Avignon and All That

"During a January closed-door meeting at the Pentagon, a Trump administration official reportedly warned a Vatican ambassador that America had the military power to do whatever it wants in the world, and that the Catholic Church had better take its side.
While the sourcing is limited, the American government confirms the meeting happened (if not the wording used) and Christopher Hale confirms that “some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year [for the celebration of America’s 250th].” All of which certainly puts the Pope's comments against American violence in Iran in a different light.
But what’s getting a ton of attention is both the worst sourced, and most intriguing, piece: that an American official in that meeting invoked the Avignon Papacy." (LINK)

Why does that matter? Well, bringing up the Avignon Papacy to a Pope – any Pope – is pretty much a direct threat.

Back in the High Middle Ages, before the Calamitous 14th Century (and thank you, Barbara Tuchman, for one of the greatest histories ever written), i.e., the 1300s, there was only one official church in all of Western Europe, the Church, catholic and Catholic. Everyone was born into it, and it was integral to everything. The Church told you what was right and what was wrong, how to get to heaven, how to love your fellow man, how you should work, how you should live, how you should treat each other. All the social services that government and various non-profit organizations do today were then done by the church and the (often forced) largesse of the wealthy: welfare to widows and orphans, hospitals, asylums, orphanages, schools, etc.

The Church was like breathing, it was all around you. And that was fine with most people. The High Middle Ages, from 950 to 1300, has been called the Great Age of Faith. Cathedrals were built. Crusades were fought. And it helped that it was what's known as the Medieval Warm Period, a/k/a the Climatic Optimum: perfect weather, good harvests, often great harvests, fat bellies...

And then it all went to hell in a handcart, thanks to the Hundred Years' War (between England and France), the Black Death (where a third of the world OR MORE died, and that was just the first go-round), and the Avignon Papacy (a/k/a the Babylonian Capitivity of the Church) and the Great Schism. These three things shattered everything.

AVIGNON AND WHAT CAME NEXT

The papal palace in Avignon

Jean-Marc Rosier from http://www.rosier.pro

So let's start off with a problematic Pope, Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303): He was from the Gaetani family, wealthy Italian nobility. (Back then, it was pretty normal for a Pope to be elected from among wealthy Italian families and would be so for a very long time.) And it had been expected that he'd be elected to the papacy, but it didn't happen.

Instead, a monk named Pietro Angelerio, a hermit monk was elected by a fluke of frustrated cardinals (who were tired of wealthy noble Italian families running everything, and this was way before the Borgias). Pope Celestine was extremely holy, and wept when he was dragged from his cell to Rome. He was easily persuaded to resign a few months later, probably by Boniface, who was immediately elected Pope.

NOTE: Celestine had been promised he could return to his hermitage, but instead Boniface had Celestine arrested and imprisoned until he died.

Pope Boniface accomplished a lot, including the Regulae Iuris, a collection of legal principles, which is still used as a source for deciding matters of canon law. But his most infamous achievement was the papal bull Unam Sanctam – which declared the pope's jurisdiction over both temporal and spiritual powers: "We declare, announce and define that it is altogether necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff."

This wasn't new: it was pretty much believed throughout Western Europe. Not in Eastern Europe, where the Orthodox Church still considered the Bishop of Rome as just another Patriarch among many. The Catholic/Orthodox schism over papal authority goes back a very long way...

The King of France was Philip IV a/k/a "the Fair" (apparently he was handsome), and did his best to expand French lands. He spent a lot of time at war with England, also with Spain, Flanders, etc., while setting up an alliance with Scotland (the "auld alliance" began with him), conquered Flanders, and made contact with the Mongols with the idea of future military alliances. The trouble is, all that cost money. He was always scrambling for money, and got it a variety of ways, such as arresting bankers and seizing their money.

(Later, under the next Pope, Philip IV pitched a huge fight with the Knights Templar, who had financed most of his war with England, and sent troops to arrest all the Templars in France, accusing them of sacrilige, idolatry, homosexuality, financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. And seized all their large assets…)

But then Philip IV levied taxes on the French clergy of one-half their annual income. Neither the Church nor the papacy would put up with that... Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericos Laicos, forbidding the transference of any church property to the French Crown.

