Next week, the ninth book in my Cork O’Connor series goes on sale, and I still don’t know exactly what to think of this work.

Often at the heart of my books is an issue.  With Copper River, for example, it was a question of what happens to the children in our society that we turn out backs on them.  Thunder Bay considered the sacrifices we’re willing to make in the name of love.  Red Knife was about our culture of violence.  But I’ve to tell you honestly there’s no issue involved in Heaven’s Keep. I just tried to write a damn good story.

I’m told I succeeded.  Me, I’m usually a terrible judge of my own work.  By the time I’ve finished a project, I don’t know if it’s good or bad or will have any impact at all on readers.  By the end, it’s become stale for me.  I’ve poured my time and my energy and my creativity into the work, draft after draft, and I’ve usually exhausted myself in the process and all my enthusiasm has been sucked dry.  Almost always, by the time I send off my final responses to the copyedits, I never want to look at that piece of writing again.  And worse, I’m afraid no one else will want to look at it either.

So I rely on the judgment of others whose opinion I trust: my agent, my editor, my writing group, and, finally, the critics.  With Heaven’s Keep, the critical response has been overwhelmingly positive.  Sally Fellows, who reviews for a number of venues, says, “Things just do not get any better than this.”  Ted Hertel, who reviews for Deadly Pleasures, says, “The story grabs you and will not let go.  This book – indeed, this series – is not to be missed.”  Robin Agnew, of the wonderful Aunt Agatha’s bookstore, wrote in her review for the Ann Arbor Journal, “After nine novels, I think it’s safe to say Cork O’Connor is as beloved by readers as Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn.   The fever of anticipation when a new Cork book comes out is as high as the one I remember for a new Leaphorn or Chee novel.  This novel is well worth the anticipation, though it will definitely have you reaching for a (large) box of Kleenex.”

Man, I hope lots of people buy this book, read it, and enjoy it.  Hell, all writers hopes this for their work.  But in terms of sales, writers have little influence.  It’s up to the gods or fate or whatever.  And I hope if people read it and like it, they write to tell me so.  I don’t care if you’re Stephen King or John Grisham.  You can never hear enough that you’ve done a good job.  Especially if, like me, you’re never quite certain that you have.

Two things you never do in the crime genre.  First and foremost, never kill a pet.  You can be brutal to human beings, kill them in imaginative, excruciating ways, but an innocent little dog is off limits.  Second, never end a book without all the loose threads tied up, all the answers given, justice done, and the world set right again.  Readers expect tidy endings.  It’s one of the reasons, probably, that they choose books in the genre.  The comfort factor.

But does this always have to be the way?  Can a mystery be satisfying even if it consciously doesn’t meet this powerful expectation?  That was one of the questions—the biggest question, in fact—that I considered as the story of Mercy Falls formed in my thinking.  I began to see a long story arc, one that, more and more, I realized would probably span two books.  And I wrestled with how to write this project in a way that would fit neatly with readers’ expectations.

The more I considered the project, the more I realized that there were two significant ideas at work.  First, to write a book that would carry the reader only partway across the bridge of the entire story.  And then, to write a book in which Cork O’Connor has to confront a whole new mystery and set of dangers, while at the same time keeping an eye over his shoulder for the problems that have followed him from the earlier book.  It would mean ending the first part of the project without tying up loose ends, and writing a follow up that would not only complete the story but also be independent enough of the earlier work that readers coming to it without having read the first part would still feel that they’d been given a satisfying piece of fiction.

An audacious idea, I knew.  In retrospect, I’m amazed that I decided to undertake the challenge.

I thought out the entire story arc fairly carefully and found a place that seemed appropriate for the break in the two books to occur.  I knew it would leave the reader with questions unanswered, a cliffhanger kind of ending, which was a situation I strongly suspected readers might not appreciate.  But I liked the idea of trying it, just trying something different.  So that’s what I did.

