The Lawyer Who Saved Lennon

I was such a musical illiterate back in the day that I was routinely mocked in high school when a friend discovered that I could not name the four Beatles. One morning late in 1980, this same classmate spotted me in the halls and held up three fingers. “You only have to remember three now,” he said morbidly.

John Lennon had died the previous night.

Left to my own devices forty-one years later, I probably would not have sought out a nonfiction book entitled Lennon, the Mobster & the Lawyer (Devault-Graves Books, 2021) if I hadn’t met the author at a book event last fall.

It was the same weekend that Hurricane Helene bore down on our region in Appalachia. At the time of the storm, I was at a book event in Charleston when I overheard a gentleman named Jay Bergen tell a group of writers and hosts how he had come late in life to write his one and only John Lennon story, and how, when the book was done and published, he donated five banker boxes of legal documents in his possession to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Because of my hearing issues, my brain sometimes has to replay for me what my ears have heard. Oh shoot, I said to myself later, this guy was John Lennon’s lawyer!

It’s a riveting story whose prelude began in 1970, when Lennon was sued by record producer Morris Levy over alleged similarities between Lennon’s song, “Come Together,” and Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.”

The real-life inspiration for the fictional Hesh Rabkin character on The Sopranos, Levy had a longstanding habit of attaching himself as a songwriter to the copyrights of his performers’ songs, thus ensuring for himself a forever share of their royalties. An associate of the Genovese crime family, he was a violent individual who had once beaten a cop so badly that the officer lost an eye. Levy filed frivolous lawsuits to bully people into paying him cash or to extract otherwise juicy commitments.

Predictably, the two parties settled out of court, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs that Levy owned the rights to on Lennon’s next album. Lennon, by then a solo artist, was such a star that Levy was sure to be adequately compensated by whatever royalties flowed his way.

Except, the production of that next album bogged down. The record, which Lennon intended to be a collection of oldies that he’d long admired, became a “problem” project. For one thing, its producer, the legendary Phil Spector, flaked and absconded with the master tapes. Lennon moved on to another album, Walls and Bridges, which became his fourth solo release when it arrived in stores September 1974. Assuming Lennon had reneged on their agreement, Levy threatened to sue. Lennon mollified the manipulative hothead by informing him that twenty-eight boxes of the oldies tapes had been finally recovered. Listening to them again, Lennon felt some of the songs were salvageable but a lot would need to be re-recorded. He assured Levy that the oldies album would be released…soon.

Levy grew increasingly impatient for his expected payday. Since the two men lived in New York City, Levy kept insinuating himself into Lennon’s life, badgering him to visit Levy’s nightclub, inviting Lennon to Disney World in Florida so their families could hang out, and to his horse farm in upstate New York, where Lennon and his fellow musicians rehearsed.

Every time they met, Levy tried to persuade Lennon to let him release the album. Lennon always brushed him off. Lennon had an exclusive deal with EMI stretching back to his days with the Beatles. The firm alone decided how his music was marketed. Levy knew this, but was ever the noodge.

Lennon did not regard Levy as a friend, but he found it hard to say no. So when Levy asked if he could hear some of the recordings Lennon had made of “his” songs, Lennon sent over a rough cut, reel-to-reel tape of the entire album—sixteen songs in all—hoping to get Levy off his back.

With the tape in hand, Levy must have realized that every creative person he’d ever bilked was small potatoes compared to Lennon and the artistic firmament he had at his disposal. “I’m gonna put it out!” Levy shouted in his office in front of witnesses. “I’ve got a shot! I’ve got a shot!”

In 1975, Levy announced to the world that his (s)crappy record company would release Lennon’s new album, which Levy called Roots and which he planned to market via cheesy television ads. Of course Capitol Records/EMI filed an injunction. In a pair of lawsuits, Levy sued Lennon, EMI, and Capitol Records, claiming Lennon had breached a verbal agreement permitting Levy to release the album. He claimed damages of $42 million, a laughable figure designed to rattle his opponents and force them to capitulate to a high-dollar settlement.

Enter Mr. Bergen, whose job it is to save John Lennon’s musical reputation, stop the bootleg album in its tracks, and keep John from having to pay millions to settle.

