26 February 2025

The Gap in the Curtain


John Buchan wrote six Richard Hannay novels, the first and best-known being The 39 Steps, with its propulsive chase story, but he wrote another series, of five books, with a markedly different tone and a very different hero, Sir Edward Leithen.  Hannay is sort of a muscular Christian, brash and unambiguous, Leithen is more thoughtful, and acts less with animal cunning than with his wits. 

The first of the Leithen books is The Power-House, written before the Great War, and serialized in Blackwood’s in 1913.  Conan Doyle had introduced Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” in 1893, and Moriarty is our template for the arch-villain.  All the same, Moriarty is still mortal, not superhuman.The bad guy in The Power-House is modeled expressly on Nietsche, and he heralds a new breed of heavy.  “Someday there will come the marriage of knowledge and will, and then the world will march,” he tells Leithen, and you feel the chill of Mein Kampf, a good twenty years before Hitler makes it come true.

The Power-House is still my favorite of the Leithen novels, and in fact my favorite Buchan, but Buchan explored odd venues in the Leithen stories, not least with The Gap in the Curtain, from 1932, about precognition.  It’s a thriller, with elements of science fiction and the supernatural, the title a spooky evocation of eavesdropping on the future.  Five people attend what might as well be called a séance; two of them foresee their deaths.  Spoiler alert: the predictions come true, but. 

Buchan wrote fast and loose, and called his penny-dreadfuls ‘shockers.’  He perhaps took his historicals more seriously, The Blanket of the Dark (another knockout of a title), Witch Wood, Midwinter.  He never gave less than good weight.  The Gap in the Curtain is a novel of ideas, along the line of H.G. Wells, with its social and political commentary, but it’s chiefly an entertainment.  You don’t have to give it a lot of deep thought to enjoy the ride, if all the same you swallow some sulfur with the molasses.

Buchan died in 1940, of a stroke.  He was Governor-General of Canada.  He’d been a lawyer, a diplomat, a spy.  His last novel, Sick Heart River, was published after his death.  In the book, Edward Leithen is given but a year to live, and he goes off on a quest into the wooded wilderness of the upper Mackenzie River.  It’s a story about redemption, and clearly Leithen foresees his own death.  Buchan had no such premonition, although you can only wonder.  Leithen is the closest thing to autobiographical we find in Buchan, and his career arc as a character is an alternate history to Buchan’s own.  I’d prefer to think Buchan didn’t see it coming.  I’d rather not see it coming, either, but sooner or later, the curtain parts for us.

25 February 2025

They Have the Beat


In late December, an anthology I edited was published by Level Short. It's called Angel City Beat, and it includes fifteen stories by members of the Sisters in Crime Los Angeles chapter about the city they call home. On Monday evening--as I'm writing this--eight authors in the anthology are appearing on a panel moderated by Naomi Hirahara (who wrote the book's introduction) at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California, as part of the book's launch party. I wasn't able to be there, but this is the perfect time to let you know about this book here.

Here is the book's description: The City of Angels has a dark side. Hidden beneath its shiny surface are misdeeds, miscreants, and murderers. From Santa Monica's sandy beaches to Hollywood’s glitzy streets, from Boyle Heights to Holmby Hills to the dirt trails of the San Gabriel Mountains, there are so many tales to tell. So many people on the beat. The police detectives seeking justice. The reporters seeking truth. Writers who build beats into their movies and TV shows. And people who choose violence to beat others and come out on top. Angel City Beat is an anthology of stories that show life behind the plastic smiles of the rich and famous, the desperate pleas of the overlooked, and the promises of dreams forgotten. Angel City Beat is the beat of a city told by those who love her. 

