That's a Question

 

Last week, the local university’s library had an open house of its special collections. My traveling companion and I attended. It felt nice to act erudite and sophisticated without writing a big donor’s check for the privilege.

The library displayed a series of illuminated manuscripts. I couldn’t read a word. Sadly, I’ve let my classical Latin lapse. But I did enjoy looking at the vivid colors and intricate designs on the page. At the end of one line, I noticed a small mark, resembling a Spanish tilde. The docent explained that the medieval writer used this squiggle to indicate a question.

Feeling erudite and sophisticated, I nodded. Of course I knew that. When I got home, I looked it up. I immediately fell down a rabbit hole. 

As punctuation, the question mark has one of the more straightforward histories. We all know what a question is. In her 1932 lecture, “Poetry and Grammar,” Gertrude Stein certainly believed this. “A question is a question, anybody can know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already there…Therefore I never could bring myself to use a question mark. I always found it positively revolting…”

While I admire Stein’s passion, “revolting” seems a strong word for a punctuation mark. The sentence also overlooks a central debate in all things punctuation. Who is the mark intended to benefit? The question mark began, according to grammarian David Crystal, as a way of giving preachers a useful graphic cue about when to adopt a questioning tone of voice during a public reading.

We know that early written text was frequently unspaced. Scriptura continua reflected the way people speak—we don’t normally pause between words. But this mashup made reading challenging, so marks that separated words gradually emerged. Dots, slashes, and spaces began to appear. Reader marks followed. Some grammarians believe that our system of punctuation has its roots in ancient Egypt and the chief librarian of Alexandria.

Virtual Manuscript Library-Switzerland, Wikimedia Commons

On the specific origin of the question mark, most experts look to the Romans and their European heirs. In the 8^th Century, King Charlemagne invited the English scholar, Alcuin of York, to join his court. Grammarians credit him with creating the punctus interrogativus, or interrogative point. The mark signaled that an oral reader should add inflection to the end of the sentence. (The half note before tamen in the third line is a punctus interrogativus)

In 1582 Richard Mulcaster published The Elementarie, a stab at standardizing English writing. On the matter of the question mark, he wrote,

Interrogation: two points one aboue another, whereof the vpper is sometime croked which both in writing and reading teacheth us, that a question is asked there, where it is set. 

The short explanation reveals that English speakers still struggled in the 16^th Century to settle on what to call this inflection mark. They tried out “asker,” “erotreme,” “mark of interrogation,” “quaestio,” “interrogative point,” and “question stop,” before settling on the term “question mark.” Crystal cites the OED for authority that we didn’t finally agree on this term until the dawn of the Twentieth Century.

Grammarians also wandered a bit before settling on the question mark’s shape. Sources vary on how we arrived at the present form. Some suggest that the curved body mimics the bend of a cat’s tail when a feline becomes inquisitive.¹  While the cat-tail tale makes a good story for a Halloween blog, it lacks real academic support. Alcuin of York deployed the tilde shape, the outside end rising slightly like a lightning bolt. (a good design for prompting readers to employ an upward inflection.) Others wrote the word quaestio at the end of the sentence to signify a question. Over time, quaestio got reduced to a “q” above the “o.” Draw it out on a piece of paper. The shape is not far from a modern question mark.

Printers also may have influenced the design of our current interrogatory symbol. The theory goes like this. Most of the early printed publications were Bibles and other religious texts. Generally, they don’t contain many questions. Therefore, the number of question marks in a printer’s inventory of type was relatively small. When plays began to be published, the need increased. Plays are often full of questions. 

Think Shakespeare. "To be or not to be?" 

English grammar and spelling remained fluid. Printers improvised. Some flipped a semicolon to extend their stock of moveable type.

Finally, writers and grammarians puzzled through when to use a question mark. Although Gertrude Stein may think the question is obvious, rhetorical questions, in particular, pose an issue. What to do when someone is using the question form but not really asking a question? We’ve all likely experienced times when we’re simultaneously asked and told.