So between the two bulls, Philip IV of France saw a threat, and held a little assembly of his own in Paris in April 1302. Nobles, burgesses and clergy met to denounce the Pope and pass around a crude forgery*, Deum Time ("Fear God"), in which Boniface supposedly claimed feudal suzerainty over France, an "unheard-of assertion". Boniface denied the document and its claims, but – insanely – reminded Phillip that previous popes had deposed three French kings. (Also a few English ones, including John Lackland.)

*I know, you thought social media and fake news were modern, right?

And that ticked Philip IV off enough to call for a council to depose Boniface on charges of heresy, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, simony, and sorcery. Boniface prepared to excommunicate Philip, and in order to stop him, Philip hired some thugs who attacked Boniface and imprisoned him for three days without food or water. Boniface was rescued by a group of Italian nobles, but the pope died of his treatment within a month.

Depiction of the death of Boniface in a
15th-century manuscript of Boccaccio's De Casibus

Pope Clement V (r. 1305-1314)

With Boniface's death, King Philip IV promptly bribed the college of cardinals, and Boniface's successor was a Frenchman who revoked Unam Sanctam. And in 1309 King Philip IV moved Clement and the papacy to Avignon, France. Clement brought with him all the French cardinals, papal bureaucracy, etc. In exchange, Philip promised him protection from anything like what happened to poor Boniface.

And there the papacy stayed, at Avignon until 1377, a period that's known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.

In case you're wondering, this was a disaster for the Church, because the church expenses skyrocketed. Why? Well, they're in France, and the papal states are in Italy, and the papal states are where a lot of the papal wealth comes from. And the money isn't flowing regularly, so papal taxes went up even more. And, since the pope and his court were in France, and dependent on French support, they rubber-stamped all of the French king's policies and decisions. Especially since, of the 134 cardinals that were created during these 70 years, 113 of them are French.

But it really helped French royalty. A nice, tame Church that could pretty much be controlled…

Gennadii Saus i Segura

A map of Rome, showing an allegorical figure of Rome
as a widow in black mourning the Avignon Papacy

So what's the big deal?

The big deal is that the Avignon Papacy began with a king sending a bunch of thugs to capture the Pope, and then setting up his own pope on his own land and controlling the church for 70 years.

Anyone in the Vatican would, and probably did, see mentioning it as a threat.

BTW, things got worse. Eventually a pope returned to Rome, but instead of things getting back to normal, the French contingent elected yet another Pope in Avignon. So now there were two Popes, one in Avignon, one in France, each excommunicating the other, and all of the others' followers... But that's another story, for another time.

Got Any Duck Food?

Last week I was complaining on Facebook about a number of small issues, the kind of annoyances that are sometimes called first world problems.

Example:
The company that services our furnace had called and said we were about due and would tomorrow be convenient?  We said it would be and set up an appointment for between 10 and noon.

I cleared the space around the furnace and we made sure to be home at the scheduled time.  At 12:30 we gave up and called the company. The clerk said she had no record of an appointment.  (Let me remind you: they had called us.)  She apologized and we set up an appointment for the 16^th.

An hour later I received an email from them confirming our appointment – for the 13^th. Right time, wrong day.

And that was how our week had gone, one stupid little annoyance after another, mostly involving companies who couldn't keep their own records straight.

I acknowledged that none of these were big problems but together they felt like being nibbled to death by ducks.

Someone wrote back delighted by the phrase and I wondered if it was possible they had not heard it before. And that got me wondering: where does it come from?

Which sent me to the Ngram Viewer. I have written about this tool before which lets you harness the power of the millions of publications scanned by Google to trace the use of a word or phrase.

The earliest reference it pulled up was from an 1813 book of proverbs: "One had as good be nibbled to death, or pecked to death by a hen."  They offer no explanation but it appears to mean that one stupid fate is as bad as another.

Two ducks.  See them both?

(On the same page the author helpfully explains that "to dine with Sir Humphrey" means to go without your dinner.  Glad we got that cleared up.)

Actually, the Viewer also pulled up a comic song from 1810 which says that if a person misbehaves with women "sic a fellow desarves to be nibbled to death by ducks, as the worm said to the fisherman."

In 1865 Thomas Mozley wrote that sitting through sermons in his childhood had given him the fidgets, which felt  like "being nibbled to death by ducks, or scraped to death with oyster shells."

