Pulling Threads: The Dalrymple Mystery and Editing the Dead in the Age of AI

This month, I'm honored to turn over my column to author, critic, scholar, and all-around swell person Angelic Rodgers. Angel has been one of my closest friends for more than twenty years, dating back to when we were both adjuncts at Auburn University. Of late she's been working on a project that I think will be of considerable interest to SleuthSayers readers, one that has a lot to tell us about the history of our genre--and in particular, one of the many women who made significant contributions to it, but are too often forgotten today. I've invited her to tell you about it, so take it away, Angel!

Angelic Rodgers

Pulling Threads: The Dalrymple Mystery and Editing the Dead in the Age of AI

by Angelic Rodgers

 

It’s not that I don’t read mysteries, because I long have. As a kid, I watched Scooby-Doo every day after school. Once I started reading chapter books, I gravitated toward Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Encyclopedia Brown, and Cherry Ames. My sister, our friend Will, and I used to play detective. I was the secretary of their detective agency, a classic younger-sibling assignment. Through undergrad and grad school when I wanted to read recreationally, I often opted for mystery series. Writers like Westlake, Cornwell, Grafton, Highsmith, and Vin Packer offered me an escape from the work of literary analysis. 

But I never took up mystery as anything other than recreational reading. That changed as I worked on preparing Octave Thanet’s The Dalrymple Mystery for release in November. The Dalrymple Mystery was originally serialized in The National Magazine from October 1913 to March 1914. It also ran as The Unterrified Citizen in Joseph Chapple’s Newsletter the year before. It is one of the writer’s few magazine stories that was never released in book form. Many of her short stories were collected and reprinted in bound volumes. Three of her novels, Expiation (1890), The Lion’s Share (1907), and By Inheritance (1910), for example, were first serialized. 

The project fascinated me from multiple angles—not only was Dalrymple never republished as a stand-alone, but it also was a full-blown mystery. While some of her other novels included mystery elements, Thanet has never (as far as I’m aware) been considered a mystery writer. 

When Joseph Walker suggested I do a guest post about my experience with editing and annotating Dalrymple, I wasn’t sure. My first reaction was that I don’t write mystery, crime fiction, or detective fiction. I’m a specialist in nineteenth century women’s fiction typically described as “domestic” or “local color” by training, and my fiction might be categorized as chick lit or lesfic. 

I first came across the name Octave Thanet while reading Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men. Faderman identifies her as a lesbian writer who lived part of the year with her partner in a small town in Arkansas. Faderman also pointed out that Thanet was one of the highest-paid and most successful writers for a thirty-year span. 

Faderman’s brief mention set me on a quest to find out who Thanet was. Her real name is Alice French. Born in 1850 (the year of The Scarlet Letter) to a well-connected family, Alice took a pen name for her first short story, “Hugo’s Waiting,” which appeared in 1871 under the name “Frances Essex.” Such androgynous pen names, of course, were common for female writers at the time. By 1878, when her “Communists and Capitalists: A Sketch from Life” appeared in Lippincott’s, she had switched to the pen name she would use for fiction until her death in January of 1934. “Octave Thanet” was supposedly chosen from the word “Thanet” that Alice saw on a train car once and from the name of her Abbott Academy roommate Octavia Putnam. 

The young Alice French

Despite my area of specialty being examining literary works by three-named American women writing between 1865 and 1914 who might or might not have been what we categorize as queer women today, I’d never heard of Alice French or Octave Thanet. Her contemporaries certainly had, though. Theodore Roosevelt was one of her biggest fans, and they wrote letters to each other. He reportedly traveled with a copy of her Stories of a Western Town (1893) in the “pigskin library” that he took on African safari (according to McMichael). He visited her at Thanford, the Arkansas plantation where she and her companion Jane “Jenny” Allen Crawford spent part of the year. She was well-regarded by contemporaries like W.D. Howells, Susan Glaspell, Sarah Orne Jewett, and other literary figures we are familiar with today. 

How is it possible such a successful writer, who lived a chunk of her life in the same state where I grew up, wasn’t covered in any of my undergraduate or graduate seminars? 

I became determined to learn more about her. What was it like living and writing as a queer woman in Arkansas at the turn of the century? Also, how could this woman-loving, cabinet-building, cross-genre best-selling author who carried a flask and a pistol everywhere she went be against women’s rights? 

Alice French, it turns out, was a complex woman. 

Her writing as Octave Thanet is most often categorized as local-color writing that sold well but is not considered valuable or of interest to modern readers. The idea that what was popular in the past is mere pulp today likely rings bells for fans of crime fiction, as well. I probably don’t need to convince crime writers that there’s gold in those pulps and dime novels just waiting to be mined. 

