My Novel Picks for the Edgars

The Edgars, awarded annually by Mystery Writers of America, are mystery and crime writing's Oscars. As Best Picture is the Holy Grail of the Oscars, so Best Novel is the Holy Grail of the Edgars. Over time, MWA has chipped away at the main fiction category with separate awards for Best First Novel by An American Author and Best Paperback/E-Book Original as well as not-quite-Edgars. These include the Sue Grafton Award for a novel with a "strong, independent woman who is a professional investigator" as protagonist; the Mary Higgins Clark Award for a novel with "nice young woman whose life is suddenly invaded" as protagonist; and the Lilian Jackson Braun Award, for a "contemporary cozy mystery" that must be "light in tone, often humorous. While the book may reference serious themes or subject matter, it does so in a non-heavy-handed manner." This leaves Best Novel to some extent to literary crime or crime-adjacent fiction and what I still can't help thinking of as "boy books."

I'm a longtime member of DorothyL, a venerable online mystery lovers group of eclectic readers, including many writers and other crime and mystery professionals. In recent years, many of them have never heard of most of the Edgar nominees. This year, in a field of three men and four women contenders for Best Novel, we all knew veteran bestsellers Robert Crais and Scott Turow. Collectively, we considered their current books up to standard but not outstanding. Our first and second place 2025 Favorites votes went to Sally Smith, Of Mice and Murder, whose protagonist is a barrister in the Inner Temple in 1901; and Allison Montclair, An Excellent Thing In A Woman. The sleuths in this brilliant series, which always makes DorothyL's top ten list but has never been nominated for an Edgar, are a pair of formidable and delightful women running a marriage bureau in post-World War II London.

It seemed only fair to check out the Edgar nominees. My rule is to read on only if I'm enjoying what I'm reading. If the story doesn't grab me or the voice fails to appeal, that's it. No dutiful turning of pages because a book's been praised or because it's literature. So I'm not saying that my picks for Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Paperback Original are the books I think will win the Edgars on April 29. They're the three nominated books, one in each of these categories, that I read with enjoyment and appreciation.

Best Novel: Allison Epstein, Fagin the Thief
In this brilliant and compassionate twist on a Dickens classic, Epstein blows away the thick fog of anti-Semitism that allowed Dickens to describe Fagin the master pickpocket merely as a Jew for his readers to supply the stereotypes—small, contemptible, avaricious, heartless—and need to know nothing more about him to despise him and wish him a bad end. Instead, Epstein gives us Jacob Fagin, Jewish survivor, profoundly alone and not without heart.

Jacob loves three people in his life. His mother Leah nurtures him, reads to him, and believes in him. When Leah dies, Jacob blames God, turns his back on the Jewish community, strips himself of faith, vowing never to love again. Then he takes in a thirteen-year-old boy with nowhere to go, Bill Sikes, and teaches him the trade of thieving. He's played Pygmalion before, but this time he creates, not a Galatea, but a Frankenstein monster: a giant filled with rage and incapable of controlling his impulses. Enter Nancy Reed—again, it's Epstein who gives her the dignity of two names—a pickpocket as skilled as Fagin himself. When they work a crowd together, they're like partners in a dance. Nancy has charisma. She has only to enter a tavern to light up the room. When she stands on the table and sings, hardened criminals and down at heel old soldiers and sailors sing along. For Fagin, it's not a romantic love, but she is precious to him.

Epstein picks the right moment to challenge anti-Semitism, which is raising its ugly head again all over the world. She also takes on our current stereotypes of exploitation of child labor and domestic violence. Of course these abuses are genuine and widespread in the real world. But what goes on in Fagin's world is more nuanced. Fagin's school for thieves consists of children as young as six whom no one else wants. They come to him cold and starving. He gives them shelter, food, clothing, and a sense of family. He also teaches them a trade that will allow them to eat from day to day, which is the reason he picks pockets himself and always has been. He is a good teacher. He makes sure they excel because he wants them to survive.

Bill Sikes and Nancy Reed fall in love at first sight—both of them. It has the quality of a great love story, even a love triangle. Jacob, with his love-hate relationship with jealous, dangerous Bill and his concern for Nancy's safety, is the third. For more, you'll have read the book. It's beautifully written, well researched, and a satisfying story.

Best First Novel by An American Author: Zoe B. Wallbrook, History Lessons
Wallbrook gives us a Black feminist perspective on academe red in tooth and claw in a savvy, distinctive, and often hilarious voice and a clever mystery that keeps the surprises coming.

Newly hired assistant history professor Daphne Ouverture, "a Bambi in the eyes of her colleagues," has to deal with all the usual tenure battles, shredding of reputations, sexual shenanigans, and plagiarized student papers in the age of AI, along with the traditional sexism and racism that clings like ivy to the older tenured white male professors. The rich intellectual and cultural context of Daphne's life makes this book far more than just another academic mystery.

   Daphne, Sadie, and Elise became best friends after finding one another at some university-sponsored mixer for faculty of color last term. Daphne thought she had been making do just fine with her white colleagues—until Elise and Sadie barged into her life. ...The conversation took off the moment Daphne and Elise realized they'd been raised by tough, immigrant mothers. At some point when swapping strategies for surviving varying punishment methods, a tall Brown Amazonian goddess..had leaned across the bar and asked if she could compare notes. By the third margarita, they were screaming with laughter about the merits of surviving middle school with a mother who refused to pack sandwiches like the white moms. By one in the morning, the trio was dancing to Lil Wayne at a bar downtown and making plans to meet for brunch the next day.
   Brunch lasted approximately ten minutes. ...They'd napped away the rest of the day in Sadie's living room like toddlers at preschool until their hunger woke them up. ...Something had clicked for Daphne that day—an actual physical feeling of her brain making sense of herself. Sadie and Elise had gifted her with the greatest freedom through their friendship. The freedom to be her most honest, messiest self.