More than anything, what the stories have in common is the setting, the Los Angeles area. But LA is so big and diverse--its geography and its inhabitants--and these stories reflect that. They are, in order of appearance:

"The Missing Mariachi" by Aimee Kluck - this is a police procedural story about a kidnapped woman

"Murder Unjustified" by Daryl Wood Gerber - this whodunit starring a TV showrunner offers a behind-the-scenes look at writing for Hollywood

"Getting Warmer" by Kate Mooney - a newspaper reporter is on the trail of a cold case that is heating up

"What's Really Unforgettable" by Ken Funsten, CFA - an investment manager is determined to help a potential client after the man is attacked and lands in the hospital with amnesia

"The Feast of the Seven Fishes" by Gail Alexander - this is a suspense story starring two caterers who witness a murder on Christmas Eve day

"Death Beat" by Meredith Taylor - a hospice worker notices her patients are dying faster than they should

''Everything's Relative" by Jenny Carless - a dystopian story set in the near future, when water is so scarce, it inspires desperate behavior

"Settling the Score" by Anne-Marie Campbell - a high-tech whodunit involving the LA Philharmonic Orchestra

"A Thesis on Murder" by Paula Bernstein - a graduate student is close to getting her PhD, but someone stands in her way

"Underbelly" by Jacquie Wilvers - when a screenplay is stolen, its author has plans for the thief

"A Dead Line" by Ken Funsten, CFA - a suspense story about a teenager whose summer job involves making cold calls

"Fatal Return" by Sybil Johnson - a whodunit involving a murder at a library

"Crime Doesn't Play" by Norman Klein - a police detective good at puzzles puts his skills to good use

"Unbeatable" by Melinda Loomis - A pet psychic is hired to ensure an unbeaten horse is ready for his upcoming final race just days after his jockey died in a horrific accident

"Byline for Murder" by Nancy Cole Silverman - a newspaper reporter is assigned the explosive story of an A-list actress accused of killing her costar

I hope you are enticed to pick up this anthology and check out its diverse stories. The book is available from the usual online sources. It also is available at Vroman's Bookstore. Click here to order a copy from this independent bookstore. If you live in the LA area, the anthology also will soon be on the shelves at the Pasadena Public Library.

24 February 2025

Weather or not.


Elmore Leonard was indeed a great writer.  That doesn’t mean his 10 Rules For Good Writing should be followed.  Some of them make sense, but, “Never open a book with weather?”

     What if your book is set in the Amazon, might your characters take note of a little humidity?  What if your lead guy is a leatherneck working on an oil rig in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska? Can he say, "Gee, it's nippy." How about Monsoon season in Bangkok?  "Before I left the house I had to choose between an umbrella and diving gear."

      I wrote a book set in the Hamptons that starts in the middle of a raging snowstorm, a phenomenon not often observed out there, at least not in fiction.  Not a single reviewer mentioned my flagrant violation of Leonard’s rules.  So there.

            I find the cliché of “setting as character” a little annoying since it’s not.  Setting is the setting.  But there is some truth that a special setting, like Raymond Chandler’s LA, Parker’s Boston or Grafton’s Santa Terresa, California, does have a personality that infects the story, like a member of a series ensemble, familiar and prominent in the narrative.

            You English majors will recognize the term “pathetic fallacy”, a conceit used by Homer, Shakespeare and 18th century Romantics where the mood and behaviors of the characters both reflect and influence natural forces.  In modern literature, this can be pretty silly, unless it’s deftly metaphorical.  Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is often found trudging through a howling blizzard somewhere in the Upper Great Plains (even in Chapter 1), establishing the promise of savage and frozen-hearted villainy about to ensue. 

             (My wife played on a softball team in graduate school composed mostly of PhD candidates who called themselves The Pathetic Fallacies.  Still my favorite use of the term.)

            I’ve written two other books that featured giant storms, which might betray more of a meteorological than literary obsession.  In both, hurricanes capped off the action, a deployment of weather as a plot device Leonard is silent on.  In Black Swan, I was credited with a clever use of the “locked-room mystery” motif (trope?), though my actual intent was to crib somewhat blatantly from the plot of Key Largo.  The concept of being trapped in a claustrophobic space as an uncontrollable fury smashes into the building is pretty compelling.  Especially when you’re trapped there with a bunch of murderous, drunken bad guys.  Weather in this case really deserves to be front and center, open to any metaphorical, theological, existential interpretation you wish to infer. 