“You’re doing the dishes, aren’t you”

Can a question not be a question? And if it isn’t, how should it be punctuated?

In 1962, an American advertiser, Martin K. Speckter, proposed the interrobang (or interabang) as the solution, a punctuation symbol combining the question mark and the exclamation point. ‽ The interrobang was intended to indicate questions for which no answer was expected, or questions posed with excitement or disbelief. (Rejected names for the interrobang included ‘exclarogative’ and ‘consternation mark.’ After a flurry of interest, the symbol faded. As writers we’re back to the classical toolbox of punctuation marks. The question of how to properly punctuate these sentences remains.

How do you think we should handle them?

Do you have a punctuation mark you find positively revolting? 

Until next time.

-----------------------

1. Thanks to the Burbank Leader and Wikipedia for this feline tidbit.

Anyone up for horseshoes and hand grenades?

When something is called a simple truth, it isn’t always a contradiction in terms.  Some truths are simple.  If you jump from the top of a mature oak tree without a means for arresting the fall, you will hit the ground.  Irrefutable. However, the underlying mechanism involved in this event is gravity, and there is nothing simple about a fundamental force of nature. Ask any physicist.

I’ll go out on a limb of that oak tree and propose there is no truth that is simple, for the simple reason that a truth itself is nearly impossible to establish absolutely in all its particulars for every observer assembled for the task.

I’ll creep further out on the limb, testing its tethering to the trunk, and propose that mystery stories, in all their dazzling variety and genre distorting forms, are all essentially about people seeking the truth, in competition with other people and circumstances aligned in opposition.

Truth has always been under threat, yet today is a time of particular advantage for the powers of concealment and obfuscation.  There is a cultural trend of people “speaking their truth.”  This is a triumph of solipsism, since it affords deference to the notion that everyone’s version of reality is equally valid.  It’s also in direct contravention of Daniel Patrick Monihan’s maxim that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”  If one abandons Moynihan’s proscription, then there’s really no point in trying to understand anything.  In such a world, we would have no use for people like Sam Spade or V.I. Warshawski. 

I spent many years in close enough proximity to the media, often thoroughly involved in the matter being reported upon.  In all these cases, I never observed the story to be 100% accurate.  And none of these slight variations (some not so slight) would I attribute to malicious intent.  The principal culprit was time.  It just wasn’t possible for any reporter, editor or factchecker to pin down every nuance and particular with total precision in the time required to get the story written/published/distributed.   The majority of these imperfections were incidental, though not all.  Journalism has its share of sloppy performers, but by and large, they strive for an accurate and dispassionate recording.

Still, biases have a way of creeping in.  This is always true for everybody.  They’re often manifest in how information is interpreted.  One of the wonders of language, and the cognitive process overall, is the bounty of ways one can express any given thought or observation.  Within these multitudes, there’s little chance that something can be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

What can be agreed upon is that everyone try to get close.  For this endeavor to work, we rely heavily on cynics, skeptics and imperturbable analytics.  Their counterparties are those committed to deceit, duplicity and guile, people actively striving to obscure the truth.  These folks are the bread and butter of the genre we celebrate, and thus indispensable.  What’s more interesting to me, however, are those who have decided the truth is their truth, a conclusion arrived at usually through a tortured, circuitous psychological voyage. 

They don’t have to be patently delusional.  There are plenty of historical heroes who simply understood something the rest of humanity considered absurd.  Though sometimes they are, they just don’t know it.  When this condition inhabits a brilliant or powerful mind, or a collective of capable people, things get really interesting. 

The action and adventure in the mystery genre are fun, though the appeal wanes over time.  What endures for me is the effort involved in uncovering the truth, however approximate it might be.  This dynamic achieves its fullest expression with the unreliable narrator, though any narrator’s reliability is also suspect for the reasons outlined above.  My favorite books are those that relish ambiguity and uncertainty while still managing to arrive at a satisfying conclusion. 

