The Nearest Exit

  

My pal Stephanie gave me a couple of Olen Steinhauer’s, in paperback, curious to know what I thought.  I was a big fan of Berlin Station, so I knew of the guy, although I hadn’t read any of his books.  (Berlin Station, if you’re not familiar with it, was a spy show Steinhauer wrote and exec produced, shot on location, solid cast, tight scripts.  I thought it was convincing and adroit, but I have to say the first season was the best.)  In the event, there are four novels so far in the Milo Weaver series, about a CIA agent trying to retire from the game, and I’ve now read the first two, The Tourist and The Nearest Exit. 

I wasn’t crazy about The Tourist.  It was a little too Red Sparrow, if that makes any sense – overwrought in the wrong places, meaning both books went deep into the mechanics of stuff I didn’t care about, at the expense of clarity and momentum.  That’s probably an unkind criticism.  The Tourist has a terrific third act, no question, but it took a while getting there.  Having now read The Nearest Exit, I have the unsettled feeling that The Tourist is a necessary prequel, but in the sense of being like an author’s note to himself.  Again, that seems like a mean-spirited thing to say.  It’s as if there were too much clutter, competing for his attention, and he had to get it out of the way before he could write the far more crisp and sinister second book.  Anyway, least said, soonest mended. 

It’s probably obvious, by this point, that I thought The Nearest Exit was terrific.  It’s about a deception op, meant to make the clandestine CIA department, the Tourists, doubt their security.  This is one of the elements that bothered me in the previous book, that CIA would set up an off-the-books entity like the Bureau of Tourism, which doesn’t answer to chain of command.  It’s simply not how a national intelligence apparat operates.  You might very well want to cultivate deniability, and use black money to establish a proprietary, so you’re one step removed, but even if you’re using a system of cut-outs, to protect yourself from direct responsibility, you’ll never surrender command authority.  Reading the second Milo book, though, my required suspension of disbelief was frictionless.  What gave me pause earlier didn’t seem important, this time.

While we’re talking about the rogue or ‘disavowed’ black ops unit, a staple of conspiracy thrillers, we might pause to consider its real-life origins.  CIA has been troubled from the beginning by the institutional split between intelligence-gathering and covert operations, sometimes known by the euphemism Active Measures, or what’s called spook shit in the trade.  The wartime OSS and SOE (the Brit asymmetric warfare outfit) did a lot of behind-the-lines sabotage, and used information management and disruption to good effect.  Some of the schemes they came up with were Looney Tunes – some of the schemes they successfully executed were Looney Tunes, see The Man Who Never Was – but they didn’t lack for imagination and daring.  Allen Dulles was the OSS resident in Bern during the war, and when he took over CIA, in 1953, he brought with him a fatal weakness for the romance of covert.  It’s just so tempting.  CIA rarely gets in trouble for intelligence collection, it’s always some cowboy crap.  Dulles oversaw painless coup d’etats in Iran and Guatemala, and then tripped over his skirts at Bay of Pigs.  This didn’t mean people gave up on covert, they just thought, We’ll manage it better next time around, and then they blew their cover, yet again. 

This is precisely the threat environment in the Milo Weaver novels, a secret spook shop, not much loved and certainly never acknowledged, always in danger of being exposed.  They operate on the periphery, and seem to specialize in Wet Work, eliminating the awkward or embarrassing loose end, the compromised asset, the defector in place that’s lost their nerve or outlived their usefulness.  There are two parallel plot lines in The Nearest Exit, the hunt for a double agent, inside Tourism, and the sex traffic in children, from Eastern Europe.  And like parallel lines, receding into the distance, they appear to converge as they approach the horizon, but that could be an illusion.

Here’s the thing I really liked about Exit.  The second act goes off in a completely different direction, with a completely different set of characters, and circles back with a very deliberate and almost fated sense of mixed motives and missed signals.  The theme is retribution, and it gets claustrophobically personal.  All very John le Carré, in its circularity, and a le Carré turn of phrase comes to mind, shaking the tree.  It’s both satisfying and astringent, the moral complications never theatrical, but a steady bass rhythm, in support of the flashier solos.

Highly recommended.  This is what good spy fiction looks like, when you don’t condescend to the material, and let it find its own voice, open to sorrow and ambiguities. 

Dogged Pursuit

     Occasionally, a meeting delay can be a good thing. 

    I keep the book, Useless Etymology within easy reach on my desk. I enjoy stories about word origins. I've now and again incorporated a few of them into blogs. Useless Etymology offers short snippets on a variety of words. The book is entertaining and easy to set aside when the other meeting participants sign on to their computers. 

    Last Monday, while I waited for the meeting to kick off, my attention wandered to the backstory for the word, feisty. 

