Author Guest Post with Mike Nemeth: Parker’s Choice

Framed by cops and chased by crooks, a white ex-con and a rebellious black woman become fugitives. They didn’t plan to fall in love.

Welcome to the December 5th stop on the blog tour for Parker’s Choice by Mike Nemeth with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, more author guest posts, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

Please note that this post contains affiliate links, which means there is no additional cost to you if you shop using my links, but I will earn a small percentage in commission. A program-specific disclaimer is at the bottom of this post.

Author Guest Post

Clean is Good

For decades Elmore “Dutch” Leonard was my favorite author and I devoured everything he wrote. Fortunately, Dutch was prolific and he kept me supplied with dozens of books about petty crooks and ex-cons with delusions of hitting the big time in their next caper. I liked his stories because they are rife with betrayals and miscalculations which tells you something about my character.

You haven’t heard of him? I’ll bet you’ve seen the movies based upon his novels: Be Cool, Get Shorty, Fire in the Hole, Killshot, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, 3:10 to Yuma, Cat Chaser, 52 Pickup, Hombre, The Big Bounce, Stick, Mr. Majestyk, and Freaky Deaky.

When I started my writing career, I wanted to be the next Elmore Leonard. Emulating Dutch isn’t so much a matter of telling similar stories—although two of my protagonists are ex-cons—as it is an adoption of a storytelling style. Dutch is renowned for his realistic dialog. He has an “ear,” as they say in writing circles, for dialog that realistically paints the picture of his characters and their actions. Having an ear for dialog is a matter of talent. Easier to mimic is his cinematic narration style. Some would call his prose “spare,” I call them “clean.” He minimizes “author speak” and maximizes the storytelling role of his characters through their dialog and actions. The characters tell Leonard’s stories, not the author, which is why his novels are so easy to adapt for the screen.

There’s a mindset that goes along with this technique. If an author accepts that the story belongs to her characters she will allow the characters to tell their story.

Before he passed, Dutch left us with ten simple rules for writing in his style, a slender tome available on Amazon called Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing. Two of his rules have become my writing Bible.

Rule #8 – Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Dutch said, “In Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, what do the ‘American and the girl with him’ look like? ‘She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.’ That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.”

In Parker’s Choice, my two protagonists are a white ex-con and his female work colleague who is descended from slaves. We learn that Parker was a college baseball player, is a good dancer, and wears a two-day stubble beard. That’s it. Parker is athletic so we can assume a body type. His colleague Sabrina is tall-ish, lithe, and wears her hair in many different styles. The rest is left up to the imagination of the reader. In the case of Sabrina I intentionally refrained from describing her facial features because attractive Black women are too often described as having Caucasian features and a good tan. I wanted to avoid that sort of racism.

Rule #10 – Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Dutch comments: “Think what you skip [when] reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s … perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialog.”

I’ve been criticized by professional reviewers for a lack of introspection on the part of my primary characters. I admit that I’ve caved in to this criticism to a degree in my latest novels, adding a couple of lines here and there as a character decides what to do next or how to feel about another character. But introspection can often be better replaced by evocative dialog and expressive actions. We don’t need to be told what a character is thinking when he punches a hole in the wall.

About the Book

Parker’s Choice
by Mike Nemeth

Published 16 February 2023
Nemo Writes, LLC

Genre: Romantic Mystery
Page Count: 302
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

Framed by cops and chased by crooks, a white ex-con and a rebellious black woman become fugitives. They didn’t plan to fall in love.

After serving time for a crime he didn’t commit, Parker and his wife, Paula, hide from an old enemy in an Atlanta suburb. Their fresh start is disrupted when his new boss demands his involvement in a fraudulent scheme that will replace thousands of white collar American workers with artificial intelligence and offshore labor. Parker unfortunately suspects his secret and elusive birth father is mixed up in the fraud. Then a body is pulled from the Chattahoochee River and Parker believes Paula has murdered his enemy, but the police think Parker did it. He and his brilliant colleague, Sabrina, a woman who can trace her roots to Virginia slaves, steal the “smoking gun” that will expose the fraud and go on the run, pursued by cops and crooks. After a violent showdown in a frightening New Orleans cemetery, they connect the dots between a murder, fraud, and a man from his mother’s past. Parker’s loyalties are torn, but he must choose.

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Excerpt

The terror Parker felt was what an antelope feels when it is about to be eaten alive by a pride of hungry lions. He took shallow breaths through his nose to mask the sound of his breathing as he listened to the blood coursing through his carotid artery—whoosh, whoosh. Where the hell is my backup?

In the crepuscular light, Parker saw her then. She emerged from her hiding place in the boathouse and assumed the shooter’s stance she’d been taught at the gun range. She gave the hunter no warning, just fired her compact Beretta once, and the man crumpled onto the Cool Crete surface with a thud and a rush of expelled air. That hadn’t been the plan. She was only supposed to balance the threat Parker suspected Meredith had posed. She wasn’t supposed to shoot anyone. It’s so easy to get these things wrong.

A scan of the house’s back windows revealed no sign of Meredith. Parker put a finger to his lips—don’t talk—and motioned for the woman to hurry into the shadows. The wounded man moaned softly, and Parker’s quick check confirmed that he was semi-conscious and neither moving nor watching. Parker took the woman’s pistol and shoved her toward the neighbor’s property. The snowbirds who owned the place were away enjoying the mild Canadian summer during the Florida off-season.

“Run,” he whispered.

She loped into the darkness. He counted to twenty—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi—then he dialed 9-1-1.

About the Author

Mike Nemeth, a Vietnam veteran and former high-tech executive, writes love stories tucked inside murder mysteries highlighting America’s social issues. THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY won the Beverly Hills Book Award for Southern Fiction and the Frank Yerby Prize at the Augusta Literary Festival. The novel inspired singer/songwriter Mark Currey to compose the song Who I am. PARKER’S CHOICE won a Firebird Award for thrillers and American Fiction Awards for Diverse and Multicultural Mystery/Suspense, and for  Romantic Mystery/Suspense. Other credits include The New York Times, Georgia Magazine, Augusta Magazine, Southern Writers’ Magazine, and Deep South Magazine. In 2018, I was named Atlanta’s Best Local Author by Creative Loafing magazine. Mike lives in Villa Rica with his wife, Angie, and their rescue dog, Scout.

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Giveaway Alert!

Mike Nemeth will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.