Zeke Armstrong on KidsReads.com!Check out the Zeke Armstrong section on
KidsReads.com. There's a trvia contest, a Zeke Armstrong word scramble, and an interview with Matthew and Daniel, just to name of few of the sections.
Red Card wins Agatha!
Red Card is the 2003 winner of the Agatha Award for Best Children's/Young Adult Mystery; Matthew is the youngest-ever recipient of the Award. Both of the guys were onhand for the ceremony, which took place just outside Washington, D.C. on May 3, 2003. Neither of them knew they were going to win - it was a total surprise! For details, have a look at the Malice Domestic web site:Malice Domestic's Agatha Awards
Green Streak nominated for Agatha Award!Following in the footsteps of
Red Card, which won the Agatha Award for Best Children's/Young Adult Novel in 2003,
Green Streak was nominated for this year's Agatha Award.
Matthew and Daniel featured in Crescent Blues E'Magazine interview:
Going to the Head of the Mystery Class
Matthew and Daniel featured on Apple.com!Check out the
Apple Computer story on Matthew and Daniel, and how this unusual writing team uses technology in creating the Zeke Armstrong Mystery series.
Red Card has been added to the Accelerated Reader list. You'll find the quiz in:
The Accelerated Reader Quiz Store
Fast on the heels of winning the Agatha Award, Matthew and Daniel were featured in the May 7th edition of The Dallas Morning News. The text of the article follows:
Writing duo scores with mystery fans
05/07/2003
By NANCY CHURNIN / The Dallas Morning News
Playing on a select soccer team that he hated was one of the best things that ever happened to Matthew LaBrot. He just didn't know it at the time.
After Matthew got upset with a coach after one particularly awful practice, his uncle, Daniel Hale, tried to cheer him up. At the computer, he wrote an opening sentence about the team. He invited Matthew, then 12, to write the next one. And soon they were into it, taking turns, for the next hour and a half.
That's how, over the course of a year, Red Card, a soccer mystery starring teen sleuth Zeke Armstrong, was born. The uncle and nephew sent e-mails and talked about the book on the way to soccer between the teen's home in Greenville and his uncle's in Dallas, each adding to the story as they went along. The book, recommended for ages 9 to 12, was published by Top Publications of Dallas in July.
Matthew, now 15, became the youngest person to win an Agatha Award on Saturday, when he and his uncle picked up the prize for best children's or young adult mystery. The Agatha, administered by Malice Domestic in Washington, D.C., is an annual national award voted on by mystery writers and fans. Matthew had to miss a day of school to make the ceremony.
The first person they called with the news was Matthew's mom, followed by Mr. Hale's mom (Matthew's grandmother) and their agent.
"It felt surreal when they announced the winner," Mr. Hale said Sunday. "I said to myself, 'Red Card, Red Card, why is that name so familiar?' Then I went, 'Oh yes, that's our book!' "
It's been a little shock for Matthew, whose uncle had warned him how long it can take to get publication or recognition for writing. At the same time, he says, he always had confidence in the material.
"At first it started as a joke, but by the time we finished it, I wanted it to be pretty good," says Matthew, who wrote all the soccer scenes in the book. "I put so much work in it."
As did Mr. Hale. Both agree it's been a team effort, right down to Zeke Armstrong's name.
"I made up the name Armstrong," says Matthew. "He made up Zeke. We decided to put both our ideas together."
For Mr. Hale, 43, a lawyer with an MBA and an aspiring writer with four unpublished novels in a drawer, "it just figures" that the book he wrote for fun was the book that worked best.
"I was really working hard on the craft of writing," he says. "I went through the fiction program at SMU. I was taking it all so seriously."
The key to Red Card was simply that both writers liked the story, he says.
"We're both mystery buffs. We would be in the car, going back and forth to practices, and we would plot it out, saying, 'What do you think of this?' The momentum really grew, and six months down the line we couldn't stop if we tried. We had a good time."
And it showed, says Lisa Korth, the former president of Top Publications who bought the book (and to whom the book is, in part, dedicated).
"Nothing has leapt out to me as strongly as that one has," she recalls. "I had so many piles and piles and piles of manuscripts, but I just knew when I read it, 'Oh my gosh, there's greatness here.' I e-mailed them immediately. I met them for pizza. They were amazing. I had such a good feeling about this book and about them."
Similarly, Linda Rutledge, the Agatha Awards committee chair, says the book has struck a nerve with the mystery writers and fans who vote for the annual Agatha awards.
"We select the top five vote-getters for each nomination," she says. "This is a very good book, and it's worthy of the nomination. It's delightful to see a book with a protagonist who models good behavior for young people and tells an interesting story."
The other cool thing about it for both Matthew and Mr. Hale is that the project strengthened, rather than strained, their close bond.
"He didn't treat me like a little kid," Matthew says. "He treated me like a business partner. We never got mad at each other. I think that's probably because we had such a good relationship before we started writing."
Mr. Hale says that Matthew was easy to work with and that 85 percent of Zeke was modeled on his nephew, right down to the cowlick. Mr. Hale claims the other 15 percent, including Zeke's international savvy ("I lived in France and speak French," he says) and the ability to drive a car at an early age ("When I was 6, I could drive a pickup around my family's pastures in Arkansas").
"We have very similar senses of humor," Mr. Hale says. "A lot of times we would have the same idea at the same time."
In some ways, too, life has modeled art for Matthew. Just as Zeke tries to keep his identity as an international mystery sleuth from his teammates so he will be treated normally, Matthew didn't want to tell his new classmates at Greenville Christian School that he was a published author.
"You get treated a little differently when people know stuff like that," he says.
Then he agreed to give a talk at the library in Greenville, and before he knew it, the news spread through the classrooms.
"All my friends started making fun of me for a few days. 'So he can read and write,' they said."
For Matthew and Mr. Hale, Red Card is also the beginning, rather than the culmination of a larger dream. As they labored over the book, they were already planning out new Zeke Armstrong sports mysteries, including the just-completed manuscript of Green Streak, which is set against the story of an in-line skate racing team.
Their model is the Hardy Boys, a series they both loved. They now have four books sketched out, and they have a Web site, www. zekearmstrong.com, on which they are holding a contest for kids who want to tell them what they would like to see Zeke do next. The prizes are an autographed copy of Red Card and an autographed soccer ball. Entries should be submitted to zekearmstrong@mac.com by May 30.
"Kids have the most amazing imaginations," Mr. Hale says. "We really would love to see their ideas."
Although it may be hard to dream up a more imaginative story than that of an uncle and teenage nephew teaming up to write mystery novels together.
"We're the luckiest guys on the face of the earth," Mr. Hale says.
E-mail nchurnin@dallasnews.com
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'RED CARD'-CARRYING FACTS
Matthew LaBrot came up with the title Red Card, and both he and co-author Daniel Hale liked it for its double meaning.
When someone gets ejected from a soccer game, as Zeke's coach does early in the book, it's called getting a "red card." And when the coach ends up in the hospital because someone is trying to kill him, it's as if he's getting a "red card" in life. The coach won't get back in the game of life unless 13-year-old Zeke Armstrong figures out who's trying to kill him.
The plot unfolds between soccer games, which is when Matthew and Mr. Hale dreamed up the book, and there are more coincidences with real life: Zeke, like Matthew and Mr. Hale, lives in Texas; Matthew turned 13 while writing the story -- the same age Zeke is in the book; and Zeke's uncle's name is Uncle Dane, which is pretty close to Matthew's Uncle Dan.
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