Blackoranges, Public Domain

    I like the imagery evoked by feisty. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word as "active, forceful, full of determination." For me, it brings to mind a creature who is spunky. Sometimes I get an image of Muffin, the dog down the street that is always ready to defend her property line. At other times I picture an indomitable elderly individual--the kind of character who might get cast in The Thursday Murder Club. 

    Delving into its origins, I learned that in the 19th Century, a feist did, in fact, refer to a small dog. (If you've ever been cussed out by a Pomeranian, you see the connection.) In "The Bear Hunt," a poem composed by Abraham Lincoln, he refers to a feist (although he spelled it fice.)

    Feisty has always been a descriptor for dogs. 

    But here is where the etymology grabbed my attention. Feist comes from the Middle English phrase fysting curre or feisting cur. Most people recognize cur as a synonym for a dog. Feisting means to break wind. (Fizzle has the same root.)

    To be feisty than is to be a stinking, flatulent, little dog. 

    Muffin's mom would be horrified if she knew. 

    Useless Etymology cites an 1811 source that discussed how feist and dog became thoroughly merged. Picture a group of 19th-Century, high-society women sitting in the parlor, sharing tea. Each socialite had a small dog planted on her lap. If someone accidentally broke wind, the dog would be available to assume the gastrointestinal blame. 

    Like many words throughout the English language, the archaic definition of feisty has fallen away. The word became more associated with other characteristics of small-breed dogs and then moved on to other creatures. Still, the next time you're watching ESPN and a commentator describes the underdog team as being feisty, I hope you'll wonder if there is, by chance, an alternative reason why the team can't wait to get out of the locker room and back on the field. 

    Bonus Etymology:

    As a related linguistic tangent, I found aske-fiske, a now-obsolete English term for a fire-tender. It dates from around the 15th Century and literally means ash blower. According to Etymonline, an online etymology source, aske-fiske often described a bellows rather than a human tasked with the job. I'll let you make the connection between flatulence and a bellows. Some war-like Norse clans also used the term for a cowardly fellow who preferred sitting in the corner by the fireplace than pillaging among the neighbors. 

    At last Monday's meeting, the other participants eventually appeared. I started the meeting with a smile on my face. Fortunately, everyone behaved themselves. If someone in the meeting had acted feisty, I might have fallen out of my chair. 

    Until next time. 

The Unique Art of Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam Self-Portrait

Last fall, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced a retrospective exhibition of the work of Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. (His mother was Congolese and Spanish, his father Chinese.) But what caught my attention was an article in the newsletter of the Archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALBA), which detailed Lam's participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, when idealistic )social democrats and Communists banded together in a doomed attempt to stop a takeover by General Franco and his allies, Hitler and Mussolini.

The Civil War

From this perspective, "it was Republican Spain, where Lam frequented left-wing circles and read Marxist literature, which first politicized the painter. Lam rejected the Eurocentric primitivism of much modernist art, which he denounced for commodifying non-European cultures as objects of curiosity. In Lam’s paintings, Afro-Cuban culture speaks back. Toward the end of his life, he described his work as 'an act of decolonization.'” In Paris, Lam had close ties with Picasso and other European artists and writers. His painting, The Civil War, conveys the same anguish and chaos as Picasso's Guernica. Lam's, like many of his later works, was painted on brown wrapping paper, because canvas was expensive.

Lam and Picasso

On his return to Cuba in 1941, Lam became involved in Afro-Cuban culture and spirituality, both the Négritude movement of poet and theoretician Aimé Césaire and the spiritual practice of Lucumi. He said, “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but fully expressing the black spirit, the beauty of black [visual] art.” (wifredolam.org/biography) His magnificent painting, The Jungle, the centerpiece of the 2025-26 MoMA show, created a scandal at one of its first showings at a gallery in New York. When the Museum first acquired it in 1945, they hung it inconspicuously next to the coat check. Lam said, “I could have been a good painter from the School of Paris, but I felt like a snail out of its shell. What really broadened my painting is the presence of African poetry.”

Enough words. The paintings speak for themselves. I'm sorry if you missed the MoMA exhibition, which ended on April 11. I don't always have a visceral experience at the art museum, but I found Lam's work thrilling and unique.

The Jungle

Oggue Orissa

Body and Soul

Song of Osmoses (Bombing of Hiroshima)

Malembo, God of Crossroads

Grief of Spain references both the Civil War and images of African masks that influenced the Cubists in Paris. Lam would later criticize them for appropriating African motifs.

