A Little Religious Conspiracy Theory: Redux

(In the interest of maintaining openness and transparency, most of this blog post first appeared in March, 2015.  I thought a repeat would be timely, especially since tonight is Maundy Thursday, although I have updated it a little...)

As you hopefully know by now, I love a good conspiracy theory.  And some events generate lots of them.  A very early event that has not yet stopped generating conspiracy theories is, of course, the death of Jesus, and since Easter is in 4 days, I thought it would be a good time to review some of most interesting conspiracy theories.  If nothing else, just to prove that it's not just politics that brings out the crazy...

First of all, there were at least three real conspiracies that surrounded Jesus:

• The first one is in (among other places) Matthew 26:14-16, where the chief priests paid Judas to betray Jesus so they could have him executed, quickly and relatively quietly, before the Passover.  

• The second, of course, was the show trial before first Caiaphas and then Pilate, complete with manufactured witnesses and a lot of fake weeping, wailing and tearing of clothes in horror.  (This is in all the Gospels)

• The third is in Matthew 28:11-15, after the finding of the empty tomb:  "Now while they [the disciples] were going, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests everything that had happened.  After the priests had assembled with the elders, they devised a plan to give a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them, “You must say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.”  So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story is still told among the Jews to this day."  
• BTW that "keep you out of trouble" part was VERY important, because Roman guards who lost prisoners were killed in their stead.  (See where the guard gets ready to kill himself in Acts 16:27 because he thinks Paul and Silas have escaped.)  

But enough with reality, let's get on with the crazy:

"When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage & Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent 2 of his disciples & said to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, & immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it & bring it. If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’” They went away & found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” They told them what Jesus had said; & they allowed them to take it. Mark l1:1-6

Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it.” They asked him, “Where do you want us to make preparations for it?” “Listen,” he said to them, “when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house he enters and say to the owner of the house, ‘The teacher asks you, “Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”’ He will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished. Make preparations for us there.” So they went and found everything as he had told them; and they prepared the Passover meal. Luke 22:7-13

The above  two passages have been used repeatedly to prove that there was a plot, a conspiracy, and Jesus was in on it and/or was the mastermind. But what kind of plot?  What kind of conspiracy? Folks, there are a lot of them:

(1) That Jesus would be replaced by his twin, or doppelganger, who would die on the cross for him so that he could appear to be resurrected and, thus, start a whole new religion. Or get out of town later. Both ideas have been used. The most likely candidate?  Thomas Didymas, a/k/a "the Twin". Conspiracists know that he really was Jesus' twin, which certainly puts a whole new spin on Doubting Thomas, doesn't it?

(2) Another theory says that these 2 messages - the colt and the guy with the pitcher of water - were coded messages, letting the conspirators know that the time was at hand for a major magic act to take place.  This conspiracy theory breaks down a couple of ways:

• One version says that the plan was for Jesus to be arrested, tried, convicted, crucified and drugged with that vinegar on a stick which actually had opiates in it (John 19:28).  He was then taken down - comatose but still alive - nursed back to health, appeared to the disciples, who spread the story of his resurrection while he went off to Tibet to become a monk in the Himalayas. 

• Another version was given in the 1960's book "The Passover Plot", where they said that everything was going according to the above plan BUT then came some stupid soldier with a spear.  For some reason, he hadn't been bribed, and he killed a living Jesus on the cross by mistake.  And then the disciples had to make up a story and stick to it.  Hence, John 19 & 20, Luke 23 & 24, etc.  

• Dorothy Sayers in her "The Man Born to be King" says that it was a code, a conspiracy, but it was set up by the Zealots:  they offered Jesus a choice between a horse and a colt, and if he took the horse, they'd follow him in an uprising against Rome.  If he took the colt, he was on his own.  They'd find another leader.  He took the colt, and death was the result.  BUT Judas didn't know the details, and he thought that by taking the colt, Jesus had turned political, and so Judas turned him in for being less holy than Judas wanted/needed him to be.  Actually, I kind of like this one - at least it makes sense in the political climate of the time, and it gives Judas a reason to betray Jesus.

(3)  Jesus never existed, but was a myth.  Variations:

• D. M. Murdock, in her book "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold," says that Christianity was invented by a variety of secret societies and mystery religions to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion.  Without, of course, bothering to explain why the Roman Empire needed one state religion when it already had one in the Emperor Cultus...  Let's just say that this is the kind of book that makes historians like me go bang their head against a wall over and over again...

• Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Holy Grail - ad infinitum, ad nauseum…  Dan Brown, you have a lot to answer for.