            My other book featuring a wild tempest took place on the Jersey Shore, where I actually rode out a hurricane.  I was a lifeguard, and since the town was paying us to protect lives, we had to stay on while the protected fled to the mainland.  After clearing out a few knuckleheads trying to surf in the wrathful Atlantic Ocean, we retreated to our bungalow for the night, when the worst of the storm hit.   So, I too was confined to tight quarters that were being bashed and jostled by the wind with a bunch of people who were not murderous, but decidedly drunk.

            This was an experience that I had to use at some point.  In Homer, to say nothing of the Old Testament, these sorts of events are an act of divine cleansing of the hubris and corruption inherent in ever-fallible humanity.  I didn’t want to go that far, though as we all know, few things impose a greater sense of humility on real people and fictional characters alike than a rip-roaring natural disaster.    

          After that storm in New Jersey, with only the Beach Patrol and other first responders wandering around looking at the damage, the world was strangely quiet, even serene.   For some reason, it evoked the feelings I had reading the last paragraph of Joyce’s The Dead, which I believe is the finest bit of literary language ever composed in English.  So I adapted that for the ending of my lifeguard book, Elysiana. 

            I waited for charges of appropriation but never heard a word. 


23 February 2025

The Horror! The Horror?


For the past few years, I've been maintaining a list of markets for short crime/mystery fiction for the members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (obligatory plug: membership is free, and the group is open to writers, readers, editors, and anyone else interested in the form). Several times a month I go hunting for new market opportunities: magazines, websites and anthologies that might be of interest to the writers in our group. This means checking sites like Duotrope and the Submission Grinder, scrolling through social media, doing general Google searches, and so on. New magazines are relatively rare these days, but new anthologies pop up fairly often.

I'm Stephen King, and you're not.

And I've noticed something odd– or at least, something I don't quite understand.

Mystery readers can be a fairly rabid bunch, and there are a lot of them. Walk into any bookstore, and the mystery section is likely to be among the largest. So why is it that there seem to be a lot more markets for short fiction in other genres than there are in mystery?

This isn't new; it's something I was aware of even before I started keeping the markets list. I should also say that it's possible I'm just wrong about this. Maybe my perceptions are skewed somehow, or maybe I'm just not good at this kind of searching.

But, man, it certainly seems as though, for every new anthology seeking mystery stories, there are ten seeking fantasy or science fiction and fifteen or so seeking horror. It's the preponderance of horror that I always find especially confusing. Go back to that generic bookstore, and compare the size of the mystery section to the size of the horror section (you can find it by looking for Stephen King and Joe Hill). In pretty much every bookstore I've ever frequented, the mystery section is larger.

So what explains the seemingly much larger number of markets for horror? Logically, it would seems to suggest a similarly larger number of readers, but I don't see much other evidence that this is the case. Maybe it's just the case that there are a lot of horror readers who don't read anything else? Maybe horror readers are more open to short stories, while most mystery readers prefer novels?

One of the places I dabbled in horror

I should make it clear that I have nothing against horror fiction. I've dabbled in it myself, and I certainly recognize there's a lot of wonderful writing being produced in the field. My first love will always be crime, though, and I guess the bottom line is that I wish mystery writers had more opportunities to strut our stuff.

So: short column this month. It's February, after all. The main reason it's short is because I don't have an answer to this question, and I'm hoping someone will. What do you think? Are my perceptions of the current market just wrong? If they're not, what explains this?

Or maybe everyone just wants to be Stephen King?

The irony, of course, is that horror fiction has its roots in texts like Dracula and Frankenstein. Mystery fiction, by contrast, looks back to the short stories of writers like Poe and Doyle (yes, this is reductive, and yes, Doyle wrote novels about Holmes, but I think there's pretty general agreement that the stories are better).