George McMichael’s biography, Journey to Obscurity: The Life of Octave Thanet, isn’t truly a critical biography. Crafted from his dissertation, the book largely focuses on the business side of her life as the public persona of “Octave Thanet.” He glosses over the really interesting stuff. After reading the work, I felt I knew more about her family’s socio-economic status and how they came to live in Davenport, Iowa, but many of the details of who Alice French was, what she thought, and how she lived a rich, full life are absent. He set out only to write about Octave Thanet’s life, not Alice French’s. 

But Octave Thanet was merely one facet of French’s identity. 

McMichael’s biography left me with plenty of threads to pull. 

One of the threads I decided to pull first: to locate the “unpublished and unlocated works” listed at the end of the book. McMichael’s discussion of Thanet’s actual writing is surface-level plot summary with details about where she submitted and the result (royalties, advances). Given the era the slim volume was written in and that it was originally McMichael’s dissertation, this surface-level analysis is not surprising. 

Like any good detective, though, I started looking for connections and unturned stones. 

While The Dalrymple Mystery isn’t designated as an unlocated or unpublished text, a story titled “The Mystery of the Red Hand” appears on the list. This led me on to McMichael’s index, where I found “The Red Hand.” McMichael mentions a short mystery story titled “The Red Hand” in 1909 and that the story was rejected by publishers twice. When checking for other mysteries mentioned, I found The Unterrified Citizen. McMichael does note that text was retitled and published as The Dalrymple Mystery. I suspect it is likely “The Red Hand” and “The Red Hand Mystery” evolved into the text published serially in The National Magazine as The Dalrymple Mystery from October 1913 to March 1914. 

Of Thanet’s foray into detective fiction, McMichael only states that in 1909, when she attempted to sell “The Red Hand Mystery” to magazines, she was simply trying to cash in on the trend started by Arthur Conan Doyle, Anna Katherine Green, and others. 

That didn’t lead me to expect much of the work. 

The process of compiling the text was fairly simple once I located it in a scanned volume of The National Magazine. Internet Archive has a treasure trove of periodicals digitized, and recovery (as long as the volumes are complete) is a matter of searching the massive PDFs for the installments. I’m a Mac user, so Preview makes whittling the massive digital file down into the serial installments relatively easy. Then, I used the Adobe Acrobat PDF to Word tool to get the manuscript in text form. With a bit more cleanup to get rid of text carried over from half pages Thanet’s work shared with other contributors, I was ready to begin the real editing work. 

I approached the work first as cleanup and fixing all of the scanning and conversion errors, and  I kind of expected that to be the most time-consuming aspect of the project. I didn’t expect the work to have much value or interest, as Thanet is not known for her mystery writing, and McMichael had nothing to say about it beyond that it was serialized. 

I should have known better—Dalrymple features numerous threads to pull. 

Anyone who has studied American literature between 1850 and 1920 may be familiar with Hawthorne’s 1855 lament about the “damned mob of scribbling women” who were outselling him. Mark Twain likewise struggled with sales and control over his content to the point that he became an early adopter of self-publishing in 1884 when he established Charles L. Webster and Company. While male writers of the time–Hawthorne, Melville, Twain–are well-known, the women who outsold them are often absent from reading lists. This creates a false sense of those texts being unworthy of study. And, I fell into that trap of thinking that because only one biography existed about Alice French and her work as Thanet, there wouldn’t be much heavy lifting to do. 

National blurb touting the story

Specifically, I assumed editing this text would largely be a mechanical exercise of my editing skills. I expected to fly through the edits and say some bland words about how this was a fun project. 

What I found was something far more exciting and engaging—the world of domestic mysteries and detective fiction written by women. 

Alice French’s work goes far beyond local-color writing about quaint old ladies with anxiety about marriage and family. French was well-read on the news of the day, both locally and nationally. Her nonfiction works include essays on Arkansas and on issues like losing her leg to diabetes as well as topics like labor strikes, suffrage, photography, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and the 1898 Trans- Mississippi and International Exhibition. She had a finger to the pulse of America. 

Her fiction, likewise, often focuses on reform. One of her stories condemning the practice of convict leasing in Arkansas, “Trusty, No. 49,” (1890) developed as a result of her interest in court cases. She subscribed to a weekly paper so she could track court cases that sounded interesting. She would then make the trip from Clover Bend to Walnut Ridge and observe cases in court. 