• My personal favorite of all conspiracy theories is in an obscure book from the 1970's, "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" by John Marco Allegro.  According to Allegro, Jesus was actually a psychedelic mushroom. Or hallucinations resulting from taking psychedelic mushrooms.  And, in case you're wondering, yes, I absolutely do believe that psychedelic mushrooms were consumed in the conception and writing of that book…

Why do people come up with these things?  Or believe them?  Well, there's a lot of reasons.  But I think the main reason is simple:  conspiracy theorists feel like members of an elite club or cult, in which they are in on the "real" truth.  People love to be in on a secret - it makes us feel like we belong, like we're knowledgeable, like we're superior.  Nobody can fool us. We're in control, because we're in the know, whether it's about 9/11 or Roswell or Bigfoot or a death in Judea 2000 years ago.

BTW:  If you like this blog post, you might also want to read/reread my "Who Killed Judas?" HERE.  And I think I'm onto something...  But then don't we all?

BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION

Rabia Chaudry reads my story, "The Seven Day Itch" aloud on her podcast, Rabia Chaudry Presents The Mystery Hour with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Listen to it here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-seven-day-itch/id1581854514?i=1000703738987

Also available in Instagram!

The Two-Sentence Trick

 

I sold a story to an anthology this week.  I can't tell you about that yet but I want to tell you about a tool, new to me, which I used.

I have always been a plotter rather than a pantser, but I don't usually outline.  I knew this would be a longer story than I have been writing lately -- it turned out to be 7,500 words which I then had to (shudder) edit down to 6,000 -- so I decided to outline it.

But here's how I did it: For each scene I wrote two sentences. The first told what happened.  The second explained why it was important. Or putting it another way: How did this scene advance the plot? (Because if it doesn't, why is it there?)

This was particularly appropriate because this mystery story really was a mystery story, meaning my protagonist had to solve a crime.  My system made it easy for me to keep track of the clues.

For example: 

Scene 6. Chickie, the manager,  confronts them and says he doesn’t want Hilda back because she caused them trouble by getting arrested.  They learn that  Surebank is the insurance company involved in the theft.

Got it? The first sentence is what happens in the scene.  The second sentence tells me what the protagonist got out of it. 

Worked for me. This time.  Who know what will happen next time around?

Two Anthologies and a Collection

Yesterday—April 14, 2025—saw the release of Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties (Down & Out Books), the most recent of my detectives by the decades anthologies that began with Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties in 2022. Today sees the release of Trouble in Texas (Sisters in Crime North Dallas), fourth in the Metroplex Mysteries anthologies, and last month saw publication of Al Sirois’s collection Before Baker Street: The Adventures of a Young Sherlock Holmes.

Anthologies and collections are created in a variety of ways, and these three projects represent a few of the ways they come together.

SLEUTHS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun expands the detectives by the decades anthology series by bringing private eyes into the 1980s, following the 1960s (Groovy Gumshoes and More Groovy Gumshoes), the 1970s (Private Dicks and Disco Balls), and the 1920s/1930s era of Prohibition (Prohibition Peepers).

With Sleuths, I created the concept, pitched it to the publisher, invited the contributors, and edited all the stories before submitting the completed manuscript to the publisher. This is a tried-and-true process for anthology creation, but it isn’t the only way anthologies are created.

Contributors include Elizabeth Elwood, John M. Floyd, Debra H. Goldstein, James A. Hearn, Richard Helms, Kathleen Marple Kalb, Tom Milani, Sandra Murphy, Laura Oles, Alan Orloff, William Dylan Powell, Mark Thielman, Joseph S. Walker, and Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

Flannel Fedoras, which takes the series into the 1990s, is on track for publication next year. I don’t anticipate taking the series into the 2000s, but I might go back and fill in the two-decade gap—the 1940s and 1950s—between Prohibition Peepers and Groovy Gumshoes.

TROUBLE IN TEXAS

Trouble in Texas continues the Metroplex Mysteries series created by Sisters in Crime North Dallas. Fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman edited the first two entries in the series, and I’ve edited the two most recent.

My role as editor is significantly different with these anthologies than with my own. Each year, the North Dallas chapter of Sisters in Crime develops the concept and selects the stories, so my work doesn’t begin until I receive the selected stories. Then, I work with the writers, helping to shape the stories and prepare them for publication.

Contributors include BJ Condike, ML Condike, Karen Harrington, Nan McCann, M.E. Proctor, Amber Royer, Tiffany Seitz, Liese Sherwood-Fabre, Shannon Taft, Lori E. Tchen, and Mark Thielman.

I’m already looking forward to seeing what next year’s entry in this series will be.

BEFORE BAKER STREET

Though I’m listed on Amazon as the editor of Al Sirois’s collection Before Baker Street: The Adventures of a Young Sherlock Holmes, I didn’t actually edit the collection. I did, however, edit six of the seven collected stories for their initial publication in Black Cat Weekly, and I wrote the collection’s introduction.

