Short Cut to Hell

Seriously, how could you resist?  There are pulp novels, and B-pictures, with titles made for the bottom half of a double bill on the drive-in circuit.  (A phenomenon that doesn’t exist anymore, of course, and that’s half the point.)  It’s a marketing ploy, sure, but it’s a conscious esthetic choice.  I Spit on Your Grave, from 1951, falls somewhat short of its lurid promise, while I Married a Monster from Outer Space delivers quite nicely – never an expressive actor, Tom Tryon is as flavorless as a boiled rutabaga – although you never know.  Sometimes the tease is exactly that, an empty handshake.

Short Cut to Hell, which I stumbled across on YouTube, is less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are pretty juicy.  The opening shot, with Yvette Vickers sashaying down the hotel corridor in a skintight dress, is a visual the rest of the movie can’t begin to live up to, the male gaze made flesh.  And the long third-act set piece on the assembly line of the aluminum foundry is terrific.  Short Cut to Hell is the only picture James Cagney ever directed, an oddity by itself, apparently as a favor to the producer, A.C. Lyles.  It’s a remake of This Gun for Hire, and doesn’t even come close.  The lead isn’t bad, but he’s got nothing on Alan Ladd.  The two actors that show the most chops are Georgann Johnson, who did a lot of TV, early and late, and should have gotten better parts and more airtime, and Orangey the cat, a two-time winner of the Patsy award (Rhubarb and Breakfast at Tiffany’s).  The rest of the cast is wallpaper. 

The rewrite is credited to Ted Berkman and Raphael Blau (collaborators on Bedtime for Bonzo), based on a screenplay by W.R. Burnett and Albert Maltz, who shouldn’t need an introduction - The Asphalt Jungle and High Sierra are Burnett’s; Maltz did Mildred Pierce and The Naked City – and they adapted the Graham Greene novel.  The director of photography is Haskell Boggs, best known for three Jerry Lewis pictures (along with I Married a Monster from Outer Space, as it happens), and he shot Short Cut to Hell in black-and-white VistaVision.  I’ve talked about this process before; it was a widescreen competitor to Cinemascope, that lasted from the middle 1950’s into the middle 1970’s, and has been used since mostly for special effects work, Star Wars, for example.  VistaVision used two frames, side-by-side, which gave it enormous depth of field, and color saturation (Hitchcock loved it).  When you shoot with it in black-and-white, you get deep, deep blacks.  For example, in Short Cut to Hell, in the factory floor scene, the patrol cops are wearing leather jackets, and you see the light catch the folds in the leather.  That, boys and girls, is good cinematography.  You have to wonder what John Alton, the great black-and-white DP who shot Raw Deal and T-Men, among others, might have done with it, if he’d had the chance.

You see where I’m going.  Short Cut to Hell is a great title, but it isn’t a great picture, by any stretch.  There are plenty better.  All the same, it’s got bits that stick to the ribs.  I wouldn’t call it adventurous; Cagney uses a pretty conventional format, and except for Georgann, as noted, the acting is generic.  The best thing about it is the look Haskell Boggs brings to the shadows.  So, watch the beginning, and then skip through, until about 58 minutes in, to the factory chase scene, which is gonna hold your attention.  The rest, not so much.

Bad Dates—I’ve Had A Few

My newest short story was published yesterday in the anthology Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy: Thirteen Tales of Murder, Mystery, and Master Detection. The book’s cozy mysteries are all written by winners of the Agatha and/or Derringer awards. My story is “The Postman Always Flirts Twice.”

You may be wondering about the title. Maybe you’re guessing that since The Postman Always Rings Twice was noir, for my cozy mystery, I decided to change Rings to Flirts because Flirts sounds cozy. To that I say ... buzz! (Think of the buzzer sound when a contestant gets something wrong on a game show.) I used the word Flirts because it makes for a much catchier title than The Postman Pressured Me Into a Date.

Say what?

To steal from Sophia on The Golden Girls:

Picture it. Indiana. Summer 1994.

I had my first full-time job as a newspaper reporter. My apartment complex had all the tenants’ mailboxes in one spot near the complex entrance, along with two newspaper boxes, one for each of the two—two!—dailies that small city had back then.

One day I stopped to get my mail while the postman was finishing filling the mailboxes. He started to chat. I’ve never been a fan of small talk, but I participated for a minute or two. The social niceties, you know. Then he glanced at the mail in my hand.

“I know your name from somewhere,” he said.

Wondering if I was being punked, I said, “Yeah, from the mail.” And I pointed at the envelopes in my other hand.

“No. That’s not it.”

So I nodded at one of the newspaper boxes. “I’m a reporter. You probably saw my name in the paper.” Back then, before everything was online, a lot more people read newspapers—on actual paper.

“No. That’s not it.”

I shrugged. “Well, those are the only ways I think you’d have heard my name. See ya.”

As I turned to go, he said, “Would you like to have dinner sometime?”

I offered him an uncomfortable smile. “Thanks, but I don’t think so.”

“Aw, come on. You gotta eat.”