Mercy Falls ends with a threat—to Cork, his family, his entire life—a threat not resolved until nearly the end of the book that follows: Copper River.  The novel received a fine welcome from critics.  Reviewers loved it.  Almost immediately I began to get emails from my readers with a broad range of responses.  Some loved what I’d done.  Others were perplexed.  A number were angry.  Pretty much what I’d expected.  To those who were outraged, I explained myself and most understood.  But there were still some who bought Voodoo dolls, put my image on them, and stuck needles through the heart. They also vowed they would never read another of my books.

I continue to get the occasional email rant from someone who’s just read Mercy Falls, and I continue to offer my explanation and advise them to move quickly to a reading of Copper River.

I confess that I wonder at times if I made the right decision.  But the place I end up is always the same.  If you never take risks in this art form—and it is an art—you never grow as a writer, and who wants to be a writer stuck in the same place book after book?  Even more important, who wants to read that kind of writer?

I’m often asked, “Do you outline?”

The answer (at least for the first nine novels I published) is yes.  I’ve done this for a variety of reasons, but one of the most important is that I need to know where the story is going.  What this does is free me from the question that can absolutely paralyze an author in mid-book: What the hell happens next?

I followed this process with Blood Hollow and had, I thought, a fine plot in place.  Here’s how I initially imagined the story.  It would be about a wild young Ojibwe man—a character named Solemn Winter Moon—who is accused of murdering a white girl.  Cork, who knows the young man well and has an emotional attachment, believes that despite all the evidence against him, Solemn is innocent.  Cork would go about doing what he does well, investigating in a rather stumbling way.  He would enlist the help of Jo, his attorney wife, to defend Solemn in court.  And Jo, ala Perry Mason, would extract a confession from the true perpetrator of the crime.

Looking at this basic storyline, I can see now that it seems pretty lackluster, at least on the face of things.  But I had a few twists in mind that would surprise readers.  And it would feature all the hallmarks of the series: the great northwoods setting, the Ojibwe culture, Cork and his family, and, of course, Henry Meloux.  I thought the story through, created my outline, and sat down to write.

Midway through the book, however, things changed dramatically.

Here’s how it happened.  I knew that at a particular point in the story Solemn Winter Moon would flee the murder charge against him.  During his flight, he would encounter wise old Henry Meloux.  Meloux would tell him that in order to face his reality, Solemn had to be a man, and he was not yet one.  Meloux would send Solemn on a vision quest that would initiate his passage into manhood.  It’s an old Ojibwe tradition called giigiwishimowin.  In my outline, I had Solemn receiving a fairly traditional kind of vision for an Ojibwe, one that involved an animal spirit of some kind.  But that’s not how I wrote it.

On the morning I was due to write the scene in which Solemn relates to Cork O’Connor the vision that he received during his quest, I sat down in the Broiler (the coffee shop where most of my books have been written), opened my notebook, and proceeded to give myself the surprise of my writing career.  The scene I wrote was nothing like I’d imagined.  In it, Solemn Winter Moon tells Cork that alone in a place called Blood Hollow, he spoke with Jesus.  Jesus was dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt, and wore Minnetonka moccasins.  Cork can see that Solemn has been profoundly changed.  And Solemn’s transformation causes Cork to begin to reevaluate his own spiritual journey, or rather his abandonment of that journey.  The story suddenly became about something entirely different than I’d planned, and the outline went out the window.

After I’d finished the book and looked back at that pivotal morning at the Broiler, what I realized was this: I wrote that scene in the week I learned that my mother was dying, and all the questions I’d been asking myself had changed, and the story reflected that in a profound way.

I still outline.  It’s still the most comfortable approach for me in writing a story.  I still dread waking up in the night wondering in a panicked way, What happens next?  But I also try very hard to be open to those unplanned inspirations of the moment that can, if I let them, make all the difference in the world.

I do a weird thing with my books.

Rereading Purgatory Ridge has made me look at the issue of story arc and how I construct a narrative, and I’m honestly surprised.  I see that I have often done something without really being aware of it.  Simply this:  At a certain point in the story, I shift direction dramatically.  A story that has had a very specific drive suddenly changes and what’s at the heart of the drama shifts.