My primary role was that of an acquiring editor, selecting stories for their original publication based on how well I thought they fit the needs of the magazine. While the author may have envisioned a collection, the thought certainly wasn’t on my mind when I initially published the stories.

Beyond Baker Street’s stories were a delight to read when I first encountered them in my submission queue, and they are equally delightful upon rereading.

* * *

Despite all the editing I’m doing lately, I’m still a writer, and In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Genesis (Down & Out Books, March 31), edited by Alan Meyer, includes my story “Turn It On Again.”

Crime Scene Comix Case 2025-04-029, Night Lover

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.

A Tragedy

In two trials in 2023 and 2024, Lucy Letby, a 33-year-old nurse in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital in England, was found guilty of the murder or attempted murder of 14 babies in her care between June 2015 and June 2016 and sentenced to life in prison. 

Her murder trial lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The press called Lucy, "UK's most prolific child serial killer in modern times". The judge highlighted, "the cruelty and calculation" of her actions and a mother of an infant girl stated, "I don't think we will ever get over the fact that our daughter was tortured till she had no fight left in her, and everything she went through over her short life was deliberately done by someone who was supposed to protect her and help her come home, where she belonged."

Prologue: 

All tragedy invokes the question of what could have been done to stop it, but the prologue is Lucy's life before this tragedy and it's remarkably normal, with no indication that she was a danger to the tiny, premature babies she looked after. She appeared to have been a psychologically healthy and happy, with many close friends and a dedication to nursing. She wanted to be a nurse since she was a teenager, 

“She’d had a difficult birth herself, and she was very grateful for being alive to the nurses that would have helped save her life,” her friend Dawn Howe told the BBC. An only child, Letby grew up in Hereford, a city north of Bristol. In high school, she had a group of close friends who called themselves the “miss-match family”: they were dorky and liked to play games such as Cranium and Twister. Howe described Letby as the “most kind, gentle, soft friend.” Another friend said that she was “joyful and peaceful. Letby, who lived in staff housing on the hospital grounds, was twenty-five years old and had just finished a six-month course to become qualified in neonatal intensive care. She was one of only two junior nurses on the unit with that training. “We had massive staffing issues, where people were coming in and doing extra shifts,” a senior nurse on the unit said. “It was mainly Lucy that did a lot.” She was young, single, and saving to buy a house. That year, when a friend suggested that she take some time off, Letby texted her, “Work is always my priority.”

Act I: The Trial

The prosecutors, in seven of the murder or attempted murder charges, relied on an academic paper written in 1989 by Dr. Shoo Lee, one of Canada’s most renowned neonatologists, on a rare complication in newborns — pulmonary vascular air embolism — to argue that Ms. Letby had intentionally injected air into their veins.

At her trial, Lucy suffered from PTSD, was barely coherent and, despite denying that she murdered anyone, she was found guilty of the murder or attempted murder of 14 babies.

Act II: 

Dr. Lee had retired to a farm in Alberta in 2021 and only heard of the case when Lucy's lawyer emailed him in 2023. Dr. Lee agreed to help with Ms. Letby’s request for an appeal because the expert witness had misinterpreted his work, but the court ultimately denied her request, saying Dr. Lee’s testimony should have been introduced at trial.

Dr. Lee assembled a team of neonatal specialists to look into the case with the caveat that the panel’s review would be released even if they found Lucy guilty.

Fourteen specialists from around the world assessed the clinical evidence and found: In all cases, death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care.

“There was no medical evidence to support malfeasance causing death or injury” in any of the babies that Ms. Letby was charged with harming.

“If there’s no malfeasance, there’s no murder. If there’s no murder, there’s no murderer,” Dr. Lee said, adding, “And if there’s no murderer, what is she doing in prison?”

Some of the hospital staff, the panel concluded, were caring for the most critically ill or premature babies in a unit that was only meant to treat babies with lesser needs. 

Act III: The Hospital

The neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, run by the National Health Service in the west of England, was found by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health to have inadequate nursing- and medical-staffing levels and the increased mortality rate in 2015 was not restricted to the neonatal unit.

Burkhard Schafer, a law professor at the University of Edinburgh who studies the intersection of law and science, said,

 “Looking for a responsible human—this is what the police are good at. What is not in the police’s remit is finding a systemic problem in an organization like the National Health Service, after decades of underfunding, where you have overworked people cutting little corners with very vulnerable babies who are already in a risk category. It is much more satisfying to say there was a bad person, there was a criminal, than to deal with the outcome of government policy.”

That last sentence warrants repeating: It is much more satisfying to say there was a bad person, there was a criminal, than to deal with the outcome of government policy. It was precisely the need to find a culprit that led to the failure to understand the real reasons that babies died. 

