Deadly Ink mystery conference begins Aug. 7

Deadly Ink is unique.

Held at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, it’s the only annual national mystery conference based in New Jersey. Designed for fans, readers, wannabe writers, authors or the simply curious, Ink’s informal tone encourages interaction.

“Our authors love to chat, whether you register for one day or all three,” said Deadly Ink founder/publisher/author Debby Buchanan. “In addition to book room, where authors will autograph their books throughout the conference, you’ll almost unavoidably share a table with at least one at mealtime or break.”

Attendees can meet the David Award nominees on Saturday morning. Voting for Best Mystery will take place during the conference. Presentation will occur at Saturday’s Gala Awards Banquet.

Participating in 17 panels and workshops are almost three-dozen award-winning authors and experts. Several live in or write mysteries set in New Jersey, and one of the panels this year is Friday evening’s Jersey Girls (and Boys).

The conference begins 9 a.m. Friday, Aug. 7, with the optional Deadly Ink Academy, and officially kicks off with the Deadly Dessert Party the same evening.

This year’s guest of honor and keynote speaker is Brad Parks, whose Carter Ross series has won Shamus, Nero and Lefty Awards. He is the only author ever to have won all three. His protagonist, investigative reporter Carter Ross, writes about crime for the fictional Newark Eagle-Examiner, as did Parks for the Star-Ledger and other newspapers.

“I find that wherever I go, there’s a real fascination with New Jersey,” he said. “I always say (New Jersey) loads a writer’s toolbox with possibilities. We’re the most densely packed state in the union — we have every ethnicity, every demographic. It’s the training camp for citizenship.”

Latest in the Carter Ross series is “The Fraud,” available since July 7, which deals with a rash of carjackings in Newark.

“It’s a critical Garden State issue, especially in Newark and Elizabeth,” Parks said. “The rates are stunning compared to anywhere else. In Brooklyn, it’s two bridges and a tunnel to get a car out, but not here.”

Crime as inspiration

In keeping with Saturday’s Ripped from the Headlines panel, two real-life crimes served as inspiration — “one dealing with the high side of crime, the other usually ignored,” said Parks.

Parks refers to the Dec. 15, 2013, Short Hills Mall carjacking during which attorney Dustin Friedland, 30, was fatally shot defending his wife of two years; and a double shooting the next day in Newark that resulted in the death of Naeem Williams, 28.

“That resonated. It hit us close to home,” he said. “The lawyer from Short Hills graduated from Bucknell, as did both my parents. There was an exhaustive manhunt for Friedland’s killers and the reward grew to $41,000. The reward offered for Williams was $10,000. Both victims were similar in age, so why was one’s life worth four times as much? That really struck me. Also, Carter has become weary of covering stories about rich white people so in this book, (so) he chooses to also write about a victim who is Nigerian.

“New Jersey has such a rich and colorful history when it comes to crime that we should host a crime fiction worthy of that dubious legacy. It’s so wonderful have Deadly Ink — a big-enough presence to be significant but intimate enough for us get a chance to get to talk the other authors and still get face time with the fans.”

Toastmaster E.F. Watkins will interview Parks on Saturday and both will appear on panels throughout the conference. An Eppie Award winner and former Cranford resident who now lives in Passaic County, Watkins is one of the founding members of Garden State Speculative Fiction Writers. She specializes in paranormal suspense and has eight published novels with Amber Quill Press. Her two latest feature Quinn Matthews, writer for a fictional New Jersey newspaper. Matthews is an amateur sleuth with latent psychic abilities whose writing assignments lead to paranormal challenges and murder mysteries.

Like her heroine, Watkins grew up in a quiet Union County town and worked for daily papers, residing in Hudson and Essex counties before she bought an old house that needed a lot of work, “Though as far as I can tell, it did not come with any ghosts.”

“She has plenty of that Jersey attitude, even when she’s facing a goon with a gun ... or an apparition conjured up by black magic,” Watkins said about Quinn.