22 February 2025

That First Book You Loved...


What's the first book you remember loving?

When I was a kid, say just learning to read, my favourite book was Mr. Hazelnut. It was about a young girl who meets a tailor who sews magical clothes. He knows just what Alice longs for, makes the clothes for her, then poof! Disappears. But the clothes grow with her over time, so it's a kind-of happy ending.  I still have that book (it was written by a Scandinavian woman) and plan to read it to my three year old granddaughter this winter.

I grew older and devoured Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  By eleven, I was into Agatha Christie and had read most of her books by the age of thirteen.  In high school, I fell in love with Ivanhoe. Then and now, I zoom to my friends' bookshelves in every house I go into.

Were there books in your house?  We had several low-bookshelves lining our living room and dining room.  I was raised by an ardent book-lover. My dad lost his father when he was six, and there was no money for books in his young years. He vowed that - when he grew up - he would buy every book he ever wanted. I grew up in a house full of books and they are still my treasures.


My own home has books in every room.  Filling walnut bookshelves, piled on side tables, bedside tables.  My office is a shrine to books.  And while I applaud the development of Kindle, a shelf-full of Kindles doesn't fill my heart the way book spines do.

Yes, there was magic in the first book I loved.  Sorcery magic, plus the kind that fills your soul.  

Because books create magic, I have found.  They provide a magical escape into a zillion adventures.  

I count myself lucky to have made a career in writing books.  If in my lifetime, I can create that wonderful escape for some readers, then my heart will be full.

What about you?  Was there 'one' book that made a difference to your childhood and stoked your love for reading?  

21 February 2025

Dimes, Mules, and Starvation:
An Inspirational Guide to Short Story Success!




I’ve been obsessed lately with sticking to a decent writing schedule, and still having some semblance of family life. How do you pull it off? To find out, I’ve been collecting anecdotes about writers who came before us. Alas, their stories tend not to be terribly helpful because the times in which they worked and their personal circumstances are so varied. But they are nevertheless inspirational.

Back in the 1930s, when radio was still in its infancy and print was king, a writer we all know adhered to a solid schedule for producing and selling short stories. His writing regimen is a matter of record, enshrined in a collection called Selected Letters of William Faulkner.

At the time, writing “good” stories for magazines earned Faulkner between $300 to $400 per story, so if he could stick to this schedule, he could support himself and his widowed mother on $1,200 to $1,600 a month.

That money was decent for Depression-era Mississippi, but it was still tight. When his father died, he tells a correspondent in 1932, Faulkner’s mother had just enough money to live on for a year. After that, her support fell entirely on Faulkner’s shoulders. And he could never rule out the possibility that his brothers and wider circle of kin would hit him up for money.

He experimented with ways to earn more. By 1934, he was working on two novels and still maintaining his weekly short story output. He tried upping his short story output to two stories a week, but found that exhausting. If a check from a magazine editor ran late, he mortgaged one of his late father’s mules, mares, or colts to tide him over. (Note to self: Joe, what is your horseflesh back-up plan?)

Then he hit upon a genius plan: He would crank out six—count ’em, six!—short stories aimed at the Mac Daddy of American magazines, The Saturday Evening Post. If they bought all six of these “pot boilers,” he would raise $6,000, enough money to live on for six months while he wrote another book. But the plan failed. The Post bought only one of those stories, and Faulkner—who would win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and a Nobel in his lifetime—despaired because in his mind the remaining five stories were fit only for the trash. He seemed to believe that The Post bought lesser stories that other magazines wouldn’t touch.

Another time, agent Harold Ober told him—either by mail or by phone, I forget which—that he would try to sell a story to The Post if Faulkner made some changes. Faulkner agreed, then told Ober to air-mail him back the damn story because he didn’t make a carbon copy.

Well, crap, we know that it would not do to wait, right? Our man needed cash and he needed it now. So what did he do? He rewrote the story from memory, incorporating Ober’s requested edits, and mailed it off so it could get in the pipeline and he could get his check that much quicker.