That was true. But I didn’t have to eat with him. I shook my head.

“You sure? It’s just one dinner.”

Maybe it was his tone. Maybe it was my imagination. But I suddenly thought, if I don’t go on this date, I may never get my mail again. I was in my midtwenties, nowhere near as assertive as I am now. And back then, all your bills came in the mail. I needed my mail. So, reluctantly, I said yes. We agreed to meet the next evening at that hot spot of romance, Denny’s.

All of you who love meet-cutes are probably thinking the dinner must have been wonderful. Sparkling conversation, love in the air, the beginning of happily ever after.

Dream on.

The conversation was forgettable. The food was … Denny’s. And the only future I was looking forward to was getting home.

As the meal wound down, he said, “What would you like to do now?”

It wasn’t even 8 p.m., but I yawned and said I was going to have to call it a night. I had to get to work early the next morning. You’d think my meaning was clear. Subtle but clear. Not interested. And maybe it was, but he was determined to go out swinging.

“How about if I come back to your place and give you a massage?”

I may have wanted my mail, but I didn’t want it that badly.

I thanked him for my burger, went home—alone!—and called my best friend to fill him in on the date. When I got to the bit about the massage, his outraged voice boomed through the line. “If that isn’t a sex invite, I don’t know what is!”

In the end, I never heard from my mailman again, thankfully, and my mail kept coming. Now, all these years later, I put the experience to good use in “The Postman Always Flirts Twice.” If you read it, you’ll recognize some of the details. It’s a whodunit about love, family, and friendship. Someone murdered Hazel’s mailman and hid his body in the woods behind her cul-de-sac. Desperate to point the cops in another direction so they don’t discover her secret, Hazel starts her own investigation—focusing on her neighbors.

Who killed the mailman? What’s Hazel’s secret? You have to read the story to find out. 

Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy also has stories by fellow SleuthSlayers John Floyd and Robert Lopresti and SleuthSayers alum Art Taylor. The other ten authors with cozy stories in the book are Tara Laskowski, BV Lawson, Kris Neri, Alan Orloff, Josh Pachter, Stephen D. Rogers, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Marcia Talley, and Stacy Woodson. The book was edited by Gay Toltl Kinman and Andrew McAleer and published by Down & Out Books in trade paperback and ebook. I am including links to the book at the end.

So, if you’re wondering if it’s a good idea to mine your past for story ideas, yes, it is. If you’re wondering if I killed my mailman, no, I did not. 

With the caveat that I write fiction, that is my story, and I’m sticking to it. 

---

In addition to purchasing Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy from your favorite indie bookstore, you can buy it from:

• The publisher (buy the trade paperback and the ebook is included). Click here.
• Barnes & Noble. Click here.
• Amazon. Click here. 
• Amazon UK. Click here. 
• Kobo (ebook only). Click here.

Tartan Noir

I’m writing about novels again, this time about a group of splendid Scottish novelists (yes, yes, they all write short stories too) whose work is collectively known as Tartan Noir. Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina are the three best known to Americans. I could focus on the women, who include Lin Anderson, Alanna Knight, and Alex Gray, self-titled Femmes Fatales. Anderson and Gray are co-founders of Bloody Scotland, Scotland's leading international crime writing festival. But today I’d like to share my enthusiasm for two terrific male authors: Christopher aka Chris Brookmyre, who’s long been one of my favorites, and Doug Johnstone, whose work I discovered by chance (in fact, while reading the Acknowledgments in Val McDermid’s latest Karen Pirie book) last year.

Both Brookmyre and Johnstone are Scottish to the core. Brookmyre is a satirist and master of humor who’s often been compared to Carl Hiaasen. His earlier novels rant a bit about Scottish politics, which may baffle or bore the American reader, but as his work comes into its full power, he brings ample compassion as well as keen observation to his characters, giving them wit and emotional intelligence, and brilliant plotting to his stories. Johnstone brings to his fiction an eclectic background as a nuclear physicist and rock drummer that adds breadth and depth to the crime and mayhem. Besides dealing with their lives, their relationships, and the extraordinary situations they’re thrust into, his characters reflect on the meaning of the universe and the fragility of human life and planet Earth.

My highest recommendations for Christopher Brookmyre go to the three final novels in the Jack Parlabane series, not counting “Easter eggs” that appear in some of his later books. The Parlabane books really function as standalones, because Jack’s life changes so much from book to book.

Dead Girl Walking Jack’s career as a journalist has just been destroyed by a scandal when he’s asked to find a young rock superstar who’s gone missing. An immersive plunge into the world of sex, drugs, and rock & roll and a nuanced blend of character and mounting suspense.

Black Widow One of the twistiest psychological suspense novels you’ll ever read. Jack investigates the death of the husband of surgeon Diana, who’s been doxed on the Internet in revenge for her blog about sexism in medicine. I defy the most skeptical, after reading Diana’s voice, to say a man can’t write a feminist woman authentically. But is Diana the victim, or is something else going on?