In 1868 Charles Sturgeon wrote a pamphlet warning trade unionists that the government was treating them like a man who tickled his rich wives to death and said that if they follow along "you will deserve not only to be tickled to death but nibbled to death by ducks."

I finally found what was clearly the correct meaning (which is to say, mine) in an engineering magazine in 1874. The writer complained of "the old, old story:" a great man with a great idea nibbled to death by ducks.

Let's jump to modern times. Laura McCullough wrote a delightful article about the life of an academic administrator. She bought a box of 100 little rubber ducks and every time her work was interrupted she moved a duck from one box to another.  It made both her and the interrupters aware of some of the obstacles to her productivity. 

My faculty took it very well and joined in with the exercise in a playful spirit. One professor brought in a nice wicker basket for the ducks to live in at the start of their day. Her children decorated my “nibbled” box with pictures of ducks and the word “nibble” scribbled all over it.

And speaking of productivity, now that I have my (ahem) ducks in a row, I'm going to write some fiction.

But one more thing: if you don't understand the title, see this.

Another Round

 

Today marks a milestone in my writing journey. It is Publication Day for The Firefall, the third book in my Johnson and Nance series. As with the first two books, I’m over the moon. For much of my writing life, I wondered if I’d ever have a book published. And today, number three drops.

                The happy coincidence of my regular blog rotation occurring on publication day got me wondering about what I might write to mark the event. I knew what I wanted to say-- Buy my book! Buy my book! --but in a subtle, more indirect way.

                When responding to a short story call, I sometimes type the key words into my search engine and follow random threads. I’ll search for these internet Easter eggs until I land on something that strikes my fancy.

                I tried it. I entered “new book thoughts” into my computer. The search engine processed the request. She knew that I was searching for books on “new thought.” I got long lists of books about positive thinking and envisioning success. I promptly exited. I was positive—I’d had a good day. And I was positive I didn’t want to talk about other people’s books. I wanted to talk about mine.

                Typing in the words, “starting a new book,” led me to YouTube videos about writing books, ads for publishing houses happy to make my book a reality for a small fee, and writer’s software packages to make novel-writing a veritable breeze, complete with a sliding bar to chart my incredible progress.

                Finally, I entered “advice for writing a book.” Various websites broke the mysterious process of novel creation into manageable steps. The number of bite-sized steps varied wildly. One expert chose seven, another twenty-three, and a third settled on thirty-one. The secret sauce for writing, I determined, lay buried in some obscure prime number. That whole search had a Dan Brownesque feel to it. I abandoned it in three steps: point cursor, click, exit.

                I gave up. My reliable technique for shorts failed me. I began to wonder if I’d have anything to say. (Readers may be wondering too at this point.) Fear crept in.

                The Nigerian American writer Uzodinma Iweala said that, “Anybody who tells you they’re not scared when starting a new book project is a very good liar.”

                Perhaps that’s what best describes my emotion today. I have a giant, joyous, celebratory fear. I worry that people may not like The Firefall. I worry that the publisher may lose interest. If they ask for more, I worry that I won’t be able to find something to say. And I love having a book out there in the world that generates all these worries.  

                To combat the fear, I’ve taken the advice of Terry Pratchett. My sons and Rob Lopresti both nudged me to read some of his Discworld books. Pratchett once said that the only writing superstition he had was that he “must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.”

                And so, I do. The best way to combat the fears that creep into a void is to avoid the void. I’ll spend a little time today typing on the next book in the series.

                I also take heart from something I read in the foreword to Of Mice and Men. In his journal, Steinbeck wrote:

                “It is strange how this goes on. The struggle to get started. Terrible. It always happens…I am afraid. Among other things I feel that I have put some things over. That the little success of mine is cheating.”

                If a Nobel Laureate can be plagued by bouts of self-doubt, I think it’s okay for the rest of us too. I’ll type something, just to prove I can.  

                And celebrate The Firefall. I’ll spend a little time doing that too.

 *****

                It’s been a good month for writing. Besides the novel, my short story, "Masterpiece," is a finalist for a Derringer Award. That’s an excuse for another round.

 

                Until next time.

The New Maigret

 I just finished reading a popular book on the new physics, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, which informed me that, thanks to quantum, we can now be confident that time is an illusion, that there is definitely no present, that past and future are almost as problematical, and that the world appears to us as it does solely thanks to our ignorance of most matters big and small. As Heraclitus wrote millenniums ago, change is the only reality.