We know that massive social and political movements can be premised on monstruous untruths.  It’s unsettling to contemplate.  At least we have mysteries and their adjacent narratives, where in one messy entanglement someone was able to get close to something resembling a true thing.

Día de los Muertos Vivientes

Today's essay serves one purpose only, to lay the foundation for our 1^st of November's Día de los Muertos / Day of the Dead article and persuade you to catch the most brilliant ghost story of our time. And, unbelieveably, it’s free. You may remember one of our authors whose life was cut short.  Allow us to reintroduce…

Fran Rizer
(12 Dec 1944 – 24 Dec 2019)

Andrew Wyeth: Ghosts

On a Christmas eve nearly seven years ago, our colleague Fran Rizer left us a gift, which we share today. Harking back to the golden age of horror, it’s one of the finest classic paranormal stories ever written. So why haven’t you heard of it?

It was published not in the US, but in a short-lived Canadian publication, Ficta Fabula. Rather than try to shop an already published story, Fran placed it in our SleuthSayers queue. Following damage to its MS Word file and to capture most recent publication edits, she turned to me for help.

We copied text from the publication’s PDF, which turned out a mess, suffering breaks at the end of every line instead of every paragraph. Italics and bolds disappeared. Little could be automated, paragraph by paragraph, it had to be reassembled by hand. She never anticipated it would take so long, nor that she wouldn’t be present for publication. Shaking off the ghost of Fran’s hand, so to speak, took a while, but the result is one of the most artfully ingenious stories you’ll likely read.

Fran and I became friends at an MWA gathering where she was giddy her first novel had been accepted for publication. Some thought her excitement was unseemly, but why not? We began to chat, partly about wrting, partly about everything. She liked to say after retirement she could move to Florida and quietly fade away, or live out her dream to write.

She sometimes phoned in the middle of the night to chat about nothing in particular. Fran was warm, witty, and wildly inappropriate. She entered her teens in the latter 1950s and I imagine young Fran was a trip and a handful. Even in her 70s, she was an incorrigible flirt. She loved men and could read XY chromosomes as readily as a Vanity Fair article. She had an uncanny knack of peering into the mind, perhaps learned from years of classroom experience and knowing herself. It wasn’t a bad thing.

Fran admired Mickey Spillane, loved bluegrass banjo, enjoyed cooking, and she appreciated American fine art. She claimed she watched sports for one reason only, to gaze upon players’, erm, male Sitzfleisch, that is to say derrières, tochus, hindaments, bums, buns, butts, booty patooties– you get the idea. That was Fran, unapologetic.

She also suffered great tragedy. Linda, Fran’s cousin, best friend, neighbor, and organizer of Fran’s Callie Parrish fan club, was brutally murdered in a home invasion. Fran swore she’d never write again. In our wee hour chats, I quietly listened. Slowly she returned to the notion of her writing again. That took a year. Her fourth novel wasn’t the same, but she’d taken the step. Over time, Fran once again found her footing.

Fran died on a Christmas Eve, her wonderful story suspended in the æther of the otherworld. For a long time, it occupied a pending spot in SleuthSayers files. Earlier this year, I readied it for the Halloween season as a holiday gift.

I cannot emphasize how much I admire this many layered story. You’ll discover why I illustrated today’s article with the Wyeth painting above. Take a moment on El Día de Muertos, the 1^st of November, to read her brilliant tale, Emily’s Ghost.

— Leigh

Since the Ball's in My Court

NOTE: We'll be traveling on the day this is posted, so I'll be late in responding to any comments. In other words, the ball will probably sit there awhile before being hit back.

Do you ever wonder where we Sayers of Sleuth get the ideas for these columns? (No, mine are not from those bowls of chili I eat just before going to bed.)

The idea for this post came from an interview I watched the other night following a college football game. A coach I will leave unnamed said to the press and the TV audience, "Our team came to play tonight and gave 110%, but it was a game of two halves, and at the end of the day the other side wanted it more."