The Last Hack (Want You Gone in UK) Jack teams up with a young hacker whose mother is in prison, leaving her the sole support of a sister with Down's. Hacking, social engineering, twists and turns wrapped up in surprising bonds between unusual people and the empathy that cushions Brookmyre's razor-sharp satire and diamond-hard brilliance.

Doug Johnstone's The Skelfs is so far a six-book series set in Edinburgh about a three-generation family of women who combine two occupations: funerals and private investigation. The first is A Dark Matter. Dorothy, the matriarch, plays drums and nurtures talent in the young. Her daughter Jenny struggles to find herself when a marriage that seemed perfect turns into a relentless fantasmagoria.  

Granddaughter Hannah, a graduate student of astrophysics, ponders the nature of the universe as well as her place in the family. Johnstone is another male writer who can speak in authentic women's voices. He also invites the reader to explore an authentic insider's Edinburgh, dark corners, glorious views, numerous cemeteries, warts and all.

In the course of the series, social, philosophical, and environmental issues get a good airing and a brisk shake along with the family drama and the ins and outs of undertaking. In the latest volume, Living Is A Problem, the Skelfs are getting into eco-friendly burials, and the investigations involve drones, Ukrainians, panpsychism, and a lot more.

Switch Hitters

 by Janice Law

I recently read Red Comet, Heather Clark's fascinating biography of poet Sylvia Plath. Aside from thinking that the prevention of so complete and probing a book might make an excellent motive for a literary mystery, I was interested that Plath sold some illustrations to The New Yorker before the editors bought her poetry.

That made me think of other notable artists who moonlighted in another discipline: Michelangelo wrote sonnets, Van Gogh, wonderful letters; novelist Gunther Grass did handsome etchings, while both Bob Dylan and Tony Bennett paint, not to mention several present and former Sleuthsayers who compose songs and perform music.

I am a minor member of this interesting fraternity, being a semi-serious painter of long standing. Although I have done the occasional illustration for my own pleasure and, years ago, did cover drawings for a number of Anna Peters novels when I participated in the Back in Print opportunity, I have rarely combined the two arts or even treated the same subjects.

But about a year ago, writing a short story focused on the Tour de France gave me a little insight into the differences, at least for me, between writing and painting. 

I have long been a fan of grand tour cycling and had done quite a number of paintings inspired by the grand tours. For non-cycling fans, these events, even on TV, are a visual feast. They traverse spectacular scenery in France, Italy, and Spain, with, increasingly, well-chosen visits to other cycling mad countries.

 

The colorful array of team uniforms proves a real challenge to the fans, who themselves favor wild costumes–dinosaurs and inflated fat suits are popular this year– along with Borat style tiny bathing suits, big fluffy wigs in team colors, and, of course, at Le Tour, the giveaway shirts and caps from the sponsors' Caravan, in white with red polkadots (the King of the Mountains jersey) or bright yellow (the maillot jaune– the famous Yellow Jersey of Tour leader). You can imagine how promising all this is to a painter!

 

A short mystery story was a different matter, and though I had often thought of writing something set in the cycling world, there were always technical difficulties. A body can be dropped anywhere in a story, so can forbidden drugs or an act of violence. But timing is difficult around a cycling race. People consuming the equivalent of 4 or 5 bananas an hour just to keep pedaling are unlikely to get into much trouble, while riding along at up to 70 kilometers an hour just inches away from other bikes does not lend itself to anything but the tightest focus.

 

Commentators, professional observers that they are, are trapped in their booth watching multiple screens, while understanding the duties and techniques of the professional security people would have required serious research. It was not until I thought of a favorite former rider, himself a terrific writer, who does color commentary for Le Tour and blogs on  random topics during the race, that I found a plausible protagonist.

I decided that someone along his lines would do. Only the crime remained, and that was easy. A mystery about the Tour had to involve the Devil. Not, you understand the genuine Hadean item, but the fan who for years has danced and capered along the sidelines in horns, red top and tights, a pitchfork, and in recent editions, a black cape, which, one commentator remarked last month, he wears to breakfast.

With these ideas in hand, I struggled as usual to construct a plot, as I like mysteries to be plausible and am more at ease with interesting characters than unforeseen twists and turns. As usual the beginning went swimmingly, the end was at least vaguely visible, the middle, a struggle. It was finished, revised, fussed over, sent out and sold. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

About a year later, I got an idea for a painting on the same subject: the Devil at Le Tour, which is actually the name of the short story. I had been taken with the dinosaur costumes and the sea of yellow and polkadot t-shirts and thought the brilliant red of the devil costume would serve to pull it all together. One day as the TV camera panned along a group of fans, devil gave a hop and there was the picture. 

I made some drawings, pinned a satisfactory one up next to my easel, picked up a small brush and, using burnt umber, sketched out the design. At this point, I really should wait a day or so to be able to spot the inevitable little errors. But no, although I can wait for a literary idea to develop, an image, once arrived, must be gotten down fast. I use inch wide brushes and rough the whole thing in as fast as possible.

For better or worse, I usually have a good sized (20 x24 or 24 x 28 inch) board covered in an hour. Then I spend probably 50% more time looking at the picture than I do physically painting, and, I must admit, a fair bit of time making corrections that could maybe have been avoided with a less impulsive and more professional and craft wise approach. 

