Mitchell & Sandovan novels

For professional golfers, the odds of getting a hole in one are 3000 to 1. In tournament play, Tiger Woods only has two. Which puts him eight behind Hal Sutton and Robert Allenby, who each have ten in tournament play. Golf legend Tom Watson has two in tournament play, 37 years apart. 

The odds of a hole in one for an average golfer are 12,500 to 1. And according to the PGA of America, the average amount of time that recreational golfers play before making a hole in one is 24 years. Mine took me 40 years. Mind you, some of those years I didn’t play very many rounds. 

It was a perfectly struck 7-iron on a 160-yard par three. Water to the right, sand traps on three sides. Landed about 10 feet left of the pin, curled to the right. My buddy said “get in the hole!”. I turned to him and was about to say “we always say that” when it rolled in. 

In celebration, my 7-iron flew 30 feet in the air. Thankfully it didn’t land in the water. 

My buddy suddenly realized he was three down after only five holes. So on the next hole, he drove the green on a 300+ yard par 4. Lucky for me he missed the eagle putt. Unthinking, I played the rest of the round with the golf ball I used to score my ace. Could’ve easily lost it.

One of my brothers has an even better story. After playing golf for almost 50 years, he finally had a hole in one. Then he had another in the same week. And then he had another later that same summer.
Hat-trick!

Before I wrote my first novel, I had a career as an advertising copywriter/creative director. It was a lot of fun. I never took it as seriously as legendary New York ad man George Lois, who threatened to jump out of a window if a client didn’t buy his campaign for matso crackers. But there were a lot of great debates as we encouraged clients to buy breakthrough work.

Renowned authors James Patterson, Salman Rushdie, Mary Higgins Clark, Clive Cussler, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others all spent time writing advertising copy. 

Writing ads taught me never to take readers’ attention spans for granted. When you only have 30 seconds, or a quarter page, or a banner ad to intrigue people, you can’t write flabby copy.

I used to embrace the challenge of simple, text-only ads. The most austere of these were career ads. 

Before the internet, the newspaper was the go-to place for job ads. And there was no search function. You had to read the classifieds or career pages. Lots of firms were content to simply list the position and prerequisites. But I always took it as a great opportunity to make a company stand out.

I wrote an ad for our ad agency with the headline,

“Once a woman sat in our reception area for 17 months.”

The copy went on to reveal that she was our receptionist. She did a great job, proved herself, got promoted, and now we needed a new receptionist.

I knew I’d written a good ad when we got a ton of responses for the entry level job. 

One was a phone call from a guy in Montreal. He said he wasn’t interested in applying, but he’d read the ad and it made him laugh (LOL hadn’t been invented yet). He was in the midst of an arduous, unsuccessful job search. He’d been unemployed for a while and the ad had put a smile on his face. So he called to say thanks.

Makes your day when that happens. 

When I started writing my crime fiction series, I knew that my lead detective was going to be handy in the kitchen, like Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Elvis Cole, the great lead character from Robert Crais. 

The descriptions of food in their books always made my mouth water. Mitchell, my lead, is often found in his girlfriend Mya’s kitchen. He’s either lamenting the paltry contents of her refrigerator or stocking it, prior to making them something good. 

When he’s at home he’ll whip up anything from a stir-fry to pasta. Here’s a sample from my book, “Shank”:

He used the blade of the knife to push the garlic to one side, then chopped some green onion and fresh ginger. Once the chicken was sliced thin, he prepped a bowl of fresh squeezed orange juice, honey, and soy sauce. He whisked in a rounded teaspoon of corn starch, and it was ready. 

After five minutes in the wok, the garlic, ginger, chicken, and young asparagus were perfectly cooked and coated in the sauce. 

Mitchell spooned the stir fry over two bowls of jasmine rice, then added some fresh mango and a fistful of freshly torn mint. He poured the remaining sauce from the wok over top of each dish and sprinkled on the green onion. He shook some chili flakes on his own bowl then took them to the couch where Mya was relaxing.

If you like the sound of that, you can find the recipe in Steven Raichlen’s excellent book, The Big Flavor Cookbook. The Tahini Salmon recipe is killer too!

Every writer has their favorite books on the craft. For me they are:

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser

On Writing, by Stephen King

Anything by Elmore Leonard

The first two offer great advice on the craft of writing. The third is useful in the same way that Quentin Tarantino found it helpful to work in a video store – you get to immerse yourself in craftsmanship.

They’re the reason I use adverbs like habanero peppers (sparingly – see what I did there?). They’re also why I keep to the active voice.

I tend to keep my sentences under twenty words, with the occasional exception (see above). I think it’s due to my decades in the ad business, where space was expensive and attention spans fleeting.

Stephen King’s book is also a great memoir. He’s lived an interesting life. And he gives proper credit to his wife for rescuing early pages of Carrie from the garbage can.