When he enters the story, Mr. Bergen is a young but seasoned litigator. The lawyer and the musician are both in their thirties and conflicted fathers who long to make amends with the children from their previous marriages.

Consisting as it does of court transcripts, legal maneuvers, and scenes of the two men roaming Manhattan in between depositions and court appearances, the book shouldn’t work but does. As they walk the streets, visit New York landmarks Lennon has never visited, eat lunch in dives and legendary restaurants alike, they form an unlikely but charming bond. Lennon comes to life as a decent fellow who always has time to sign autographs for fans as long as they agree not to bug him when he’s eating or tail him everywhere he goes.

Summoned to Lennon’s Dakota apartment on the West Side, Mr. Bergen is grilled by Yoko Ono, who, while noshing on caviar, stresses that they must keep the settlement figure down. She and everyone else assumes that Lennon will have to pay; they just want to keep him from paying big. Admittedly, Lennon’s case suffers from some glaring inconsistencies. If Lennon didn’t like and trust Levy, why did he spend so much time with him? Why did he and his musicians rehearse at Levy’s farm? If Lennon didn’t want Levy to release the album, why did he give Levy a tape of the entire record?

Mr. Bergen may well be a suit (that’s him in the dark, pinstriped suit in the 1976 Bob Gruen photo shown on this page) but he’s got the soul of a rock ’n’ roller. The moment he heard the Penguins sing “Earth Angel” on the radio back in high school, he fell in love with the form. When Elvis made a rare east coast appearance in 1957, young Mr. Bergen ordered two mail-order tickets from the venue—only $3.50 each!—but could not find a single college classmate at Fordham who wanted to make the long bus trip to Philly to see the pre-glitter King’s performance in a cavernous but half-populated ice hockey arena. Lennon, who idolized Elvis, demands a beat-by-beat recounting of Jay’s experience, which his lawyer is happy to provide. In short, Jay loves rock ’n’ roll. Chiselers like Levy sicken him. And if he can help it, his client will not pay a freaking dime.

In a scene that made me laugh, Mr. Bergen decides he will fly to Los Angeles and Detroit to interview the session musicians who witnessed Lennon’s interactions with Levy. Seeking to blend in, Mr. Bergen decides to leave his suits at home and dress casually. What sort of attire will put rock musicians at ease? We watch as he hilariously buys his first pair of cowboy boots, western-style shirts with snap buttons, and a crisp pair of black jeans that he washes a few times to break in. (It’s an aesthetic that will become Mr. Bergen’s sartorial preference later in life.)

Author publicity photo by Paul Mehaffey

Mr. Bergen’s key courtroom strategy is to get Lennon to recount exactly how he creates a song, records it, and polishes it before releasing it to the world. On the witness stand, Lennon’s creative process unfolds, and we (and the court) grasp that the rough cut tapes Lennon shared with Levy were never intended to be released. Doing so would have been like us writers allowing a digest magazine to publish the first draft of one of our short stories.

After the Lennon case, Mr. Bergen’s professional and personal life shifted. He built a lucrative practice representing rock stars, baseball teams, and even George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees. In time Mr. Bergen loosened up, let his hair down (literally and figuratively), remarried for a third time, and retired to our mutual corner of the southeast, where neighbors and local writers motivated him get his story down on paper. His book is a fine addition to his Nashville publisher’s long-running Great Music Book series.

In December 1980, like the rest of the world, Mr. Bergen was devastated to learn of the murder of his friend at age 40. These days Jay Bergen tells audiences that he is haunted by the fact that he missed seeing Lennon five days before his passing. John was in the same recording studio where Mr. Bergen was visiting a client, but Yoko was being weird, and Mr. Bergen did not permit himself the liberty to knock on a few of those studio doors to say hello (and goodbye).

Had he lived, Lennon might well have written books or granted interviews that shed even more light on his creative process. But since he was taken from us far too soon, we are lucky to catch a glimpse of that artistry in this story. We are lucky too that Mr. Bergen, now in his eighties, is around to help us imagine it all.

* * *

You can inspect some artifacts in Mr. Bergen’s Lennon archives here.