Daphne tells Elise about a disastrous first date.

     "Did he like your story about Belgium, at least?" Elise asked.

     "You mean how nineteenth-century Belgian colonial administrators in the Congo dismembered indigenous Africans for the purpose of scaring local villagers into creating profit for their newly emerging rubber industry?...No, Elise, it turns out that explaining the evils of late-nineteenth-century European imperialism on a first date isn't exactly a seductive move."

The mystery itself is the murder of Sam Taylor, the university's most popular professor, a rising star whom everybody loved—or did they? a man who could do no wrong—or had he? Daphne finds herself increasingly embroiled in the investigation, which is somehow connected to her. This complicates her growing interest in Rowan, a former cop turned bookseller, who works with the police. She can't walk away, because for some reason, Sam's death has earned her enemies who threaten her career and perhaps her life.

Best Paperback Original: Abbi Waxman, One Death At A Time
I'm not usually a fan of Hollywood or LA novels, but the sleuthing duo in this one won me over: Natasha Mason, age twenty-five, three years sober, recovering from alcohol, drugs, and intrusive psychiatrist parents in Berkeley; and Julia Mann, age sixtysomething, fading Hollywood star: formerly famous, still glamorous, served her time for murdering one husband and can't remember if she killed the one who's been found floating dead in her swimming pool, because she was in an alcoholic blackout at the time. Mason volunteers to be Julia's interim AA sponsor and finds herself cast as personal assistant, dogsbody, chauffeur, and unlicensed PI charged with detecting the real killer, preferably before Julia is convicted of the murder.

I'm a pushover for funny books about recovery from alcoholism and addictions, and this one is both on target about what it's like and very funny indeed. The wisecracking narrative voice elicits not only laughter but compassion for both protagonists, who start out bristling with antagonism toward each other and slowly form an unlikely alliance that works for both of them and satisfies the reader. The mystery is convoluted and takes in the machinations of the varied participants in the complicated business of making movies.

Hardy Like a Fox at a Crime Scene

This month, some musings on recent reads/listens, followed by a piece of news I find pretty exciting.

THEY CERTAINLY ARE HARDY, THOSE BOYS

I like to listen to audiobooks on my daily walks, and often I choose to listen to favorite books from my childhood. The sense of nostalgia is a welcome break from the daily grind, and it's always fun seeing exactly how much I remember. I've listened to all fourteen of L. Frank Baum's Oz novels, Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Westing Game, Pippi Longstocking, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Once and Future King, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wind in the Willows, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Lord of the Rings (in a new reading by Andy Serkis so good I've listened to the whole thing twice).

Last month I listened to a package of four of the early entries in the Hardy Boys series by "Franklin W. Dixon." I'm sure I'm not the only crime writer whose first introduction to the genre was these books (or Nancy Drew--but I'm old enough that, in my youth, boys reading Nancy Drew simply Wasn't Done). I had, if memory serves, a set of the first seventy or eighty novels, in their distinctive blue-spined hardbacks with the painted covers. Encyclopedia Brown probably came along at about the same time, and then The Three Investigators (much better books, as I recall) and the McGurk Mysteries (which nobody but me seems to remember). Then came Sherlock Holmes, followed by Agatha Christie . . . well, you get the idea.

(An aside: I wonder what happened to the original paintings the publisher commissioned for the covers of these novels. Were they, like so much commercial art, discarded and forgotten? Are there people who collect them?)

It's been decades since I read the Hardy Boys, and I found listening to several in a row a little startling. It rapidly became clear, first of all, that the audiobooks were not the versions I read in the 1970s, which had been heavily edited and, as much as was possible, updated. Those blue hardbacks filling my shelves always had exactly twenty chapters, for one thing, while the audiobooks had 23 or more. They were clearly the originals, from the 1920s and 30s, which made things a bit disorienting. It's hard to identify everything that was different, but there were more scenes with the Hardys simply hanging out with their friends, and even going to school, than I recalled. Also, I really don't think the Frank and Joe I knew were quite as accustomed to toting guns, which their earlier incarnations very casually bring along on several of their adventures. They never actually shoot a person--at least not in the books I listened to--but they cheerfully dispatch large numbers of snakes and wolves in ways that modern, ecologically-conscious readers might be a bit uncomfortable with.

I should say, by the way, that the readings, by Gary McFadden, were quite good--even given his choice to make the Hardys' chums Chet Morton and "olive-skinned Italian-American" Tony Prito (who's described that way literally every time he appears) sound like, respectively, Gabby Hayes and Chico Marx. Chet, the primary chum, is the only one given anything more than a single defining personality trait (Biff Hooper is athletic, Tony Prito is Italian, Callie Shaw is pretty). I remembered Chet as being a) fat and b) cowardly. In the originals, though, he's a) fat and b) a practical joker, whose jokes usually backfire on him.

I did definitely remember the extremely limited and repetitious vocabulary employed by "Dixon." Friends are always "chums." Fired revolvers invariably "crash." Cars are either "roadsters" or "jalopies." On the other hand, there were some turns of phrase I found quite novel. Several times, expressing enthusiastic agreement with a statement just made, Joe breaks out not with "I'll say!" but rather "I'll tell the world!"