However, I am not sure one can change one's working style too much. Little modifications, yes, complete change, no. Too much of creative work is beyond conscious control, and while I have sometimes thought that I would have done better with a more careful approach to painting and a more colorful approach to writing, change of that magnitude is not possible.

"The Devil at Le Tour" may or may not have appeared in AHMM by the time this emergency piece runs, but the painted version appears below.

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

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

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

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

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

Grim Reaper: An Ode to Editors.

 

I just came back from a funeral I never wanted to attend. Courtney Tower was a family friend who was the last of the Greatest Generation. Yes, he was old but, damn, I’m going to miss him. 

People shape us. Some sow seeds in our growing up and then continue to water them. That was him. There are many things I could tell you but this isn’t that article. This is an ode to editors because it’s time they were celebrated. 

While growing up, I admired Courtney. He had worked with Pierre Trudeau, was an editor and, ultimately a newspaper man as he stated poignantly, "I work 60 years in the same Press Gallery where I started. However tenuous it was, I liked to be at the fringe at least of the political action. That was the main reason. The extra money was fine, and I loved walking through the buildings.

There’s something about this place. There truly is."

As a young woman I often butted heads with Courtney on many issues. He was one of the few adults who I enjoyed arguing with because he had a sense of humour to match his stubbornness, had an unshakeable commitment to democracy and always doing the honourable thing. 

When I wrote my first article for a national newspaper, I excitedly told Courtney and he asked to see the article before I submitted it. I sent it to him with high hopes that he would like it. He returned it full of corrections, explained that I had a lot of facts first, summarized the story at the end and the facts presented like that bored him greatly. He told me to tell the story first and then the reader will be hungry for the facts when they're presented. He also told me to write to the reader in that way always: make them curious enough that they want to read what comes next. There were other corrections and he signed it all "Grim Reaper". 

The edits were presented in his usual gruff manner but, oddly, I was not offended but, rather, enchanted by the fact that he took such an interest in the article and in improving it. They say that all politics is local and Courtney's deep commitment to democracy politically started with his relationships. He took a completely novice writer of articles like me as seriously as he would a proper journalist. 

We went back and forth with my corrections and his critiques until he was satisfied. I sat down and compared the first article with the last edit and there was no question about how much better the final version was and how much I had learned along the way. 

In the last few years, Courtney asked me to write an article to publish in his community newspaper. I was too busy to write it so, of course, I put everything aside and wrote it immediately. As I structured the article and edited it, I heard Courtney's voice because he honed many of my skills. Courtney critiqued the article, of course. I was grateful for more wisdom generously coming my way. Then, when we were done, he published it. 

I've heard many writers bemoan working with editors, claiming they feel insulted by the changes suggested. Quite apart from what skills Courtney taught me, he taught me to be grateful for editors. They are someone who, unlike most people on the planet, are actually reading your work and taking it seriously. The critiques that appear to come out of left field are actually the best ones of them all, because they teach you a new way of looking at writing. 

With his tough, newspaper guy approach to editing, Courtney was the best editor of all. There was such empathy in his signing his edits "The Grim Reaper" because he knew I would be taken aback by the extent of the changes, the many criticisms and humour was the best way through that. 

I will deeply miss my "Grim Reaper" and will continue to write with his voice in my ear. 

        Thank you for the edits, Courtney. 

It was Random Joe, on Your Porch, With His Teeth

Imagine the scene: A famed detective gathers everyone in the drawing room and lays out the evidence. "Ah, but it is clear," she says. "Someone among us even now got drunk last evening and punched a dude in the face." Or, in a darkened interrogation room, the hardboiled cop leans over the table and says, "Listen, we know you swiped that lawn mower." No, not as dramatic as what lands in crime novels, but sucker punches and swiped Cub Cadets are the crimes most people commit.

The FBI's Crime Data Explorer statistics for the last five years (select categories):

For data nerds, how I pulled the FBI reported crime numbers is post-scripted below. 

Here, I'll stipulate a couple of things: 1) Any murder is one too many and 2) Crime stats are full of unreported incidents and societal biases. My point is that we porch-pirate or pick-pocket each other a lot. A whole lot. Or gnawing on each other--literally. The top weapon involved in aggravated assault is "personal," which is Fed-speak for fists, feet, teeth, any body part. And then there are those seven million simple assaults.

Murder has the inherent stakes and drama to pump up fiction, but that level of malice is proportionately rare. A bloody business, too. I'm of the Raymond Chandler school. People don't take malice as far as murder without a damn deadly sin involved. The FBI data say that some type of gun was used in 75% of reported murders. Knives, vehicles, and blunt objects account for most of the rest. Nowhere near topping the list is overly elaborate murders or killings for the sake of a puzzle. Even comic mysteries--which I love--need a non-trivial motive. Without it, the whole thing can feel hollow. Somebody got killed, y'all. 