Yes, I admit I'm paraphrasing that, but the real thing wasn't much better. After a lot more talk about momentum shifts and gut-checks and physicality and athleticism, he closed by saying they're taking it one game at a time, which if I'm not mistaken is the only possible way to take it.

On the one hand, I'm used to hearing this kind of mumbojumbo, because I like college football. On the other hand, I consider myself to be a writer and to know at least something about words and word usage. So, since I needed a subject for this column anyway, I put together the following list of 100 sports-inspired cliches that have made their way, God help us, into the English language and our everyday speech.

Fasten your chin-strap; here we go:

Keep your eye on the ball

It was a slam dunk

Par for the course

Step up to the plate

Full-court press

He talks a good game

It's time to play hardball

Don't pull any punches

Monday-morning quarterback

Go for the gold

Knock it out of the park

They control their own destiny

Put on your game face

In a league of their own

Out of left field

In my wheelhouse

Batting a thousand

On the rebound

Four-down territory

Hit a home run

The ball didn't bounce our way

They've moved the goalposts

A hail-Mary pass

We got the W

A team player

They brought their A-game

He's their go-to guy

Watch from the sidelines

Snap the ball

Pass the baton

Tee it up

Rein in

Jump the gun

Run interference

Take a rain check

We're on the home stretch

They left it all on the field

Go down swinging

Hit the ground running

A whole new ballgame

We're home safe

Warm the bench

Go the distance

Hit the bulls-eye

Home-field advantage

A must-win situation

Make the cut

The gloves are off

The ball's in your court

A photo finish

On any given Sunday

He ran the table

Nothing but net

Get the ball rolling

Take it on the chin

Just under the wire

Touch base

Move the chains

A team effort

Pinch hitter

Heavyweight/lightweight

Out of the starting gate

It's a marathon, not a sprint

False start

Kick off

Go to bat for

Throw in the towel

Behind the eight-ball

Two-minute warning

Cross the finish line

Top of the ninth

Stick to the game plan

Back up and punt

Saved by the bell

They threw us a curve 

Keep the drive alive

Bring home the gold

Call the play

Goal-line stand

They dropped the ball

He drained the three

She hit a hole-in-one

A dark horse

A low blow

A chip shot

A bad call

A tight race

A gutsy play

There's no I in team

They won't play ball

Split the uprights

In the red zone

Game, set, and match

Three strikes against you

Depends on where they spot the ball

The crowd went wild

Down for the count

Third and long

Fourth and goal

Take one for the team

. . . and many more

He took one for the team

Do you recognize all these sports-related phrases? Do you use some of them? Cringe when you hear them? (I especially hate "draining" those three-pointers. Draining?) Can you think of any cliches I left out? Did I think of way too many? (My wife says YES.)

Although I try hard to avoid using cliches--sports or otherwise--in my fiction writing, I confess that I use them a lot in speech, and also as a part of story dialog. Why? Because it feels and sounds natural to do, I guess, and because they're used so often almost everyone gets the meaning.

But I'll only take it so far. I promise that you'll never again hear me say or see me write the words athleticism or physicality, or use the letter W instead of the word win. I do try to maintain at least some dignity in my life.

A closing note: I'm not criticizing all sports broadcasters or coaches or others who regularly spew these kinds of words and phrases. Some make informative observations. NFL analyst and former quarterback Joe Theismann once said, "Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein."

On the subject of writing, Norman would probably say . . . Take it one story at a time. 

  

Book DNA – is it for you?

This is my penultimate SleuthSayers post, and I hope you'll find it helpful if you have a book to promote - or if you just like to read and discuss books!

When I was seeking publicity opportunities for It's Not Even Past a year ago, Liz Zelvin steered me toward Shepherd, a "book discovery platform" similar in some ways  - but not all - to

Goodreads. In 2026, Shepherd rebranded as Book DNA, which is certainly a more informative name for a book-finding service! They've got an interesting concept. Book DNA allows readers to find curated reading lists (if you like books by Jane Doe, here's what other Jane Doe fans recommend). It categorizes books by genre, and provides "author profile pages" that let you meet an author, learn about his or her book, and explore a list of five books that author recommends.