Plotwise, the books are . . . let's be generous and call them thin. They're not really mysteries, as the bad guys (gangs of thieves or kidnappers, generally) are immediately obvious from the first page, and it's just a matter of tracking down their hideouts. There were two things I found very striking about the books. First, storms. I listened to four books, and in every single one of them the Hardys (and usually some of their chums) are put into moral peril by a sudden hurricane-level storm or, if it's winter, the worst blizzard in decades. These are always preceded by Frank casting a worried glance at the gathering clouds, but deciding that the boys probably have time to do whatever detective task they're engaged in before the storm hits. He's always wrong. As a variation on the theme, there are cave-ins, which happened three times in the four books. The minute Frank and Joe decide to go into a mine, the supporting timbers immediately age by several hundred years.

The other thing that was impossible to ignore was probably one of the main elements that had been updated for the 1970s versions. In the originals, the Hardys live in an America that is still overwhelmingly rural. Trains are the main way to get from town to town; most roads, outside city limits, are unpaved; airplanes are still a novelty. Most families grow at least some of their own food. Odd hermits can built themselves cabins in the woods not far from town and go unchallenged. Teens go ice skating on frozen rivers. Placing a long-distance telephone call requires lengthy negotiations with operators and a bit of luck. Outside their hometown of Bayport, the landscape for hundreds of miles in every direction is farmland, dotted with occasional small villages that generally aren't even named. I found it all quite fascinatingly alien. 

I don't think I feel the need to listen to any more of the books, but revisiting them was fun. Maybe I'll try a couple of Nancy Drews. I've been told that, on average, they hold up better. Anyone want to vouch for that?

THE SHELF YOU LIVE ON

While I was listening to Frank and Joe, the actual physical books I read over the last few weeks were just a tiny bit different, being new novels from a couple of titans of American literature who have been around since the 1960s: Fox, by Joyce Carol Oates, and Shadow Ticket, by Thomas Pynchon.

Of the two, I found Fox more successful and compelling. It concerns the murder of a popular teacher at an exclusive New Jersey middle school who, it turns out, was also a serial pedophile. It's a long book, and most of it is concerned with putting us in the heads of the characters--including, in a number of chapters that sometimes get very difficult to read, the pedophile. The structure of the central plot, though, is a fairly straightforward murder mystery, and while Oates leaves more plot threads dangling at the end than is typical in such a work, she does ultimately provide a satisfying answer to the question of whodunit.

Shadow Ticket, meanwhile, is about Hicks McTaggart, a Milwaukee PI in the early 1930s who gets caught up in the search for a missing heiress--the daughter of "the Al Capone of cheese." The quest eventually takes him, against his will, to Eastern Europe, where people are more concerned with a certain political uprising that it's getting harder and harder to make fun of. Does this plot reach a satisfactory resolution? Hard to say because, as in most of Pynchon's novels (and especially his recent works), the very structure of the book seems designed to undermine the idea of plot. Or causality. Or logic. There are vast global conspiracies that may or may not exist, phantom submarines, vengeful golems, Hungarian biker gangs, vigilante autogyro pilots, spies, counterspies, and swing musicians, and after a while it's pretty much impossible to tell what any of them are trying to do or if they manage to do it. This is a book that openly mocks the idea that anyone is going to try to make sense of it. You just go along for the ride, and if you're a certain kind of reader, the absurdity and humor make it worth your time. It worked for me for a while, but I can't say I was sorry to get to the end.

So, what we have here is a murder mystery and a PI novel--and yet, I'm sure the vast majority of bookstores will put them on the general fiction shelves, not the mystery shelves, mainly because of the names of the authors. A lot of Oates's books in particular involve murder or other serious crimes, and she's been in Best Mystery Stories of the Year and Ellery Queen many times, but I don't often see her books alongside those by Richard Osman. I don't know that I have a point here, beyond noting that a lot of "serious" or "literary" fiction is really just crime writing wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of wire-rimmed specs.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Hey, speaking of books on shelves . . . 

I try to avoid vulgar self-promotion in these columns, but there are times I can't resist.

It's been fifteen years since I published my first crime story. In that time, I've hit a number of milestones that I found thrilling. First sale to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. First sale to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. First award nomination. First acceptance to an open-call anthology. First award win. First inclusion in an invitation-only anthology. First Honorable Mention in Best Mystery Stories of the Year, followed by the first actual inclusion in the volume. First Bouchercon. Joining SleuthSayers. Becoming the president of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Of course, I haven't notched nearly the number of publications and impressive achievements that many of the other columnists on this site can boast, but I'm having a blast chasing them. I figure I only have to live another 500 years or so to publish as many stories as John Floyd has, for example.

This past week I hit another personal milestone, and one that's especially meaningful to me, when Level Best Books published Crime Scenes, my first collection. Not too long ago, I thought such a thing would never happen, but here we are. The book includes twenty of my stories, including finalists for the Edgar, Derringer, Thriller, and Shamus Awards, two winners of the Al Blanchard Award, and several selections from Best Mystery Stories of the Year. 

Even if I never have another book published under my name, I'm thrilled to have this one out in the world. I didn't publish my first piece of fiction until I was in my forties. For many years, I thought being a published author was a dream that would be forever out of reach. Now I've got something I can put on the shelf to show that I made it after all. I'm proud of that, and also extremely grateful--to Level Best, to every editor and publisher who ever accepted my work, and most of all to the readers who have enjoyed it.