The story was “The Bear,” a hunting novella that is found in every high school and college anthology. The Post published that “pot boiler” in 1942.

That is the real point: The story that teachers and professors celebrate as a work of genius, fit for days of analysis, was written to stave off hunger, bills, and the loss of another mule.

In his lifetime, Faulkner wrote 125 short stories, possibly more. Fitzgerald wrote 181. Hemingway wrote 70, the slacker.

Another writer returned stateside after World War II and cranked out 800,000 words in his first four months out of the Army. He worked 80-hour weeks, amassing 1,000 rejections. He never had fewer than 20 to 30 short stories in the mail. Eventually, John D. MacDonald sold 600 stories, and launched a career writing mystery novels. If his early output figure is correct, he wrote just under 7,000 words a day during those critical four months.

Like I say, that’s an amazing story of one’s dedication to craft but not terribly helpful to a guy who is looking for lessons in the realm of life/work balance. MacDonald lost 20 pounds sticking to this regimen. If the purpose of writing is to earn one’s bread, he was doing it wrong.

Let’s see…who else have I got here? Nathaniel Hawthorne, another darling of school anthologies, calculated that he could only write about 10 to 12 short stories a year–about one a month. If he could manage to sell them for $25 each, he could support his family. Getting $25 a story was feasible but difficult in pre-Civil War America. It forced him to be exceedingly choosy about which publications he submitted to. Philip K. Dick wrote 121 short stories, and I’m sure every single one of them will eventually be made into a movie. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant sold 116 short stories to The New Yorker. Our genre’s Ed D. Hoch wrote 950 short stories.

One of my favorite true stories concerns an American writer whose eyesight was so bad the military would not enlist him to fight in World War II. Hence, his creative adolescence, during which he sold his first few stories, extended well into his adulthood. He lived with his parents in Los Angeles until he married at 27.

Every week, he adhered to the following schedule.
“On Monday morning I wrote the first draft of a new story. On Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday at noon I mailed out the sixth and final draft to New York. Sunday? I thought about all the wild ideas scrambling for my attention…”
Even at that young age, the writer, Ray Bradbury, had begun to trust his imagination. The more he wrote, the more ideas came. Even though he lived at home, he was driven by an intense work ethic.
“There was another reason to write so much: I was being paid twenty to forty dollars a story, by the pulp magazines. High on the hog was hardly my way of life. I had to sell at least one story, or better two, each month in order to survive my hot-dog, hamburger, trolley-car-fare life.
“In 1944 I sold some forty stories, but my total income for the year was only $800.”
One technique that served him well was to draw up long lists of story ideas. He’d write down the word “the” followed by a noun, usually something from childhood that scared or fascinated him. One list might have looked like this, he tells us:
THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.
From there, he picked one of those ideas and let his subconscious take over. By the time he ran those personal memories through his process, he had a fresh story that bore no resemblance to its real-life counterpart.

In essays he later wrote about his process, he attributed his success to his early consumption of poetry and short stories. Those twin loves trained him to sharpen his prose, to bake economy into every sentence.

Short stories were his early bread-and-butter. It’s believed he wrote 400 of them, but at first glance they were useless in helping him land his first book deal.

In June 1949, he took a Greyhound Bus to New York, where he made the rounds of book editors, all of whom inquired if he’d written a novel. He hadn’t, and they could not care less about his stories. Even then, the world of New York publishing greeted a collection of shorts by a single writer the way one would welcome a shoebox filled with a three-day-old catfish.

He finally met with an editor at Doubleday, the friend of a friend, who cheerfully announced, “I think you’ve already written a novel.” The editor explained what he meant: Wasn’t there a common thread in the series of stories Bradbury had written for several years on the topic of Mars?

Why, yes, Ray said. He wrote them like that because he was so moved by Sherwood Anderson’s novel in stories, Winesburg, Ohio. Ray had never confided that inspiration to anyone and he certainly never thought of collecting his Mars stories in a book.