The Urge to Kill

My ancestry is Scottish. I was born in New Zealand, but my family line (on both sides) is only a couple of steps out from Scottish soil. So, it wasn't random that I set a large chunk of my latest short story, Alan Duncan Did This, in Edinburgh (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2026). My story is about a Scotsman, Alan Duncan, who travels down to London on Guy Fawkes night (1949) to commit a murder. A murder he's quite proud of. A murder he ranks as a work of art.

Fletcher's murder had been a work of magnificence. Alan almost wished he could have signed it. With a bold, florid flourish, like Salvador Dali. Alan Duncan did this.

Vanity? Yep. A villain's vanity was a common theme in Agatha Christie's mysteries; it was often her villain's downfall. Anyway, in this post, I don't want to chat about Scotland or a murderer's vanity, but about motive. Alan Duncan had a good, cogent reason to commit his murder. Killers in fiction should.

Detectives are always looking for means, motive, and opportunity. But in real life, motive is the lessor of these in criminal investigations. It's not required for establishing guilt or gaining a conviction. It's nice for the prosecutor to have one in their basket going into a courtroom, but it's unnecessary to prove. For writers of mysteries, however, motive is the central key to a character's actions. It's the engine on which a story is propelled.

People don't commit murders for weak reasons in fiction. Without a strong, compelling motive, a character's actions reek of implausibility. Yes, in the real world, killers can and do commit murders for no reason, but that doesn't really fly in fiction (there are exceptions, so I'm speaking in general). Spoiler: Imagine if the killers in Murder on the Orient Express had meticulously plotted and killed Ratchett/Cassetti because he stole Princess Dragomiroff's polo mallet. Weak sauce.

Strong and clear motives engage the reader. And audience. Shakespeare was a master of this.

• Macbeth (back to Scotland) murders King Duncan through ambition; he wants the crown, and to allay the doubts of his wife and demonstrate his power. His motives are ambition and ego.
• Richard (Richard III) needs nought from a wife to spur him to action; his ambition has no hesitation when he orders the murder of, or personally dispatches, a succession of nobility to the hereafter. His motivation is also revenge against the world. He is a man bitter with resentment.
• Iago (Othello) is also motivated by resentment (Othello's promoting of Cassio rather than himself), and sex (the suspicion that Othello has slept with his wife). “I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leaped into my seat.” Envy is Iago's principal motivation. He envies everything about Othello. And it's true that Iago doesn't actually murder Othello, but he does systematically destroy Othello and lead him to kill his own wife. Revenge writ large.

These are all strong motivators because they are plausible in their contexts and thoroughly human. We might not condone a character's actions, but we instinctively understand their reasoning.

It's often remarked that sex or money are the most common motives for murder in crime fiction. Cherchez la femme. Cherchez la dollar. Here's my stab (see what I did there?) at a start of a murder motive taxonomy based on these two headings:

SEX	MONEY
Jealousy Betrayal Humiliation Obsession Eliminating a rival	Inheritance Insurance payout Freedom from a debt Property acquisition Career advancement

To sex and money, as per Shakespeare above, I would add revenge.

Revenge is often egged on by sex or money. Alan Duncan's motive is revenge by way of sex – jealousy and obsession. He focuses his whole life on seeking revenge because of his jealousy. Murder is his only release from his idée fixe.

Revenge can also stand alone. Spoilers: Murder on the Orient Express is a murder of plain and simple revenge. The actions of the killers are not invoked because of sex or money (however, what they are avenging was a crime involving money (a ransom)).

This is only the tip of the iceberg of murder motives. Do you have a favourite when you write, maybe one that isn't in this list?

Why would ANYONE want to write a Novel? (a humorous post)

Wacky thoughts as my 21st novel hits bookstores across the continent...

I actually wrote my first novel on a dare.  This is not a particularly good reason to embark on such an endeavor, and probably illustrates exactly why my kids think I shouldn’t be allowed outside of the condo without a leash.

But true, it is.  Some years ago, I was having a good time at the bar of the Toronto Press Club, and a local columnist (an older guy) said to me, “You’ve written comedy, you’re a syndicated columnist, and you’ve got a slew of short story publications to your name.  Why haven’t you written a novel?”

Upshot, he dared me.  Since then, I have sworn off scotch and older men.

That doesn’t tell the whole story though.

I love writing fiction.  I wrote my first story at eight, and won my first award at eighteen. 

It started even before that.  At four, I was making up stories.  My parents called it lying. I figure that was short-sighted of them.

Still, after 21 books, I have to ask myself, Why would ANYONE want to write a novel?  Truly, I don't understand why so many people do.

Writing a short story is FUN!

Writing a novel is HARD.

It takes me a year to write a 70,000 word novel.  Tons of research and 1000 hours of slumping over a keyboard.  This is a peculiar way to spend your time.  Wouldn’t it be more fun to be out on the golf course?  Or meeting friends for lunch?