Because it turns out that actually being a writer is a lot more fun than dreaming about being one. I'll tell the world!

You can't take the Italian out of the Writer

It’s been brought to my attention that some readers here might not know that I got my start writing stand-up.  (30 years later, I have to work hard to simply stand up, but that’s another column.)

It’s also quite possible that since I collect husbands with Celtic last names (Campbell and O’Connell), readers might not know that I am predominantly Italian.

So when I was asked by Gemma Media – a terrific publisher of short, easy to read adult books- to write a crime series for them, it was just possible that my Italian background might come through.  As it did for The Goddaughter series.  As it did for…okay, all the others.  I’m an Italian gal masquerading as a WASP, and I couldn’t keep a straight face if they ironed and botoxed it.

Melodie Campbell is Canada’s “Queen of Comedy” – The Toronto Sun

Comedy is my lifeline.  Laughter is my survival kit.  I love the Merry Widow Murder series that I’m currently writing for Cormorant books.  It has humour in the form of my beloved character Elf.  But I miss the old standup days.

Writing PIZZA WARS brought me back to my early comedy-writing days.  It’s perhaps my most loopy book.  Take a city (Hamilton) that’s known for steel mills.  Take a population where a good many came from Sicily between the wars. 

Take all that, try to fit it into a Police precinct, arm the place with Officer Rita “Mom” Gallo, and you can have some pretty funny things take place.

After all, who needs a gun when you have a wooden spoon?

Now available!  At Amazon, and all the usual suspects.  (If you like The Goddaughter books, check out PIZZA WARS!)

 

Tales from the Jungle

I don’t recall how I first heard of Frank Gruber’s 1967 book, The Pulp Jungle. It’s one of those books that, once you’ve heard about it, you start seeing references everywhere in the writing community. For me, the hype, if you can call it that, always seemed to touch upon three points:

1. If you want to know what it was like to write during the heyday of the pulps, this is the book to read.

2. The book is out of print, and you’ll pay through the nose to snag a copy.

3. Nearly every review I’ve read shares Gruber’s famous lunchtime soup ritual, which neatly encapsulates just how impoverished he was while trying to break into New York City publishing in the 1930s.

I won’t keep you waiting on these points, since I am obliged by the Pulp Jungle code of ethics to disclose them all:

1. Yes, this is the book to read to get a sense of the pulp fiction lifestyle as practiced by writers in the 1930s and 40s, and slightly beyond.

2. Yes, finding an original copy of the book is costly, with prices starting around $50 and quickly shooting into the hundreds. One rare book dealer has for sale a copy of the MS once owned by the author for about $1,300. But now, thanks to Fiction House Press, you can buy a paperback copy for $15.

3. I’ll save the soup story for later. I promise.

Not gonna lie: It’s a weird little book. Gruber tells us in the opener that in 1960 he took a call from a professor at UCLA. Was he THE Frank Gruber who had penned classics of the pulp era? You see, the university was about to launch a Black Mask exhibit…

The call triggers a wave of nostalgia, and Gruber realizes that it has been two decades since he’d written his last story for Black Mask, twenty-seven by the time he got around to writing this brisk, 189-page memoir. Pulp Jungle feels strangely incomplete. For one thing, it ends abruptly in an odd place, and some of the chapters feel rushed as well, almost as if its creator could not be bothered to give it a thorough editing before sharing it with the world. If that does not embody the spirit of the pulp era, I don’t know what does.

Gruber estimates that between 1934 and 1941 he wrote between 600,000 and 800,000 words a year, the equivalent of seven to 10 modern novels a year. In his lifetime, he wrote about 400 short stories, 60 novels, and 200 screenplays for television and the movies (most for projects that were never filmed). He wrote detective stories, adventure stories, love stories, westerns, spy novels, and “spicy” stories (which I take to mean erotica). By the way, I think he grossly undercounts his short story output. In one year alone in the 1930s, he wrote 176 stories. But let's go with 400. It's his book.

Born in Minnesota, he’d longed to write as a boy, after reading a slew of Horatio Alger stories. After a stint in the U.S. Army, he sold his first short story at age 23 for $3.50. In 1927, he landed his first job editing an agricultural newspaper, and eventually moved to a publisher in Iowa, where he edited as many as five of those agri-rags. In between, he wrote and sent rounds of stories to the pulps in New York City.

Just as we do today, as soon as a story was rejected, he sent it in the mail to another editor, using the barely one-decade-old Writer’s Digest as his guide. Between 1932 and 1934, he reports, he wrote about 620,000 words of fiction but never earned a living wage. His dream of becoming a writer plays havoc with his family budget, for in the early decades of the twentieth century, ceaseless rounds of postage cost a fortune.

If he were actually on the ground in New York City, he theorizes, he’d save money on stamps, deliver each manuscript by hand, and meet a ton of editors in the process. In 1934, when the agri-papers tank as a result of the Depression, Gruber sees his chance. He sends his young wife to live with her parents, and boards a train to the Big Apple lugging a suitcase, a typewriter, and $60.

Times are tough. Rent in New York City is exorbitant compared to rent back home. (Upon arrival, he shells out $10.50 for a week’s rent at a hotel.) Over the next seven months, he shares hotel rooms and apartments with other writers. When he gets locked out of one apartment for being late with the rent, he rides the subway all night, trying to keep from nodding off. But golly, at least he wasn’t paying for those damn stamps.

To make ends meet, Gruber patronizes Automats, squirts hot water into a bowl, squeezes in several packets of ketchup, sprinkles crushed soup crackers over the liquid, and slurps it up with a spoon. Instant tomato soup! Cost: $0. He did this for days at a time to stave off hunger.