While there aren’t court scenes in The Dalrymple Mystery, the story does involve crime and two older women, the Dalrymple sisters, who are witness to a mystery and its resolution. The Dalrymple sisters awaken on an ordinary morning to find a corpse in their library. By the time the police arrive, the body has vanished and the game is afoot. Upon searching the property, in an attempt to locate the body, they come across a bloody handprint: 

Plain and ominous on the cement walk running past the porte cochére to the side door was a big red hand, the dexter finger pointing to the words above, “No. l,” daubed in the same blood red. There were faint footprints, but so trampled that it was not easy to distinguish them, and all about were flecks and splotches of blood.

With a tiny bit of help from the police, the Dalrymple sisters and their friends—a female newspaper reporter, two teen boys, and a physician critical of the justice system—set out to uncover the victim’s identity, as well as that of the murderer. 

Without revealing a lot of spoilers, I can tell you I pulled a lot of tiny and some very large threads from a text I expected to just clean up and reprint. Some of these threads ranged from minor things like clocked stockings to major crime syndicate issues like the early mafia’s Black Hand extortion schemes. Colonial Revival architecture, early electric cars, kimonos as fashion in the nineteenth century, and Sheraton dining room furniture are just a few of the other threads I followed. 

Thanet in later years

Thanet also left a clue about early American mystery novelists—Anna Katherine Green, in particular. 

Green has been discussed on this blog before, notably in Louise A. Willis’ “Three Firsts” in December of 2013 and in Leigh Lunden’s “Women in Mystery History” in March of 2014. 

In Chapter Ten of The Dalrymple Mystery, she drops names: “Radcliffe was a devoted reader of Gaboriau, Doyle, Anna Katherine Green and all the newer workers of detective marvels in fiction.” I knew Doyle’s name, of course, but Anna Katherine Green’s name was new to me, so I knew that needed a note. First, I turned to McMichael’s biography to see if he mentioned Doyle or Green. And he had–Doyle is mentioned four times, Anna Katherine Green (as “Ann Katherine Greene”) once. 

Contrary to McMichael’s claims that Thanet was merely trend hopping and never completed a successful mystery for Bobbs-Merril, she did finish and successfully publish a mystery story. The Dalrymple Mystery was not only completed, but it is rich with cultural and historical references. 

We just have to pull the threads. 

One of the most interesting threads I pulled in annotating Dalrymple is William J. Flynn’s 1919 book The Barrel Mystery. Considered one of the first true crime books in the United States, the work focuses on the Black Hand and its role in a series of murders in 1903. Thanet would have read the 1903 newspaper coverage of the murder of Benedetto Madonio, whose body was found stuffed in a barrel on a Manhattan street in The New York Times and other outlets. Even though her story appeared before Flynn’s book, she was harvesting story ideas in real time from the same newspaper articles that covered his investigation. 

I never could have imagined that a forgotten serial by Octave Thanet would lead me to a foundational true crime account of forgery and Mafia killings. 

Not only were women writing serial mysteries and selling to magazines (Dalrymple was never published as a stand-alone novel in Thanet’s time), but many of the writers we do know from the time were writing thrillers and mysteries. Louisa May Alcott is a prime example. Even though it’s been decades since Stern & Rostenberg discovered Alcott’s “blood and thunder” thrillers published under her pen name of A.M. Barnard, the work Alcott is most known for is Little Women. Alcott, though, was far more cutting-edge, and her V.V. or Plots and Counterplots, an 1865 parody of Poe’s detective character C. Auguste Dupin, is now considered an important part of American mystery history. For more discussion of their work, see “Rostenberg & Stern: An Appreciation.” 

Text recovery and analysis like that done by Stern and Rostenberg is important work. The impulse to find and fully appreciate works by women in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is what drove my work as a graduate student and early scholar. It’s what motivated me in 2004 to learn who Alice French was and to try and understand how Octave Thanet has been dismissed as just another quaint female author despite her clear interest in politics, crime news, penal system reform, and court cases. 

We live in a horrifying age of fast fiction and digital literary schemes. In the post-Kindle era, public domain reprints have flooded the retail market. I’m often confused by people paying top dollar for texts that are ripped from Gutenberg or Internet Archive and reproduced with little to no editing, no annotations, and no introductory essays with context. From the beginning of KDP eBook publishing, simply repackaging public domain texts with eye-catching covers has been touted as a way to financial freedom. 

Basic preservation is also important work. We should be doing basic conservation and digitization of texts. And, I totally applaud the work of Standard eBooks. We should support the curation, editing, and formatting of works from the past. But we need to go further. 