If these stats are a guide, the data say Americans are running 13 times more con games than murder plots and 25 times more burglary rings. The petty stuff also makes for excellent studies of human flaws and motivations. Urgencies and justifications, delusions and miscalculations. What can be more human? I think this is why I gravitate toward small-change bumblers. 

The FBI stats say that about three times as many homicides are of family or acquaintances than strangers. Aggravated assault is closer to two-to-one acquainted. Burglary is about fifty-fifty, and vehicle theft swipes a stranger's car twice as much as a friend's ride. Things get more random as they get more small-time. This leaves more room to explore an idea, or it does for me. Plus, I'm talking fiction. Bumbler fiction. Things must inevitably get out of hand, and in sneaks the stakes and danger. 

Write enough stories, though, and you get around to most everything. A few years ago, I wrote a spin on a manor mystery, even down to the dead guy as story device. I like to think that one subverts manor mysteries as much as it upholds tradition. A quick scan of my story tracker shows I've bumped off six characters by murder (however justified), or one every four crime stories. As side mayhem, I also have a manslaughter, a suicide, and two characters left to their likely death. But there are still the other three-fourths where nobody got killed. The story didn't need the murder. Why force one? 

The FBI numbers bear me out. It's a big, criminal world out there, and most people have a little crook in them given the right or wrong moment. 

But hang on. Golden Age Mystery fans, there is something in the FBI data for you. 727 homicides in the five-year period were by narcotics/sleeping pills. Fifty-one were by poisoning. 1,092 were attributed to a cryptically categorized "other." That's right. No category exists to capture the deed. 

Summon the famous detective. Unexplained methods are mystery story inspiration if I've ever seen it.

Postscript: About those FBI Crime Data Explorer stats...

The crime counts aren't static across all reported elements. It must depend on completeness of reporting, multiple elements per report, etc. So. For as consistent a count as possible:

• The data was as of November 2, 2024.
• I used crimes reported, not arrest counts. It's notionally more inclusive and maybe avoids some inequities seen in arrest rates. 
• Within the "Crime" tab, I used the "Offender Age" section as my official incidents count. I used percentages for all other stats.

Fascists in the Family

Every summer my father climbed to the top of a rickety ladder and hacked away at the tall arborvitae shrubs surrounding our house in the New Jersey suburbs. My brothers and I dutifully collected the dropped branches, and dragged them to our Mom, who stood ready to bundle them with twine so they could more easily be dragged to the curb for our town’s weekly trash pickup.

Mom was absurdly proud of her branch-bundling skills. If we tried to bundle them ourselves, she’d watch for a while before chiding us that we were doing it the wrong way. “Hmph,” she’d say. “You don’t know how. I learned the right way. From my grandfather!”

To this day, I am not sure I can’t even describe her method, but I could probably duplicate it if you watched me. The point was that when she was done tying, you could shake that bundle as hard as you could, and none of those branches would come loose. Yay, Mom.

I reminded one of my brothers of this annual ritual some years ago, and he chuckled, “Well, sure she knew how to bundle sticks. She was a good little Fascist.”

And we had a chuckle at our late Mom’s expense.

Joe's Mom:
Top row, second from left.

He was referring, of course, to Mom’s upbringing in Italy during the rise of Mussolini. And the freakish images (which I’m sharing here) of those days. They are a reminder to me how easy it is to mold young minds to believe that This Is The Way. The Only Way. The Way of Our Leader.

Like it or not, a war intervened and erased the world of her childhood.

The word fascist and fascism gets lot of play these days, especially this week. The word is derived, of course, from the fasces, a bundle of wooden rods (not sticks or brush) enclosing an ax, that has been a symbol of government going back to the days of the Etruscans.

I rooted around the web some time ago, trying to learn more about those wooden-rod bundles, and how fascism differs, say, from totalitarianism or authoritarianism.

The Romans meant the ax to refer to the right of the state to use violence to keep order, when necessary. When the legions returned to Rome from war, the ax was removed from the symbol carried aloft by soldiers, indicating that military power yielded to civilian authority. Minus the ax, the wooden rods alone symbolize governmental authority.

The fasces motif is still used today in that context. You’ll find them on the Great Seal of the United States, the Lincoln Memorial, on the walls of the Oval Office, and so on.

The "Doll Dance":

Mom, second from left.

I had heard growing up that the fasces were a symbol of unity. Together, went the notion, the rods were stronger than each was alone. But it turns out that that concept came later, thanks to a fable by Aesop. The earliest users of the symbol would not have ascribed that meaning to the rods and axe.

My brothers and I were surprised later in life to discover these photos of Mom in various school pageants with a giant portraits of Il Duce in the background. She had described these events to us, but seeing the photos was another thing entirely. In the context of her time, she would have been called a “Piccola Fascista,” or a “little (female) fascist”.

She was under the age of ten when these pics were taken. She hailed from a family of four siblings. Near the end of their lives, I interviewed her and her older brother, Mike, whose story was slightly more troubling. As a teen he was sent to a fascist youth camp on the Adriatic coast, where young boys trained in calisthenics, marched around in green knickers and Tyroleon hats. Later that year, they performed for Il Duce himself in their regional capital.