The editor requested an outline. Bradbury hurried back to the YMCA where was staying, stripped to his underwear, and pounded on his typewriter in the sweltering heat until 3 AM.

The next morning, the delighted editor offered him a contract and a check. “Now that we’re publishing your first ‘novel,’ we can take a chance on your stories, even though such collections rarely sell. Can you think of a title that would sort of put a skin around two dozen different tales—?”

The “skin,” or framing device, of that 18-story collection was the story of a carnival refugee whose extensive tattoos spring to life, thus engendering each of the tales in the book.

So the first two books Bradbury ever published were fashioned entirely of short stories. The “novel” was The Martian Chronicles, the collection was The Illustrated Man. He triumphantly returned to his wife in Venice, California, with two checks totaling $1,500 (about $20,000 today). The sale of those two books gave the Bradburys enough money to pay their rent for a year, finance the arrival of their first daughter, and help with a down payment on their first house.

The following spring, Ray needed to find a quiet place to write and couldn’t afford an office. He escaped to the basement of the UCLA library, where he rented a desk-mounted typewriter for 10 cents per half hour. You put your money in, a clock ticked away, and you typed furiously to get as much of your money’s worth as possible in those 30 minutes before the machine bricked.

In nine days Ray had the first draft of a manuscript. He thought it might become a novel, but it was still too short, only 25,000 words. He would eventually expand the story to a whopping 45,000 words. It only cost him $8.90—about 44.5 hours—to bring Fahrenheit 451 to life. Considering it has sold 10 million copies, I think we can all agree that the dimes were well spent.


* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe


Selected Resources:


The material on Bradbury comes from his 1990 book, Zen in the Art of Writing, a collection of about 11 essays on writing.

The material on John D. MacDonald is drawn from two articles, here and a 2019 SleuthSayers post by Lawrence Maddox here.

The material on Faulkner is drawn from Eudora Welty’s review of the Faulkner text, found in her book The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (Vintage Books, 1979).


20 February 2025

More Notes for Horatio


"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5.

First, some BSP - Back in 2017, I wrote a SleuthSayers post on Fort Mountain, Georgia, and the Cherokee legend of the Moon Eyed People with whom they lived and fought and eventually… drove out. Maybe. (LINK) Anyway, Neal Burnette, a writer and director of documentaries, read it and found it interesting and interviewed me for a documentary on the Moon Eyed People. (The video is at the bottom of this post.)

So, I had a few more thoughts on the whole thing (as if I don't always have a few more thoughts on everything...).

First of all, my general approach to history is and has always been to look for the patterns. Because they're there; they're always there. History may not repeat itself, not identically, but it sure does rhyme. I would always try to get that across to my students - there are patterns to revolution, to war, to missionaries, to education, to just about everything.

And the same with legends. Every legend has a germ of truth in it. Often more than a germ. Often it's blaring at us, except that we know it has to be a myth. thanks to the common fallacy that time is an arrow of progress, and we, we who are living here and now, are the purpose and pinnacle of it all, and we are the most brilliant, educated humans who have ever lived. All our ancestors were inferior to us, and they lived in darkness. (This was the whole point of the collective Renaissance strut during their stage of time.) Now that's complete and utter bull hockey, and we can prove it by looking at, if nothing else, the Pantheon in Rome, the bronze vessels of the Shang Dynasty, and the Pyramids. Geniuses and artists have always been with us, along with dictators and monsters, since... well, since the earliest records we have (back to say, 3,000 BC). And before. Check out Gobekli Tepe some time.

But back to legends and myths.

