in me. He knew how scared I was. I had passed out, not because of my heart condition, but because another doctor with a fancy French name and a lot of credentials had overdosed me on a drug. Dr. Lehmann is the one who later saw me through my pregnancy. He told me, “I’m here to help you live the life you want.”

Don’t get me wrong. I complain about a lot of things. About the frenetic world of publishing, about the pickup truck that cut me off, about how they are putting fewer chips in potato chip bags.

But my heart?  My heart has made me better. Maybe that is why I gave Tessa, the heroine in

Black Eyed Susans, the same crazy heart. It was like giving her a part of me. It was assuring her she could survive.

The only difference is that she can really, really run. Fast.

black eyed susans by Julia Heaberlin is out on 13^th August 2015 (£12.99, Michael Joseph)

Black Eyed Susans

17-year-old Tessa, dubbed a 'Black-Eyed Susan' by the media, became famous for being the only victim to survive the vicious attack of a serial killer...  Her testimony helped to put a dangerous criminal behind bars - or so she thought. Now, decades later the black-eyed susans (yellow flowers on the cover) planted outside Tessa’s bedroom window seem to be a message from a killer who should be safely in prison. Haunted by fragmented memories of the night she was attacked and terrified for her own teenage daughter’s safety, can Tessa uncover the truth about the killer before it’s too late?

You can find more information about Julia Heaberlin and her books on her website.  You can also find her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter @Juliathrillers

Six Tips for Suspense by Sarah Hilary

Alfred Hitchcock drew a useful distinction between shock and suspense. Shock, he said, would be a bomb going off without warning at the family breakfast table. But if you show your audience the bomb in advance, and if you intercut that with images of the oblivious family breakfasting — juxtaposing the normality with the horror in store — then you have suspense.

Here are six ways in which I created suspense in No Other Darkness.

#1 Be visceral

This is about engaging the reader senses — taste, touch, sound, smell — but it’s also about pulling the reader headlong into the story, getting under their skin, making their pulse race. In No Other Darkness, I trapped Marnie Rome underground with a trio of dangerous people. I kept the chapters short. I ditched conventional sentence structure. Got right inside Marnie’s head. We’re as scared as she is that she might not make it out alive.

#2 Keep it real

Having horrors in store for your characters is all well and good, but take care not to go too far away from what a reader can easily imagine. You’re after empathy. If your hero’s suspended over a tank of snakes (say) then can your reader reasonably imagine this sort of danger? If not, you’ll have to work twice as hard at the suspense. Lots of readers have told me that they find both Someone Else’s Skin and No Other Darkness scarier than serial killer stories precisely because the books contains dangers they can imagine. It feels as if it could happen to them.

#3 Don’t be afraid of the dark

Hitchcock was one of the first mainstream directors to use darkness as a motif. He knew that the darker the fate in store for his characters, the closer his audience would sit to the edge of their seats. Darkness is your friend. Use it. But know when to switch to #4 below, for contrast and effect.

#4 Turn on the lights

Have you ever watched a horror film and found yourself laughing at a moment when you’re damned sure the director meant you to scream? Relax, it’s not you. The director got it wrong. It’s a normal human reaction to prolonged stress. The director should have given you a break, a scene where there was a chance to gather your breath. A moment of light will make the dark more effective.

#5 Go around again

Hitchcock was the grand master of the motif, using staircases or fairground rides or simply shadows to signal his intention to scare us rigid. Look at how few of us can watch a shower scene without hearing screeching music and fearing for our lives. No Other Darkness opens underground in a pit where two small boys are trapped. When, towards the end of the book, Marnie finds herself in similar straits the tension is immediately doubled because we remember the fate of those boys.

#6 Keep secrets

We all want answers. It keeps us turning the pages, to find out what happens next. If you give the reader too much information too soon, or if your information is always on the level, your reader will lose a little of that motivation to keep reading. No Other Darkness is a book about secrets, so in a sense I cheated. But not all secrets are the same. Marnie Rome is an expert in uncovering secrets and at keeping them. You’ll have to read to find out why.

More information about Sarah Hilary and her Marnie Rome series can be found on her blog. You can also follow her on Twitter @sarah_hilary.

2015 Ned Kelly Awards Shortlist Announcement

The Ned Kelly Awards are Australia’s oldest and most prestigious prizes for crime fiction and true crime writing. First established in 1995, the list of previous winners includes Peter Temple, Shane Maloney, Kerry Greenwood and Geoffrey McGeachin.  The shortlist was announced by the Australian Crime Writers Association, (ACWA) on Saturday August 8 at the Byron Bay Writers Festival.

