No damn character arcs: The story behind the missing Owl and Raccoon novella

In January 2015, I sent a breathless get-stoked message to my email list. "The third Owl and Raccoon novella is coming! A kindergartner disappears from a moving school bus! Here's the gripping opening chapter!"

Cut to July 2016. I finally published the third Owl and Raccoon novella. Except it was called Not With A Bang. And the missing kid was a teenager. And the bus was a city bus. And, yeah, obviously not the same book.

So what happened to the novella I'd titled Last Child Missing?

One of my goals when I sat down to write the very first Owl and Raccoon novella, The Single Staircase, was to avoid anything that looked like a character arc. Owl and Raccoon were adults uniquely suited, in different ways, to hunt for missing children. The decision they make in that book's final pages was based on decades of dedicated police work and frustrated personal lives. They weren't meant to evolve, they were meant to find Sophia Grey.

But after the second Owl and Raccoon novella, WDYG, I started to get a clear vision of where Owl and Raccoon were going in their lives. I knew them as humans. And I wanted to let them follow their different paths.

So when I wrote Last Child Missing, I ended it with a moment that would irrevocably alter the course of their lives. And here it is:

Raccoon executes a pedophile and Owl covers it up.

I came so close to publishing that book. But I couldn't do it. Because I hated my ending. It was like the serial killer from The Wire. Or the episode where you learned Buffy was hallucinating. Or that whole arc where Crockett got amnesia. It was a moment so stunning it eradicated the grinding, quiet, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other universe I had worked so hard to create.

So I sat on Last Child Missing. For sixteen months.

This was harder than it sounds. While Sin Walks Into the Desert is my most successful book, it's had tons of advertising, awards and reviews supporting it. Meanwhile, the Owl and Raccoon novellas just kept plowing forward, earning readers through giveaways, word-of-mouth, and the support of blogs like The Locked Room Mystery and The Invisible Event. I needed to keep the momentum going with a third installment, but I couldn't make myself publish Last Child Missing.

Unfortunately coming up with a third mystery was hard. Wait, that's inaccurate. I came up with dozens of great mysteries. It was coming up with one great solution that took forever.

But eventually, I figured it out. And I'm glad I waited. Not With A Bang moves Owl and Raccoon forward in a way that's true to the characters and the series as a whole. The title is an allusion not only to the book's end, but to the struggle I faced writing it. In the real world, there's no big catharsis and there's no dramatic closure. There's just people making the best decisions they can with flawed and incomplete information.

Or as Owl himself says, "We're all good men. Things just go sideways on us."

[Ed. - If you've never read any Owl and Raccoon books, I recently published The Single Staircase, WDYG and Not With A Bang in one collected box set entitled Owl And Raccoon: Locked. You can get it on Amazon now.]

Not With A Bang featured today on The Invisible Event

Mystery blogs like The Invisible Event, The Locked Room, Brandywine Books  and Crime Fiction Lover have been so encouraging to me. Most days I feel like publishing a book is just flipping pennies into a well. And then, at last, there's a splash.

Today the former has a five-star review up of the third book in the Owl & Raccoon series, Not With A Bang:

[W]hat I particularly love about Ingwalson’s writing is how inside of those words he finds so much space for pathos, and fear, and hope, and redemption, and love, and all the other quiet things that gnaw away at us, and it makes these achingly human stories motivated by these beautifully universal themes. But — crucially — he does it without ever smacking you over the head about how Human and Universal his themes are, and throws in an excellent update of the impossible crime while doing so, keeping everything moving at a brilliant pace and slowly binding these threads tighter to each other on the way to the solution.

And the blog's writer let me publish a guest post, too:

The man’s nose had been broken and his teeth were bloody. He was looking into the cop car. And he was laughing at me. 

Why was he laughing at me? 

For a second, I couldn’t figure it out. I was on an overnight ride-along with the Denver police department. And a stabbing at a club had incited a legit riot. Hundreds of half-drunk club-goers had poured onto the street and for several minutes, our city was chaos.

Go check the whole thing out.

Owl & Raccoon #3. Get it first, get it free.

Not With A Bang, the next Owl & Raccoon locked room mystery, is just about wrapped up. So this is a reminder that everybody on my email list gets a free advance reader copy. Subscribe in the sidebar of this blog before July 17 if you're interested.