Well, why not? At the basic level, it's free to both readers and authors, so I hit "contact" and a pleasant, enthusiastic person named Cathy got back to me quickly, inviting me to fill out a form describing my book and listing five of my own faves. I was only sixty-five percent certain she was a real person and not an AI assistant, but - she turned out to be for real.

Listing my top five books was a tough assignment, because my purpose was to steer traffic toward my book, which is gritty crime fiction, perhaps could be called noir, and is technically a story collection, though the stories are interlocked, chronological, and  - read together -  form a novel. But many of my favorite writers are entirely outside those genres:  Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad), Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kittredge), Ann Patchett (Bel Canto), George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardo), Jim Fergus (One Thousand White Women), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex). And don't get me started on kids' books. I read the entire Little House, All of a Kind Family, and Miss Bianca series straight through every few years. I still dream about Lois Lenski's Indian Captive and Ruth Archer's A Candle in Her Room. So I narrowed my focus to the best books that had something in common with my own - a dark premise, one or more murders, an element of mystery - and I still had a very, very hard time narrowing the list.

I knew Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell would make the cut. I wasn't sure which book in either case, but I finally decided by thinking, well, you love all their books, but which do you remember best?  And that gave me What Came Before He Shot Her - George's tour de force follow-up to her own With No One as Witness, in which Inspector Thomas Lynley's fiancee, Lady Helen Clyde, is murdered by a child of twelve. What Came Before He Shot Her is heartbreaking, moving, terrifying - as good as any of George's novels, but in some regards, entirely different. For Rendell, I was tempted by The Veiled One - I love Inspector Wexford - but I finally decided on a Barbara Vine title, A Dark-Adapted Eye, a masterwork of secrets and family dysfunction. (Vine is one of Rendell's pseudonyms.)

I had the same problem with Kate Atkinson, and I sort of thought I should list her twice - once for Jackson Brodie (I chose Case Histories, almost solely because it's first, but they're all great) and again for her more literary (and weird, and wonderful) Life After Life. I finally went with Jackson because it's closer to what I write - he's a semi-amateur sleuth with a predilection for trouble - and also because how do you choose Life After Life without its equally stunning companion novel, A God in Ruins? Haven't read those? Get thee to Bookshop.org. You are in for a life-changing read. I promise. 

Well, speaking of life-changing, I've listed three books and haven't gotten to Sarah Waters yet, although she's probably the best contemporary writer going. Fingersmith, remember? But I went with The Paying Guests. Oh. My. God. Just read it, if you haven't yet. It's got everything: Depression-era London, class warfare, forbidden lesbian sex, murder…

I sat up late arguing with Emma Donaghue (Room, Frog Music) and Paulette Jiles (have mercy! she has written some amazing books: Enemy Women, News of the World). Finally, I realized I cared a lot more about my list than either of them do (also, they weren't actually there) and I went with Jiles' phenomenal The Color of Lightning. It was tough because I dream about News of the World, but Lightning taught me so much about the American West and about fine, fine writing. It's the fictionalized story of Britt Johnson, a free Black cowboy who rescues his family from Comanchees during the Civil War.

When I'd turned in my list, along with a blurb about my own book, I heard back from Cathy and crew almost immediately. They'd made some small cuts for space and some edits to break up lengthy blocks of text. I didn't really notice anything missing, but I certainly appreciated being asked. 

The next step takes us to my only quibble with Book DNA - the buy button. Although readers can buy from Bookshop.org, Amazon is the default. One must click on a very small arrow on the Amazon button to see that there's an option.

I clicked through on both sales platforms to check my book, and found that there was no "preview" or "look inside" option on Amazon - something that many readers use prior to making a purchase. It turns out that Amazon doesn't post previews until a book is actually released. And once again, Book DNA came through with flying colors, offering to hold off posting until the release date - October 20.  

