Something happened when I was proofreading Book Three in the Declan Shaw PI series, The Way You Say My Name. I suddenly became aware of patterns in my approach to stories. Nothing to do with style, voice, or theme. Like all writers, I have favorite sentence structures and go-to words that I have to be careful not to overuse. But this was something else, something I did unconsciously in the Declan books and I just realized it.
The first quirk is pretty obvious. In all three books I stuck a flashback smack in the middle of the narrative. I did it in Love You Till Tuesday where the chapter explains Declan’s repulsion for guns. I did it again in Catch Me on a Blue Day with an incident during his college years. And now, in The Way You Say My Name, the flashback digs deep into the childhood trauma that upended his life. I’m of the crime fiction school that follows the ‘come in late, leave early’ credo which means that I keep exposition to a minimum. The flashback inserts are a way to deliver peeks into the main character’s personality. What’s funny is that they always pop in at mid-point and I don’t do it on purpose, it just happens that way. It’s weird …
The second pattern has to do with subplots. I love to entangle them with the main narrative, weave them in so tightly that they become indispensable. In Love You Till Tuesday, Declan Shaw takes a case in Florida because he can’t stand remaining in Houston, being shut off from the investigation into the murder of his lover. The people behind the killing use his trip to Tampa to try to frame him. An innocuous side plot becomes an element of suspense.
Book Two, Catch Me on a Blue Day, starts with a suspicious suicide that connects with a thirty-year-old cold case and the Salvadoran civil war. The side plots are crucial for the case resolution. They connect everything.
In The Way You Say My Name I went a step further. The side plot spirals around the main narrative and becomes an integral part of it. At times, the secondary story line might even push the primary to the sidelines.
It must go back to childhood … Even as a kid, I thought that what happened in the woods was a lot more interesting than what I could find on the path.
So What’s The Way You Say My Name About?
On New Year’s day, P.I. Declan Shaw is hired to investigate a disappearance. Amanda Spencer, a young mother of two, slipped away from a Christmas concert without leaving a clue. What made her run and who is she running from?
While digging up shreds of info from Amanda’s parents and friends, Declan meets Sam Chandler. She’s the kind of woman who stops him in his tracks. Sexy, smart, and complicated. And skilled at keeping secrets. So skilled Declan questions his abilities as a detective. What began as an intriguing missing person case soon shifts into a cross-country pursuit with Sam’s life in the balance.
For once, Declan isn’t the searcher, he’s the one who cannot afford to be found.
In The Way You Say My Name, two narratives intertwine like a double spiral that winds tighter and tighter. Amanda’s story is one of them. Protecting Sam is the other.
And the closer Declan comes to finding Amanda, the more he risks losing Sam.
M.E. Proctor is the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries: Love You Till Tuesday, Catch Me on a Blue Day and The Way You Say My Name (Shotgun Honey Books). She’s the author of two short story collections, Family and Other Ailments and A Book to Live By. She’s also the co-author with Russell Thayer of two retro-noirs: Bop City Swing and Kansas City Breakdown. Short fiction in Vautrin, Tough, Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Reckon Review and Black Cat Weekly among others. She’s a Shamus and Derringer short story nominee. Catch Me on a Blue Day is nominated for a Shamus Award in the Best Original Paperback category.
Author Website: shawmystery.com. On Substack: meproctor.substack.com.
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