In the early days of working on Dalrymple I kept telling myself that I was merely flexing my editing and annotation muscles. I had gotten lost in the sea of technology as king. I had to remember the basics. It’s easy to get lost in the speed that digitization and AI scraping have created. But in doing so we drown in the shallows. After all, the book market is flooded with reprints. Now, we can just feed public domain texts to AI bots and have it spit out books in the style of Octave Thanet or Anna Katherine Green. 

We’ve lost our ability to pull threads and reveal the patterns underneath the surface. We get lost in the “look what I found” moment and forget to answer why what we found matters. 

Now when I think about this edition of The Dalrymple Mystery, I think about work of recovery and exploration, rather than simply producing reprints with pretty covers. While university press editions like Duke’s 2003 The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight attempt to reintroduce foundational works to modern readers, those editions are often not truly accessible. Specifically, those reprints often are not palatable to a modern audience.  While I enjoy a pithy essay about domestic detective fiction that is heavily footnoted and rooted in literary criticism I might be able to track down on J-Stor, a lot of readers don’t. A university press imprint with a “critical introduction” written in academese often signals “boring” to a reader. 

Not everyone is willing to mine that introduction for the one or two golden nuggets it might provide. 

In addition, reprints from university and scholarly presses are not affordable to laypersons or even graduate students or contingent faculty. Some eBook editions, like Cambridge’s 2023 edition of Ganor’s Susan Glaspell in Context, cost $126 for the Kindle edition and $120 in hardcover. Even the original edition from University Press of Michigan sells for $33 in eBook, $35 in paperback, and $85 in hardback. The Duke reprint of Meta Victoria Fuller Victor’s novels is more affordable right now, but they still ring up at over  $17 for eBook, $33 for paperback, and over $90 for hardbacks. 

It’s not hard to see why folks aren’t buying those versions that provide some background and context for public domain texts. And, even though projects like Standard eBooks do a great job at providing beautiful digital reprints for free, they don’t tend to provide any context or analysis. 

Proofreading and repackaging is only the first step. If we’re going to combat the literacy crisis, we have to go further—we have to provide affordable reprints with enough context and analysis to make readers’ fingers itch to the point they start their own thread pulling. 

After all, true text recovery is detective work when done well. Once you start pulling threads, the text opens up and sends you on a million side quests. We live in an age where we can have a bot go out and put feelers across the internet looking for information. Despite the virtue signaling we see online about AI, we’re inundated with AI flyers, cartoon versions of photographs, deepfake videos, and even AI-authored novels. Tons of texts (some contemporary and some public domain) are likely entered into LLMs daily by giants like Anthropic and by individuals, looking to cash in somehow by training AI to output “books” that will make them rich.

We can’t leave this kind of work to the bots. Bots have been trained on materials like McMichael’s biography that dismiss or ignore the connections. 

To fully engage with the texts, we must pull at the threads. Only then can we bridge the gap between the digitized versions of texts we can find in public domain sites like Gutenberg and the high-priced reprints put out by academic presses. 

In the beginning I worried my efforts to annotate and publish The Dalrymple Mystery would matter to anyone else. I told myself the process was the thing and kept going. And, I’m so glad to report that the process led me back to my roots as a literary detective. 

Angelic Rodgers is currently exploring the Lake Chapala area of Mexico when she’s not chasing down obscure and largely forgotten tidbits of writing by women in America. She is an editor, writer, and founder of The Octave Thanet Project. Her edition of The Dalrymple Mystery is set to release in mid-November from Thanet House Press. The cover for the upcoming reprint is seen here. This cover is from a lino-cut Angel's sister, Renee Rodgers, designed for the book. They researched cover designers of the time and after discovering Margaret Armstrong was in vogue (and designed covers for some of Octave Thanet’s works), Renee moved forward with a design inspired by Armstrong’s style. And, yes, that is the same sister mentioned in the piece.

In addition to her work on Thanet, she also writes fiction and creative nonfiction. You can find her most recent updates on her Substack and on her website at http://www.angelicrodgers.com.

AND NOW BACK TO JOE:

Thanks, Angel! Readers, once The Dalrymple Mystery is available for purchase, I'll include a reminder in my following column. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to see this important piece of our history,

IN OTHER NEWS . . . 

Another of the anthologies that was orphaned when Down & Out Books was shuttered has returned to shelves, this time with a very snazzy new cover! Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Material World, edited by Michael Bracken, collects tales of PIs at work in the 1980s. My story, "The Right Size of Favor," about a threatened shakedown of the Hands Across America charity event, was selected by fellow SleuthSayer Rob Lopresti as his "best mystery story I read this week" in May of last year, and was also chosen for the upcoming volume Best Private Eye Stories of the Year. Many thanks to Crimson Gate Books for getting this dynamite collection back out into the world!