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

Crime Scene Comix Case 2025-04-031, Drive Thru

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

Cover Up

Here’s an oddment.  Cover Up, released in 1949.  William Bendix, Dennis O’Keefe, Barbara Britton, Art Baker.  Directed by Alfred E. Green, whose career goes back to the silents; first picture of note is the pre-Code Stanwyck, Baby Face; did biopics of Jolson, Jackie Robinson, and Eddie Cantor.  Original screen story by O’Keefe, under a pseudonym.  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo, who also shot D.O.A., Stalag 17, and Kiss Me Deadly, before going on to Judgment at Nuremberg, and an Oscar for Ship of Fools.  The razor-sharp black-and-white in Cover Up is the best thing about it.  The picture is less than the sum of its parts – not incoherent, but lukewarm – and you can wonder why I was curious about it in the first place.

For openers, Bendix.  He gets top billing, although he plays second banana to O’Keefe.  Bendix did a lot of lovable saps, the best-known being The Life of Riley, but he did solid work for Hitchcock, in Lifeboat, with Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, and as Babe Ruth.  You could do worse, though, than to check him out in The Dark Corner, a nifty little noir where he plays very much against type.  Dark Corner has two serious weaknesses, Clifton Webb doing the same character he did in Laura, a year or so before, and Mark Stevens, who’s a Godawful stiff, as the hero.  It has two serious strengths, Lucille Ball, as the private eye’s Girl Friday, who gets him out of the frame, and Bendix, who has the part that used to go to Raymond Burr, before Perry Mason.  Bendix plays the muscle with alarming menace, thick-tongued, and his eyelids shuttered.  His body English is top-heavy, but he has a predator’s grace.  He’s sly, like many stupid people, and gets what he deserves, in the end, spoiler alert. 

Secondly, we’ve got Dennis O’Keefe.  You either know or you don’t.  O’Keefe did a lot of amiable and undemanding B’s, but in 1947 and ‘48 he made two pictures back-to-back with Anthony Mann, T-Men and Raw Deal.  Raw Deal is probably the best part O’Keefe ever got, and it features Claire Trevor, along with both John Ireland and Raymond Burr as the bad guys.  T-Men, though, is the one that really holds your attention.  Undercover cops, infiltrating the mob.  Alfred Ryder, almost invariably a yellowbelly and a slime, in over a hundred features and TV episodes, here gets to play the stand-up guy, who goes down without ratting out his partner to the mob torpedoes.  Charles McGraw, who once in a blue moon got to crack a smile or even be the hero (in Narrow Margin), is the torpedo in this picture, and one of the chilliest psychopaths in the Anthony Mann stable, which is going some.  O’Keefe, at the end, coming after McGraw, is past the point of no return, and clearly off the leash.  He heaves himself up the gangplank, in a fury, and you can feel his physical force.  It isn’t a shock cut, or a sudden scare, or some camera trick.  The camera’s steady.  He’s coming at you, and you shrink back.  His forward movement is that implacable.  You can’t help it.  Raw Deal and T-Men were both shot by the great cinematographer John Alton.

So, what is it with Cover Up?  It just doesn’t have any tension.  You keep wanting it to go somewhere, like it’s the Little Picture That Could, and the air keeps going out of its tires.  O’Keefe comes to town, he’s an insurance investigator, he’s going to file a report on a suicide.  He meets cute with Barbara Britton.  They’re a little old for their characters, but believable, and kinda sweet.  He checks in with the local sheriff, Bendix, and begins to smell a rat.  The guy shot himself, but the gun’s gone missing.  Bendix affects unconcern.  O’Keefe pokes around.  The town clams up.  It doesn’t take long for O’Keefe to figure out it’s murder, staged as a suicide.  Bendix, no fool he, already knows.  The question is, why is Bendix covering it up, or is he in fact the killer?  But mostly, O’Keefe is sticking around because he’s moony over Barbara.  Her dad, the local banker, turns out to be a suspect.  O’Keefe, however, is half-hearted about all this.  Oh, and it’s Christmas.  You can tell because they keep playing the opening bars of carols on the soundtrack.  Then, the only real suspect, the saintly retired doctor you never actually get to see, dies off-screen of a convenient heart attack.  The best moment in the movie, coming up.  Barbara finds the missing gun, at her dad’s, and goes to plant it, at the doctor’s.  O’Keefe shows up.  She hides.  He finds the gun.  Over his shoulder, you can see her reflection in a framed picture on the wall.  He sits at the dead doctor’s desk, and you realize at the same time he does, that the dead doc was left-handed.  Of course, so was the murderer.