A “from-the-beginning” participant at Ink, Watkins makes use of places she has lived or knows well.

In her latest, “Hex, Death and Rock’N’Roll,” “I include a fatal accident that occurs in an old theater under renovation in Elizabeth, set a scene in a factory near the Hudson being renovated for condos, and locate the rock star’s very cool apartment in Hoboken because it’s hip and expensive,” she said.

“For a small state, I think New Jersey offers a great variety of locales and people,” she added. “To question suspects, Quinn travels to a farm, an inner city and trendy Hoboken without ever leaving the northern part of the state. And very different types live in those areas.”

In addition to interviewing Parks, Watkins is a panelist on Not of This World, Q&A with Some Real Characters, One Last Thing, moderates What If? and will be interviewed on Sunday by author Roberta Rogow.

“The Outsmarting of Criminals: A Mystery Introducing Miss Felicity Prim” is Steven Rigolosi’s fourth — and breakthrough — book. It’s a 2015 (Deadly Ink) David Award nominee, also selected last fall as an Oprah’s Book Club Top 5 Mysteries Editor’s Pick.

“I was shocked because outsmarting plays with all the conventions of the standard mystery structure,” said Rigolosi, who lives in Franklin Lakes.

Prim is an anachronism, eschewing all things digital — cellphones, computers, Internet ... with the exception of her trusty Laser Taser 3000 (which she has vowed never to use). She considers forensics, databases and trappings of technology crutches of lazy investigators, relying instead on her insights into human behavior.

A youthful, attractive 57, Prim is a lifelong Manhattan resident enjoying a successful career, devoted friends, a vibrant cultural life and a rent-controlled apartment — until she’s mugged.

Profoundly shaken, she seeks permanent refuge in a small Connecticut town two hours from her beloved city. A reader who reveres the written word, Prim decides to embark on a new career as a “criminal outsmarter,” putting into practice knowledge absorbed from mystery novels. When she discovers a corpse in the basement of her new home, it’s time to outsmart a murderer.

How? Rigolosi laughs, “Miss Prim is an outsider, so she can ask questions where others can’t.”

What inspired such an — unconventional — character?

“I wanted a different angle, an interesting twist,” Rigolosi said. “Prim is a reader, she loves the printed word, and follows clues the old-fashioned way because it’s how she lives her life.”

Prim’s models are her late parents; she thinks frequently about how she was raised, replaying in her head their suggestions and advice.

“That’s a key to her character,” said Rigolosi. “She wants the same for her friends, especially her sister, who seems her opposite, yet they’re extremely close.

“Prim is lovely and delightful and always chooses to see the good rather than the bad when given the choice, but she won’t accept the world as it has become,” Rigolosi said. “And I didn’t want her to be prude — they don’t usually have a generous soul — but she is a realist. Her soul is that of a passionate woman and she cares deeply about the people she loves.”

So Prim is too good to be true?

He laughs.

“Hardly,” he said. “It’s important your characters have flaws. But I wanted her to be likeable, so why couldn’t her flaw be more of a comedic flaw? So the one thing with the car — she’s oblivious that she’s a madwoman behind the wheel. Quirks make people more endearing when they’re genuine — and she’s genuinely oblivious.

What’s next?

“A sequel is in the works,” he says.

“I was born in a place which no longer exists,” Sheila York said.

Can go home again

Although neither of York’s parents are from New Jersey, her father was a career Army officer stationed at Camp Kilmer in Edison, Middlesex County, her place of birth. Used as staging area for troops during World War II, it closed officially in 2009.

“You can imagine, I’ve had some fine times explaining that to security,” York said, laughing.

“I’ve always claimed New Jersey as my home. It drove my mother crazy when, even at age 4. As we moved around the country — a lot — I’d pipe up to guests who’d ask where the family was from that I was from New Jersey. And then, when I moved back here in 2007, I quite accidentally ended up buying a house in Bloomfield, 10 minutes from where my parents used to live in Paterson.”