I can get on board with that as fortunately the entertainment business is fond of producing unsurprising changes and gentle evolutions. Partly this must be due to another idea from quantum theory: the gradual disintegration of everything thanks to entropy, that is to the loss of heat in one form or another to cooler things and colder places.

So perhaps it is inevitable that a successful idea in the mystery business is gradually copied and sequeled (if that's not a word it should be) and sometimes even synthesized via new writers until it gradually fades away in a total loss of energy. 

Benjamin wainwright/Stefani Martini

Other times, it is the character alone who survives to be updated, modernized, made younger, older, more genial, more accessible, Sherlock Holmes being the classic example. Now another old and popular detective is once again enjoying the attentions of modernization: Chief Inspector Maigret.

He's already had a long run in print with Simenon's many procedurals.According to Wikipedia, he has been honored with no less than 75 audio books, some fifteen movies, and almost innumerable television programs (one series alone ran to 88 episodes!) in many languages. 

Now comes the new Maigret of 2025. Gone is the slightly seedy Paris of the Michael Gabon ITV version of the early 1990s, the one I remember. This was the post war Paris and Maigret was likely in his 50s, old enough so that Madame Maigret is already dreaming of a cottage in the country and her husband's retirement. Maigret was robust in every way, a confident man at the peak of his abilities, blessed with a superb memory for the low life of Paris and their various specialities.

He had an old and trusted corps of detectives (all male naturally) and if his stiff-necked examining magistrate was not always satisfied, Maigret regarded official complaints with considerable insouciance. Unusually for a literary detective, he was happy with Madame Maigret who turned out long and delicious lunches while always looking tres chic.

Kindly but with a strong moral sense, this older Maigret was very much of his time and place and comfortable with both. He relied on the oldest of detective skills, precise observation, sensitive questioning, and careful listening, which together formed his usually sound intuition.

That was the Maigret of the 40s and 50s as captured in the 1990s. This new, young, contemporary Maigret (Benjamin Wainwright) is in a shiny modern Paris, and comes complete with the last word in forensics and surveillance. He has a rather droll young techie (James Northcote) who can examine dirt on a shoe, spot a rare fern spore, and point Maigret toward the locale of the next bank heist. 

The rest of his team is an integrated mix of able, and often technically astute, young men and women, that is both nice and appropriate. But among them, Maigret's methods necessarily involve more reliance on CCTV footage, forensics, and phone surveillance, while his considerable knowledge of the city's underbelly seems implausibly complete for the length of his career.

 As for the detective, himself, gravitas is out and eccentricity and personal angst is in. Gone is the older detective's handsome suit, topcoat, and fedora. Now our detective appears wedded to a topcoat made out of plaid pajama material, and burdens us with his recurring dreams.

The brave and charming Madame Maigret has also been updated. She is now a psychiatric nurse who often deserts the kitchen for take out. The Maigrets remain a happy couple but, with our modern taste for personal anxiety in our sleuths, they are dealing with infertility, burdened with nasty hormone treatments and uncertain hopes.

The results of this tinkering are not necessarily bad. The Simenon plots are well constructed, the characters good, and the acting is the usual Masterpiece high level. Someone coming to the new series without any prior acquaintance with the Parisian detective will find it diverting. This is a well done contemporary series, very like any number of other well made, well performed procedurals. 

What it does not have is the individuality and flavor of earlier versions. It has been homogenized. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, I found the last of the series, Maigret Goes Home, the most effective, being the least reliant on up-dated techniques and the most reliant on Maigret's knowledge of human nature.

Shanigua Okwok

The new Maigret series is entertaining, but while retaining the plots, it has lost much of  the detective.

---

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864

 

Identical twins: Can DNA distinguish which twin dunnit?

The real life murder trial of 33-year-old brothers, Jérémy and Samuel Youmbi in France has revived the age old dilemma: which twin pulled the trigger? After reviewing the DNA on the assault rifle used to commit the double murder, one investigator is quoted as saying, "Only their mother can tell them apart." 

In response to this trial, Nature recently published an article on scientific advances to help distinguish the DNA of identical twins when both are accused of the same crime. Rarely does Nature extend a helping hand to crime writers in such a specific way, so of course, I'm thrilled to summarize it. 

