Carve your own niche in the crime writing world
Carve your own niche in the crime writing world
By Julie Tollefson
The creative paths within the mystery world are many and varied. Just ask Jeffrey Marks — fiction writer, biographer, and publisher. If, like Jeffrey, you find yourself pulled in multiple directions, he offers five tips to make the journey a success.
1) Follow your interests — Jeffrey began his mystery career in nonfiction, producing author interviews and articles for magazines.
“I became interested in digging deeper into authors,” he says. Curiosity lead him to take detailed dives into the themes and patterns of an author’s work as well as the reasons an author tackled certain issues or ideas in their writing. And that led, naturally, to him writing book-length biographies of some of the crime fiction luminaries of the previous century.
For his first full-length biography, Jeffrey wrote about Chicago mystery author Craig Rice. Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice; Queen of the Screwball Mystery, was nominated for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards.
That book led to more books about other mystery authors. His biography of Anthony Boucher won the Anthony Award in 2009. Jeffrey’s latest subject: Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of Perry Mason.
“He was a dynamo, writing 10,000 words a day. He puts me to shame,” Jeffrey says.
2) Learn from others — Jeffrey’s nonfiction work, his research into other authors’ lives and methods, led him to identify techniques he now applies to his own fiction writing.
“My biography of Craig Rice led me to study her work carefully,” he says. “I think that when you break down another author's works and study them, you're in a better place to write something yourself. You see what works and what doesn't. She had a wonderful way with humor, and I do see some comedy in my own works as well.”
Nonfiction — research, fact-checking, citations, and all that goes into a credible piece — is a lot more work than fiction, Jeffrey says.
“I tend to write my biographies based on choosing a subject,” he says. “With fiction, I normally start with a scene that I develop and then build the story around the scene.”
3) Bring your particular expertise to all your endeavors — In 2018, Jeffrey took over Crippen & Landru, Publishers (www.crippenlandru.com). There, he oversees all aspects of publishing the company’s niche products: single-author mystery short story collections, both contemporary and classics.
As a writer, he’s developed a new appreciation of short stories because of his experience with Crippen & Landru.
“The earliest and some of the best mysteries have appeared in short form,” he says. “If you think of Poe, his mysterious works were short stories. Sherlock Holmes appeared in fifty-six short stories and only four novels. The pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s were full of some of the best in mystery fiction.”
Jeffrey’s most recent piece of fiction — “Disco is Dead,” a semi-autobiographical story about a stabbing in a roller disco, where he worked in his teens — appeared in the November/December 2022 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
As a publisher, Jeffrey’s nonfiction roots again play a role in the direction of the company, as his interest in the real lives of mystery writers of the 1940s and 1950s has uncovered a number of authors whose works have appeared or will appear in Crippen & Landru collections. Among the classics, they’ve published collections by John Dickson Carr, Craig Rice, and Margaret Millar.
On the contemporary side, the publisher’s recent collections include work by Art Taylor and Edith Maxwell.
For writers interested in working with Crippen & Landru, Jeffrey recommends getting to know the company before submitting work.
“Buy a book and see what would be expected of you if you were to get accepted,” he says. “So often, we get submissions that have nothing to do with our mission. I’m not kidding when I say we get at least one weekly submission for a science-fiction novel. I have nothing against science fiction, but the submission is a waste of time for the author and for me.”
4) Focus on one thing at a time — Creating balance between publishing and writing responsibilities can be challenging.
“If one or the other is doing really well, it’s tempting to concentrate on what’s going well. So I have to be conscious of my time,” Jeffrey says. “One of the ways I do that is to split the day. Right now, the mornings are for Crippen & Landru. The afternoons are for writing, and the evenings are for my home life.”
Sometimes he switches up the schedule, moving his writing time to early in the morning if he needs to concentrate more on that.
“I can look at the time of day and see what I’m doing, and in seconds, I’ll know if I’m doing what I should be doing.”
Technology, too, can assist when you have multiple plates spinning at once. Jeffrey has established separate email accounts and phone numbers to draw the line between his publishing work and his writing.
“I can tell immediately if the email or phone call is from one part of my life or another. I can then decide if now is the time to handle this,” he says.
This approach helps with time management, but the lines blur when it comes to the people in his life.
“I have many personal friends who are also authors for Crippen & Landru or help me with various publishing-related projects. It’s harder to keep them compartmentalized. I try to be very professional in my work and then enjoy their company when it comes to the friendship side of things,” he says.
5) Get organized — When you keep as many plates spinning as he does, you have to have a system. For Jeffrey, the system involves color-coded lists and a paper planner.
“It might sound corny, but I use different colors for writing and publishing,” he says. “In that way, I can look at the page and see: Am I spending all my time on one part of my day? Is there a balance? Am I pushing too hard to get too much done?”
He’s added a third color to represent tasks he needs to complete outside of publishing and writing.
“When I first retired, I was amazed that I could get all of this work done for publishing and writing, but I found myself at the end of the week having not done any cleaning or outside work,” he says. “So now I’ve added that third category to make sure non-work things are getting done, too,” he says.