Some Degree of Murder re-release!
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Some Degree of Murder (SDoM) is the first collaborative novel of my career. Colin Conway and I wrote the original draft back in 2004, and if you want the truth, we had trouble getting any traction with agents or publishers. It sat for about seven years, until the landscape of publishing shifted and the avenue of self-publishing became a more viable option. I’d already published the digital versions of the River City novels by then, and I approached Colin about reviving SDoM.
He agreed, and we took a look at our draft. Both of us had the same reaction.
Ewwww.
There was a lot of things in that original draft that made us both cringe when we viewed it through the lens of what we had learned as writers in the intervening years. Some of it was storytelling, some of it was craft, and some of it was attitude. There was plenty to be critical of, and we both understood then what we didn’t before — why agents and publishers passed on the project.
At the same time, we also saw the core of what was a great story. We saw the reason that, while they eventually passed, a number of agents and publishers took a long look at this book before making that decision. We knew we had something. It just wasn’t finished.
Colin and I set about re-editing the book.
Mercilessly.
We slashed everything that didn’t move the story forward. And there were plenty of places that was true. Most were so obvious to us with the advantage of hindsight, some distance from the original draft, and again, where we were in our own writing journey with regard to craft. We both saw multiple instances in which we had clearly been simply wallowing in the mire of “look at me, ma! I’m writing a book! Not just a book, but a gritty crime novel!”
We cut fluff. We cut sex. We cut or toned down profanity and violence, something that may be difficult to believe when you read today’s version, but it is all true.
Colin had a mantra during the edit. The story was like a freeway, said repeatedly. Action and narrative had to keep moving a highway speed. Anything that took an exit from the freeway got cut, or was limited to a pee break and back on the freeway.
He was right. And it worked.
The original draft of SDoM ran almost 111,000 words. By the time we finished our revisions, it ran 70K words. Even my bad math says that is over 40K words…. more than a third of the book!
Not just was there less, but the writing became tighter, which is just as important. The story was taut, the tension nearly constant. Finally, in 2011, we had the book we meant to write in 2005.
How big a difference is there between the two versions? Well, my wife and first reader, Kristi read that early bloated draft to offer her thoughts as Colin and I prepared to edit. She hated most of it, and for all of the same reasons we eventually saw as flaws, too. But when your biggest fan says the book has umpteen million problems, you know there’s an issue, right?
Kristi disliked that draft so much that it took reading Charlie-316, a new collaboration that Colin and I wrote before she changed her mind about how good of a writer Colin was (I somehow got a partial, but not a total, pass due to her reading my other work). The negative elements of that early draft were that pronounced.
Though we edited with ruthless abandon, we did keep the structure of the story and the format intact. The story is told through the eyes of Virgil Kelley and Detective John Tower in alternating first person chapters. Tower is investigating a young woman’s death, and mob enforcer Kelley arrives to do the same, as the victim was his daughter. This dual first person narrative gives the reader the intimacy and insight that comes with that point of view, but some of the breadth that you get with the typical third person viewpoint. It also allowed us to create a great deal of tension as the two men encountered some of the same people and ultimately the same places.
As an interesting side note, several agents and publishers counseled us to drop this dual first person narrative form. The hot new style du jour at the time was a first person police narrative interspersed with a third person bad guy narrative, and this was something that was suggested to us, too.
We flatly refused (and maybe sealed our fate with those doing the suggesting). For one thing, while we both understand that the marketplace matters, neither of us is prone to chasing market trends. Secondly, and more importantly, we saw John Tower and Virgil Kelley as equals, not as protagonist vs. antagonist. Or, put another way, each was the protagonist in their own mind, and the other his antagonist. Each was on a particular journey of equal value, and by giving them both the same voice and same format, neither one was wearing a white or black hat.
We stuck to our guns, and that refusal, along with the warts of that original draft, is why the book remained unpublished. Until…
In 2012, Colin and I self-published the new, leaner version of Some Degree of Murder. Photographer Matt Rose created a cover, which I still think was a good one for the time period, especially for an independent artist. The book went on to become my best-selling fiction title over the next seven years. On Amazon, it has over 330 reviews and an average rating of 4.3 stars.
I sometimes make the mistake of reading reviews. Okay, I often do. But at times, there is something to be learned from them, if you look at it in a macro fashion rather than a micro one. I’m talking trends, basically. And the trend was that people who liked this book liked the action, the tension, the gritty nature of it. The people who didn’t like it objected to the profanity and the violence.
I’ll take that 86% who like it for being the book it is over the 5% who object to its ‘R’ rating equivalent.
In 2018, I had a conversation with Down and Out Books, the publisher of several of my books. SDoM seemed like such a great fit for their line, and Colin and I quickly negotiated a contract to bring it under the D&O banner. We de-published the book, and D&O cover designer JT Lindroos set to work on a new cover. He did a stellar job that I am thrilled with. He really captures the gritty nature of the book, and I think that those potential one-star reviewers out there will no longer be surprised by the book’s content (Truthfully, I don’t think they should have been in the first place, but maybe I’m being a little salty there).
On March 18, 2019, D&O will release the new and improved SDoM. The book finally has the home it should have, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, the SDoM collaborative experience was a pivotal one for my career. Because things went so well working with Colin, I was completely willing to try another collaboration when it came along. Enter Jim Wilsky, and our first book together, Blood on Blood. That easily became the Ania series, a trilogy in its own right (plus a prequel in 2018). When Bonnie Paulson said she wanted to dive into crime fiction, I didn’t hesitate to write The Trade Off with her. And along the way, I hounded Eric Beetner to work together until he relented long enough for us to knock out The Backlist (and two more in the Bricks and Cam Job series).
I wrote all of these books with these other writers in that same dual first person narrative, and it worked well for the stories we were telling. Then Lawrence Kelter proposed working together on The Last Collar in a more traditional format — a single first person POV . Although I wasn’t entirely certain it would work, we gave it a go. My concerns that Mocha, the protagonist in The Last Collar, would sound schizophrenic in the first person turned out to be completely unfounded. He had a voice of his own, formed from both Larry and I. 
Then Larry suggested writing a book together with multiple third person POVs, and we gave that a try in Fallen City. That process was even easier than I expected, and I’m proud of the book that resulted. It also brought my collaboration experience full circle, in a way.
In 2018, Colin pitched a project he was developing called Charlie-316. It was a a third person police procedural with six to eight point of view characters. He wanted to collaborate on it for a variety of reasons, but one of the considerations was the specific police experience and knowledge I brought to the table.
His idea was a great one, and we set about working up the outline. Just like in 2004 and again in 2011, working together gained a synergy of its own. Ideas sprung forth and were immediately improved upon, and the book took on its own momentum. The back and forth of the writing process was like a tennis volley, and the first draft of this book happened with an almost scary rapidity. It’s a book that we’re both pretty stoked about, and it’ll be out in June 2019 from Down and Out Books. It’s also only the first of a four-book arc. As I write this, we’ve completed book two, and are about to start writing book three. Each installment of this series will be published in successive Junes — 2020, ’21, and ’22.
All of this, really, happened because of that first project — Some Degree of Murder. That’s why it has a special place in my heart, and it is why I’m happy as hell to see it in its rightful home at Down and Out Books.
If you haven’t read it yet, it’s available again on March 18, 2019.
What are you waiting for?
Source: All The Madness In My Soul
