Alexander the Great: Bastard as Exemplar for an Age (356–323 B.C.)

 Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week, that most terrifying of ancient conquerors, Alexander the Great!

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Alexander ordered all but those who had fled to the temples to be put to death and the buildings to be set on fire. . . . 6,000 fighting-men were slaughtered within the city’s fortifications. It was a sad spectacle that the furious king then provided for the victors: 2,000 Tyrians, who had survived the rage of the tiring Macedonians, now hung nailed to crosses all along the huge expanse of the beach.

                                                                        — Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni 

Alexander the Great

Held up throughout the ages as a shining example of both the great conqueror and the philosopher-king, Alexander III of Macedonia was considered by many to be the greatest monarch of the ancient world. 

He was also a homicidal megalomaniac who developed a god complex to go along with a drinking problem, likely had a hand in killing his own father, murdered one of his own generals in a drunken rage, conquered the Persian Empire, and unleashed the Macedonian war machine on an unprepared world, resulting in the deaths of untold numbers of people.

Born to parents who could barely stand the sight of each other by the time he came along, Alexander was in his teens and already trained as a cavalry officer and a leader of men when his father, Macedonian king and bastard Philip II, took a new, young wife, whom he immediately got pregnant. When the girl delivered a boy whom Philip promptly designated his heir, Alexander and his crazy snake-cult-priestess mother Olympias fled Macedonia for her native country of Epirus (modern Albania), where they cooled their heels until Philip was assassinated later that same year. Alexander and his mother probably had a little something to do with that. Within weeks, Philip’s new wife, her opportunistic nobleman father, and her infant son had all been quietly put to death. 

The destruction of Thebes

On news of Philip's death the tribes to the north rebelled, and Alexander was forced to take time out to resubjugate them. A rumor that he had perished while doing so sparked a revolt by the Greek city-states Philip had conquered two years previously. Alexander marched south at the head of the army his father had built, and attacked Thebes, one of the cities leading the rebellion, and also where Philip had learned phalanx battle strategy in his youth.

Destroying Thebes' army, Alexander went about making an example of the city so as not to need to worry about further Greek rebellions once he was off in Asia. Six thousand Thebans died in the fighting, and Alexander had a further thirty-thousand sold into slavery.The Greeks never rose against him again.

After this Alexander was finally on to Asia, leading an army that Philip had built, conquering territories left and right. He lived another thirteen years and never again set foot back in Greece.

When Alexander and his army entered Egypt, the priests of Amun there hailed him as a god himself and the son of one of their gods (a syncretic figure that combined aspects of the Greek god Zeus with the of the Egyptian god Amun), a connection that played to both his vanity and his political need to lend legitimacy to his conquests (after all, who can argue with the reasons of a god-on-earth for anything he does?). 

Alexander kills Cleitus

The further he got from Macedonia, the more binge drinking he and his senior officers did, and the worse Alexander’s god complex became. One evening, he got into a drunken brawl with one of his generals, a veteran named Cleitus, who had saved Alexander’s life in battle at the Granicus River years before. What's more, Cleitus's sister Laodice had been Alexander's wetnurse when he was a baby. 

The argument began when Cleitus confronted Alexander over comments he was making about his dead father. Cleitus, who had served as a junior officer in Philip's army, objected to Alexander disparaging the dead king, both men were very drunk, and it was all downhill from there. After a heated back and forth, Cleitus opened his tunic, offering his chest as a target, should his king wish to take his life. In the heat of the moment, Alexander snatched a spear from one of his bodyguards and threw it at Cleitus, killing him on the spot. 

Overcome with remorse once he sobered up, Alexander contemplated suicide but was talked out of it by his entourage, who convinced him that Cleitus was disloyal and since Alexander was a god, he was therefore infallible. 

When he finally died in Babylon of a combination of malaria and exhaustion at the age of thirty-three, Alexander left a changed world behind him. Whether or not it was for the better is up for debate. 