Yadda-yadda-yadda. It isn’t Bendix, and it isn’t the dad.  O’Keefe and Barb realize the only obstacles to their happiness are their own cold feet, the stage door closes as Dancer and Prancer lift off.  Inoffensive.  It’s a pretty poem, but you can’t call it Homer.  In other words, it’s not noir enough.  O’Keefe pretends to be hard-boiled, but come on, he’s soft on the girl.  Bendix tries on some ambiguity, but too much Dutch uncle, not enough sinister.  The dad, with his rosy cheeks and white hair, is he cooking the books at the bank?  Not.  You want the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden.  I expected a little less sugar, and a little more bite.  The snake never shows up.

Author, Author

 I'm making a nontraditional distinction between "writer" and "author."

When I last blogged three weeks ago, I celebrated the release of my debut novel, The Devil’s Kitchen. Since then, I've been writing very little. Instead, I've been busily forcing myself on audiences to talk about the book. It's been exhilarating. The process has left me thinking about the terms “writer” and “author.”

While acknowledging that the words are often treated as synonyms, dictionaries and the web distinguish the two. The line they draw gets squiggly. Most sources suggest that the key distinction lies with publication. All authors are writers, but only those writers who put their work into the public realm are authors. Using this definition, we might quarrel about the meaning of publication. 

Other definitions reserve the title of author exclusively for those who have published books. Sorry, short story crafters, a writer is all we can ever be.

A different definition focused on intention. It's an internal/external distinction. Writers are scribes who create content for others. Journalists and ghostwriters are perhaps the foremost examples. Authors, on the other hand, are internally driven. They create for themselves and the satisfaction they derive from the creative process. This one seemed a tad pompous. 

I'm sidestepping the debate. The last few weeks have left me thinking about another way to define the words. It’s a solo/social distinction.

As a writer, I sit alone at my keyboard. Sometimes, the dogs join me, but that's about it. I type. I edit. Occasionally, I talk to myself. "Writer" emphasizes the introverted side of my soul. The craft is a solitary activity. Remembering an admonition from Joyce Carol Oates that “constant interruptions are the destruction of imagination,” I block off time when I won’t be disturbed.

“Author,” conversely, is the public face of my writing. It’s me talking about my work in the hope that someone will give The Devil’s Kitchen a try. It's me, standing in a bookstore, giving a public reading, or sitting alongside mystery lovers at a book club talking about the characters’ paths. It's me attending conferences and signing books.

"Author" is my narrow, extroverted, social side. He is the promotional arm of book writing.

Just as there are guides for writers that propose effective ways to develop plot twists or characters, there are also a variety of resources offering advice on how to  inhabit the "author" persona. As a novice, I delved into a few of them and learned everything I needed to know.

The pen—The expert community strongly recommended gel ink as the best pen for book signing events. Rubber grips, with their ergonomic benefits, also received high marks.

The autograph—I found a surprising amount of advice about changing my signature for book signings. I was told that I needed enough swoosh to project style. I should strive for heightened legibility, yet with an economy of motion allowing for speed in a signing line. The blogosphere recommended practicing my signature. Too late, I’m afraid. I’ve been signing too much for too long. My default signature emerges unless I go slow and concentrate hard on my swooshy author script.

The reading—Here, things got controversial. Some sources recommended tabbing my book and reading directly from it. This approach flashes the cover to the audience and helps market. Other experts suggested printing the pages so an author can enlarge the font for easy reading. Printed pages in sleeves mean that the reader will not have to battle with a book's bound spine in a public forum. The debate raged.

Everyone agreed that authors practice their corporate reading and hone their style. Don't read as one normally would. Focus on enunciation and clarity over theatrics. Find your Goldilocks moment, the advice guides suggest—neither too long nor too short. Choose an excerpt with a stand-alone value that emotionally engages and reveals the essence of what the book is about. That asks a lot from a few short paragraphs.