There is an amazing similarity among stories world-wide of "the little people". The canotila in Lakota a/k/a wiwila in Dakota who live in the Black Hills and Badlands, the sidhe in Ireland (commonly called fairies in the British Isles, and very commonly called the Good People in Ireland) and others who appear in every indigenous culture around the planet. All are humanoid, but most are much smaller than most humans. Some live in the forest, some in caves in the woods, but the stories told make it clear that they live in another dimension that intersects with ours. They have their own roads, places, habits, work, hobbies. Some little people have been said to reside in the Pryor Mountains of Montana and Wyoming. The Pryors are famous for their "fairy rings" and strange happenings. Some members of the Crow tribe consider the little people to be sacred ancestors and require leaving an offering for them upon entry to the area.

And the legends of the sidhe are endless. I highly recommend a book called "Meeting the Other Crowd: the Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland" by Eddie Lenihan and Caroline Eve Green for just a few of them.

BTW, by and large, they're not that interested in us. Sometimes they will take children to their world, sometimes for pity (especially an abused child - very common among the Native American legends) or a replacement for a sickly child of their own (most of these stories are European in origin), or for who knows what reason? Some adults have been invited to the sidhe's world, where they find hallways and royalty and a warning (from other humans who have been taken there) that if they eat or drink anything there, they'll never be able to go back. And it's always hard for a human to return to our dimension. Thomas the Rhymer was supposedly carried off by the Queen of Elfland and returned to earth with the gift of prophecy, but then had to return to Elfland when he was summoned back by a milk-white hart and hind. Washington Irving's fictional Rip Van Winkle slept and woke up after almost everyone he knew had died. But there were earlier stories from the German Peter Klaus to ones that are at least a thousand years older, Ranka from China (Link), and Muchukunda from India. Basically, if you eat or drink with the fairies / elves / sidhe / immortals, and go to sleep, if you ever wake up, it will be whole lifetimes later.  

Now to me, this is very interesting. The leap from Klaus to Rip Van Winkle is fairly obvious. But how did the ancient Chinese legend of a woodcutter who runs across a pair of immortals playing a game of Go, eats some of their food, and who falls asleep for so many years that his axe handle turns to dust make it all the way to Peter Klaus in Germany? But then, there are stories of Cinderella, Blind Kings, and deals with the devil in every culture...

There be giants in every culture, and dragons…
But that's another blog post.

Another note, all the stories about them say that if you treat them well or do them a good turn, they will reward you, sometimes very richly. But if you do them a bad turn, they will do you harm, perhaps life-long... In fact, you would do well to appease them or move away, quickly.

Meanwhile, all of this made me do a rethink of the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin Town. Now it's pretty obvious that it's tied to the bubonic plague, because Hamelin is swarming with rats and the Pied Piper gets rid of them. But then the Hamelin leaders refused to pay him, and he gathers up all the children (except for one that was blind, one that was deaf, and one that was lame) with his music, and leads them out of town... and into a cave in a mountain, which promptly closes behind them. BUT... the oldest version of the legend is as follows:

On the back of the last tattered page of a dusty chronicle called The Golden Chain, written in Latin in 1370 by the monk Heinrich of Herford, there is written in a different handwriting the following account:

Here follows a marvellous wonder, which transpired in the town of Hamelin in the diocese of Minden, in this Year of Our Lord, 1284, on the Feast of Saints John and Paul. A certain young man thirty years of age, handsome and well-dressed, so that all who saw him admired him because of his appearance, crossed the bridges and entered the town by the West Gate. He then began to play all through the town a silver pipe of the most magnificent sort. All the children who heard his pipe, in the number of 130, followed him to the East Gate and out of the town to the so-called execution place or Calvary. There they proceeded to vanish, so that no trace of them could be found. The mothers of the children ran from town to town, but they found nothing. It is written: A voice was heard from on high, and a mother was bewailing her son. And as one counts the years according to the Year of Our Lord or according to the first, second or third year of an anniversary, so do the people in Hamelin reckon the years after the departure and disappearance of their children. This report I found in an old book. And the mother of the Dean Johann von Lüde saw the children depart.

The sidhe are known for being handsome and well-dressed and excellent musicians...

And now for the documentary! Enjoy!