How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Susan Cox's website.
Title are famously difficult, and they’re not copyrighted, so I could have called my mystery The Sun Also Rises or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Quite often a title comes late in the process, prompted by something that happens in the book, but in the case of The Man in the Microwave Oven I thought of the title first. It came to me as a joke, really, while making a short presentation at Bouchercon. But once I got my laugh, I decided I really liked it and then I went about writing the scenes that made the title work. It’s quirky, but it follows up with the sinister appliance theme from the first book (The Man on the Washing Machine), and microwaves have always had this rather dangerous reputation. They’re in everyone’s kitchen and they’re such a benign little tool until you accidentally put the wrong thing in it and all hell breaks loose. That’s why I liked it—my novel is...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Man in the Microwave Oven.
Q&A with Susan Cox.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