I understand that people may yawn at the mere mention of DNA but this is eye opening rather than yawn worthy. Perhaps the lede of the DNA story will interest you; being born with the same DNA doesn't mean it stays the same because life changes us. This is true for characters in novels and also for DNA. In a novel we call it a character arch, in DNA we call it mutations or methylation. 

Identical twins have the same DNA because they come from a single egg splitting in two after being fertilized by a single sperm.

Forensic scientists typically attempt to identify the person DNA belongs to using a technique that essentially samples parts of the DNA, concentrating on certain areas that distinguish people easily. This is called short tandem repeat (STR) analysis, using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method to amplify up to 30 specific regions of the genome that have a lot of genetic variation. Normally, this easily differentiates one person from another but identical twins are born with the same DNA in these regions. 

With twins, analyzing the entirety of a person’s genome allows scientists to identify differences caused by mutations that occurred after an egg split. The problem is that these mutations are rare, random and also require finding enough DNA to do this analysis. 

Another option is sequencing DNA found in the mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutates more often, meaning it is more likely to differ between twins.

A final and promising option is where life really changes DNA: methyl groups. These are the basis of the often discussed ‘epigenetic’ changes caused by factors including a person’s behaviours — such as their diet and drinking or smoking habits — and their environment. These changes add methyl groups to DNA, a process called methylation, which can change how genes work. 

These techniques  require more research to bring them into court as a reliable way to distinguish between identical twins. However, their promise lies in the fascinating fact that the DNA we're born with changes over the course of our lives. 

Supercomputers, Mongols, and Carbing Up: April 11 Isn't Boring at All

Brace yourselves, folks. Today– April 11^th– is no ordinary day. It's an extraordinarily ordinary day. In 2010, a team of Cambridge scientists aimed cutting-edge technology at history and declared…

The Most Boring Day in History

That's right. The Cambridge team, being a Cambridge team, had a supercomputer and a powerful analysis program called True Knowledge. The team fed 300 million historical facts with date references into True Knowledge and asked a question that has haunted humankind since we invented campfires: What day wound up as the most boring in history?

The supercomputer had an answer: April 11, 1954.

On that date, nothing happened, not really. Not many notable people were born, and not many died. No scandals of note, no major battles, no geopolitical flare-ups. No financial drama, either. It was Sunday, so the traders stayed home. 

What did happen? The Belgians had an election. The algorithm was unimpressed. Probably the Belgians weren't, either.

Which all raises a compound irony. For starters, that Cambridge lab couldn't have been a thrill-a-minute either if they had spare time enough to compare the relative boringness of history's doldrums. Second, the team stumbled into the classic Observer Effect. Scientifically crowning April 11, 1954 as the slowest day in history makes the day no longer boring at all. It's famous now. If anything, April 11, 1954 managed an incredible achievement.

April 11: The Mayhem Edition

Admittedly, other April 11s left more of a direct mark. Take 1241, for instance. Batu Khan, the grandson of Genghis, defeated the Hungarians at Mohi. The kingdom was there for the taking. Panic spread through Europe. 

Or there was 1512. On April 11, 1512, the French and Ferrarese defeated Holy League forces at Ravenna. The victory was costly, though. The French lost their rising star general and promptly abandoned the campaign. That left the Duke of Ferrara to wrangle with the papal forces– not so successfully. A decade later, Alfonso had switched to Team Holy League. These days, April 11 is surely a sore point on all sides of the Ferrarese duchy divide. 

But April 11 is so much more than science and battles. Why, today is…

National Cheese Fondue Day

God bless the Swiss. First, the humble Swiss farmers gave us fondue as we know it (though we know fondue's invention didn't happen on April 11– see above scientific analysis), which Big Gruyère seized on in the 1930s to promote as a national dish. 

And with good reason. Traditional cheese fondue is pure, high-caloric goodness: heaps of cheese, wine, bread. Jazz it up however it tickles your fancy. There are no rites or rituals--yet--for Cheese Fondue Day, just your imagination, adjustable pants, and your friend Craig whom you pretend doesn't double-dip. 

But save plenty of room, because April 11 is also…

National Poutine Day

You may just want to mark April 11 as an automatic diet Cheat Day. Yes, today also celebrates Quebec's famed dish and ultimate comfort experience. Pommes frites, brown gravy, and cheese curds--all slopped on top of each other. Say no more, and thank you, Canadian friends.