The presence—Almost all the guides recommend that the author do something to ensure that the audience remembers the writer. Several suggested that authors consider coming in costume. I don’t have a National Park Service uniform, so I can’t dress like the main characters in my book. I still have my Boy Scout uniform in the back of the closet. The shirt is festooned with a variety of patches. Maybe that would work. I can promise that if I show up in my BSA shorts and neckerchief, I'd  give bookstore patrons something to talk about on the drive home. 

The recap: The guides I reviewed suggested that I change my pen, signature, voice, reading style, and clothes. Most, however, concluded by reminding me to be authentic.

I’m seizing on the last bit of advice. I’ll be attending Malice Domestic at the end of the week. I won’t be in costume. My signature will be the typical scrawl, and I will likely sound like I always have.

But I will remember to bring a gel ink pen. It proves I've learned something.

BSP: April has been a good month. In addition to the novel’s publication, the anthology Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun with my story "A Placid Purloin" was released on April 14^th. Trouble in Texas, an anthology from Sisters in Crime North Dallas, dropped on April 15th. It includes my story, “Doggone.” Michael Bracken edited both anthologies. He blogged about them last week. 

Until next time.

”Parents in Tech Want Their Kids to Go Into the Arts Instead.” — Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2025.

             The sub-head was:   “Hands-on jobs that demand creativity are seen as less vulnerable to artificial intelligence.” 

Before all us underpaid artists and writers start letting the Schadenfreude sneak in, our chosen path is still a chancy way to make a living, and always will be.  That is, if you put all your financial eggs in one basket.  I’ve always believed that picking between science and the arts, or business and the arts, is a false choice. 

There’s no law that says you can’t do it all.  I have friends from college who went all in on careers in music, or photography, or theatre, or dance.  Some of them made it, and though now elder statespeople in their fields, many of their names, and certainly their achievements, are recognizable.  You haven’t heard about the ones who failed, now dead, embittered, or wistfully resigned. 

 I’m sorry for them, but I have little sympathy for those who regarded their art as a higher calling, superior to anything one might do to just make a little money.  This is nonsense.  I believe that all honest work is equally honorable.  My son is a working artist who also helps run a sawmill.  He paints and pays his bills.  The art might be more enriching, but he loves wood and delights in the associations he’s developed inside the woodworking community.  He also knows how to run giant mill saws, shop tools, laser cutters. CAD/CAM and C&C machines, computers in the service of art and commerce. 

You want to give your grandkids good advice?  Just say “Man-machine interface.”

I’ve been entangled in the building trades my whole life, mostly as a designer and cabinetmaker, and you won’t find a more intelligent and engaging bunch of people in any profession.  None of them ever thought I shouldn’t be writing books.  One of them is in a band with a standing gig at a local bar.  Another is a carpenter and phi beta kappa graduate in English literature.  Do not challenge him on how to cope inside crown moldings or the rankings of the best books of 2024.

I have another carpenter friend who’s also sort of a career criminal who loves my books and shares them with his fellow inmates.  He wrote me once to say he’d convinced the prison librarian to stock my whole list. 

This might be the definition of a captive audience. 

       The standard advice by the self-important is to follow your passion.  Well, I’ve aways had a passion for regular meals, a decent place to live and a serviceable car.  You can achieve all this and still have plenty of time left to write novels, paint landscapes, play funky bass or imitate Sir Laurence Olivier at your community theater.  Or all the above.  (You could also watch a lot of sports and work on your handicap, but these are different ambitions not addressed in this essay.)

Since this is a project in alienating as many people as possible, I also have little sympathy for those who talk about writing a book, or learning guitar, or playing Lady Macbeth, but never get around to actually doing any of it, blaming their demanding job/kids/wife/husband/Pilates class.  The same rules of time apply.  There’s plenty of it in a day, or weekend, to pack a lot in if you really want to do it.  I suspect that many of these people have learned that it’s really hard to be good at anything in the arts.  That it takes tremendous discipline, hard work and sacrifice.  So it’s a lot easier to talk about than actually do.

            I might have had a bigger literary career if all I’d done was write books.  I’ll never know, and I really don‘t care.  Instead, I got to do an awful lot of interesting things, meet a wildly diverse array of people, master several different commercial and manual skills (like playing the funky bass), and pay all my bills.

Mostly on time. 