BEST CRIME NOVEL:

Sweet One by Peter Docker

Eden by Candice Fox

A Murder Unmentioned by Sulari Gentill

Crucifixion Creek by Barry Maitland

Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty

Present Darkness by Malla Nunn

BEST FIRST CRIME NOVEL:

King of the Road by Nigel Bartlett

What Came Before by Anna George

Chasing the Ace by Nicholas J Johnson

Quota by Jock Serong 

BEST TRUE CRIME:

The Fall by Amy Dale

This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial by Helen Garner

The Family Court Murders by Debi Marshall

He Who Must Be Obeid by Kate McClymont and Linton Besser

The Murder of Allison Baden-Clay by David Murray

The Feel-Good Hit of the Year by Liam Pieper

SD HARVEY SHORT STORY (IN CONJUNCTION WITH KILL YOUR OWN DARLINGS):

A Watched Pot by Aoife Clifford

Short Term People by Andrea Gillum

Prisoner's Dilemma by Stephen Gray

Sweetie by Grace Heyer

Daddy Played the Trumpet by Adriane Howell

Roux's Sister by Darcy-Lee Tindale

Macavity Award Nominations

The Macavity Award is named for the "mystery cat" of T.S. Eliot (Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats). Each year the members of Mystery Readers International nominate and vote for their favourite mysteries in four categories.

The year listed is the year of the award, for books published in the previous year.

2015

Best Mystery Novel:

The Missing Place by Sophie Littlefield  (Gallery)

The Killer Next Door by Alex Marwood (Penguin)

The Lewis Man by Peter May (Quercus)

The Day She Died by Catriona McPherson (Midnight Ink)

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny (Minotaur)

The Last Death of Jack Harbin by Terry Shames (Seventh Street)

Best First Mystery Novel:

Blessed Are the Dead by Kristi Belcamino (Witness Impulse)

Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman (W. W. Norton)

Invisible City by Julia Dahl (Minotaur)

Someone Else's Skin by Sarah Hilary (Penguin)

Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little (Viking)

The Black Hour by Lori Rader-Day (Seventh Street)

Best Mystery-Related Nonfiction:

The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis by Charles Brownson  (McFarland)

Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe by J.W. Ocker (Countryman)

400 Things Cops Know: Street Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman by Adam Plantinga (Quill Driver)

Writes of Passage: Adventures on the Writer's Journey by Hank Phillippi Ryan, editor (Henery Press)

Best Mystery Short Story:

"Honeymoon Sweet" by Craig Faustus Buck:  (Murder at the Beach: The Bouchercon Anthology 2014, edited by Dana Cameron; Down & Out)

"The Shadow Knows" by Barb Goffman (Chesapeake Crimes: Homicidal Holidays, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley; Wildside Press)

"Howling at the Moon" by Paul D. Marks (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Nov. 2014)

"The Proxy" by Travis Richardson (Thuglit #13, Sept./Oct. 2014)

"The Odds Are Against Us" by Art Taylor (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Nov. 2014)

Sue Feder Historical Mystery Award:

Queen of Hearts by Rhys Bowen (Berkley Prime Crime)

Things Half in Shadow by Alan Finn (Gallery)

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (Knopf)

A Deadly Measure of Brimstone by Catriona McPherson (Minotaur)

Present Darkness by Malla Nunn (Atria)

Hunting Shadows by Charles Todd (Wm. Morrow)

Congratulations to all the nominees.

Hat tip to Mystery Readers International.

Doug Johnstone on Writing the Jump

You get widows and orphans, but why isn’t there a word for a parent who has lost a child? It’s a question that I pose right at the start of my latest novel, The Jump, and the only answer I can think of is that it’s just too horrible a thing to contemplate.

The idea of parents losing a child to suicide has been sitting in the back of my mind for ages, gnawing away at me. It’s not an easy subject matter to tackle in a novel, perhaps, but eventually the voices in the back of my mind grew so loud that I just had to try to write about it. So that’s how The Jump came about.

I often get a little bit annoyed when crime novels write about suicide because, more often than not, they turn out not to be about suicide at all. What seems like suicide in the first instance is usually revealed to be a murder, maybe the victim of a serial killer. But what if there was no such resolution? That’s what I wanted to write about, a suicide that was really suicide, and all the emptiness and loneliness and pain and damage that goes along with that awful act.

The Jump is not about trying to find out who the murderer is, it’s about trying to come to terms with loss, and trying to grab a second chance at family life, no matter how fucked up that might be. And in The Jump, without giving too much away, it’s pretty fucked up.

Ellie deals with her grief by making a daily pilgrimage up to the Forth Road Bridge where her son killed himself. At the start of the book, she encounters another teenage boy about to do the same thing, and she talks him down. But when she takes him back to her house, virtually catatonic, she discovers he has blood on him, blood that isn’t his.

And so she is swept into this new boy’s mess of a life, all the while doing her best to protect what’s left of her family and what amounts to a new family.

And, inevitably, it’s an unholy mess. There are abused children and bad police, murder and body disposal, alcohol and pills, and a sunken boat. Throughout it all the road and rail bridges that span the Firth of Forth loom over everything. The book is set entirely in South Queensferry, the small coastal town that hunkers between the bridges. The bridges create a specific, eerie atmosphere, a sense of always being looked down upon, the constant traffic permanently heading elsewhere. It’s a beautiful place, but the mouth of the river as it spills into the North Sea is a forbidding place, and nature and the elements play a large part in what happens as the book reaches its climax.

