Rereading the "Dancing Priest" Series

Someone once asked me if I reread my own books after they’re published. And the answer is yes. Part of the reason is research and “story-checking.” When I was writing the Dancing Priest series, I had to reread the early books to make sure I was keeping story line, characters, and settings consistent and accurate.  

But I must confess that, sometimes, I reread the books simply for pleasure. Occasionally, I get so wrapped up in the stories that I forget I wrote them. I suppose that’s a good thing. Yes, I have favorite scenes in every book that I like to reread, but I do reread the books in their entirety, about once a year.

 

I’ve had readers tell me that they reread the Dancing Priest series, too. Last week, Bill Grandi, a pastor in Indiana, started writing about it at his blog Living in the Shadow. This is part of what he had to say about the first book, Dancing Priest; he captured the very heart of the story in just a few words:

 

“Glynn has weaved together a wonderful story that even a non-religious person would enjoy. Even though Michael is a fictional character, one begins to admire this young man and his passion for life. Grounded without being preachy, Dancing Priest is a wonderful story of faith, hope, caring for others, putting other’s interests before your own, and being sensitive to those around us.”

 

And here’s what Bill wrote about the second one, A Light Shining, after summarizing a conversation between the Anglican priest Michael Kent and a 15-year-old boy on the steps of Michael’s church in San Francisco:

 

“…Each one of us matters to God. He sent Jesus to die so that we could be forgiven. While a story written by Mr. Young, the conversation is heard all over the planet. Every person has value and merit. Each one matters. We are all sinners, for sure, but we still matter to God.”

 

It might be time to reread my books (again). Thank you, Bill Grandi.

 

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Kids These Days Need The Black Stallion – Larissa Phillips at The Free Press.

 

Grant and Whiskey at Shiloh – Sean Michael Chick at Emerging Civil War.

 

The Span of a Season – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

“Try not to think what we are going to do to ourselves”: Grant at the Wilderness and Shiloh – Chris Mackowski at Emerging Cvil War. 

 

Who controls our histories? – Barb Drummond at Curious Histories.

"An Honest Man" by Simon Michael

C

harles Holborne is approaching desperation. He’s getting no legal cases at chambers, except where he can tag along with junior barristers. He’s behind on his rent and overdrawn at the bank. He survived being charged with the death of his wife (The Brief) but it seems he’s become untouchable. And then Sally, the clerk from his former chambers falls into his life, and what had been a dearth of work becomes a flood.

The big cases is defending an elderly attorney accused of conspiring with criminals in a diamond heist. The attorney is known for close connections to various criminal enterprises, but the evidence looks planted. Charles takes the case on.

In the meantime, his father becomes ill and appears to have had a small stroke. Charles has been estranged from his family; in college, he turned his back on his Jewish heritage and changed his name. His mother is still unhappy with him.

Simon Michael

An Honest Man is the second in the Charles Holborne Legal Thriller series by British author Simon Michaels. Set in 1960s London, it’s a time of the Profumo / Christine Keeler scandal bringing down a government, of when criminal gangs were almost out of control, and of when there were almost as many crooked as honest police officers. It’s a top-notch story, with an account of a trial that makes the book almost impossible to put down. Michael draws upon his extensive experience in and knowledge of criminal law, and he knows how to tell a riveting story.

Michael is the author of five novels in the Charles Holborne series. He studied law at Kings College, London University and was called to the Bar in 1978. He worked primarily in the field of criminal law until the late 1990s, when he focused his practice on clinical negligence. He began writing in the 1980s and resumed it when he retired from legal practice.

An Honest Man is an outstanding legal drama story, and Michael manages to keep several mysteries and story threads going simultaneously. The conflicted Jewish-by-heritage attorney will not be bought and will not be compromised, and Michael knows exactly how to play that in a criminal and often dangerous world.

Related:

My review of The Brief by Simon Michael.

Lessons I Learned from the Hardy Boys

When I was about nine years old, I discovered the pleasure and excitement of reading The Hardy Boys mysteries. Ostensibly by an author named Franklin W. Dixon, these fast-paced mysteries filled with adventure were usually set in or near the fictional town of Bayport, likely somewhere near New York City. The books began to be published in the late 1920s and continued for decades. When I began reading them, there were somewhere about 50 Hardy Boys different mysteries.