I'm also in love with the cover for Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder!, the new anthology from Wildside Press, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley. Crime stories based on urban legends--it's a fantastic idea for an anthology, and I can tell you the writers here really came through on the assignment. My entry, "The Things We Remember," kicks off the book with a tale about the grisly legends on one college campus--and the even more grisly origins of one of them. Fun fact: the story mentions several campus legends, all of which (save the central one the story revolves around) are actual stories told on campuses where I studied or worked.

Thanks again to Angel. See you all next month!

 

How Important is Plot?

Earlier this month, Liz posted a compelling blog about Standalone Characters. This made an almost uncanny introduction to the post I had written below, for September.  I always re-examine my life in September - remnants of having taught college for over 25 years, no doubt.   

So I ask today: 

How important is plot? 

I work hard on plot.  I don't start writing until I know the end of my crime novels.  Blame it on my short story training, perhaps, where every word must matter.  In a novel, I design every scene so it moves the story forward.  If it doesn't, out it goes.

Not only that, but I work hard to write a plot readers haven't seen before.  And after 60 short stories and 22 crime novels, that's not easy!   It takes me at least a year to imagine and write a 75,000 word mystery book.

So I was somewhat taken aback recently, when I asked a number of my readers which books of mine they liked best, and why.

WHAT READERS SAID: 

Almost everyone said some version of, "The Pharaoh's Curse Murders.  I like the banter between Lucy and Elf, her maid." Or  "The Goddaughter books.  They're so funny!"

When I tried to pin them down to an actual book, and an actual plot, that got harder.  One said,  "The book where The Lone Rearranger was introduced."  Another, "I really like Nico in The Goddaughter books."  Another - "I loved the fashions in The Silent Film Star Murders."

No one mentioned the plot of any of the books.

To say I was surprised is an understatement.  All that time creating plots with unique spins?  Plots where an astute reader might come to the same conclusion as the protagonist, at the very same time?  

But never too soon.  The clues must be clever enough, so a reader isn't disappointed.   We don't want them to figure out the mystery too soon.

WHAT ABOUT CRIME WRITERS? 

And then I talked to some noted crime-writer friends of mine.  I asked them the same question.  Which of my books did you like best?  The answers came fast and furious.

"The one where Lucy shoots the snake. Clever reveal."

"Your latest, the Egyptian one.  I loved the unusual and daring ending." 

(There were more, but to list them here would be spoilers.)

But they all had one thing in common:  they said something about the plot.

So here's what I came away with:  Readers remember and fall in love with characters.  

Writers love characters too.  But they are more apt to point out a clever plot, because they know how hard it is to pull off. 

My conclusion:  Of course, the best books have both.  Good Characters and good plots.  I expect readers would notice if the plot was ho-hum.  I certainly do.

I write the books I wish someone else would write, so I could read them.  I feel blessed when readers like them too.

What about you?  How important is plot to your writing? Is plot more important in a short story than a novel?

Compared to Agatha Christie by The Toronto Star, and “Christie-meets-Wodehouse” by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Melodie Campbell is the winner of 10 awards. Her publications include 22 novels and over 60 short stories. The Pharaoh's Curse Murders, from Cormorant books, has just been released.  http://www.melodiecampbell.com

The Horse Latitudes

More than a few years ago my sister-in-law gave me her copy of The Horse Latitudes, Robert Ferrigno’s first novel. Knowing I wrote crime fiction, she thought the book would appeal to me.

The setup is on the surface straightforward. Former anthropology professor and former drug dealer Danny DiMedici returns to his apartment from a night swim, when he’s confronted by two detectives, whom he believes are from Narcotics. It turns out they are homicide detectives, who want to question him about his ex-wife’s blood-spattered beach house. There are no bodies at the scene, which convinces Danny that Lauren Kiel, his ex, is still alive.