Act IV: Yet to be written

We have a nurse in jail for life for murders she didn't commit and a hospital woefully underfunded, that put babies lives at risk. There is no way to rectify things. Lucy, even if released, will be irrevocably damaged. The families who lost their babies will never get them back. The underfunding of hospitals remains unchanged.

It's all a damn tragedy.

Writing About Writing...About Talking

I haven't written about writing in a while, and this being a writers' blog, I should pitch in. And I'll write about, well, talking. The characters, anyway. Dialogue.

TO GET SOMETHING OUT OF THE WAY

Writers have opinions about things like "dialogue" versus "dialog." Both are acceptable under reputable style guides. I use "dialogue" exclusively unless somebody is interacting with a computer. "Dialog" is more specific to speech, meaning interactions such as "hello" and "pass the salt." "Dialogue" is more expansive, implying a progression or learning tied to the discussion. Writers should write character interchanges that propel events, that lead to something new. Hence, it's "dialogue" for me.

Harrumph. 

I'm less-is-more when it comes to dialogue. It has its purpose, and nothing is better at that purpose. Dialogue freezes time while someone takes that spotlight. Dialogue is the character framer. Dialogue is the big reveal, the perfect riposte, the thing that must be said. But spotlights, like stories, must move. Narrative moves. It's malleable. Narrative plays with ideas and time in ways dialogue often can't. 

When a moment calls for dialogue, I have a general approach, and it goes like so:

1: WHY DOES IT NEED TO BE SAID?

We're writing fiction here. Verisimilitude. It's a crafted world, right down to what people say to each other. Dialogue isn't conversation. 

My early drafts can be guilty of dialogue running long. The characters get in a back-and-forth groove, but the story stops dead in its tracks. 

Let's say Bill and Doug are getting together to watch a game. Real-life discussion might go:

"Hey, man," Bill said. "What's up, brother?"

"Same old," Doug said.

"Grab a beer. Kick-off is in like five minutes."

"Great. Thanks."

"Pizza?" Bill said. "I was thinking pizza."

"Killer. Hey, turn the sound up."

"Sure. What a game this is, right?"

Let me clean that up.

"Hey, man," Bill said. "What's up, brother?"

"Same old," Doug said.

"Grab a beer. Kick-off is in like five minutes."

"Great. Thanks."

"Pizza?" Bill said. "I was thinking we order Giuseppe's."

"Killer. Hey, turn the sound up."

"Sure. What a game this is, right?" Bill cleared his throat. "Man, I am mad in love with your wife."

That's a story. That's what needs to be said. Now, some dialogue ahead of that showing Bill working up to the big reveal could be great. And much argument should follow, but where to sit and where to get pizza? It better be critical to something later.

Novels deserve more latitude. Novels are long. Readers need pauses and key fact reminders to help hold plot and character arcs together. Still, it's one thing to summon everyone into the drawing room to rehash the clues. It's another thing to hold a 10-page chinwag.

2: WOULD ANYONE EVER SAY THAT?

You know where I'm going.

"So, Agent Coolguy," Bigbad said. "Now that you're my prisoner, I suppose it's fitting that I explain my evil plan. At length. Yes, you were right that I've been buying up all the fast-casual restaurants west of the Pecos. What you weren't clever enough to see is yadda yadda yadda."

Yes, the dreaded Monologue. 

Or:

"As we all know," Madge said, "it's quite mild here this time of season. It's when the tourists come, as we also all know, they come for our famous lobster races. One reason they are famous is that the races were illegal for many years until in 1886 Mayor Codfish up and died. From fatty lobster, the legend goes. Well, what were we talking about?"

Call this the Basil Exposition, the Michael York character in Austin Powers who pops up with a recitation of backstory. Then there's Stating The Obvious. You know, characters just speaking explain-y facts and spot-on deductions at each other.  

HARDEDGE: The shooter must have been on the fire escape. High-cal weapon. 45mm, I'd say.

KICKSIDE: That's elite marksmanship. You're not saying the perp was Special Forces like you? 

HARDEDGE: That's exactly what I'm saying.

I get that word count or run-time pressure might require shoehorning in facts, and I'm probably guilty of info-dumps myself. But things people say in fiction should be things people might actually say.

2a: WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE?

I have a corollary pet peeve to Stating The Obvious: Chiming In The Obvious. Let's pick up the chase for that shooter.

HARDEDGE: That's exactly what I'm saying.

KICKSIDE: Then he's highly trained. You know, he could strike again.

SMITTY: He would need access to cleaning solvent.

DR. PROFILER: That checks out. I've been writing about this for years.

McNERD: There's been chatter on social media about scoring solvent.

ROOK: We should head over to the Army base. They have a lot of solvent there.