 

Dear Abi, or the Ultimate Unreliable Narrator

 "As for myself, I belong to that delicious subgenre, the self-confessed unreliable narrator." - Matt Coward

Back in 2021 I wrote here about Stuart Turton's remarkable first novel, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.  (Leigh also wrote about it later.)  Turton is a master of mash-ups or genre-blendings, so let's call that book a fantasy novel braided together with a golden-age-style mystery.

I also enjoyed, but never wrote about his second book, The Devil and the Dark Water, which is sort of a seafaring historical mystery with horror overtones.

I just finished his third novel, and it's an amazing tale.  The Last Murder at the End of the World is a science fiction mystery.  It is set hundreds of years in the future (I had to keep reminding myself of that when futuristic technology is used) when all animal life on earth has been wiped out except on an island in the Mediterranean where a village of a few hundred people remain. 

 

When one of the residents  is murdered solving it could literally mean life or death for  the whole planet.  And since their memories of the past night have been wiped - futuristic technology - even the killer doesn't know whodunit.  Fortunately one of the villagers is uniquely qualified to do the detective work.  There is a breathtaking scene in which Emory, the sleuth, looks at a scene of utter chaos and immediately deduces what happened.  Nice piece of writing.

But what fascinated me most about the book is the narration style.  Most of the book is in third person, the classic omniscient narrator who can tell us all the actions and thoughts of the characters.  But every once in a while, well, take a look:

She remembers being out there when she was a girl, hearing this same lesson from the same teacher. She cried the entire way and nearly jumped out to swim for home when they dropped anchor.

"The children are safe with Niema," I say reassuringly.

Say what? Who is this first person narrator suddenly intruding, one who can tell us what the characters are thinking?

Her name, it turns out, is Abi (and I think I was halfway through the book before her gender was mentioned). She can see through the eyes of the villagers, talk with them through their thoughts and, to some extent, control them.

So, who or what is Abi? Obviously that is one of the puzzle boxes that the reader hopes will  be opened before the end of the book.  

But now we're getting to my main point.  Abi sometimes tells us that she is lying to the villagers.  But does she tell us every time she does? Can we  trust anything she is telling us?  

This is a terrific book but not without flaws.  The last quarter is so convoluted you practically need a flowchart and map to track Who is Where When.  And there is something which is described as a major clue which feels to me like an error an editor should have caught.

But it is a stunning read. 

Mining the Files

Some of the many publications containing my stories, including those that were mined from the files.

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, as I have, you likely have a file drawer (or a file folder on your computer) filled with unsold stories.

Likely, some of them are unpublishable under any circumstances. Some, however, are publishable as is or with minor tweaking. Because you were unable to find suitable markets at the time, you disappeared the stories into your files. If enough time has passed, you may have even forgotten writing them.

This is a mistake. Every so often, you should reread your unsold stories and spend time seeking information about markets that have changed or that did not exist when you wrote the stories. You might be sitting on a gold mine (figuratively; you do know how well short stories pay, don’t you?).

This has been one of those years. Though there’re still thirty-one days left (as I write this) and I could receive additional acceptances that will impact the numbers I’m about to share, this has been a good year for mining my unsold stories file.

So, far, I’ve placed eight of those stories. I wrote the oldest—a bit of crime fiction—in 2013; the other seven are short romances I wrote in 2016. I placed them with three different publications, none of which existed at the time I wrote the stories.

Other than correcting typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors I hadn’t caught at the time, I only found it necessary to revise one story. I found a submission call for a winter-themed romance anthology, so I added a few sentences to one story to make it clear the story took place during winter.

UNFINISHED STORIES

I have another, larger, file of unfinished stories, and I frequently mine it as well. I’ve written about this before, but whenever I am not writing to deadline and have no specific project top of mind, I read my unfinished stories until one captures my attention.

Sometimes, I have a burst of inspiration and finish the story. Other times, I add a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire scene. Sometimes I create a rough outline for the balance of the story. If nothing compels me to finish, I move on to other unfinished stories.