The best books and moments of 2015, featuring James Ellroy not punching me in the face.

For me, the most memorable literary moment of 2015 happened outside a movie theater.

I'd bought my dad and I front row tickets to see James Ellroy introduce the movie version of L.A. Confidential at the Alamo Drafthouse. I brought along my personal copy of the legendary crime novel, on the off-chance Ellroy decided to do a signing. And on my way to Littleton, I stopped by Tattered Cover and purchased one of my own books because, well, I don't know why. But I did.

Ellroy gets onstage and tells the crowd that the movie we're about to see is simplistic and badly acted, and it succeeds only because it's "a model of filmic proficiency" and because of the genius of the source material. He admonishes us for sacrificing a night of our "sex lives and drug habits" to sit through it. He then walks offstage, leaving us to our film.

Afterwards Ellroy comes back onstage and does a long and generous Q&A. To my dismay, the audience's questions focus not on his books, but on his opinions of various TV shows. Anyway, the Q&A concludes and - gasp! - Ellroy says he'll sign books in the lobby.

I get in line, trying to figure out what I'll say to one of the greatest novelists ever. Minutes blur by. I reach the table. He signs my copy of L.A Confidential. I take a deep breath and blurt, "I know you don't need writers pushing their books at you, but I wrote this and I want you to have it." I thrust Sin Walks Into the Desert into James Ellroy's hands, fully expecting him to beat me to death with it.

He looks at my book, looks at me, and says something like, "Yeah, OK."

Success! I was alive! I start to retreat. When all of a sudden my dad jumps in front of me and tells James Fucking Ellroy, "It's such a good book, you really have to read it."

Time stops. My jaw hits the floor. Ellroy looks at my dad. My dad doubles down, literally says, "I'm his dad, so I know it's a great book."

I'm too old to be embarrassed by my parents, high school-style. But I just stand there, unable to move. Finally James Ellroy looks at me, sort-of smiles, and says, "You better take good care of this one. He's a good man."

I say something like, "Yes sir," or "You bet," grab my dad and shuffle towards the door.

End scene.

Meeting James Ellroy was great. He's everything you hope and fear. But what really made the night special was being there with the best man I know and the best friend I have. My dad.

My year-in-books did have a few highlights that actually involved reading. With the exception of a single Louis Lamour novel I picked up late one night at a roadside jerky stand somewhere between New Orleans and Texas, I didn't venture outside the crime genre. Here are some of the books that stood out:

Best Impossible Crime Book: Without a doubt, the dizzying, grisly 1981 novel, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. The book opens with a man murdered in a locked room. Beside him, police find a long letter detailing his plan to chop up his daughters and use their parts to construct the perfect woman. Days after his death, the murders are carried out. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders requires the reader to uncover clues within painstaking explanations of alchemy, astrology and geographic data. But the big reveal, when it comes, is brilliant.

Book That Most Made Me Want To Take A Shower: At The End of a Dull Day's protagonist is a sociopath. He murders. He manipulates. He desperately defends the money he thinks he's earned and the status he thinks he deserves. I think less of myself for having finished this book. And loving it made me feel downright filthy.

Best Climax: I wrote pretty extensively how deeply the short stories in Zane Lovitt's debut collection, The Midnight Promise, affected me. Each story builds on the last, getting grimmer and grittier as a self-loathing private eye tries to fulfill his self-centered death wish. The book ends as he hits rock bottom, and that final story haunted me for a long time.

Best Mayhem, Best Title & Most Alcohol Consumed: Frank Sinatra In A Blender wins 2015's Triple Crown. The damn thing is just chaos incarnate. Crazy cool characters, bullets flying, and everyone is full-scale fall-down loaded the entire time.

Best Repurposing of the English Language: Donnybrook! I already wrote a post about how enamored I was with the pure audaciousness of this novel. You can check out my reasoning here.

I'd like to end this post with a moment of silence for William McIlvanney, who passed away this year. McIlvanney's greatest hero was Laidlaw, a cop clinging desperately to the idea that even the most wretched lives matter. In the final lines of The Papers of Tony Veitch, Laidlaw pulls an elderly woman from a cab queue to dance in the rain to the tuneless noises of a homeless man's harmonica. It's a defiant and wonderful scene, defining what makes the crime genre special. Life must have meaning, if detectives are willing to work so hard to uncover the facts that surround its miserable end.