What’s Your Book About? The Challenge of Book Descriptions

What do you think about book descriptions?

When someone asks us what our book is about, some of us are hamstrung. Having lived with the book for potentially months, we know the ins and outs of the story. Some of us launch into a massively detailed description of the book, the characters, the plots and sub-plots.

That’s not entirely helpful.

You’ve read a lot of book descriptions. I know I have. They either catch you or they don’t. Well, there’s another thing that can sometimes happen: the book description that tells too much. How irritating are those movie trailers that all but show you the entire film? We are all sophisticated viewers (and readers) so I don’t think we need every single beat of a story told in a description.

The reason I’m talking book descriptions is that I’m preparing my next book for publication. It’s called TREASON AT HANFORD: A HARRY TRUMAN MYSTERY. I’ve been re-reading it and making edits and changes most of the summer. I’ve got a cover concept (well, at least five) and I sent it to some of my fellow graphic designers to get their take. One of them came back: what’s the book about?

So I sent the description.

What’s problematic about a book featuring Harry Truman is that most folks know he was president and probably instantly jump to that conclusion when they think of Truman. But my tale takes place the year before he became vice president and then president. So I needed at least a sentence or two to lay the groundwork that I’m referring to Senator Truman and not President Truman.

After a few attempts, here’s what I wrote:

Before he became vice president in 1945, Senator Harry Truman led a congressional committee dedicated to ferreting out corruption during World War II. The investigators of the Truman Committee adhere to a simple credo: help the country win the war and bring our soldiers home.

In the spring of 1944, Truman receives a series of ominous letters from a lawyer out in Hanford, Washington. His client, a common farmer who lost his land when the government confiscated miles of territory for a secret project, has been drafted to keep him quiet about what he’s seen going on around a local warehouse with direct ties to the giant facility in the area.

Fearing the worst, Truman leads the investigation himself, bringing along Carl Hancock, a former policeman. Soon after they start poking around, Truman and Hancock witness a pair of brutally murdered corpses, a town clouded in secrecy, and the warehouse owner who is ready to pull strings and dismiss the pesky senator.

But the man from Independence, Missouri, is tenacious, and in no time, Truman and Hancock not only find themselves embroiled in the top-secret world of the Manhattan Project but also must confront the worst act of treason in American history since Benedict Arnold.

 

Analysis:

To me, paragraph one sets the stage in the reader’s mind that this is Senator Truman I’m writing about. Paragraph two features the incident that gets Truman’s attention and start the investigation. The third paragraph ups the stakes by throwing in corpses and the world of 1944. And the final paragraph—which could almost be a log line itself—tosses the phrases “Benedict Arnold” and “The Manhattan Project” into the mix, letting the reader know the just how high the stakes are.

I think it’s a good description and should tell potential readers whether or not they’d like the book.


Then there’s the elevator pitch. Maybe it’s the log line, the one-sentence version of the book. Kudos for any creative type who can sum up a work in a sentence. It’s crucial, mind you, but it’s a skill that must be learned if you don’t already have it.

Like I just wrote, the last paragraph of the description could serve as the elevator pitch, but I also have a sentence on the cover: Before Harry Truman dropped the bomb, he had to save it.

I debated whether or not to include ‘A Harry Truman Mystery’ or not as a sub-title and will likely opt not to have it and leave in the cover blurb. Not sure. Still tweaking the cover concept.

What’s the cover look like? Well, you’ll just have to watch a little bit longer.

What are  your thoughts on book descriptions? How do you structure them?

Book Review: The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl

New Mystery Reader has posted my review of Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens. This marks the second novel of the year in which The Mystery of Edwin Drood has been featured, the other being Dan Simmons' Drood (my review). Here's the funny thing: I haven't read The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Yet. I plan to rectify that deficiency early next year.

In the meantime, have a read at my review and let me know if you agree or not. Thanks.

Book Review Club: Drood by Dan Simmons

(This is the latest installment in Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list of this month's offerings, head on over to Barrie's blog.)

In his new novel, Drood, Dan Simmons has done for Charles Dickens what Jack Higgins did with First Gulf War and British Prime Minister John Major. Confused? Don’t be. It’s a simple novelist’s plot device.

On 7 February 1991, the Provisional IRA launched a single mortar against 10 Downing Street, the home of the British Prime Minister. From that real event, thriller novelist Jack Higgins wove a fictional story that sought to offer a possible explanation of how the event happened.

A similarly horrible event occurred in 1865 to Charles Dickens. On 9 June, the train on which Dickens, his “mistress,” and her mother were riding jumped a span of a bridge under repair. Dickens’ train car was the only first-class car not to be destroyed. The event scarred Dickens and he died exactly five years later. The last years of his life was marred by an increasing attention towards death and increasingly poor health. And Dickens left his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished and without any outlines or notes. That is the truth.