I don’t have a pic of Mike handy, but at the time he was a husky boy, what Italians then and now would describe as ciccione—chubby. Laughing, he described to me the trouble he had performing the most basic feats of strength required by the program. He could not, for example, climb a rope, and watched with envy as one of his camp mates performed the act handily, twirling in the air like an aerialist. When he descended, the expert rope climber strode over to my uncle, sneered at him, and slapped his face in a gesture of derision. You can’t do what I do.

Mike was rescued from further involvement in Mussolini’s program when his father returned from the U.S., where he’d gone to seek employment, and brought his oldest son back to Brooklyn, New York.

From that point forward, each half of the family had vastly different wartime experiences. Mike enlisted in the U.S. Army, fought all across Europe, and served as an engineer at Normandy. His most soul-crushing experience, he said, was carrying emaciated survivors out of Buchenwald in his arms.

My mother, her two other siblings, and their mother remained behind. Nazis camped in her grandfather’s fields, threatening the old man with a gun to get access to his barn. When the Americans started bombing, the Nazis dumped their gunpowder in her grandfather’s fields and fled. Mom, her family, and her neighbors hid in (yet another) barn to wait out the air strikes. When the smoke cleared, their village was filled with a new crop of soldiers: Americans, Brits, and their Indian allies. The family was reunited after the war, when all but one sibling moved to the U.S. with their mother.

In the immediate occupation after the war, Mike was stationed in Germany, where he was assigned to question and repatriate Italian soldiers—a portion of about 30,000 POWs at one site who had been captured by the allies. Every day for weeks, he sat at a desk in a local gymnasium, asking one soldier after another—in their native tongue—their name, rank, home province, and one question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Fascist Party?”

To a man, every single soldier said no, they weren’t, and never had been.

One day, as he was working in the gym, Mike looked up and saw a POW climbing a rope and twirling in the air like an acrobat.

Seething, Mike waited for this Italian soldier to descend.

Mike asked him the question.

“No,” Expert Rope Climber said. “I am not a Fascist.”

Mike slapped him in the face. Sweet justice. “Liar,” he said, proceeding to spell out the athletic games where they had together performed for Mussolini: “Campo Dux. Campobasso. 1935!”

Mike estimated that he had interrogated 5,000 of his countrymen. Every single one denied involvement in the ideology that had sent a nation to war and so many to their graves.

Sick to his stomach, one day he leaned over to his captain and said, “Hey, you know what? Looks like I’m the only Fascist here!”

Angels and Devils.

Mom, first, top row left.

---

Thanks for reading. See you in three weeks!

— Joe josephdagnese.com

Don’t Have the Words

 So, lucky me, today of all days is my turn in the rotation, and gotta be honest, folks. I’m having trouble finding the words.

Any words.

Lots going on in BrianWorld, and to top it off I’m one of the folks none too thrilled about the outcome of the Big Event yesterday.

Not gonna talk about it. I’m not mad at anyone about the outcome. You win some, you lose some. Besides, someone a whole lot wiser than me famously said, “the failure is not in the fall, but in the not getting up.”

Today, I got up. 

No more anxiety with the potential outcome hanging over our collective heads like the proverbial sword of Damocles. No more dread. No more uncertainty.

Instead I feel blessed with a clearer vision of what lies ahead for myself, my family, and my friends. And I immediately began to take steps to realize the new goals-both short and long-term-I’d already set for myself, and which had been buried and shunted aside by the creeping dread of the feared potential outcome.

So that’s “What next?”

Huh. Whadaya know?

I guess maybe I do have the words after all.

And now if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got stuff to do.

See you in two weeks!

HVI2, or Heads, You Lose

 

I subscribe to BritBox and I have worked my way through most of the mystery series I enjoyed (Jonathan Creek, No Offense, MacDonald and Dodds, Cadfael, New Tricks, mostly) so I have been giving lit-er-a-choor a try.

Britbox offers the entire canon of Shakespeare as interpreted by the BBC. I am working my way through the plays I have never seen or read (an embarassingly large number) and watching each one until I get bored or too puzzled by the language. (They make the subtitles too damn small.)

The Trout

For example, I tried watching Henry VI, Part 1, and gave it up quickly. Not even a guest appearance by  Joan of Arc could keep me tuned in.

But I made it through Henry VI, Part 2, no trouble.  I noticed that Wikipedia says Part 2 is usually considered the best of the trilogy.  We will see how I feel about Part 3.

Some random thoughts.  There are few Shakespearean characters I have wanted to give a good punch in the kisser as much as Henry VI.  What a boring, pious, pompous little trout.  No wonder his wife wants nothing to do with him.

But speaking of Queen Margaret, I had a really writerly moment during one of her speeches.  She watches hubby walking away with another fella she dislikes, Warwick, and says: "There's two of you; the devil make a third!"  First I thought: Billy the Bard sure knew his way around a curse, didn't he? Then I thought: What a great title! The Devil Make a Third.

privateproertynotrespassblogspot.com

A quick search taught me that one author had already figured it out.  Douglas Fields Bailey wrote a novel by that name in 1948.  As I understand it, the book is about a rural man who makes it to wealth by any means necessary - a not uncommon theme of the time.   The book was reprinted for the Library of Alabama Classics series in 1989.  There is an entire website dedicated to the book, run, as near as I can tell, by Robert Register.  