CHIEF: Army? Good call, kid. This is a really tense moment. I want everyone's A-game, got it?

NOTGONNAMAKEIT: Come on, Rook. Let's hit that base.

I like big ensemble casts. What distracts me is when everyone gets a toss-in line apparently because it's a big cast. Dialogue hits harder when it's person-to-person, not group brainstorming.

3: WOULD THAT CHARACTER SAY THAT?

Nature and nurture make us each our own person. What we say and how we say it is a product of place, culture, education, life experience, and so forth. That singularly created individual is who has the dialogue spotlight. Let them be singular.

Speaking of which, first-person point of view. Of my published stories, first-person perspective tops third-person three-to-one. I write characters, and first-person is pure character. Literally. I write every word of those as if the main character is always speaking, whether narrative or their share of dialogue. It's only the other characters who speak in another voice, their own voice. Even that gets filtered by what the main character must hear -- or is willing to hear.

4: HOW WOULD THAT CHARACTER SAY IT THEN?

A story moving along in a single flow, everything converging as it should. It's time for our characters to have an important verbal exchange. All good. But where are we in the story? What's happening at that very moment?- What's going on around them? Bill and Doug will need very different lines if that love triangle is the inciting incident versus a final showdown.

I keep the characters talking about only the story problem as it exists then and there. Exchanges might be longer or more subtextual while characters grapple with their problem. There might be more misunderstandings and talking around each other. As the problem reaches its resolution, words are more pointed, more revealing.

Going back to human nature, people shift from moment to moment. How we speak and how we phrase it changes based on mood, place, power dynamics, who we're speaking to, whether we're protecting something or we're straight-up lying. Dialogue is a combination of those choices in that moment, and it makes for characterization gold.

I'VE SAID MY PEACE

A truly powerful character choice is when to stop talking. Which I'll do now, leaving this as my take on dialogue. The approach keeps me out of trouble, mostly. And I need it, because it's easier to write about dialogue than to write actual dialogue.

Remembering Ken Bruen

It was about two weeks ago we got the news Ken Bruen passed away. If you read Ken's Jack Taylor or Inspector Brant series, you know he infused every page with rage. You might call his writing "brutal poetry" as that's how he wrote prose. The violence and horror he depicted came to the reader like a long epic poem.

But in person, Ken was the kindest, most generous person to other writers. Quick to take an author he liked under his wing, he would nonetheless make it about something other than writing when you hung out with him. If he wasn't regaling you with stories of the people he met, he was listening to you. Because the stories all had to come from somewhere. Ken not only wanted to tell you where his came from; he wanted to know where yours came from.

I met Ken in 2004 at the Toronto Bouchercon. It was a year of firsts for me. My first novel was scheduled for the following year. It was my first trip to another country (during which my second day was spent, in part, at a Walmart and a McDonald's. But I did legally smoke a Cuban cigar!) I mingled, met some of the people I'd spoken to only online or at book signings. One of them tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey, Ken Bruen's taking a bunch of us up the street to an Irish pub. You're invited."

Me? Yes. Ken read a bunch of our stuff. So a handful of us, including our own Brian Thornton and Jersey writer Dave White, ended up a couple of blocks from the Intercontinental where the Jameson flowed, and so did the Molson. (Well, one of us insisted on drinking Guinness. "Dude, the famous Irish guy is drinking Molson. We're in Toronto!" "It's an Irish pub.")

Ken was partially, though not entirely, responsible for crime fiction writers of a certain age developing an obsession with Tom Waits. But Ken could personalize it, too. He me into a five-year binge of the late Rory Gallagher's work. Prior to meeting Ken, I knew Gallagher is one of those who floated in the same orbit as Clapton, Page, and Beck. Usually, I heard him on other people's stuff. But getting the CDs direct from Ireland was a revelation. 

And of course, there was the writing. The Guards grabbed me and threw me to the ground. I've read all but the latest Jack Taylor novels. The best was The Dramatist, but the ending was so harrowing I can never reread it. He could do that. He could put a reader through the emotional ringer yet leave them wanting more.

And now Jack's story is done. And Brant's. And Max's, his raucously funny series cowritten with Jason Starr (who knows a few things about putting readers through the meat grinder.) And unfortunately, Ken is gone. We miss you, buddy.

"Worst Case Scenario: We Amputate Your Leg"

    "Worst case scenario: we amputate your leg to save your life

 — Hospital ER Surgeon, in conversation with me, March 10th, 2025

Soooooo it's been a while. Miss me? How did your March go?

To say mine was "eventful" would be a colossal understatement. I spent three weeks in the hospital battling a septic infection that had half of my legion of doctors convinced I would be dead before the end of the week.

Not that they told me.

They told my wife. Gave her the whole "Might want to get your affairs in order" speech.