He estimates that there were about 150 pulp magazines headquartered in New York City, which boggles the mind when you think of the paucity of story markets today. He asserts that 300 writers lived in the New York area who had cracked those markets, with thousands more living in the hinterland wanting in on the action.

The magazines hit the stands with lovely names like Ace Detective, Ace Sports, Ace Western, Ten Detective Aces, Adventure, Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Dime Western, Double Action Western, Love Story, Weird Tales, Western Story, and Western Trails. The “kings” were Doc Savage and The Shadow, published by Street & Smith, and of course, Black Mask.

What surprised me was how often Gruber phoned editors to ask if he could stop by to introduce himself and pitch his work. Many blew him off, erecting walls between themselves and the legions of writers who craved access to their offices. Gruber speaks about sneaking past secretaries and assistant editors to find his marks. In some cases, the editors said yes! Off he confidently went to shake hands, talk about his work, the places he’d written, and lob ideas. Sometimes the editors would bite; often they kindly sent him on his way.

It took me a long time to finish this fairly short book because I was frequently pausing mid-sentence to research the names he drops. Many of the editors and writers were unknown to me. In some cases, the big-name editors struck me as different versions of the editors I knew in New York publishing: Highly educated people who had attended upscale universities but who, for whatever reason or lack thereof, had pursued career paths that led straight into the ink-stained trenches.

Joseph Shaw, for example, attended Bowdoin, won an Olympic medal for fencing, served his country in WWI—and eventually edited Black Mask, filling its pages with the work of Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner. Gruber tried many times to crack Shaw’s market. With each rejection, Shaw graciously dissected the pieces to explain why he had declined them, warmly encouraging Gruber to submit something else.

Black Mask nevertheless struggled to survive, and when “Captain” or “Cap” Shaw wouldn’t take a pay cut, he was dismissed and replaced by Fanny Ellsworth, the daughter of a New York banker, and a Barnard graduate who would later in life earn a doctorate in Turkish Studies. Among the writers Ellsworth lured to her pages was Cornell Woolrich.

We watch Gruber struggle to sell his work, and cringe as he dodges landlords, hotel clerks, and bill collectors. When he has missed a series of meals, he fondly recalls an incident in 1932, while he still lived in the midwest. A magazine for salesmen had mistakenly mailed him duplicate payments for a pair of stories, and Gruber had mailed the extra check back with a note explaining the error. 

Now, in 1934, Gruber answers his hotel door one Sunday afternoon, half expecting to be berated by his current hotelier. But no, standing in the hall is a well-dressed giant of a man, who enters and studies Gruber’s digs. “I always wanted to see how a starving writer lived,” says Aron M. Mathieu, who is the owner and editor of the sales magazine whose check Gruber returned two years ago. By chance, Mathieu is also the editor of Writer’s Digest. For two years Mathieu has been curious to meet the writer who returned that check:

“He swore roundly even then that I was the only downright honest writer he had ever heard of. He insisted that no writer on earth, especially one who was as close to the howling wolves as my letter had indicated, would have done such a thing. So that was why he was now visiting me.”

Would Mr. Gruber care to join him for lunch? Mathieu’s treat, of course. Gruber was so hungry that he was out the door like a dog whose ears perk up at the sound of the word treat. Over lunch at Schrafft’s and for three hours later, Mathieu expounded on his new concept: an annual publication that listed market opportunities, in detail, for writers. It would be called…Writer’s Market. If Gruber would consent to collect the data and send it to Cincinnati, Mathieu would pay a munificent $90, with a $40 advance. Gruber leaves Mathieu’s hotel with two beautiful twenties in his wallet.

Cha-ching!

Next, out of the ether, after six months and a raft of rejections, an editor phones on a Friday. His magazine is going to press Saturday, and he needs to fill a gaping hole. Could Gruber write a 5,500-word story overnight? Why, sure, he could! He delivers the story, and scurries back to his digs to wait for news of its acceptance. He never hears a peep. Only when he stops by the magazine days later does the editor tell him, oh, we pay on Fridays. The editor had forgotten to phone.

“It was already on the press. Good story. Do me another next month.”

Double cha-ching!

After that, Gruber’s luck changes. He summons his wife from the midwest, and they set up house in the Big Town. In 1935, he earns $10,000, which amounts to $238,000 in 2026. Soon he is comparing his income to that of doctors and lawyers. But that does not mean his output decreases. No. If anything, he’s maintaining the same number of words, just shaking it up with new opportunities in Hollywood.

His list of friends, editors, and acquaintances grows. He meets Lester Dent and befriends Carroll John Daly—who most credit as the creator of the first series private eye, Race Williams. One night, Gruber and his writer pal Steve Fisher go out on the town with the introverted mama’s boy, Cornell Woolrich, and prank him by grossly inflating their Black Mask earnings. The next day, editor Fanny Ellsworth phones and chastise Gruber for messing with poor, sensitive Woolrich’s head:

“He came tearing in here this morning yelling that I was paying Gruber, Fisher and Torrey four cents a word and he was getting only one and a half cents and he was never going to write for the magazine again!”

In another anecdote that I’ve seen shared in many reviews, Gruber attends a party at the Brooklyn apartment of a writer named George Bruce. Thirty or so guests pack the place, having a blast until about 10 pm, when Bruce suddenly remembers that he promised to deliver a 12,000-word story to an editor tomorrow. His guests offer to clear out, but Bruce won’t hear of it. While the party rages on, he sits at his electric typewriter and dutifully pounds out his story. Four hours later, the manuscript is completed, and Bruce rejoins the party and celebrates by knocking back a dollop of gin. Do the math. That is 3,000 publishable words an hour.