 

 

Wabbit Time

The celebrated actor with the most unusual command of the English language never stepped into the Globe Theatre or on any other London stage, nor Broadway for that matter. His enunciation of Shakespeare brought down the house. Consider these famous lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

“A wose by any other name…”

and

“Woemeo, Woemeo, wherefwore art thou?”

Yes, this is the megastar who uttered arguably the cleverest, wittiest, most famous applause-winning line in any theatre:

“My twusty wifle 
  is a twifle wusty.”

You nailed it, we’re talking Elmer Fudd, the thespian who put the ‘warning’ in Warner Bros.

A Fudd by Any Other Name

Unbeknownst to many fans, shotgun-toting big ‘El’ had his name appropriated by outside forces. Nay, not those words of conspiracy theorists: FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) or its variant, FUDD (fear, uncertainty, disinformation, doubt).

Instead, dictionaries define fudd as an old-fashioned person. More narrowly, NRA fans derisively refer to non-militant gun owners who use rifles made of wood and steel exclusively for hunting rather than weapons of war fabricated from carbon fiber, and esoteric ceramics and polymers.

Generally, fudds of this sense don’t see the necessity of tactical weaponry. They are thought to side with more restrictive pre-Clarence Thomas interpretations of the Second Amendment. Personally, I thought they missed a bet by not using fuddite. Luddite… Fuddite… Never mind.

The above are North American denotations. Among British definitions of fud is a Collins entry of Scottish root meaning tail of a rabbit or hare. Which brings us to today’s terrible Easter crime. No, not the terrifying Skeezicks or Pipsisewah weirdly nibbling the souse off Uncle Wiggily’s ears, but handling an over-population of Beatrix Potter bunnies.

Oops. Sowwy

One childhood Easter my young brothers, friends, and I thought abusing the Peter Rabbit song would be hilarious. I’m not sure if the real crime was the homicide of Peter or that we drove parents nuts singing it to the saturation point. So on behalf of disturbed third graders everywhere…

Here comes Peter Cottontail Hopping down the bunny trail. ★BANG!★ Thud. Thud.

{sigh} Children can be horrible little delinquents. And along with millions of children everywhere, we bit the ears off chocolate bunnies! (although I preferred giant coconut eggs.)

Plotting 101

I've said before, at this blog, that the two things I enjoy most about writing short stories are plotting and dialogue. I think most of my fellow writers agree with me about dialogue---it's just fun to write--but very few agree with me about plotting. And beginning writers seem to be either confused about it or terrified of it. One asked me, "Why do I have to worry about the plot? Can't I just dream up some interesting characters and give them something to do?" Well, sure you can. But what they do is the plot.

It's not as hard as it seems. One way to address this, I think, is to talk about some plot techniques, or devices. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Foreshadowing

Wikipedia says foreshadowing is "a narrative device in which a storyteller gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story." I like to think of it as something you put into a story, usually early on, that makes later action believable. It's not always used, or always required, but it's helped me many times when I needed to make something work in what would otherwise be an illogical sequence of events.

Example: If you want your story hero to be rescued from attacking headhunters at the last minute by a helicopter, you must at least mention that helicopter earlier--maybe there's a military training base nearby, etc. If you don't, nobody's going to buy that too-convenient ending. Or if the murderous bad guy is sneaking up on the good guy during their hunting trip and falls instead into a bear pit, be sure to have a guide warn them earlier to "Watch out for bear pits." That kind of thing. The best movie example I can think of is Signs (2002)--there are at least half a dozen instances of foreshadowing in that film, little things that are casually introduced during the story that seem meaningless at the time, but later turn out to be necessary to the ending.

There's also another kind of foreshadowing that can come in handy. Sometimes a character or a place can  be mentioned early in order to build suspense and anticipation. Example: A counselor is leading a group of campers on a hike when one of the group spots a line of scarecrows in the distance and asks, "What's that?" and the leader says, "Oh, that's the Forbidden Zone. You don't want to go there." If that happens, of course, that's exactly where the unfortunate campers will wind up, before the story's done--and the reader will both dread it and look forward to it. As for using a character for that kind of thing, think of The Misfit, in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." He's mentioned only in passing, in the opening paragraph, but the attentive reader suspects that the traveling family will cross paths with him at some point--and they do. 