The book is full of quirky characters:^*

• Detective Holt—“She was the best dressed cop Danny had ever seen, and wore a tailored gray suit too clingy for Sunday mass and too conservative for a good table at Trumps. Her thick red hair was bound by an ornate antique gold clip. She looked like old money, the kind that got a Yale law degree but felt it was her civic duty to spend a few years with a good PD on the way to a federal judgeship” (p. 15).
• Detective Steiner—“His tie had a yellow ‘I Love Grandpa’ pattern on a black background” (p. 16).
• Dr. Reese—“More gristle than meat, Reese was a tough little bantam with a cropped bullet skull and a look of intense calculation.…Reese was a burnt-black and unforgiving as a Ubangi shaman or a Yaqui medicine man—the very people who had contributed so much to his success” (pp. 45–46).
• Boyd and Lloyd, twin nephews of Dr. Reese—“The twins were his greatest achievement and his most bitter failure. They were raw power, totally obedient, but their performance was erratic. Throw a stick into a boiling volcano, and they’d fetch it. As long as they remembered what it looked like.…What a waste of DNA. They didn’t even dream” (p. 78).
• Michael Kiel, Lauren’s brother: “Michael stood in the front yard wearing baggy madras Bermudas and a white letter sweater, a Pebble Beach Country Club golf cap rakishly tilted back on his head. His ancient jungle boots were spit-shined and laced halfway up. Even with his question-mark posture, he was huge: six feet six, with a wide, flat chest and spindly legs” (p. 88).

And that’s just for starters.

Despite how much I like the book, it took me a long time to understand that what made it stand out in my mind is how it undermines the tropes of the crime fiction hero. Why is Danny swimming to exhaustion every night? Because he’s still in love with his ex. Why did she leave him? Because after he witnessed the murder of friends of his, he lost his edge and got out of the drug business. Lauren’s response? “‘God hates a coward’” (p. 12).

Filled with nonlinear narrative and told from multiple points of view, it’s not a conventional crime novel and it doesn’t have a thriller’s pacing, but despite all that, or maybe because of all that, it’s one of my favorites.

Robert Ferrigno’s path to fiction writing reads like one of his novels:

I was born in Florida, growing up on the last paved street of a small town, spending my youth cutting secret passages through the palmetto thickets with a machete and occasionally burning down those palmettos for the simple pleasure of seeing the fire trucks arrive, sirens blaring.

After earning a college degree in Philosophy and a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I thought that I would be happy being a college professor, writing dense, literary novels which I would assign to my students. I found, however, that being a professor was mostly a matter of going to meetings, and instead went back to my first love, poker.

I spent the next five years gambling full-time and living in a high-crime area populated by starving artists, alcoholics and petty criminals. After a time, I got restless and used some of my winnings to start a punk rock magazine called “The Rocket.” The success of “The Rocket” got me a job as a feature writer for a daily newspaper in Southern California, where I took the adventure-and-new-money beat. Over the next seven years I flew with the Blue Angels, drove Ferraris and went for desert survival training with gun nuts. Great job but I wanted to write novels. I quit my day job and started work.^†

When he was a journalist, Ferrigno got to interview Elmore Leonard, one of his literary heroes. Ferrigno had been writing fiction on the weekends but making little progress on his novel. Leonard gave him some life-changing advice:

You get up at five and you start work, said Mr. L., no messing around making coffee or buttering toast. You sit down and start writing. At 7 you stop, if you’re in the middle of a sentence, you stop, and then you make coffee, take a shower, have breakfast, whatever you normally do. You’re done working on the novel for the day. You do that every day and at the end of a year, you’ll have a novel. Then you send it out to an agent and you start on the next one.^‡

Leonard later offered to blurb Ferrigno’s The Horse Latitudes, if he liked it. Which he did, much to Ferrigno’s and his publisher’s delight. Later, after the book had gone on to some success, Ferrigno let Leonard know that he hadn’t exactly followed his advice:

I told him I had lied to him when I said I would get up every day at five a.m. as he had suggested. Yeah? His voice on the line tense now. Yes sir, I told him, I got up at four a.m. every day for the last year and a half. You’re a better writer than I am, so I figured I needed the extra hour. It made him laugh, a dry cackle that kind of hung up at the back of his throat. A beautiful laugh.^‡

I’ve read The Horse Latitudes many times, and even now, I’ll open it up at random and reread a few pages. How inspiring has Robert Ferrigno been to me? I gave Erin Ferrigno, my female PI, his last name. What books or stories inspire you? Let me know in the comments.

Finally, thanks to Stacy Woodson, Robert Lopresti, and Leigh Lundin for bringing me onboard SleuthSayers. I’m thrilled to be here.

Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared online and in several anthologies. His stories have been selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, was published May 2025 and is being republished this October by Open Road Integrated Media.

Notes:

^* All page numbers for quotations from The Horse Latitudes are taken from the paperback edition, published in 1990 by William Morrow and Company.

^† “About the Author,” Crime Pays, accessed August 12, 2026, https://web.archive.org/web/20060220135533/http://robertferrigno.com/bio.html.