There are also many novels called Devil Makes Three and some of the authors might have been thinking of Queen Margaret (as I'm sure we all do from time to time).  

The most interesting part of the play for me was the Jack Cade section, based on the largest rebellion in England in the 15th century.  Shakespeare sees it as a highly anti-intellectual event, with simple literacy being a capital offense.  It is here that Dick the Butcher gives us what I think is the play's most famous, much quoted, line:  "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers."

Jack Cade, against Woke Education

The play also made me wonder whether the Globe Theatre had a propmaster whose specialty was severed heads.  There are four, count 'em, four, hacked-off noggins in  HVI2.  There are others in Macbeth and Titus Andronicus, among other of Billy's little skits.. I found an interesting article by Michael J. Hirrel discussing the chop-chops in Elizabethan plays and he pointed out something that never occurred to me. Shakespeare's audience would have been quite used to seeing severed heads in real life.  So it is reasonable to assume that someone went to a lot of trouble to make the props realistic and each one unique.

Personally, I'd rather be a writer.  So far, no severed heads adorn my work.

World Builders

The November/December issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine proves good to SleuthSayers. Rob Lopresti graces the cover while Stephen Ross, Michael Bracken, and I help to fill the pages behind him. Simple math tells me we have a third of the titles in this edition. 

My story, "From Above," is the latest in a series about the 16th-century French attorney Bernard de Vallenchin. His challenge in "From Above" is to defend, in an ecclesiastical court, birds charged with disrupting a Catholic mass.

And yes, that was a thing. Animals could be accused of violating laws and punished in both church and secular courts. They could be imprisoned or executed. As I've mentioned in an earlier blog, while researching a different topic, I stumbled into a 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E.P. Evans. He documents the work of Bartholome Chassenee, a 16th-century French jurist who described his own work in defense of accused animals. The Evans' book explores this forgotten world. 

I think of writing the de Vallenchin stories as akin to creating science fiction. The world of animal prosecution in 16th-century France is an alien place to which readers must be introduced. The age had a top-down cosmology that began with God and continued through the great chain of being to the lowest slugs. There was a patchwork of courts--royal, manorial, and ecclesiastical--that may have been involved, depending on the offense. To tell an understandable tale, a good chunk of information had to be delivered in order for the reader to know why a bird might be on trial. I needed to quickly build a different world from the one the readers inhabit. There stands the challenge. How do writers create an distant environment while avoiding a dreaded information dump. Or, in the alternative, how do writers camouflage an information dump so that it doesn't take the reader out of the story?

The standard advice is to feather the facts into the tale. With the limited word count of a short story, however, the slow accretion of details is often impossible. What then might the writer do? 

A few suggestions follow: 

Pare down the information.

In researching Europe's animal prosecutions, I acquired many fascinating pieces of trivia, odd bits that seemed really cool to me. Social historians have used GIS programs to map out the variety and overlapping jurisdictions of courts across France. But I'm not writing a dissertation. My goal was to craft an entertaining tale about fictional characters. To do so, I wanted to keep the information at the minimum level to make the story understandable. I remembered the lesson Barb repeatedly tries to teach me, in a short story, every word matters. I tested my accumulated facts and separated them into what was necessary and what proved merely interesting. The unused facts might one day become central to a future story, but they remained in the nest for this avian tale. 

Consider where to begin.

"From Above" starts in media res. From the first words, the readers find themselves in an ongoing conversation between the lawyer and a barmaid. I trusted that the readers would catch up quickly. By beginning in the middle and then going back, a writer can draw the reader into the conversation and engage their interest in the topic. The goal is to have a shared experience. If the characters were attracted to the subject, hopefully, the readers will also become interested. 

Incorporate the information into the action.

Action doesn't have to be car chases or gunfights. It may be a more subtle personal contest between two people. Bernard de Vallenchin is a libidinous drunkard and a cheap braggart. (I hope you like him in spite of his faults.) His high opinion of himself is sometimes challenged. To accomplish some earthly aim, de Vallenchin boasts about his courtroom mastery and the complexities of the subject matter. He uses his exploits to achieve an end, perhaps bedding a barmaid. In an earlier story, the scheme was to extract free food from the hotelier. The lawyer used an elaborate discussion on courts to serve as a distraction. The information became part of the action. The current story works the necessary details into the process of two characters learning about one another. 

Incorporate the information into character development.

Fans of the Harry Potter books know that Hermione Granger is the brightest witch of her age. She constantly dispenses obscure facts. These nuggets of information often prove necessary later in the story. She is an expository character. She'll tell you the things you need to know. The information dump becomes incorporated into her character development. Similarly, Bernard de Vallenchin's description of the complexities of his legal challenges helps to show readers that he is a self-absorbed trumpeter but perhaps posseses courtroom skills. The technique aids in establishing his character. 