On a drive out west, Gruber stops at the home of Erle Stanley Gardner, who seems like a good egg, and, in those days when communication was far from instantaneous, Gardner happily informs our memoirist that an editor back east wants to buy a western novel that Gruber has written.

Gruber is less charmed by other writers he meets. He nearly comes to blows with Raymond Chandler, who badmouths Fisher, one of Gruber’s oldest writer friends, over a screenwriting dispute. (Chandler would never look Gruber in the eye again, but Gruber insists that that never stopped him from enjoying Chandler’s writing.) A mutual friend, Fred MacIsaac, introduces him to Thomas Wolfe, who bores Gruber to tears speaking all night of his own greatness.

Some time later, Gruber tells us, MacIsaac commits suicide. After years of success in the pulps, he has been unable to sell a story for six months. That’s when it hits you. These people mastered the craft not for awards or acclaim or for personal fulfillment. They did it to put food on the table, to support themselves and their families. If their words did not earn bread, then what good were they? It’s easy to see how a writer might have extended that equation to their own self-worth.

In Hollywood, Gruber meets Frederick Schiller Faust, who wrote under countless pen names but was probably best known as Max Brand, the creator of Dr. Kildare. Gruber describes him as a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound man who did not so much write scripts as he did conceive stories that were later scripted by other writers. Faust showed up for work at the studio every day with a thermos of whiskey. When he drained the booze by 1 p.m., Faust snuck out for a liquid lunch, followed by a few drinks in the afternoon at a local watering hole.

Drink stoked his courage. He had grown tired of merely writing adventure stories. He craved adventure itself. He longed to live it! By now, it’s the 1940s, and a second World War is raging in Europe. In a bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot, a booze-stoked Faust shares with Gruber and Fisher the news that a military friend has fixed it so Faust can travel as an embedded reporter with infantry fighting in Italy. Off goes the great Max Brand, to launch a new career for himself as a war correspondent for Harper’s Magazine. Six weeks later, he’s dead at age 51.

By contrast, Gruber lives to witness the passing of an era that enriched writers and delighted readers. I get the sense that he’s melancholy about the death of the pulps, but he never admits as much.

Somewhere, before this book launches itself off a cliff, Gruber comes close to offering the secrets of his success. He enumerates, for instance, The Seven Basic Western Plots. And he spells out his “foolproof,” eleven-point method for writing the perfect mystery. Since we are all about mysteries, allow me to share with you the secret. Are you ready?

Colorful hero.

Theme.

Villain.

Background.

Murder method.

Motive.

Clue.

Trick.

Action.

Climax.

Emotion.

Ta-da! I bet you’re trembling with excitement. Now you can go forth and write your own mystery!

Yes, Gruber does give us a tiny bit more. He devotes exactly one paragraph to each point. Just one. Because why waste time dragging it out longer than necessary?

Perhaps that’s how he felt about his memoir. He had said all he had to say, so stopped he writing and sent it off to an editor. The end. He lived only two years more, but somehow managed to write eight or nine books before departing for his next great adventure.

* * * 

You can also read parts of Gruber's book via the Internet Archive.

Thanks for reading! See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Ever-Shifting Face of Plagiarism, Part One

 “Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.”

- The Rig Veda (Book I, Hymn 164, verse 46)

I would never, ever compare myself to a Hindu sage. No way anyone this side of Mahatma Gandhi comes away from that comparison looking anything other than...incomplete? Still emerging? Ummmm...well, let's just say that I am positive that when it comes to enlightenment, I have many, many leagues left on my own spiritual journey.

And just one of the many ways in which Hindu sages have had it all over the likes of me is in their nuanced understanding of the notion that truth has many looks. What's more, how the truth looks to you can often depend on not just how you're looking at it, but the angle from which you're viewing it. Put simply, the GodHead, the one actual reality (Brahman) can seem truly distinctive depending on one's angle of approach to it.

The Rig Veda quote above expresses that about as cleanly as can be done (even in translation from the original Sanskrit). Seen from one angle, it might manifest as any of Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver), Shiva (the Destroyer), Kali (The Transformer/Liberator), or Ganesh (the Remover of Obstacles), depending on one's perspective when looking, as informed by one's needs at the time. They are all simply different aspects (Saguna Brahman) of what the sages refer to as Nirguna Brahman (unshaped actuality).

Kinda like plagiarism, our conception of it, understanding of the notion, and our incessant need to define and redefine it over time.

Plagiarism is a concept as old as the written word itself: the act of taking someone else's words and using them as your own. Over time the notion of what actually constitutes plagiarism, and whether or not it is problematic has morphed. Shifting in substance, style and understanding from a culturally accepted practice of imitation intended to pass along great ideas in as close to their original form as possible, into a modern-day professional taboo: a serious ethical lapse seen not as the preservation of great ideas, but as the wholesale purloining of same.

Plagiarism's evolution as an ethical concept can be broadly broken down into three general eras: 

You know who you are.