Or is it? If you seek shelter from the storm of modern economic tragedy in Dan Simmons’ book, you are treated with another possible explanation about the Staplehurst accident and the change in Dickens. In a wonderful conceit, the novel is narrated by none other than Wilkie Collins, Dickens’ real-life confidant and fellow writer. Collins’ main claim to fame is as the author of the first true mystery and detective novel (The Moonstone), the genre having been introduced to the world by Edgar Allan Poe.

In Simmons’ mind, Collins is writing in 1889, on his deathbed. Collins’ instructions are to keep the manuscript a secret for 125 years. That would be 2014. Guess Simmons was in a hurry. The Great Question Collins wants to answer with his manuscript (771 pages) is this: “Did...Charles Dickens plot to murder an innocent person and dissolve away his flesh in a pit of caustic lime and secretly inter what was lift of him, mere bones and a skull, in the crypt of an ancient cathedral that was an important part of Dickens’s own childhood?” That’s quite a question. And Collins gives us quite an answer.

In Drood, the Staplehurst accident happens as it did in real life. The only difference is that there, on that scene of unimaginable horror, Dickens encounters the mysterious visage of Drood. He is a man in a large black cape, “a pale, bald scalp,” a few gray wisps of hair, a nose that consisted only of two black slits, and “small, sharp, irregular teeth, spaced too far apart, set into gums so pale that they were whiter than the teeth themselves.” Not to be too flippant about it but it sound like Voldemort as played by Ralph Feinnes in the Harry Potter movies. Every person Drood consoles on that afternoon winds up dead.

Dickens becomes obsessed with finding Drood and drags a reluctant Collins along with him. They investigate Undertown, the subterranean crypts built by the Romans, early Christians, and populated in the late 1860s by criminals and opium eaters. Collins is a reliably efficient opium addict and takes numerous doses of laudanum daily.

During these searches for Drood, Collins is introduced to one Edwin Dickinson, a survivor of the accident and a young man whom Dickens invited to his home in Gad’s Hill for Christmas 1865. A few months later, Collins cannot find Dickinson and begins to fear that the author has done away with young Dickinson in an experiment not too unlike what the characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” undertake: the murder of someone just for the experience of it. After awhile (for us, the readers, it’ll be mere days; for Wilkie, it’s months and years), Collins begins to plan the murder of Charles Dickens.

This is a big book and there are so many nuances and nods that I can’t list them all. Heck, I can’t even remember them all despite my notes. Here’s one for you. In Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drood, John Jasper is the name of one of the main characters. In the new novel Drood, that same name is part of the legacy of the character Drood. If little homages like this obvious one hit me, those folks who know Dickens’ work well likely will find more.

As a writer, I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions of the writerly craft between Dickens and Collins and trust that Simmons did his research. During these years, Collins conceived and wrote The Moonstone and it’s fun to be a fly on the wall as these two authors discuss the creation of a new genre. Yes, it’s difficult for someone like me (non Dickens scholar) to know where the truth stops and the fiction begins but I can make educated guesses. And it really didn’t get in the way of the story at all. I just enjoyed myself in the work.

Had Simmons told this tale in a standard third-person POV, it would have been a good story. That he told it in Collins’ own first person POV makes the book something else entirely. Collins’ word sometimes drip like acid, piercing the text and you, the reader, with his disdain. It’s wonderful. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a great supporting character: Collins’ doppleganger, the Other Wilkie. Yes, Collins really believed his doppleganger walked and talked and helped his write his books. As a writer, if I wrote that, an agent would laugh in my face. Truth is stranger than fiction.

In interviews, Simmons openly acknowledges his debt to the play/movie Amadeus and its conceit: that composer and rival Salieri plotted to kill Mozart and pass off Mozart’s requiem as his own. If you remember the bitterness F. Murray Abraham laced in the aged Salieri’s voice when he talked about Mozart, you’ll get a sense of the jealousy and growing hatred Collins has for Dickens.

Simmons has written mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction. He cut his teeth with his first book, the horror story Song of Kali, and Simmons brings his A Game when describing the horror and dread throughout the book. There were a few scenes in the book that were cringe-worthy and happily so. It’s a testament to a writer as good as Simmons that you lose yourself in this book, a real genre melting pot. When you pick it up, it’s hefty and big. You’ll probably wonder if you’ll ever finish it. You will. You won’t be able to stop, not in a thrill-a-minute kind of way, but in a deeply engrossing one.

Reading Drood has had a side effect in me that Simmons probably hoped for: I now want to read more Dickens’ novels. PBS’ “Little Dorrit” has come at the perfect time and I’m enjoying it so far. In high school, we’re force fed Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities like a prisoner on a hunger strike. As an adult, making my own reading choices, I’m free to read Dickens (or not) and simply enjoy the man’s genius. That, I plan to do.

Then there’s the ending, which I will not give away here. All I’ll say is I didn’t see it coming. It was a little irritating, honestly, but it fit the themes of the book quite well. There is a famous pop cultural moment--two really--that directly mirrors this book and its ending. That moment caused an uproar. Drood is not like that. It’s ending is one that’ll make you smile and, more importantly, want to re-read the book.