^‡ Robert Ferrigno, ”Thanks, Mr. L.,” National Review, August 24, 2013, https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/08/thanks-mr-l-robert-ferrigno/, accessed August 12, 2026.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2026-09-039, Gold that Glitters

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

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

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

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

John Irvin's TINKER TAILOR

  

“In my jungle, you’d be just another asshole.”

The director John Irvin died last month.  He wasn’t a brand name, and he wasn’t identified with any particular genre.  His best-known picture is probably Hamburger Hill, from 1987.  But he made two indelible stories: le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Frederick Forsyth’s Dogs of War.

The Dogs of War was Forsyth’s third novel, and it has a convoluted back story.  The plot involves a mercenary-led coup against a corrupt African dictatorship, and Forsyth created a legend that he was prepping a coup himself, against Equatorial Guinea – which got him inside the world of guns for hire, and gives the book its nuts-and-bolts authenticity - but also suggested to the wrong people that Forsyth’s invented coup was the real deal, and there was later an actual coup in Guinea, similar in many ways to the paramilitary operation mounted in Forsyth’s novel. 

The movie streamlines the story considerably, without making it less morally ambiguous or any less savage.  The preparation is in itself fascinating – Bill Goldman once said the trick to a good heist movie is that you show the audience how it’s done, and the story arc is much like a robbery picture, the pitch, the recon, the score – and then the moral reckoning.  Forsyth is said to have disliked the picture, which may be because of the necessary compressions in the script, but there’s no wasted motion.

The mini-series adaption of Tinker Tailor takes a far more circular approach, with a lot of breathing room, none of which lets any of the air out of its tires.  It’s consistently nerve-wracking.  Le Carré, it should be admitted, doesn’t suffer from the long-form.  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet’s 1967 movie of Call for the Dead) are very good pictures, both with a runtime of just under two hours, but generally speaking, le Carré is better when you don’t cut corners.  The Little Drummer Girl is a terrific book, and it turns in on itself, winding the clock.  The 1984 movie with Diane Keaton is an honorable attempt, but the 2018 adaption, with Florence Pugh, is a masterpiece.  The same can be said of Tinker Tailor and its sequel, Smiley’s People.  Each of the television versions run a full six hours. 

Tinker Tailor is very much script-driven, and Arthur Hopcraft’s screenplay is labyrinthine without becoming unnecessarily tortuous.  It also has an extraordinary cast, beginning with Guinness, but with Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhase and Beryl Reid as Connie Sachs, Joss Ackland, Ian Bannen, Hywel Bennett, Patrick Stewart (in a cameo), Nigel Stock, Sian Phillips, and the incomparable Ian Richardson as Bill Haydon.

Tony Pierce-Roberts’ other cinematography credits include The Remains of the Day and one of my own secret enthusiasms, A Private Function.  But managing this herd of cats was John Irvin’s job description.  It was a five-month shoot, complicated by logistics issues and the threat of strikes.  Alec Guinness reportedly had cold feet about playing Smiley, at the outset, but Irvin wouldn’t humor him.  Asked later what he thought about the director, Guinness said, “Balls behind the camera.”

“Being a director is the most privileged existence there is,” Irvin remarked of his career.  "It's the best table in the restaurant."

House of Creativity

One of many paintings by Temple’s mother
we have hanging in our home.

Temple and I live in a home filled with the creativity of others.

Temple’s mother and my mother were artists, and their paintings adorn the walls, as does a painting by Temple’s great-grandmother on her father’s side. Temple’s father crafted our dining room table, two end tables in our living room, and other furniture throughout the house. We have several quilts sewn by our mothers and other family members. We have original art and limited edition prints we’ve collected over the years, some by friends and acquaintances and some by strangers. Additionally, though I have none of his work, my mother’s stepfather was a photographer who also created and sold jewelry.

Our own contributions pale by comparison: A few shelves contain books I wrote, edited, or contributed to, and many of Temple’s tiny sketches and watercolors peek out from shelves in several rooms.

Temple and I both come from decidedly hard-working families, none of whom ever made a living from art, but they found time to create it, just as we do now. The attitudes they passed along, though, were markedly different.

As a child and as a young man, I drew and took photographs and created nothing but a drawer full of sketches, drawings, and photographs that demonstrate no particular skill at visual arts. My musical attempts led to a collection of instruments sufficient to outfit a rock band but which serve to remind me I have no particular musical skills.

When I was young, my mother encouraged my attempts. Though she could never afford lessons, she gave me my first guitar, and my first drum sticks and practice pad. She also gave me a Brownie camera. More importantly, when I told her I wanted to be a writer, she gave me my first typewriter and later gave me my second. Though she never made a dime from her art, my mother never told me I needed something to fall back on.