Both “Blind Pig” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025) and “The Girl in the Shop” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025) were stories I had started and which lay dormant for four years (“Blind Pig”) or three years (“The Girl in the Shop”) between the time I started them and the time I finished them.

So, whether you’re mining your files for finished stories and seeking new markets for them or you’re mining for unfinished stories in hopes of inspirational sparks that will propel you through to the end of finished manuscripts, mining your files can prove quite beneficial.

I know it does for me.

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“Forever Family” was published in Micromance Magazine, November 22, 2025.

“Writing is thinking.”

             My wife made this observation many years ago, and it has not only lingered in my mind, but grown in significance as I’ve experienced the effects. 

Here’s the premise:  When you’re just thinking something, it’s an undifferentiated ball of feelings, memories, randomly firing synapses, unstructured language, side tangents and fleeting images.  A swirl of disorganized, unmediated mush.  When you have to express all that via the written word, you have to “think it through”.  In other words, your mind imposes order and continuity to the original jumble, recording feelings and vague impressions in a way they can be conveyed to another person, essentially “completing the thought.”  Writing it down makes it real and tangible, and adds a fair amount of useful cognition along the way.

Fiction writers often mention those strange, and unfortunately fleeting, moments when something seems to be writing itself.  It’s suddenly effortless, the words flowing on the page as if directed by divine inspiration.  What could be happening, miraculous though not quite as romantic, is your brain, as your write, quickly sorts out all the inchoate reasoning that’s been going on in the background, and letting you reveal what you’d been thinking all along. 

It's also possible that the language you’re putting on the page is triggering other thoughts, which then express themselves as words, sentences and paragraphs, which then fuels further thinking, and concomitant writing, and so forth in a virtuous circle.

Brain scientists describe a process whereby raw emotions express themselves, spontaneously and involuntarily, as words in the heat of a stress-filled moment.  This is when your amygdala (once referred to as your “lizard brain”) gets so riled up that it sends a message right to your mouth, or in extreme cases your fists, bypassing all that other refining and moderating circuitry.   We usually apologize after one of these episodes by saying, “Sorry, I lost my temper.”  Or “Really sorry.  I guess I lost my mind.”   The latter is technically more accurate.  You have, in fact, lost portions of your mind when they’ve been sidelined, or hijacked (an actual clinical description) by the primitive bits from our evolutionary past.

I bring all this up to illustrate that it’s not unreasonable to assert that thoughts originating in one part of the brain can find themselves transformed for the better as they pass through the other parts.  Why the purely emotional sensations you might feel witnessing the dawn of a beautiful spring day can splash across a piece of paper in the form of a sonnet, and you have no idea how it got there.

 It would be fair to say that speaking serves the same purpose.  It also organizes the cacophony of impulses and feelings that constitute thought into discernible meaning you can communicate to other people.  That’s true, though written language operates at a different level.  It is more structured, intricate and reliant on basic logic.  You are more likely to be working your way to a conclusion, a summation that faces greater rigor than merely thinking out loud. 

            My wife would maintain that the act of writing itself not only harnesses thought, it is a type of thought itself that arrives at a destination unreachable by any other means.  It’s possible that some fiction writers compose their work fully in their heads before delivering it to the page.  But most are like me.  I have some idea of what’s going to happen in the next chapter, but I really won’t know for certain until I get there.  Often, my assumptions are misplaced, and the narrative goes merrily off in another direction entirely. 

You could argue that writing is merely a tool that facilitates thought, and by extension, creativity.  Feel free, but in my experience, no good ever comes from arguing with my wife.  

The Eyes Will Hopefully Have It

I'm writing this post early this month because I can't be sure what kind of shape I'll be in for the few days before it actually goes live. I'm scheduled to have cataract surgery on both eyes Thanksgiving week.