Ultimately, The Jump asks questions about morality and survival. Is it OK to do bad things for a greater good? In a grieving world where all certainty is gone, what will you do to protect the innocent? Hopefully, readers of The Jump will appreciate the way I’ve asked the questions, and will maybe even come up with their own answers.

The Jump by Doug Johnstone is out on 6^th August (£12.99, Faber & Faber).  More information about Doug Johnstone and his work can be found on his blog.  You can also follow him from Twitter @doug_johnstone

Eleanor Moran on How I wrote A Daughter’s Secret…

Today's guest blog is by author Eleanor Moran who when not writing moonlights as a TV Drama Executive In a previous life she also worked as a TV Executive. Her latest novel is A Daughter's Secret and she has been persuaded to tell Shots how the story came about.

I was running so fast down the grimy North London street that it almost felt like my heart could burst out of my chest, Alien style. I was no athlete - the only reason I was pelting down Archway’s Junction Road was because the much older man I’d been seeing - been obsessed with - liked to jog and lived nearby. He’d disappeared on me, ghosted his way out of my life, and I was so desperate to find out what had gone wrong that I was left here, chasing after a stranger who bore little resemblance to him, almost mad with grief.

I was eighteen years old at the time, and the man I was searching for was the latest in a string of older flames who should’ve come with health warnings stamped across their grizzled faces. This one, fortunately, was the last. The man who pushed me over the edge, and into therapy, where I learned that it wasn’t about any of them: it was all an attempt to understand the most painful relationship of all. The one with my complex, mercurial father.

A Daughter’s Secret, my latest novel, is about how this relationship can define so much of a woman’s life, for good or ill. My heroine, Mia, is a thirty something psychotherapist who looks from the outside like she’s got it all sussed. She’s got a string of letters after her name, a silver fox of a boyfriend - but when thirteen-year-old Gemma Vine walks through the door of her treatment room her stage-managed life starts to fall apart. Gemma was the last person to see her father before he went on the run, fleeing from a major criminal trial. Mia’s there to provide support, but soon the police come knocking, wanting her to secretly elicit information and feed it back. Mia’s past means she’s either the perfect person to help Gemma or the absolute opposite. As the memories of her relationship with her own father start to plague and torment her, she puts herself in terrible danger, prepared to do whatever it takes to help her troubled and manipulative client.

For me, psychotherapy was a lifesaver. I grew up adoring my unpredictable father, and forgiving him his long, painful absences from my life. He was someone who struggled to live a normal life, never marrying or holding down a job. The school holidays I spent with him were precious to me, but his behaviour was erratic and dangerous. When I was ten, he burnt the house down, leaving us to escape from a top floor window, minutes away from asphyxiation. With no home to visit him in, our relationship became even more fractured and complicated. The scars were deep, and psychotherapy gave me the courage to take a time out and give myself the space to heal rather than keep perpetuating the past like it was a choose your own adventure book, always hoping that this time I’d discover a happier ending.

Wrapping up these themes in a muscular crime thriller was a whole new challenge. My earlier novels have had mysteries contained in them, but ones that have largely been driven by emotion. Now I had to work out how a police investigation could push the story forward. Luckily my second job is as an executive producer for TV drama. I was at the BBC for many years, working on everything from Rome to New Tricks to Spooks. Much of my work involves coming up with ideas for new shows, or spotting books to adapt, and I’m experienced in helping screen writers craft a taut plot.

I’d made a legal thriller with Suranne Jones in 2013, Lawless, and met the most extraordinary criminal barrister in the process. Caroline Haughey is a leading expert on people trafficking, leading multi-million pound trials and putting away criminals who have committed sickening crimes. On the side, she offers her services as a story consultant (Mark Billingham’s latest book is dedicated to her). She directed me towards the case of a crime lord who is hiding in plain sight. Despite numerous trials and repeated Sunday Times investigations, he’s still walking the streets. I was even more interested in the people who give such criminals a veneer of respectability, so I made Gemma’s dad a top flight accountant (as Caroline pointed out, the police ultimately snared Al Capone for his dodgy financial dealings). I didn’t want Gemma’s dad to be an out and out villain - I wanted to create a more complicated character that no-one - not the police, not Mia - could get a handle on. These are the characters I want to watch or read about, whether it’s Don Draper or Walter White.

Both Gemma and Mia have to lose their illusions about their fathers to make it to the other side. The same was true for me, and I did ultimately find a fragile kind of peace with my father (he died when I was in my mid-twenties). I hope that creating Mia out of my experiences might demystify therapy for a few of my readers, and help them to befriend the ghosts which can haunt us from deep in our distant pasts. I’m using her for my next book, publishing next summer: bringing that kind of psychological intensity to a crime plot hopefully makes for a compelling mix.

A Daughter’s Secret by Eleanor Moran is published 6th August by Simon & Schuster, price £7.99 in paperback.

You can find more information about Eleanor Moran on her website.  You can also follow her on Twitter @eleanorkmoran or find her on Facebook.