Speaking of friends...my pal and colleague Lisa de Nikolits puts it so well:

 "I keep telling myself it's an honour and a privilege to still be on the playing field while so many others aren't and that's true, but still - more work rewarded by more work!"

(Lisa joins us in June for a guest column.) 

I suspect new novelists like to think they will achieve fame with a novel, that they couldn’t achieve with a collection of published short stories in respectable magazines.  I don’t know about that.  That hasn't been my experience.  You can have ten awards, and continual contracts and still not be a household name.  

Not to mention, everybody who can sit at a keyboard feels they have the right to criticize your year's work. 

So why do I do it? I really have to wonder.  I'm not sure the answer below will satisfy even me.

I seem to have this mental illness that involves characters in my head demanding that I write their stories.  If I try to ignore them, it gets awfully noisy in there, and I can’t think.

Or put another way, writing novels is cheaper than a therapist.

Melodie Campbell fights with her characters while thumping out their stories on the shore of Lake Ontario.  Her 21^st book, The Pharaoh’s Curse Murders, is now available at B&N, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo and all the usual suspects..  If you like the humour in The Goddaughter series, look for Pizza Wars, first in a new novella-length series!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Unintended Benefits of Reading Nonfiction, Pt. Deux

Last time around I talked about nonfiction books that had helped make me a better writer, influenced my style, made me think, etc. And when I asked some writer friends about nonfiction that influenced their own writing. 

Several of my friends wrote about writing craft books that helped them, and I posted examples of both in my last blog post which you can find here.

This go-round I'm back with more examples of both types of recommendations. I hope you find something interesting and useful here.

*    *    *

Writer, Editor, Publisher & Communication Guru David Schlosser had quite a bit to say on the subject: 

If I had only one book, it would be The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. For all the chatter and 
conventional wisdom we hear about "narrative" and how humans are genetically wired to respond to stories more than facts, this book explains the actual mechanisms of action:

If I had more than one book, it would be two series of three books that I often tell colleagues, "If you read these books, you will learn everything you need to know about being a professional communicator of any kind - from PR and marketing to writing novels."

Series One

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr explains how stories affect humans at a cellular level:

Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story by John Yorke explains how patterns of storytelling affect the audience and, IMHO, the right approach to what conventional wisdom frequently and inaccurately refers to as "the three-act structure."

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee translates Storr's and Yorke's strategic insights into tactics that put storytelling meat on structural bones. For all the good sport made of McKee's formulaic approach, this book is a classic for a reason.

Series Two

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman explains through research and study findings the cognitive
biases created by the human affinity for telling stories. Kahneman explains Storr's sources of the evolutionary biology that tunes humans to ignore facts and follow emotions.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini is the refence bible for anyone and everyone in the industry of motivating people to action. Cialdini wrote this book as a manual for people to resist the strategies and tactics of snake-oil salesmen and related hucksters. No consumer advocate ever sought his advice, but now he's among the highest-paid speakers at sales conferences around the world.

Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense by Rory Sutherland explains how and why irrationality is the path to success in storytelling. This book is a breezy, entertaining flight over the terrain mapped by Kahneman and Cialdini.

*    *    *

Edgar-Nominated Author Sam Wiebe was much more succinct:

(Literary Critic Harold) Bloom is a great choice! 

(For obvious reasons, I quite agree! - again see my last post here.)

Book: Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

Why: Goldman's no-bullshit discussion of the film industry and his screenwriting projects is funny and fascinating. 

*    *    *

Mary Higgins Clark Award-Winning Author Lina Chern had a great pick: 

Book: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Why: We forget sometimes that this book is nonfiction, because the story it tells is so impeccably told. It’s a stunning reminder that all life has the potential to be art, in the hands of the right storyteller.

*    *    *

Horror Writer Scotti Andrews picked one of the most acclaimed nonfiction authors of the past two decades:

I don't read a lot of nonfiction but I have read Jon Krakauer and really appreciate how he weaves facts into a storytelling arc. Especially Under the Banner of Heaven and Three Cups of Deceit.

*    *    *

Agatha Award-Winning Author Kate B. Jackson cited a classic of the writing craft genre: 

Book: The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass

So the reason I like Donald Maass' book is he takes an interesting approach to having an emotional impact. He talks a lot of how each reader is bringing their own stuff to what they read. How you don't necessarily want to the reader to take the journey with your character but you want to provide space for them to take their own journey. 

He also talks about how your character's experience doesn't usually translate to the reader unless you give opportunities for the reader to have their own experiences. 

Show don't tell but also don't try to control what you want someone to feel. 

*    *    *

And that's it for now. Hope you saw something that inspired you or at least made you think!

See you in two weeks!