York spent much of her childhood in Munich, later studying abroad as an exchange student in France and England. After postgraduate studies in psychology, she worked as a disc jockey, news anchor, sports reporter and voiceover actor. Her Lauren Atwill series takes place in post-war 1940s Hollywood.

York is a panelist on Saturday’s Pros vs. Amateurs panelist.

“I began the series before I returned to Jersey,” she said. “My protagonist is an amateur and her lover is private detective. As a strong woman living in a man’s world, she has to solve crimes, but her boyfriend can’t ever look like an idiot.”

Do she and Lauren share any traits?

“I do wish I had been more ‘troubled’ as a kid,” York said. “In fact, in the book I’m writing now, it’s 37-year-old Lauren’s regretful reply to a very nice guy who asks what she’d change about her youth. Like Lauren, I was trying to be the best little lady in the world.”

York is moderator for Saturday’s Ripped from the Headlines, will be a Sunday panelist on What If? and plays character Lauren Atwill during Q&A With Some Real Characters: “Tell readers to ask me how being the woman Death follows can complicate a career in superstitious 1940s Hollywood.”

New Jersey panelists share a wonderful sense of humor. York recalls chatting with Jeff Cohen and Jeff Markowitz at a previous Deadly Ink, “ ... about New Jersey drivers (whose reliable provision of near-death experiences I find stimulating to my storytelling) and about New Jersey’s curious decision to hide road signs behind foliage. Cohen coined what I have adopted as our state roadway motto: ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, why should we tell you?’ ”

Cohen, a Highland Park resident, chuckles at York’s recollection and shares another.

“Just over the border, there’s the best sign, ‘Welcome to PA — America Begins Here,’ ” he said. “And I always wonder, ‘What country did I just come from?’ ”

Cohen and alter ego E.J. Copperman appear (intentionally) as co-authors on his new Asperger’s Mysteries series.

“The best part: My agent and I had a real laugh when one initial publishing contract proposed we split royalties between ‘us,’ ” he said. “Also, I had the best time with Author’s Notes, thanking myself.”

Thus began a unique perspective to sleuthing in “The Question of the Missing Head” that debuted in October 2014 from Midnight Ink. Samuel Hoenig, a borderline genius with autism spectrum disorder, hangs a sign in a strip-mall storefront window that reads “Questions Answered.”

The result is a vivid, poignant, often hilarious, portrayal of young Samuel’s life as he investigates the theft of a preserved head from the Garden State Cryonics Institute — the initial question — but soon applies his powers of deduction to murder.

“Missing Head” is a David Award nominee.

The second in the series, available Oct. 8, is “The Question of the Unfamiliar Husband.” Waking up after a party next to a man claiming to be her spouse, a woman asks Samuel, “Who is that man in my bed who says he’s my husband?” Samuel once again enlists the assistance of Janet Washburn — “Watson to Samuel’s Holmes,” said Cohen/Copperman.

Father of a son with Asperger’s, Cohen is uniquely capable of putting the reader inside Samuel’s head.

“ ‘Head’ is the only book I’ve written in the first person, and I had it around for a number of years. One draft was from Janet Washburn’s point of view.

“Samuel isn’t a savant,” he added. “He does interpret things literally. He finds certain aspects of his personality useful and simply uses them to his advantage.”

Writing as E.J. Copperman, Cohen also writes the Haunted Guesthouse series, set at the Jersey Shore. “Number 7, Ghost in the Wind” (available this December) will follow last year’s “Inspector Specter.”

“It’s the first book in the Guesthouse series where (owner) Alison actually wants to be involved in the investigations because the ghost is one of her favorite musicians from the ’60s,” he said. “There’s a killer concert in the book and all your favorite dead musicians will be there.”