Pre-Industrial Age: The 19th century clergyman, writer, and eccentric Charles Caleb Colton is likely best known for having coined the phrase, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" (something with which Oscar Wilde is widely credited, but Colton's use of the phrase comes from 1820, well before Wilde was even born). And such was certainly the case during the Classical era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Authors would lift characters, concepts, plot devices liberally from previous works, rarely, if ever, giving credit for same. Shakespeare did it. So did Marlowe. All of the Renaissance poets. Accepted practice? Building on what came before? Lifting it and making your own? We still engage in this sort of practice today, but if we do so openly, it's often done once the copyright of the work in question has expired and the work itself safely passed into the public domain.

Industrial Age: With the advent of the printing press and the subsequent industrialization of the collection and dissemination of information using the printed word (newspapers, pamphlets, books, broadsides, etc.), authorship became more than a point of prestige. The ability to write engagingly, to appeal to and influence the tastes of others became a commodity capable of bringing its purveyors significant remuneration (Ah, the Good Old Days!). Copyrighted work was supposed to bring money to the original author. To copy that and pass it off as one's own rapidly came to be seen as unethical and in many cases, illegal.

Modern Age: If everything ever written is available thanks to an internet connection, all of a sudden it's a whole lot easier to steal someone else's stuff, and frequently get away with it. Sometimes it's as simple as "point and click," "highlight and copy." And not all of it is done on-purpose. Check out this fascinating article in Plagiarism Today concerning, among other things, the notion of "accidental plagiarism."

Post-Modern Age: Six words: "Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models."

So that's it for Part One. An overview and brief analysis. Stayed tuned for Part Two next time around, when we will look at the work of some famous and not-so-famous plagiarists, and wrestle with how the advent of Artificial Intelligence has the potential to change (and to not change) our understanding of the notion of "plagiarism" itself.

See you in two weeks!

Len Deighton

For many of us, Len Deighton goes hand in glove, mentally, with Michael Caine.  The movie adaption of The IPCRESS File put them both on the map.  Don’t think for a minute we weren’t crazy about Bond, but IPCRESS, with its elliptical, deep-focus photography, and the odd, unsettling score (by Bond composer John Barry, no less), signaled something on a different wavelength from the Bond world, with its deep color saturation, exotic locations, and thumping bass line.  Bond signified Empire; IPCRESS was kitchen sink. 

It’s interesting, when you think about it that way, to realize we were introduced to the writer by the movie, and not the reverse.  IPCRESS was a successful book – not the phenomenom of le Carré’s Spy Whom Came in from the Cold, a year later – but the movie was a big return on a small investment; more importantly, from my own point of view, is that I started reading Len Deighton.

Horse Under Water, an underrated and very solid sequel to IPCRESS, was published in 1963; Funeral in Berlin, in 1964; Billion-Dollar Brain, in 1966; and An Expensive Place to Die, in 1967.  Brain is the weakest, An Expensive Place to Die the strongest, the most melancholy, and an evocative valentine to the Paris of the late ‘60’s - so a sentimental favorite of mine, as well. 

Skipping ahead, we get SS-GB, an alternate-history conceit (England loses the Battle of Britain, and the Nazis take over); the outstanding XPD, shorthand for Expedient Demise; and Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, fighter pilots in that same Battle of Britain.  Then the first of the Bernard Samson trilogies, Game, Set, and Match.  He followed up with Hook, Line, and Sinker, a few years later, and Faith, Hope, and Charity.  I’m not that big a fan.  All the naked class hostilities are there, and the icy superciliousness of the upper-class twits running the Service, but in and of itself, it’s not the engine of redemptive fury that it was in the earlier, IPCRESS, sequence of novels.  It seems more like simple exhaustion.

Interspersed, though, are two very good books.  Winter, a story of generational trauma, and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany.  And secondly, City of Gold, the city in question being wartime Cairo, clearly a thematic counterpart to Rick Blaine’s Casablanca, with its shifting loyalties. 

And there’s non-fiction, as well, cookbooks and histories, and miscellany, but the masterpiece among the novels is Bomber, from 1970, which I intentionally slid past, a couple of paragraphs above.  Bomber gets credit for being the first book written on a word processor, an IBM electric typewriter mated to a magnetic tape drive.  This matters mostly because of its dense and detailed storyline, and a draft manuscript of well over 100,000 words.  Using a computer program, you could navigate the material a lot more easily – it’s been almost sixty years, and the rest of us are grateful Len Deighton took the plunge.

Bomber takes place over a single night, as a squadron of Lancasters crosses the English Channel on a raid into the Ruhr industrial zone, and through miscalculation hit the wrong target, a small German market town.  It’s told from multiple POV’s, the RAF bomber crews, the German fighter bases on the coast, and the people on the ground, caught in the storm of incendiaries and high-explosive.  There are successes and humiliations, heroism and futility, politics, opportunism, and naked terror.  The deserving and the undeserving alike will die, or be spared, by no logic but the hand of God, or the rough odds of accident.  It should be said, however, that the novel is in no way indifferent or nihilist.  You simply don’t know who’s going to live through the story, and neither do they.  I think that’s the point.  We’re in the hands of a higher power, and that power doesn’t show sympathy or intelligence or warmth.  You can’t petition it.  It simply is. 

I don’t know that this is a consistent theme in Deighton’s work.  It doesn’t seem to be.  He himself appears genuinely cheerful, surprised at his good fortune, not too terribly reflective, perhaps.  Or not prone to look a gift horse too closely in the mouth. 

He lived in Portugal and Guernsey.  My guess is he was a tax exile.  And he quit writing, thirty years ago.  I think he got bored with it.  By his own admission.  He once said that it’s fun to tell people you’re a writer, but after the party, you have to go home and actually do it.

He’d just turned 97.  God bless. 