Though her mother and great-grandmother were artists and her father crafted furniture, Temple’s parents did not encourage her. They emphasized the need to get a job and earn a living, so her path to art was a much tougher one. Rather than being in the forefront of her life—as it has been in mine—Temple’s pursuit of art was squeezed into the tiny scraps of time between her adult responsibilities. Only in the last few years has she felt free to explore her artistic calling. Now, just as I have a room where I write, she has a room where she paints.

I wish Temple had not had to battle her upbringing to find her way to art—especially because of her family’s artistic legacy—but, if nothing else, it proves that artists will find a way.

Pencils down

             Among the common laments of struggling writers is the problem of getting started.  Writing that first sentence, paragraph, chapter.  Personally, I like that part.  If all I had to do was start a project, my batting average would soar.  The difficulty for me is starting something good.  That’s a whole n’other kettle of fish.  And a consistent ravager of averages.

            There’s an opposite problem, which is knowing when to stop.  Both these issues are

dealt with by Issac Newton, who basically said getting something moving takes some effort, though stopping it can be even harder, or actually impossible, without the intervention of an opposing force. 

            Technically, the best treatment for this affliction is to have thought out the structure of your book in advance.  If you have a beginning, a middle and an end, presumably you’ll know when it’s time to stop.  This gets us into the tiresome debate over who’s a pantser and who’s an outliner.  If you believe the beleaguered panelists at a writers conference, we’re either one or the other.  Of course, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle, though when it comes to wrapping up a mystery novel, it’s pretty helpful to have a destination in mind as you’re writing along. 

Another trope of the writing commentariat is E.L. Doctrow’s bit, "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  That’s a lovely bit of poetry, but the most likely outcome of this approach is hitting a tree, or running over your next-door neighbor.  Employing a purely Doctrowian strategy, you might find yourself driving from Oxford, Mississippi to the Upper Peninsula, and not have a clue about how to find your way back.  If all that driving is a stand-in for work product, that means you‘ll be throwing out a lot of pages, and this I find

inexcusably wasteful.   I’m more in Reed Farrel Coleman’s camp, who says something like, “I know how to get started, and where I want to end up, and then I figure out how to get there along the way.”

There are believable reports from the conference stage of writers who find their plots revealing themselves as they write, with the finale popping into view at just the right moment, that is, when they’ve reached about 100 thousand words and everything suddenly makes a lot of sense.  I know this happens, and for some, it’s the only way it can happen, but I suspect their genius lies in the subconscious, which has been ably managing navigation while the driver is at the wheel wearing out her pants.

Newton did stipulate that the force needed to arrest motion is external, but this needn‘t apply to automobiles (which have brakes) or disciplined, experienced writers itching to write “Finis”.  Though in support of Newton’s proviso, we also have editors, armed with book contracts, underpinned by production costs and sales forecasts. I worked for a publisher once, and I got to say, “We love your book.  Please cut forty pages.”  I think this always made for a better novel, and importantly, one we could afford to print. 

Have you ever had a big chunk of writing get gobbled up by the computer, and been forced to recreate it all from scratch?  And then somehow come across the original pages?  In my case, the reincarnated version was always better, though some nice bits were invariably lost.  I copy these down and squirrel them away for future use.    

This might give you the idea that you can always improve your book if you have the time to constantly fiddle.  Though there’s a subset of the sin of overwriting, which is over rewriting.  In woodworking and car mechanics, two pursuits that have a lot in common with banging out novels, this is called “Fixing it till it breaks.”  It’s the delusion of perfectionists that refining will always elevate the product, not knowing when they’ve crossed into

sabotaging the messiness that actually creates something fresh and notable.  Whether inflicted by a heavy-handed editor, or ones internal arbiter, it amounts to a crime against art. It's not just about when to stop, but how you do it.

By far my favorite form of ending is one that really isn’t.  The reader thinks he’s idling around in a denouement, when all of a sudden he’s back in the soup.  Or a final twist pulls it all into a more satisfying conclusion (e.g. Presumed Innocent, my personal crime writing GOAT.)  James Cameron, undoubtedly inspired by Rasputin, built about five climaxes into the original Terminator, which my young son at the time renamed The Determinedator.  This technique is a lot of fun, but not that easy to pull off without seeming contrived.  I admire the writers who do.

Our most recent terrier, who died having outlived all his successors, always looked like he was eager to get on to the next thing.  He didn’t know what it was, but he was sure it was going to be great.  He might have been possessed by eternal optimism or just some fundamental drive; it wasn’t exactly joy, but certainly the sublime fulfillment that comes from never being entirely fulfilled.