About Deadly Ink, Cohen says, “It’s an intimate, fun conference where readers get to sit and talk with authors pretty much all they like. And it’s an easy commute by train from New York City or Philadelphia.”

Markowitz, from the Monmouth Junction section of South Brunswick, has a unique writing exercise.

“It’s about imagining a dead body wherever I go. Particularly when I’m traveling, outside my normal routine, in the airport, on the train, in an elevator, at baseball games — I’ll write a few sentences to capture the moment,” he said.

His wickedly comic “Death and White Diamonds” (December 2014) surfaced bayside at Cape May Beach in 2006.

“The first paragraph in the book captures the essence and mood and appears almost entirely as I wrote it then,” Markowitz said. “But I was never sure of the story I wanted to tell. It took me a very long time to get a handle on it. Then, summer of 2013, I woke up one morning and it was there. I finished it in about eight weeks.”

It’s a simple plot: Richie Cunningham (bearing absolutely no resemblance to anything “Happy Days”) finds himself gazing at his girlfriend’s dead body on a deserted New Jersey beach at 3 a.m. in February, bloody knife still warm in his hand. They’ve gone away on a romantic weekend at her suggestion, but his memory is hazy. He’s lost some hours, and he knows when they find her body, he’ll be the first suspect. But only if they find her body.

“Then things start to go very, very wrong,” Markowitz laughed.

“Richie is not a particularly nice guy;” he continued. “In fact, I challenge you to find any likeable characters in this story, but my goal was to write the story in such a way that you’d like Richie anyway. And I’ve had many readers tell me they were rooting for him as the book progressed.

“Good writing for me is not so much about following the crime but more about what happens to the people, and people’s lives. What makes a book good for me is the perspective of the person who tells the story.”

Also the author of the three-book Cassie O’Malley series set deep in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, “Diamonds” is dedicated to his dad.

“I think it’s the funniest book I’ve written and he would have gotten its — skewed — humor,” he said. “After four books and a dozen years, I think it’s my best.”

Readers agree: It won the 2015 Lovey for Best Thriller and is a 2015 nominee for Ink’s David Award.

Markowitz is a panelist on Friday’s Jersey Girls (and Boys), and moderator of Location, Location, Location on Saturday.

Something for everyone

Deadly Ink has something for everyone. At Sunday’s What If? the audience proposes victim, plot, setting, suspects, from which authors construct a mystery.

“Think MadLibs and mystery writing,” Buchanan said.

Fans have their say as they discuss favorite authors, books and sub-genres. They learn to write short stories and novellas at short and sweet (Or Sour). Alice Orr’s Workshop (I & II) instructs How To Write a Thriller-Mystery to Die For. Unsure why you’re addicted to mystery? Attend Make Mine a Mystery.

At Friday’s Academy, David nominee Jane Cleland teaches The Art of Distraction — Using Red Herrings. And for any who despair they have no time to simply write a draft, they’ll do it in eight weeks once they attend Kathryn Johnson’s The Extreme Novelist.

Finally, if you’re looking for an agent, schedule an appointment with Caitie Flum of Liza Dawson Associates. She’ll hear your pitch during Ask the Agent on Saturday afternoon.

“Raffles, games, puzzles, prizes, surprises,” Buchanan said. “We look forward to seeing you there.”

If you go

What: Deadly Ink, national mystery conference

When: Aug. 7 to 9

Where: New Brunswick Hyatt Regency, 2 Albany St.

Info: 732-873-1234; Registration begins 6 p.m. Friday and continues at 8:30 a.m. Saturday

Admission: $250 full conference includes Friday Academy and Deadly Dessert Party, Saturday lunch and banquet, Sunday brunch; $225 full conference without Academy; $200 full conference without Academy or Saturday banquet; $135 Saturday only and Academy only; $125 no frills (no meals/no Academy); $95 Saturday only includes lunch, no banquet; $75 Academy only

Cuisine: Vegetarian and dietary-specific accommodated

Register: www.deadlyink2014.com