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2013 Newbery Winners
Jan. 12th, 2020 08:47 amI must confess I was flagging on the Newbery project, but then I read Laura Amy Schlitz’s Splendors and Glooms and now my enthusiasm has REVIVED, because this is a novel about Victorian London! and dark magic! and puppets! and humans who get turned into puppets through dark magic! and sad plucky children and atmospheric snowfalls and a heroine named Clara Wintermute, which is a name that ought to be too on the nose to be allowed, but if you are setting a book in the London of Charles Dickens then the names can be as on the nose as you want.
I also very much enjoyed the other 2013 Honor book, Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, which is a nonfiction book about America’s race to build the atomic bomb during World War II and about the Soviet Union’s race to steal the technology. As you may imagine, this was catnip for me. I knew the rough lineaments of the story already, but I loved getting more pieces filled in
I found the parts about the FBI investigation into the spying particularly stimulating. The FBI knew that Harry Gold had acted as a courier - but this knowledge came from encoded intercepts, and they didn’t want the USSR to know that they had cracked the code, so they got him to confess basically by letting Gold know that they knew (and by gathering bits of circumstantial evidence to bolster their case) until his nerve cracked and he confessed.
It has occurred to me that I could use a similar method in Honeytrap: I could cut short the whodunnit part and focus instead on the ‘how will they get him to confess’ part. A lot of my problems with the revision arises from the fact that I feel like whodunnit is obvious and the readers will guess immediately, and there’s nothing more tiresome than reading a mystery where you know whodunnit long before the detectives, even if it’s a story like Honeytrap that is really more romance with a dash of mystery because if you’re going to tell a story about enemy agents forced to work together they have to work on SOMETHING.
I also very much enjoyed the other 2013 Honor book, Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, which is a nonfiction book about America’s race to build the atomic bomb during World War II and about the Soviet Union’s race to steal the technology. As you may imagine, this was catnip for me. I knew the rough lineaments of the story already, but I loved getting more pieces filled in
I found the parts about the FBI investigation into the spying particularly stimulating. The FBI knew that Harry Gold had acted as a courier - but this knowledge came from encoded intercepts, and they didn’t want the USSR to know that they had cracked the code, so they got him to confess basically by letting Gold know that they knew (and by gathering bits of circumstantial evidence to bolster their case) until his nerve cracked and he confessed.
It has occurred to me that I could use a similar method in Honeytrap: I could cut short the whodunnit part and focus instead on the ‘how will they get him to confess’ part. A lot of my problems with the revision arises from the fact that I feel like whodunnit is obvious and the readers will guess immediately, and there’s nothing more tiresome than reading a mystery where you know whodunnit long before the detectives, even if it’s a story like Honeytrap that is really more romance with a dash of mystery because if you’re going to tell a story about enemy agents forced to work together they have to work on SOMETHING.