Here’s how it works with Purgatory Ridge. After the prologue, the story opens with a bomb blast at a lumber mill, an enterprise that’s at the center of a controversy over the cutting of pine trees sacred to the Anishinaabeg.  The blast kills a man, a well-respected Ojibwe elder.  The first part of the book is a pretty straightforward whodunit.  Cork O’Connor, like every good protagonist in the genre from Miss Marple to Dave Robicheaux, goes about the business of trying to get to the bottom of the crime.  Midway through the story, however, everything changes.  Cork’s wife and son are kidnapped and the stakes instantly skyrocket.  The book becomes a thriller as well as a mystery.

I write my books in my head first.  When I conceived Purgatory Ridge, I had a very specific purpose in mind.  I’d written two books.  One, Iron Lake, was a book with relationship at its heart.  The second, Boundary Waters, was all about suspense. With third, I wanted to create a story that was a satisfying marriage of suspense and relationship.  I recall that I came up with the second part of the book first, the kidnapping and the idea of Jo O’Connor in jeopardy.  I constructed the first part of the book in order to set up the kidnapping and the misdirection.  One critic commented that the initial storyline would have been just fine; readers didn’t need the kidnapping.  I beg to differ.  If Purgatory Ridge had been just a book about a bombing that leaves a man dead, it would have be an acceptable mystery, but it wouldn’t be a thriller.  Putting someone in jeopardy ramps up the intrigue and the emotional investment in the outcome.  And not just any someone, but someone the readers—and Cork—care about very much.  In an earlier blog, I talked about creating suspense in many different ways.  The threat of harm to characters we care about is one of the most profound.

This switch of direction well into the book keeps the reader guessing.  I did it in The Devil’s Bed, my only stand alone.  I did it in Blood Hollow and in Thunder Bay and in the book that will be released this coming September, Heaven’s Keep. But I did it first in Purgatory Ridge, and I still appreciate the fresh energy that the technique delivers to the story.

At the end of Purgatory Ridge, all the answers have been delivered to the reader.  The mystery of the bombing has been solved.  The dark heart at the center of the all the misdeeds has been revealed.  And the mortal threat to Cork and those he loves has been resolved.  The book is a harrowing journey with one of the most emotional resolutions in the whole series.  On rereading, I think it stands up extremely well.  Another book I’m quite proud to have my name on.

People get angry over prologues.  It’s weird.  They seem either to love them or to hate them.

Me, I love prologues.  Looking at my own work, I realize that almost every novel I’ve written has opened with a prologue, though I don’t always call it that.  Boundary Waters begins with Chapter One, but the whole scene is, in reality, a prologue.  Blood Hollow, the fourth book in the Cork O’Connor series, begins with a three-chapter scene, a long arc structured to read like a short story.  Purgatory Ridge begins with a section titled November, 1966.  It’s a prologue.

A prologue can be a powerful technique for grabbing a reader’s interest.  It requires no set up and no immediate resolution.  It must, of course, be significant to the story in some way, must somehow tie deeply into the narrative, otherwise it’s a cheat, and unsatisfying in the end.  One of my favorite prologues occurs in Dennis Lehane’s novel Gone Baby Gone.  It’s a brief but compelling portrait of a woman who, clearly, has something to hide.  Her secret isn’t revealed until almost the very end of the book, but when the reader understands the connection, left dangling for three hundred pages, it’s a marvelously satisfying resolution.

So I began Purgatory Ridge with a prologue, a scene in which a great ore carrier sinks in a horrific storm and the sole survivor is left grief stricken.  That character doesn’t reappear for several chapters, and the part the sinking plays in the storyline isn’t revealed until several chapters after that.  But when the reader finally understands the connection, a great deal of the underlying motivation for the story falls easily into place.

I don’t understand the objection to prologues.  If you want to write and give me your own perspective, I’d be happy to carry on a discussion with you.  If you’ve got examples of prologues that don’t work—preferably none that I’ve written—I’d love to know what they are, and why they don’t work for you.

In the meantime, I’m going to hold to this literary device.  The book I’m working on now, a great Cork O’Connor novel titled Vermilion Drift (due out probably in fall of 2010) opens with a prologue that’s less than a page long and is, believe me, compelling as hell.