Yep. March was the cruelest of months at Casa Thornton.

I didn’t know any of this (not then anyway).

Here’s what I did know:

I had cellulitis. That infection in turn got into my blood stream, giving me a case of blood poisoning, and my leg got “septic.”

That’s when my kidneys shut down.

I can also now speak with authority on what two solid weeks of having your medical team treat your intense pain with oxycodone.

I quit taking that stuff the first minute I felt able to. I don’t understand why anyone would want to risk addiction to this particular pain killer: yes it deadened my pain, but the hallucinations were so unpleasant, and it was not the sort of “high” I would think I could ever enjoy.

Lots more to share, but I still tire easily, so that’s got be it for now.

Stay tuned!

The Old Success

You forget how good Martha Grimes is.  Reading The Old Success, the most recent of the Richard Jury books, number  twenty-five, from 2019, you’re struck by what an economical writer she is, and how devious.  Nor has she hung up her spurs; pub date for The Red Queen is July 1^st, 2025.  I, for one, can hardly wait.

The Man with a Load of Mischief came out in 1981, the year of Red Dragon and Gorky Park, so the competition wasn’t chopped liver.  In the event, Jury’s debut got a cordial welcome.  There were familiar things about it, and certainly aspects of the cozy, but Jury himself gave the book a rigorous spine.  He might have reminded you a little of P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh, both characters having a somewhat chilly reserve, and Jury being of a circular disposition, taking his time and feeling out the contours of the emotional landscape before committing the full weight of his resolve.  We recognize his moral clarity, and he gains our immediate confidence.

Not so much Melrose Plant, the former Lord Ardry as was.  Or let me correct myself.  It isn’t Melrose, who grows on you over time, but the insufferable chorus of bores at the Jack and Hammer.  We’re all guilty of this - writers, I mean – you come up with a device, or a turn of phrase, or a plot mechanism, that you think is terrifically clever, and absolutely necessary, and you won’t be turned aside.  It doesn’t matter that it’s stupid, or unconvincing.  This is my problem, unhappily, about the gang Melrose surrounds himself with.  I don’t think they’re witty and eccentric; I find them wearisome.  They impede the narrative. 

There’s another trope Grimes deploys, though, that’s used to terrific effect.  The kids.  Almost invariably (and front and center, with her Emma Graham series), she’ll give you precocious and alarming children, sometimes chillingly in jeopardy, but often the linchpin of the story.  In her handling, you can get a piece of the puzzle everybody else has missed, that the child herself may well have missed, because they’re lacking the needed context.  It’s tricky to navigate, from a child’s POV, to both tell and withhold.

To me, the most interesting thing about The Old Success is its complete lack of clutter.  There’s little physical description, not even much sense of place.  It’s mostly conversation, or observation of people, and how dialogue – or silence - and body English, and the way people arrange themselves in a room, reveals their inner character.  Even at the beginning, a woman’s body found by the shore, the island of Bryher, in the Scillies, off Land’s End, you get an impression of wind-swept shingle, and that’s pretty much it.  It’s all in what they say, and how they speak.  What they leave in, what they leave out.  The environment is personal, and one-on-one, the surroundings less significant than the subjective dynamic and self-identifying drama.

The consequence this has, overall, isn’t claustrophobic.  Rather, it concentrates your attention, and presents as a kind of watchfulness.  You find yourself very alert, to movement, or discomfort, to the way people read.  Are they transparent, or are they concealing something?  This is very true of the children, in particular, who may be reluctant witnesses, not because they don’t want to say what they’ve seen, but because they’re not entirely sure if what they saw is what you, the adult, want to hear.  They have an abundance of caution.  This seems to me utterly right, as far as kids are concerned.  They aren’t keeping secrets, exactly, but guarding their privacy.  Grown-ups are intrusive, and their curiosity can be predatory.  They have a different map of the world than children, and may in fact be a different species, entirely.  What passes for protective coloration, in a Grimes novel, is more than camouflage.  It’s a survival mechanism.  When the adults practice it, a man like Jury sees evasion.  If it’s a kid, he looks for the pattern of concealment, for the thing left unsaid, or avoided.  And not necessarily on purpose. 

I drifted away, I should admit.  I wasn’t a fan of The Horse You Came In On, for one.  Why would I want to see this crew plunked down in Baltimore, of all places?  (Martha Grimes went to the University of Maryland, and now lives in Bethesda.)  Anyway, after only dipping into a couple of the intervening titles, I came back for good with Vertigo 42 – which is, actually, somewhat atypical.  I’m not sure, really, whether you have to have read all the books in the series, but I do recommend you read them in order.  They seem, to me, more stripped down, as you move forward.  That’s part of my point about The Old Success, that it delivers the essentials, and doesn’t stray.  I don’t mean that it’s confined, or lacks breathing room, but it’s tight, there’s no wasted motion.