A Sleep or A Scrape

As part of an irregular series of blogs looking at notable trials from this month in history, I'd like to enter Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine. Let's revisit 1845 and the murder trial of Albert Tirrell. Although old, the case offers an opportunity to consider the roles of defense attorneys, prosecutors, and novel defenses. 

Twenty-two-year-old Albert Tirrell was no paragon of virtue. The scion of a wealthy Weymouth, Massachusetts family, he left his wife and two children to maintain a relationship with Maria Bickford, a prostitute living in a Boston brothel. Although they traveled and were constantly together, she refused to abandon her profession. Maria was successful in her work; she could afford a maid and expensive clothing. The relationship between Bickford and Tirrell was described as volatile. Maria reportedly said that she enjoyed quarreling with Albert because they had such a good time making up.  

In September 1845, local authorities charged Albert with adultery for cohabiting with Maria while married. He surrendered, posted a bond, and returned to Maria.

Albert visited her at her disreputable boarding house after her last customer on October 26^th, 1845. Late that evening, the proprietor saw and heard the couple arguing. The next morning, the proprietor and his wife heard a scream and a heavy thud from the upstairs room. They heard someone running down the stairs and out the door. Maria was found on her back, a neck wound nearly cutting off her head. Someone had set fire to the bed on which she lay. At the foot of the bed was a bloody razor. A man's walking stick and vest in the room were found spattered with blood. The landlord also found a letter addressed with the initials, "A.J.T. to M.A.B."

National Police Gazette

At about the same time, Albert Tirrell arrived at a nearby stable and requested a horse. He had gotten into a little scrape, he reported. When the police tried to find Tirrell, they discovered he had fled. From Weymouth, Tirrell traveled through Vermont to Canada. There, he boarded a ship bound for Liverpool. Bad weather forced the ship back to port. He journeyed to New York and booked a boat for New Orleans. He was arrested in Louisiana.

Tirrell hired Rufus Choate to defend him. A protégé of Daniel Webster, Choate is considered one of the great American lawyers of the 19^th Century. An outstanding orator, he was famous for delivering the “longest sentence known to man.” (1,219 words)

The prosecutor presented a strong circumstantial case, relying on the abovementioned facts. The witnesses, however, all resided in the brothel, and no one was beyond impeachment. Additionally, no one witnessed the murder. Still, robust evidence pointed toward Albert Tirrell.

Then Rufus Choate began his defense. His strategy was three-pronged. Maria may have killed herself, the defense argued. Choate’s associates impugned Maria’s character and suggested that suicide was “almost the natural death of persons of her character.” This theory suffered, however, from the violent nature of the injury to her neck. The defense team also presented evidence of Albert’s good character before he was ensnared by the lascivious Maria. Choate suggested another resident of the boardinghouse might have done it. And finally, the defense argued that if Tirrell had killed her, it was while he was sleepwalking.

A parade of friends and family testified to his sleepwalking habit beginning as early as age six. They elicited testimony that the somnambulism had increased in frequency and manifested bizarre behaviors. These episodes, according to his family, included window-smashing and threatening his brother with a knife. The dean of the Harvard Medical School testified that a person in a somnambulistic state could rise, dress, kill, set a fire, and escape.  

It is an essential element of most crimes that the defendant intended to commit the offense. As a society, we criminalize behavior that a person knows or should know is wrong. But if they don't understand, then punishment serves no purpose. Usually, this applies to young children or to the insane.

Harvard Art Museum

On March 27th, 1845, Rufus Choate gave his closing argument to the jury. He began by telling them he did not intend to take up much of their time. He then talked for five hours non-stop. The court recessed for a meal, and when the court resumed, Choate continued for another hour and a half. He spent much of the postprandial argument focused on somnambulism.

The jury deliberated for two hours before acquitting Tirrell.

The strategy worked again when the prosecutor tried to convict Tirrell of arson for setting the room on fire.

Tirrell later wrote to Rufus Choate asking the lawyer to return half his legal fee. He argued that he shouldn't have to pay so much for a case where it had been too easy to persuade the jury of his innocence.

I do not want to leave the blog with the impression that somnambulism serves as a get-out-of-jail card. According to an internet search, the defense has been tried perhaps sixty times. Most of the time, it has not been successful. Sleep scientists say it would not work today; Tirrell's behaviors, especially the flight, cannot be explained by sleepwalking. Even Tirrell did not get away completely. He went to prison for the original adultery charge. The judge refused to dismiss the case and sentenced him to three years.

Besides an interesting fact pattern, the case highlights the roles of the prosecutor and the defense. The government must prove each element. The government needs a clear message to explain the defendant’s actions. It has a problem, even today, when a victim comes from a marginal or ostracized part of the community.

The defense, meanwhile, succeeds when it undermines even one necessary element of the government's case. To do this, sometimes an astute lawyer presents a unified theory; other times, he or she scattershoots. Sometimes, the defense merely picks at the government's case, testing its reliability and challenging the credibility of the witnesses on which it rests. In other cases, the attorney prosecutes the defense—putting forward an alternative theory that explains the evidence and exonerates the client.

Choate tried all of the above. He picked at and maligned the government's evidence. He highlighted matters the prosecutor had not brought up--chiefly an eyewitness. He also put forward several alternatives. Choate's chief theory, the one that keeps the murder case of Albert Tirrell in the public eye, was the defense of somnambulism. A novel defense that in this case worked. 

Albert Tirrell's murder trial is the March Trial of the Month.

Now go get a good night's sleep.

Until next time.