Frank and Joe Hardy were 17 and 16 and dark-haired and blond, respectively. Frank, as the older brother, was the more serious of the pair, while Joe was more the “shoot-first-ask questions-later” character. They rode motorcycles. They could drive a car. Their father was the nationally known private detective Fenton Hardy, while their mother generally stayed at home and worried. Frank and Joe would often get themselves involved in the fringes of their father’s cases, often landing right in the middle of the action. And they ingeniously caught crooks and villains.

Who wouldn’t want to be Frank and Joe Hardy?

Edward Stratemeyer

The series was created by a writer, Edward Stratemeyer (1862-1930), who organized the Stratemeyer Syndicate to write and publish The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, The Rover Boys, Tom Swift, and Nancy Drew, among others. While the books carried one author’s name (like Franklin Dixon, Carolyn Keene, and Victor Appleton), they were churned out by a host of writers under contract to the syndicate. 

I recently reread the first two books in The Hardy Boys series, The Tower Treasure and The House on the Cliff. We had given a set of the first 10 in the series to my oldest grandson for Christmas, and I wanted to see if they could still hold my interest today.

They could and they did.

The first thing I discovered (or rediscovered) was the astonishing use of exclamation points. Stratemeyer must have mandated a certain minimum use of that punctuation in writing contracts, because the books are loaded with them. The exclamation points underscore action, fast pace, tension, unexpected events and people, and more. 

Second, each chapter ends with a cliffhanger (and usually an exclamation point). It’s like a roller coaster ride of successive hills and valleys, with the chapters ending at the top of each hill. And like a roller coaster ride, you want to keep going and read on.

Third, each chapter has a title – and the titles are designed to attract interest and add to the building tension of the story. So, you find “An Unexpected Find,” “Captured,” “The Hidden Trail,” “The Holdup,” and “The Threat.”

The main characters have simple names, one syllable for teenagers and two for adults. So we have Frank and Joe (it’s never Joseph) with their good friends and partners in detection Chet and Biff. Adults have names like Fenton and Oscar. Important secondary characters have colorful names, like “Pretzel Pete,” while the villains have names like villains – Felix Snattman, for example, is a smuggler in The House on the Cliff.

Fifth, the language is simple. The only words that may send you to the dictionary are the period, old-fashioned ones, like “sleuth” and “roadster.”

What all of these style tactics do is talk to, not at, the reader. The books never talk down to their audience. They meet their readers right where their readers are. They want to engage you, and they want to put you in the characters’ places. The teens are all recognizable – the serious ones, the geeky ones, the one who eats too much, the fun-loving and daring one. 

Many of the Stratemeyer Syndicate books have been updated for more contemporary sensibilities. Those are not the ones to read. Instead, you have to search for the ones originally published in the 1920s to 1940s and then reprinted through roughly the 1960s.

 I like the original Frank and Joe Hardys. Yes, they seem a bit old-fashioned (no laptops or smart phones, no political issues) but they’re all about telling an entertaining story.

Writing a Fiction Series

My introduction to series fiction happened in college. I was checking the sale table at a B. Dalton’s Bookstore and found God is an Englishman by R.F. Delderfield, a novel about the Swann family set in mid-19^thcentury England. Not long after, I realized there was a second volume, entitled Theirs Was the Kingdom. And a couple of years later, the third and final volume, Give Us This Day, in the series was published.

I loved those stories. Delderfield had created an entire world built around the coming of the railroads and how one man realized that there was opportunity in the routes not connected by the railroads. He builds a business empire upon that realization. It was (and is) good, old-fashioned storytelling at its best. I still have those three books.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Dancing King Stories: Unexpectedly Writing a Series

I never intended to write a series of novels. In fact, I never really thought about publishing what I was doing, first in my head and later on paper. Dancing Priest existed only in my head for almost five years. It began with an image and gradually progressed to a story.

You can tell a story in your mind much faster than you can write it down. 

But I did eventually push it on to a computer screen, all 250,000 words of it. It was too big for a novel, too unwieldy, shooting off in too many directions. Metaphorically speaking, I took an ax to the manuscript at about the 110,000-word mark. And then I spent the next two years culling those 110,000 words down to about 90,000. I rewrote the story at least once. And that was what was eventually published as Dancing Priest.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Top photograph by Patrick Tomasso via Unsplash. Used with permission.