Consider making the expository character a drinker. Who hasn't met an intoxicated person who didn't over-explain, or tell you something you already knew? Adding alcohol can allow a character to state what should be obvious to the people in the room. The writer can educate the reader not only about the necessary details but also demonstrate that the character is a sloppy drunk. 

Conversely, a writer may say something about the recipient's character, the person in the story tasked with receiving the information dump. This character acts as the portal. She is the doorway into this world. If, for instance, the listening character is drunk, she may not object to the bloviating protagonist reciting what should be commonly known information. 

As a circuit-rider, Bernard de Vallenchin travels to new cities and villages in each story. He knows little to nothing about the area's details. He is a fish out of water. Listening as another describes the local jurisdiction or corrects one of his assumptions is a necessary part of his effective advocacy. He needs to learn these details in order to succeed. The fish out of water offers another opportunity to world build and give information to the character and, also to the reader. 

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine published the second story of the de Vallenchin series in November 2022. I can't assume that anyone will remember the details of the world from that story. Every reader, therefore, needs fresh facts to  imagine a place far outside their own experience. Pouring the essential details into a brief short story required a strategy. As I consider future de Vallenchin stories, I face the same question. How might I deliver the necessary information quickly and in a way that will hold the reader's attention? 

As a writer, your issue may not be 16th-century cosmology. Every storyteller, however, needs to craft a setting. That world-building requires dropping information eggs. The challenge is to find new and different ways to open up that fictional realm. 

What strategies do you like to use? 

It's Election Day in the USA. Go vote. 

Until next time. 

True to type.

             I only write in Palatino Linotype, which is a more attractive cousin of Times Roman.  Most people can’t tell the difference, which is good, since publications often require their superannuated relative, which I find cramped, fussy and inelegant, compared to my first love. 

                I prefer to indent my paragraphs, and dislike putting spaces between them (even though I’ve occasionally done it here, when laziness trumped principle, or the blog app forces it upon me).  Nearly every book you’ve ever read throughout history follows this practice. I don’t think there’s any reason to change it now, despite the insistence of word processors and trendy digital formats. 

           Serifs are like little brush strokes at the end of straight or slightly tapered lines, flourishes that suggest a certain panache, elan, a bit of dash to the characters.  I was once told that medieval scribes saw them as tiny angels.  I’ve found no evidence of this, but the notion is enchanting.

            Times Roman can also look dated, like your grandmother’s Victorian furniture.  If disturbed by this you might select Bodoni, or Century, or my favorite Palatino Linotype, efforts to freshen up the form.  I’m fine with this as well.  All are preferrable to the execrable sans serif.     

I have no affection for any version of san serif, particularly Helvetica, which has no social charm, only narcissistic, declarative impudence.  It doesn’t care what you think, it only wants you to follow its commands.  Bold san serif is even worse:  a lout with a megaphone yelling over polite discourse. 

Or simply boring and commercial. All those straight up and down, and horizontal, lines have no personality.  It’s just a flat, soulless delivery of the words.  Serif faces have lots of smiles, frowns, intelligent observations and witty asides.  These are the Cary Grant and Noel Coward of typefaces.  The Shirley McClain and Katherine Hepburn.   Sans serifs are just pronouncements.  Demands.  Directives.  Humorless and colorless.  Bureaucratic. 
            

        You might note that sans serif faces are defined by what they lack.  Serifs.  It reminds me of Baus Haus or Brutalist architecture, which boldly erases all decorative or artistic detail, stripping everything down to right angles and plain boxes, like the ones that deliver goods to you from Amazon.  I don’t see this as an achievement.  Anyone can build a box.  Few can shape crown moldings, cornices, curvilinear arches and hip roofs. 

Digital content is often in Calibri, the slightly less school-marmish version of Helvetica.  Another cousin is Aptos, which is even worse than the other two.  Helvetica’s sadistic, stunted little sister. 

 Most of the typeface choices in Microsoft Word are novelties and nothing more.  Fun, silly and usually inappropriate comedians only useful to children and unserious designers.  Cheap invitations to the gala event, or hyperventilating car ads given to starbursts and excessive exclamation points.  The typographical equivalent of a drunken huckster screaming over the crowd noise.   

You might think that a type face shouldn’t affect your understanding of the words on the page, but that’s not true.  I spent a long career in partnership with art directors and graphic designers who brilliantly captured the essence of a headline with a deft choice of type face.  They knew the emotion the writer was trying to convey, presenting it in the precisely appropriate visual style.  (Most of the art directors I worked with were also quite capable writers.)

Art at its best conveys feelings.  Typefaces are the rare art form that bring intrinsic emotional interpretation to the meaning of the words they’re representing.  A true integration of purpose.  Digital media has the capacity for delivering an endless assortment of faces, with no sense of the mission these shapes and miniature diagrams are charged with achieving, but we can intercede and pick the face that suits our mood. 

What you are saying, of course, matters the most.  Though how you are saying it can make all the difference in the rendering.