Grimes is one of those writers, perhaps like P.D. James, noted above, who takes a little warming up to.  She’s not sunny, or confiding, like Sue Grafton.  Maybe it’s the third-person, or simply that she holds you slightly at a distance.  This being a reflection of Richard Jury’s character, a meta-fiction.  The character of Melrose Plant, then, would supposedly provide the reader with access.  I don’t imagine it’s that calculated.  I do, however, suggest you’d be rewarded, reading these eminently solid Scotland Yard stories.  They have a seamless quality, woven from the sturdy woolens of convention, with a flinty finish.

Can You Have Too Much Inspiration?

Sometimes, something obvious to one person may not be as clear to another. That was true for me in high school (math and science). And it was true for me from the first time I heard "Escape: The Pina Colada Song" until just a few years ago, when I realized that the author of the personal ad (remember those?) in the song wanted someone not into yoga, rather than someone not into yogurt. (Not being a fan of yogurt's texture, its supposed inclusion in the ad had made a ton of sense to me. But I digress.)

I also had a hard time seeing something important about writing short stories inspired by things--often songs--and I didn't even realize it. Until recently. 

But before I tell you about that, I need to give a little backstory. Short story anthologies inspired by music have been popular for more than a decade. I've had stories in books inspired by the songs of Billy Joel and Joni Mitchell, as well as by songs that were one-hit wonders in the US. Now I am glad to add another story sparked by music to my list: "Keep It Dark" appears in In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Genesis. The book, edited by Adam Meyer, was published last week by Down & Out Books.

I spent a lot of time in high school listening to Genesis on the radio, as well as to the independent releases of Phil Collins, who was the band's drummer and its lead vocalist from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. But to my surprise, when I reviewed the list of Genesis's songs in anticipation of writing a story for this new anthology (thank you, Adam, for inviting me to contribute), there was one--okay, more than one, but bear with me--that I had never heard of: "Keep It Dark."

It appeared on the 1981 album Abacab. A Rolling Stone article from 2014 about twenty great Genesis songs that aren't well known said "Keep It Dark" was never released as a single in the US, which explained why I had never heard it. I eagerly streamed it, and for the first half, I sat confused, thinking, Is this really a Genesis song? It is bad. I can understand why it wasn't released as a single in the US. But then a funny thing happened; the song grew on me. By the time it ended, I immediately played it again. And now I love it! And I totally get why it was released individually in the UK and hit #33 on the UK singles chart. And I get why Rolling Stone thinks so highly of it.

The unusual beat is catchy, and the lyrics are interesting. They tell a story--one more detailed than a lot of songs do. I decided to use "Keep It Dark" as my story's inspiration. I needed to pay tribute to the song, but I didn't want to retell the story this song tells. That turned out to be difficult. Everything I was writing felt derivative. 

And this is where the thing that you may think is obvious--but it wasn't for me--comes into play. Needing help, I called my fellow SleuthSayer John Floyd, who is a very wise man. He told me not to get bogged down trying to work so many details from the song into my story. Just find a piece of it that I could run with. That advice felt like opening a window on a lovely spring day. Rejuvenated, I took John's advice, and I ended up with a story I am delighted with. If you listen to the song "Keep It Dark," I believe you will see that it sparked my story of the same name, yet my tale is different.

Here is what my "Keep It Dark" is about:

It's the spring of 1972, and life's been good for Gary. He loves working at the pawn shop, where he helps people out of their financial jams. But a sleazy new employee has changed the vibe, and Gary's in his crosshairs. Can this good guy find a way out of the jam he's about to find himself in?

I hope John's advice is as helpful to you as it was to me. Thanks again, John! And I hope you will pick up a copy of In Too Deep. It has seventeen stories, including ones by fellow SleuthSayers Michael Bracken, Joseph S. Walker, and Stacy Woodson. 

You can buy the book in ebook and trade paperback from the usual sources, as well as directly from the publisher. If you buy the paperback straight from Down & Out Books, you can have the ebook thrown in for free. Just click here. 

Do you have a favorite Genesis song? Which song and why? I would love to hear. And listen to "Keep It Dark" and let me know if it grows on you like it did on me.

All life is improvisation.

I hardly ever listen to rap or polyphonic jazz.  Okay, basically never.  But I’m glad other people do, and want them to continue.  You might wonder how I square this in my brain, and I can tell you.  Easily.

Charles Darwin

            Darwin figured this out in the 19^th century.  In order for nature to evolve, species had to pump out a lot of experiments, deviations from the norm, which biologists somewhat frighteningly call mutations.  The vast majority of these oddities whither and die immediately.  But some squeak through, and others, a tiny percentage, turn out to be better than the original product.  Again, with a bit of luck, this success multiplies, until the whole species jumps on the bandwagon and its continued survival is thus temporarily assured.   