As Dad often reminded us, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." But no one at Book DNA had asked me for a dime. So - how do they make money? In two ways, as it turns out. One, Book DNA receives a commission on sales that accounts for about twenty percent of their revenue. The other eighty percent comes from reader and author memberships. But the "freemium" model means that the basic membership level is free for both writers and readers. Authors can - and many do - pay a bit more to get special promotion and increased visibility, but the curated lists are free for real.

There are plenty of happy writers engaging with the site, but it's always informative to know what folks don't like. So I asked Uncle Google what dissatisfied authors had to say about the platform, and the answer was revealing: authors didn't like the effort required to choose five favorite books and write a paragraph about each. These are writers.  Writers trying to promote a book. A book they have written. Go figure.  Ben Fox, co-founder of Book DNA, says that it should take authors thirty to 45 minutes to write something that will "deliver a lifetime of steady promotion. This isn't a blog where it posts and then readers never see it again; your recommendations plug into our entire platform, and every reader who visits looking for a book has a chance of bumping into your book and your book recommendations as they explore."

If you read my last SleuthSayers post, you know that I'm willing to work hard to take advantage of small promotion and publicity opportunities, and that some of these "little ponds" have really paid off for me. So I've little time for writers who claim to want to sell books but are not willing to make the effort to do so. 

I'm excited about the Book DNA opportunity, and I'm interested to see what happens on October 20th. Stay tuned.

Anna Scotti's work appears frequently in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. It's Not Even Past will be released by Crippen & Landru on October 20, followed by They Look Like Angels, a collection of stand-alone stories, early next year.  Scotti is the Chautauqua Journal's nominee for Best of the Net (fiction) this year for her story, The Intruder.

Scotti is also a poet, with recent inclusions in Chautauqua, Nimrod, The Women Artists Datebook, and in Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press).  You can read and hear some of her poems without a paywall on her site or at The New Yorker.

A Very Special Character Study

Reposted for reasons that will become obvious by the end of the post.
Happy Ides of October!

***

Sooooo… Character.  It's not plot. It's the only other thing aside from plot that can drive a story. And what makes for interesting characters?

Realistic (and often contradictory) personality traits.

I've been thinking about this very thing quite a bit lately, as I wrap the final draft of a long-delayed novel that will be finished and off to my agent before the end of this year!

Of all things, it was a vacuum cleaner commercial that gave me my own particular epiphany about how to write great, interesting, realistic characters. This one, to be exact:


Smoothies!

A biker who's a neat freak? Another who does needlepoint?

Interesting characters because they subvert expectations. Just like real life.

I have a cousin who is outdoorsy as hell: hunting, fishing. Sells cars for a living. A real man's man.

And for relaxation, he taught himself to crochet.

Interesting, right? Unexpected?

And even better because it's real life.

The best fictional characters mirror real life. Let's talk about one.

A woman, early eighties, married over fifty years, outgoing, friendly, caring, compassionate. A good friend, great sister, terrific mother and grandmother. Unironically loved Barry Manilow back in the '70s.

Once won enough money playing the slots on a visit to Vegas that she was able to buy herself a new floor for her kitchen (Including what it cost to have it installed). Not an isolated occurrence. This woman has a system. Every time she goes to Vegas, she wins thousands.

Enjoys gardening. LOVES Bruce Springsteen's music.

Was the queen of her high school's "Senior/Junior Ball" during her senior year.

Is strictly a social drinker. And yet, once, as a young woman, she stayed up late with her in-laws, drinking. By morning she had matched her father-in-law drink for drink, and the two of them had drunk every other adult member of the family under the table.

Slipped on the ice getting the morning paper one New Year's Day, and broke her ankle. Was able to laugh about it that same day (there's a "great pain meds" joke in there, somewhere!).