I've been told by multiple people that this will be quick and painless and that my vision will be almost miraculously improved afterwards.  I certainly hope so, though I can't help but be nervous.  I've worn glasses since I was seven years old, but in the last several years my vision has deteriorated significantly.  I've had to bump up the font sizes on all my devices, and reading an actual book requires careful coordination of multiple factors--lighting, special glasses, etc.  Reading has always been a cornerstone of my life, so this has been an especially difficult thing for me to accept.  What I'm looking forward to the most, assuming the surgery goes as expected, is being able o simply pick up a book and read at my whim.  A simple thing that shouldn't be taken for granted.

I will take this opportunity to grouse about a pet peeve--movies and TV shows which require us to read text messages the characters are receiving or sending.  Yes, very nice, very modern, but also very much a pain for those of us who either have to ask somebody to tell us what the hell is going on or get out of our chairs to walk across the room, hitting rewind and pause buttons on the way.  There are some shows and films which do this well, for example by "popping out" the message to a larger size, but they're rare.

But I digress.  The point is, hopefully by the time my December column goes up I'll be living in a brighter and more sharply focused world, and I look forward to seeing you there.

SPEAKING OF READING: As we're going into the holiday season, what better gift for your family and loved ones than the gift of reading, specifically reading short mystery fiction?  

I'm consistently astonished at the number of writers who aspire to see their work in the hallowed pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine but who don't subscribe to those publications.  We're living in a time when so-called "legacy media" and the basic concept of literacy are in deep peril, and I think we should be doing everything we can to preserve them.  A subscription to either of these fine magazines (or to any other periodical, such as Black Cat Weekly) is an investment in the future of the genre we all love.  I challenge everyone reading this to give at least one gift subscription to at least one of these publications this year!

The Long Road to River Road

I probably shouldn't admit this, but I've never been good at setting goals, in either my life or my work. I've always just tried to do my best at whatever task, and never worried much about long-range planning. So far, that seems to have worked.

I look at my so-called literary career the same way. I discovered at an advanced age--mid-forties--that writing short fiction was something I truly loved to do, and ever since then, I've written a lot of stories and tried to write each one as well as I can. As for goals, I never set out to make much money or win awards or have stories selected for best-of anthologies or achieve any degree of fame or fortune. Thankfully, some of those good things happened anyway--except for the money/fame/fortune part--but when they did, they usually came unexpectedly, out of nowhere.

I do recall a few things I secretly hoped I might one day accomplish. Early on, I dreamed of someday getting published in either Alfred Hitchcock's or Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I clearly remember that, because I grew up reading and enjoying those two publications. Later, I hoped to eventually be lucky enough to get something into one of the Akashic Books "noir" anthologies; I had great respect for those also, and thought it'd be supercool to be a part of one of them. Yet another pie-in-the-sky item, especially in more recent years, was to have a collection of my short stories published by Crippen & Landru. I've admired every book of theirs that I've seen and read, and I've long admired those who've been published there, a few of whom I've known for a long time. As luck would have it, about two years ago one of those friends, Josh Pachter, was kind enough to recommend me to publisher Jeffrey Marks at C&L.

I of course found Jeff to be as friendly and professional as I'd suspected he would be, and--to my great pleasure and relief--he seemed as eager as I was to put something together. So, after a trial submission and the resulting discussions about the lengths and styles and kinds of stories he was looking for, I eventually sent him a 90,000-word group of stories that I called River Road and Other Mysteries, later changed to River Road and Other Mystery Stories. As things turned out, both Jeff and the publication gods were in a good mood, and the book was accepted for publication. We kept the plans quiet for many months, but at last the contracts were signed, the stories were edited, the cover was designed, and the collection--my ninth book and eighth collection of short stories--was announced and released by Crippen & Landru this past week.

