By
JOHN SCHERBER
THE ART IN THE STORY
Mystery writers
usually look for a ‘hook,’ a fictional device that sets their primary character
apart from others and makes it easy to picture or identify him. Think of the
Columbo series that aired from the seventies on, starring Peter Falk. His
shuffling, socially inept manner masked a shrewd intelligence that viewers
identified with and embraced. In his deceptively humble way he often went after
the ‘big shots’ and hauled them in. The secret of his great success was that he
was the common man’s hero.
It’s no secret
that Paul Zacher, my detective character in the Murder in México mystery
series, is a painter. Back when I started writing these thirteen books in the
summer of 2005, I didn’t have to look far to come up with this as a hook,
because I was a painter myself, and I already knew that the act of painting
requires us to see things differently. It seemed at the time, and it still
does, that having this ability as a detective would often come in handy.
So there is
something of me in Paul Zacher, and vice versa. He views himself not as a lofty
artist, but as a craftsman, someone who in the Middle Ages would’ve belonged to
a guild, because being a painter back then was not a glorified career. In fact,
at that time, many, perhaps most, paintings were unsigned. Painting was a trade
you learned by apprenticing yourself to a master and working in his studio. I
feel the same way. I’m not very concerned with theories of writing fiction, but
of technique, of craft, and the simple mechanics of the writer’s trade. In my
view, the best writers are all storytellers, and our degree of success is based
on how well we tell them.
This translates as how fully we involve our readers so that
they travel that route with us, filling in details and nuances from their own
feelings and experience, so that they become co-author, not of the book, but of
their experience of the book. This makes for a satisfied reader, one who
returns to travel with the writer again.
Part of my
agenda in writing about this subject was to put up a few of my own paintings,
which I have never done before. Having painted these and many others is what
makes the artistic consciousness of Paul Zacher possible.
This one is
titled, Strapped, and it’s one of my
favorites. These are life jackets hanging to dry on a beach in the Dominican
Republic.
This is called,
At the Bellas Artes, with bamboo and
split leaf philodendrons in the courtyard of our own former convent, now art
center here in San Miguel de Allende.
This, no
surprise, is called Mary’s Bar. The buildings are in Cerrillos, New Mexico, an
old mining town at the edge of some of the best turquoise mines in that state.
It has a very intact look of the 1870s, and a number of Old West movies were
shot there, including Young Guns I
and II. I used this town and the
surrounding hills as a location for part of the sixth of the Paul Zacher
mysteries, called Vanishing Act.
Here’s the real
building as it sits today. The car, a Ford Model A, is actually in a junkyard
in Marshall, Minnesota, where I discovered it with many other classic wrecks on
a painting trip in 2003.
Writing the
series, I have often been behind the easel with Paul Zacher, seeing what he
sees, and sometimes my hand lifts toward the canvas as if I had a brush too.
In the series
opener, Twenty Centavos, he’s
painting series of nudes with jungle backgrounds. Although I did a number of
figure sketches from life in drawing classes, I didn’t do any finished paintings.
Visit my website for a sample of this book and any of my
others:
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