While in her thirties, once drove across the Columbia Basin from Yakima to Spokane with her eldest son, then in his teens. Drove for an hour shortly after sunset with the domelight in her car on so her son could finish a book he was reading.

Loves the color yellow. Hates surprises. Has a very close relationship with her daughter-in-law.

Started taking piano lessons last year. (That's all you get on this one. There's a ton of backstory there that the reader doesn't need to know for this tidbit to work, especially with the writer keeping it in mind while writing about it).

Possesses one of the most subversively bawdy sense of humor you'll ever encounter.

Is one of the kindliest souls I've ever known.

Okay: confession time. This character is a real person. My mother, Berniece. And it's her birthday today. Please join me in wishing her a happy one!

Love you, Mom! Hope this is pleasant surprise!

Bruce Alexander

Bruce Alexander, who died in 2003, wrote eleven period mysteries featuring the 18^th-century justice, Sir John Fielding.  (The last book in the series, Rules of Engagement, was published after his death.)  You can make a good case, that along with Ellis Peters, who wrote the Cadfael novels, they set a high bar.  Left Coast Crime, my own regional mystery con, has an award for historical fiction named in Bruce Alexander’s memory, which has been won by Jackie Winspear, Ann Parker, Catriona McPherson, and Naomi Hirahara, among others.

I thought I’d read all the Alexander books, but happily not.  It turns out I missed his next-to-last, The Price of Murder.  This is one of the more disturbing books in the series, a story about the disappearance and sexual traffic of children, along with a fair amount of GBH and literal throat-cutting.  It’s also got a road trip to Newmarket and a lively portrait of the horseracing scene, and an odd, somewhat aimless sidebar, which although it casts shade on suspected white slavery, and mob violence, doesn’t really go anywhere.  Its main purpose seems to be as an Easter egg, a real-life case involving the justice Henry Fielding, brother of Sir John, and author of Tom Jones.  Henry was appointed a magistrate first, and then John succeeded him.  The two of them, both historically, and in the novels, established the Bow Street Runners, which eventually became the Metropolitan Police.

 

One of the issues, for a reader, when you invest in a writer, and a series, and then they die on you, is that you’re left with the longer story arc unresolved: what happens with the characters beyond the books?  Philip Kerr and the Bernie Gunther novels, for example – he was only 62.  I remember being very upset when Bruce Alexander died, for the selfish reason that I’d never know how life was going to turn out for young Jeremy Proctor, the narrator of the stories.  There are hints and foreshadowings, but it’s not the same.  We do know, from the record, that Fielding himself died in 1780, five years after the story in the last book is told.  But this isn’t internal evidence.  It’s something you might look up, if you’ve a mind. 

 

The thing that’s cool, in any event, is that revisiting Georgian London with Alexander - the Blind Beak, and Jeremy, Seven Dials, and Covent Garden, and Lloyd’s coffeehouse – is so vivid.  It doesn’t smell of the lamp.  Or rather, it does, but not in the sense of being overstudied; rather, in the sense of you smelling the guttering candles and the spilled beer, gin and sweat and bad teeth.  The best historicals, Mary Renault, Patrick O’Brian, Bernard Cornwell, don’t show off.  They use detail sparingly, and let it settle, like ash.  You feel your way in.  Alexander does the same.  And there’s a trick to the language.  You can do a lot with word order.  I mentioned I was reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.  You’re very aware, at first, that you’re reading prose written in the late 1700’s – which is, of course, exactly the era Alexander is effectively reproducing in the Fielding novels – and you could do worse than imitate Gibbon.  Not self-consciously, which is only going to be brittle and artificial, but if possible, to relax into those rhythms and speech patterns.  And you can use older literary conventions, had I but known and so forth, as long as you don’t lay it on too thick. 

I’m reminded of John le Carré’s comment, which I’ve found helpful in more than one context.  It doesn’t have to be authentic, it has to be convincing.  Bruce Alexander makes it seem effortless, but we know different.  He put a lot of effort into making it look easy.