It probably won't surprise you that the book was great fun to piece together. For those who are interested, it's divided into three parts and contains mystery stories that first appeared in AHMM, Strand Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, and others, including a number of crime anthologies, plus three stories that are new and previously unpublished. And it contains--I hope--something for almost everyone: gang wars, car chases, snowstorms, barren deserts, jewelry heists, bomb threats, dollhouses, mulewagons, casinos, rattlesnakes, bus trips, movie trivia, ballet performances, science fairs, ski resorts, roadside diners, private eyes, crime bosses, land swindlers, shoplifters, drug smugglers, missing wives, bank robbers, cat burglars, crooked cops, cardsharks, waitresses, fishermen, immigrants, dwarves, giants, acrobats, realtors, novelists, lawyers, housesitters, muggers, poets, bodyguards, sharpshooters, bank tellers, ex-cons, murderous spouses, gator hunters, Old West outlaws, peach farmers, bug thieves, treasury agents, snipers, dognappers, bootleggers, and moonshiners. And that's just the first story. (Not really.)

I must mention here that the title story--the last one in the book--was first published in one of my fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken's anthologies, called Prohibition Peepers: Private Eyes During the Noble Experiment. I chose that story to "represent" the collection for several reasons: (1) Its setting is my home state of Mississippi, which is where many of the stories in the collection take place; (2) it's a historical mystery, like several others in the book (this one's set in the 1930s, an era that's always interesting to write about); (3) it's a private-eye tale, like eight of the other stories; and (4) I thought its title, "River Road," had an appropriate ring to it. 

The actual book is available in two formats: (1) a softcover edition with seventeen stories and (2) a signed, numbered, and clothbound edition that includes a "bonus" story. Here's the Crippen & Landru site where you can order either one, and I'm told the book'll be available via Amazon and elsewhere within the next week. As I mentioned in the Author Notes, I hope folks will have as much fun reading these stories as I had writing them.

I also hope you and yours had a great Thanksgiving. Happy reading and writing to you all!

 

Practicing With Swordfishtrombones

When I did my run of Bouchercons (on and off from 2005 to 2008), it seemed like Tom Waits was it. In 2006, a bunch of us sat at a riverside cafe in Chicago, a group that included the late Ken Bruen, and spent maybe twenty minutes rolling through Waits lyrics. 

And is it any surprise? Jon Stewart once said, "I'd like to get drunk and pass out in a gutter with that guy." If Steely Dan's ramblers, gamblers, and assorted survivors tended toward the affluent or wannabe affluent, Waits's characters were just as likely to be found in a dive bar or sitting on a freeway ramp with a cardboard sign. And oh, could he spin a tale about how they got there.

The focus was on three albums: Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Mule Variations. The first was probably the most noir, which is like saying the Pacific Ocean is the wettest of oceans. You're still going for a swim in the Arctic.

One only need look at the spoken word "Frank's Wild Years," (which ironically does not appear on the album of the same name.) Waits sounds like a guy rattling off the tale of a down-on-his-luck salesman with a spent wife and a yappy dog. As he prattles on through one gravelly aside after another, he comes to how Frank, tired of it all, torches his house (presumably not his wife. The dog did not fare so well.) "all Halloween orange and chimney red. Never did like that dog."

The album's other spoken-word (and, let's be honest, full-on Beatnik) song is "Trouble's Braids." More of a poem recited over bongos, one can almost see Jack Kerouac reciting this story about a man on the run, hiding in the mud, staying away from the main roads, and building a fire in the backseat of an old Tucker. Neat trick, since Tucker only built 51 cars. He either torched a collector's item, or the car had been left rotting in a field, Either way, survival, set to a hypnotic bongo beat, was the first order of business. But you don't even need an explanation to understand why "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six" is noir. It actually inspired a short story I wrote called "Whittle You Into Kindlin'."

I wouldn't call Waits a rock musician. Certainly some of his music is rock, but I'd say he's more Americana, even if the label didn't exist for the bulk of his career. But his propensity for singing about America's losers in a rough voice made him attractive to crime writers, especially when he underwent renewed interest in the 2000s. He doesn't have a lot of range, but a friend of mine, a musician, said he had thirty-two distinct voices he used in his music. That's better than Bowie, who often sounds like he's singing with two other singers. (Mind you, Bowie did a lot of this with an expansive range even guys like Steve Perry could only dream of.) What made Waits's characters and narrators (many unreliable) real came from those voices. He opened his mouth and became these people.