2. Raising the stakes

This isn't really a device, it's just good practice, and always a smart thing to do when plotting fiction. Example: Someone comes to a private eye asking for help with a relatively minor problem, maybe to find a missing friend or to shadow an unfaithful husband. That could possibly make for an interesting story in itself, but it's far more interesting if there is then an escalation of some kind, maybe a related murder or a kidnapping--something to make matters more serious and more dangerous. I think I'm right when I say the best and most popular stories, at least if they lean more toward "genre" than "literary," will include situations and villains that are life-threatening.

I've always liked the idea that fiction is problem/complication/resolution. Get a man up a tree, throw rocks at the man, get him down again. It's not enough to just get him in trouble and then rescue him; you must make things as difficult and stressful as possible for him in the middle of the story, with steadily rising action, before his situation get better. 

I'm convinced the biggest reason the TV series Lost was so successful was that it had tension and conflict on so many different levels. First the survivors of a plane crash are trapped on an unknown island, which is scary enough, but then (1) they start fighting among themselves, (2) they're haunted by their own personal demons, (3) otherworldly things begin happening around them, and (4) just when they're getting organized and trying to address all these issues, they hear distant roars and growls and see treetops swaying in the surrounding jungle. Things just get worse and worse and worse. Viewers loved that.

3. The ticking clock

Alfred Hitchcock once said, and I'm paraphrasing, that the best way to generate suspense is to put a ticking clock in your story. In his example, several men are sitting around a table playing poker, and there's a bomb under the table that they don't know about. Hitch said it doesn't matter to the viewer what the guys are talking about--sports, movies, politics, women, anything. What matters is that there's a bomb under the table.

I've done this kind of thing many times in my own stories. It of course doesn't have to be a clock--but it should be some form of countdown or deadline or pending event. It could he a scheduled execution, an approaching asteroid, a sinking ship, a terminal illness, a pilotless airplane, a final exam, a restless volcano, a slow-acting poison, a runaway train, even a trial date. In one of my stories, titled "Twenty Minutes in Riverdale," it was a ticking clock on a bomb--in fact the story consisted of nine scenes, and the title of each scene was a specific time (8:10, 8:15, 8:18, 8:26, 8:28, etc.), counting down until the blast.

One of the best examples, moviewise, is High Noon (1952), where an old enemy is coming in on the noon train to meet his henchmen and kill the sheriff, who can find no one willing to help him stand up to them. Throughout the film there are a dozen images of clocks, ticking off the minutes until the train's arrival and the shootout.

4. Plot reversals

I dearly love this plot device, and I use it regularly in my stories. (Probably because I like to encounter those twists and turns in the stories that I read.) I think one of the best ways to keep a reader interested is to have the story change direction unexpectedly--and not just at the end. Everyone talks about twist endings, but this kind of thing is effective anywhere in the storyline. And the reversals don't only provide surprise. They generate constant suspense because now the reader doesn't know what to expect. 

The best example of this, as all of us know, is the movie Psycho. When the most recognizable actor in the cast is killed half an hour into the story, viewers are shocked, I tell you, shocked. If that can happen, they think, hold onto your lap straps--anything might happen. In fact, I can think of only several other movies and TV series where the biggest-name stars died early and unexpectedly in the story: L.A. Confidential (Kevin Spacey), Deep Blue Sea (Samuel L. Jackson), Executive Decision (Steven Seagal), Scream (Drew Barrymore), and Game of Thrones (Sean Bean). I'm sure there are others, but hey, I can't watch them all.

Other examples of mid-movie plot reversals: Gone Girl, Marathon Man, From Dusk to Dawn, and Knives Out. And even though some critics still frown on twist endings, viewers and readers love them (The Usual Suspects, Planet of the Apes, The Sixth Sense, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc.).

There are plenty of other plot techniques writers can use--flashbacks, framed stories, MacGuffins, false endings, red herrings, etc.--and I have used them all at one time or another. When they're well done, they can greatly improve a story.

How about you? Which plot devices are your favorites? Which have you used the most? Which do you think are most effective? As for plotting in general, is that something you enjoy doing? Do you find it easy? Hard? How detailed is your plotting? Do you bother to outline? If you do, is it written or in your head? Do you think in terms of individual scenes?

I heard someplace--I forget where--that a plot is two dogs and one bone.

Let the contest begin . . .