In honor of those brave Canadian greasy spoon chefs, don't let today pass without gathering together and tucking into a celebratory pile. And if you run out of conversation topics, now you have the Ferrarese and Batu Khan.

Or, in the true spirit of April 11, maybe just sit and look around and take in the sweet, momentous unimportance.

Have a great April 11, or as it might also be called…

Bob Needed a Blog Day

Richard Estes and the Art of Seeing

I’m delighted Derringer award-nominee, Tom Milani, is joining us today to talk about how Richard Estes' paintings inspired him to look at his characters in a different way—a technique he applies both to his novels and short fiction. Here’s more from Tom:

Richard Estes and the Art of Seeing

by Tom Milani

In the late 1970s I was a student at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. The main campus had five buildings, one of which was the Fenwick Library. The library had a mezzanine that housed art shows.

My first year there, I wandered into an exhibit featuring silkscreen prints by Richard Estes. The one that struck me first—and stuck with me the longest—was of a bus windshield. Initially, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a photograph. But later, I marveled at the reflections, which seemed to reveal a once-hidden reality to me. Estes’s work would go on to play a role in my fiction. More on that later.

Before I saw those prints, my conception of a city’s appearance was at a remove: cities had skylines, unique to be sure, but two-dimensional from a distance. After seeing the Estes prints, I began looking for the reflections he painted. Glass-front buildings I once might have dismissed as having no character now were literal mirrors for their surroundings. Imagine looking through a microscope at a few drops of pond water for the first time and viewing the hidden life there. In a way, that’s what I was seeing.

Estes works from multiple photographs as references when he paints. The result is a perspective that can’t be actually seen from one location but is somehow nonetheless “real” in the sense that every building and reflection exists.

In the 1990s, when I was in Ann Arbor for work, I visited the original Borders bookstore, something of a paradise for my English major soul. There, I found Photo-Realism by Louis K. Meisel, a 500-plus-page book featuring thirteen photorealist painters and another fifteen photorealism-related artists. I think the book cost $65, something out of my reach at the time. When I was on the phone with my mom and she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I mentioned the book, reluctantly mentioning the price. She sent me $100 because that’s what moms do for their lonely sons.

I pored over the text and reproductions of each artist’s works, never less than awed by the technical ability displayed. Even though his art wasn’t the most photorealistic of the group, Estes still stood out to me, for he’d been the one who changed the way I see.

A few years later, newly single and living in a condo furnished with lawn chairs, I went to the frame shop in the local strip mall to buy some art for my bedroom wall. Leafing through catalogs (pre-Internet), I found a poster for the Estes painting Telephone Booths, in the H. H. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The guys who worked in the shop seemed to think it was cool, which meant something, and hanging it on my wall was a stamp of my personality on the place.

Last year, Places That Are Gone, my debut novel, came out. (It’s currently out of print but in the process of being reissued by a new publisher.) Bennett Wilder, my protagonist, also liked Richard Estes: 

In the bedroom he’d hung a reproduction of a Richard Estes painting of a bus windshield, the surrounding buildings reflected in it like a funhouse mirror. The city scene was devoid of people and impossibly clean. He liked to imagine himself in that streetscape, bathed in its pure light.

Bennett’s feelings represent a kind of Platonic ideal of what he thinks his life could be, despite all evidence to the contrary. Shelley, his wife, views the print very differently: “The painting seemed so cold to her, a world without emotion or any kind of humanity, despite the urban scene.” The collision of their diametric world views will prove catastrophic by the book’s end.

A few years ago, we bought an Estes silkscreen featuring a car hood and windshield in the foreground, reflections of the surrounding buildings spilling across the surfaces like melted wax. It sits above a corner of my desk, and when I stare at it, I’m reminded to look anew at the world and the characters I’m writing about.

#

Tom Milani’s short fiction has appeared online and in several anthologies, including In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Genesis and Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties. Derringer finalist “Barracuda Backfire” was published in 2024 as Book 4 of Michael Bracken’s Chop Shop series of novellas. “Barstow,” originally published in Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir volume 5, was named an honorable mention in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025. “No Road Back,” which originally appeared in Black Cat Weekly, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. His first novel, Places That Are Gone, was published in May 2025.

You can find Tom’s Derringer award-nominated story, “A Sign of the Times,” in Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties.