Before I moved back to Colorado, I was living in California and taking dance classes. When one classmate discovered I was a writer, she suggested I write a murder mystery about our class, and she volunteered to be the victim. I wasn’t sure I wanted to kill off someone I knew — words have power, and I didn’t want to unleash that power on even a suspecting victim. Despite my misgivings, I started to follow through, going so far as to take a photo of our lovely victim for the cover of the book. I’d expected to have to take several shots to get the pose I wanted, but she sank to the wooden floor as gracefully as she did everything else, and lay in the ideal pose. Right then I knew I could kill her. She was just too damn perfect.
After a lot of procrastination, I did end up writing the book, though funnily enough, after it was published, she asked “Why did I have to be the victim?”
Another member of the class belonged to a book club, and when it was her turn to choose the book, she chose the book I’d written, Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, and invited me to join them for the discussion. I agreed because I thought it might be fun, but when I arrived, I found out that the discussion was to be cut short because of a baby shower as well as a birthday party. They weren’t all that interested in discussing the book, anyway. Nor were they interested in anything I had to say. The only person who actually addressed me asked accusingly if I’d been my own editor. I mentioned that I had several copy editors, and she just made a rude noise and said we’d all done a lousy job because there were more typos than she could count. I did ask her to point them out, but she ignored me. So I thanked them graciously and left.
I’d had a lot of problems with my publisher during the publication process — he insisted on editing the book but ended up making many mistakes. After several heated discussions, he finally agreed to submit the manuscript as I had formatted it, but I had no idea if he had followed through, though when I got the final proof, it seemed okay.
As I’ve mentioned in the previous couple of posts, I’ve been reading my books, though always with a bit of apprehension. This one most of all since I didn’t want to face the “more typos that she could count.”
I also worried that since it was more or less a novelty book, it would seem silly or lacking any depth. But I shouldn’t have worried. After all, it is a “Pat Bertram book.”
As with the other of my books that I recently read, I was astonished by how good the writing was and by how much I liked the book. Except for the brief synopsis, I had completely forgotten the story. I hadn’t even remembered who did the deed, and wow! The ending really blew me away.
I was especially delighted by the sly mention of mystery genre tropes. For example:
The first thing you learn when you set out to write a novel is that you need a strong protagonist. No ditherers. No brooders. And I am both.
And:
I climbed into my ancient VW bug (no, I am not plagiarizing a well-known fictional detective, I really do own such a car—bought it new when I was young and never got another auto) and drove to the gas station.
And:
Like a fool in a bad drama, I stared at my phone. Huh? She expects me to drop everything and drive over there so she can tell me something she could just as easily have told me over the phone? With a shudder, I realized what had just happened. The worst cliché of all. So often in mysteries, someone makes such a call, and when the recipient arrives at the rendezvous, they find the person dead.
And:
In every mystery story, it seems, there comes a time when the author wants a way to present insights, needs to show state of mind, or simply gets bored with a straightforward narrative and plays at being creative, so the storyteller recounts a dream. Since I hate dreams, my own included, I usually skip those parts of a book, so I won’t bore you with the details of my dream.
There isn’t a lot of action in the book, it’s more of a psychological mystery, but it’s a fun story within a story — a writer writes a story about a fictional writer writing a story showing how life follows fiction.
As reviewer Malcolm Campbell wrote, Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare is “a very readable hoot. In this dandy mystery, everyone has a secret, a reason for covering it up, and a possible motive. The characters are well developed, the introspective protagonist wonders if she inadvertently set the stage for a murder by agreeing to write a murder mystery based on the dance class, and the cops tell her that in real life, most amateur sleuths end up dead or worse. Readers who love mysteries will enjoy this book. Writers who write mysteries will consider being more careful when pretending to kill off their friends in a novel. And those who’ve been thinking of taking a dance class will see the story as a cautionary tale.”
And oh, yeah — there were typos. Three of them. One absent hyphen, one missing “not,” and one extraneous “a.” It’s possible there were translation errors in the ebook, which she had read, but that’s a mystery for another time.
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Click here to read the first chapter of: Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare.
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