Engaging Novels About a Detective

The oth­er day, after pub­lish­ing the sec­ond nov­el in the Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series—The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent—I pulled a giant plas­tic crate labeled “Dako­ta Stevens Stuff” out of the clos­et. This crate con­tains note­books, ear­ly drafts, and reams of research for the first book in the series, A Real Piece of Work.

As I start­ed to file away the mate­ri­als from The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent, I found the orig­i­nal Black-n-Red note­book in which I sketched out my ideas for the char­ac­ters of Dako­ta and Svet­lana, as well as the out­lines for sev­er­al adven­tures.

For an hour or more, I flipped through that note­book, rev­el­ing in the devel­op­ment of my detec­tive series. The note­book is full of lists, and the longest lists are ded­i­cat­ed to names—names I had for Dako­ta & Svet­lana before they became Dako­ta & Svet­lana. I won’t bore you with what might have been, but I do want to share with you one entry, dat­ing back to the spring of 2004:

“I’m not sure exact­ly what tack I want to take with this series—whether it will be tra­di­tion­al or more modern—but I know this: I don’t want to write a series of ‘detec­tive nov­els’; I want to write a series of engag­ing nov­els about a detec­tive.”

The dif­fer­ence may sound like mere seman­tics, but it’s not. From the out­set, it was impor­tant to me that I not write yet anoth­er “detec­tive novel”—something with a for­mu­la detective/mystery at the for­mu­la length. There were already plen­ty of those. I want­ed to write nov­els about a detec­tive, and I want­ed to include ele­ments of his life beyond the mys­tery at hand. I want­ed to pop­u­late these nov­els with vivid loca­tions and round­ed, mem­o­rable char­ac­ters, and I want­ed to ren­der it all in prose that was aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing in itself, so you, the read­er, could enjoy these nov­els on sev­er­al lev­els: for the plot or sto­ry, the char­ac­ters and loca­tions, the humor, and the lan­guage.

That’s why reviews like this one of The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent are so mean­ing­ful to me—because the read­er clear­ly took away from the book what I intend­ed to give:

“The Rich are Dif­fer­ent is a full-bod­ied nov­el, with rich char­ac­ters, liv­ing back­grounds and loca­tions, and a tough nut of a mys­tery to crack.”

I’m pleased because what­ev­er their oth­er strengths or weak­ness­es, I believe the two nov­els in the series live up to my orig­i­nal aim: “to write a series of engag­ing nov­els about a detec­tive,” rather than just mere detec­tive nov­els.

I invite you to decide for your­self. Start with A Real Piece of Work (book #1), because The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent (book #2) is a true sequel, pick­ing up a few months after the first case ends. I hope you enjoy them, and if you do, please post your pos­i­tive review on Ama­zon. Your pos­i­tive reviews increase the books’ vis­i­bil­i­ty and rank­ings, ensur­ing future install­ments in the series.

As always, thank you for your sup­port. Enjoy your sum­mer and your sum­mer read­ing.

—Chris Orcutt

 

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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