            I didn’t see any of the movies up for the Oscars this year.  I didn’t like the sound of them, because I’m an old-fashioned movie-goer who likes what he likes and rarely shells out part of his fixed income on something designed to make him uncomfortable, confused or even challenged.  This is a failing on my part, I admit, but I’m still glad these movies got made and were honored.  Art, like nature, depends on experimentation to survive and thrive. 

            Most contemporary art leaves me scratching my head.  Maybe because the artists aren‘t blood relatives.  My son is a professional artist and he never tries to do anything that’s been done before.  Because he’s my son, I look closely at his work, and always find something to appreciate.  This keeps me open to other efforts, and when something crosses my path that gets to me, I’m grateful for the experience.

            My favorite form of art is Impressionism.  This stuff is now considered as homey and mainstream as a cardigan sweater, but when it first emerged, most people, and nearly all the commentators of the time, thought the artists were completely out of their minds.  That turned out not to be true, Van Gogh notwithstanding.  Art lovers  simply had yet to adjust their eyes, minds and social constructs to absorb the work.

        You could say the same thing about jazz and James Joyce.  Cultural revolutions rarely blast on to the scene (I’d say the Beatles were the exception.)  They come on little cat feet, slowing infiltrating our attention and devotion.  The early innovators are usually disregarded into oblivion, sadly, but the victorious mutations they create are relentless and unstoppable. 

            The alternative is stagnation.  Ironically, this is usually a side effect of success.  If everything is working for you, there’s little incentive to change.  The French Academy was saturated with rewards, admiration and nice granite galleries featuring their work.  The Impressionist rabble was likewise poor, denigrated and overlooked, but they owned the energy of innovation, and eventually, the established art culture just rotted away. 

            It’s not a stretch to attach the same logic to biology.  Everyone loves Koala bears, but they only eat certain types of Eucalyptus leaves, and are thus endangered as their food supply fluctuates.  Racoons, on the other hand, eat almost anything.  We have no shortage of racoons, and there’d be a lot more Koalas if they developed a taste for Vegemite sandwiches. 

“Hey, let’s give it a try!  What can it hurt?”  This doesn’t always pan out, but it’s why humans rule the world today.  There’s never been a more versatile and adaptive species.  Like racoons, we eat almost anything.  We’re not that strong, relative to polar bears or saber tooth tigers, but we amplify what we have with devices and machines.  As such, we’re now not only the apex of the apex, but a threat to the planet’s survival.  Too much of a good thing? 

                I don’t know what would qualify as experimental writing these days, though I’m sure others do.  I hope so.  I’m probably the least likely reader to discover the trends of the future, since I feel the same way about novels and short stories as I do about movies.  My diminishing timeline leaves little room for branching out, dabbling in the Avant Garde.  As with breakthroughs in quantum mechanics and new records in the 100-meter dash, this is something better suited to the young. 

Anyway, it’s their world that’s being quietly created, and theirs to relish.

Squid Names

Squid Game.

I despised it, finding myself standing alone as fascinated fans globally flocked to watch Squid Game. To be sure, its visuals were startling brilliant, especially the M.C. Escher architecture. Music was carefully selected from modern to classical, e.g, Blue Danube. I even appreciated that Eyes Wide Shut corrupt and wealthy secret society behind the plot. However…

I have no stomach for betrayal and torture story themes, the reason I chose not to watch the series 24. Likewise, Squid Game relied heavily on perfidy and persecution plot points, 456 participants playing off against one another to the death. I finished the first season, vowing to watch no more.

But…

Not long ago, I stumbled upon a photo essay that explained a few things, suggesting more than torture-for-entertainment pleasure.

It turns out some in South Korea may have known something the rest of us didn’t– the show was possibly inspired by horrid events. Forty years ago, unwanted children, unwanted elderly, and the homeless were rounded up to slave away in work camps, facilities with extremely high rates of attrition, as much as 551 deaths. It’s further suggested a wealthy Australian-Korean family was behind a pseudo-religious charity called the Brothers Home that ran the operation.

But…

Enter Snopes: They say while Brothers Home and South Korean street cleanups happened, no evidence exists that anyone was forced to play games or was tortured. They found no reports of exploitation, suffering, or spurious deaths.

Stephanie Soo © Rotten Mango

But…

Enter Stephanie Soo. She is a prolific vlogger and podcaster. One such podcast is Rotten Mango, a long format true crime video blog in which she cites brilliantly read crime articles, some of them atrocities and crimes in Asia and around the world.

Something about her suggests Korean, and indeed, she was born in South Korea and grew up in Atlanta. She works with an unknown, never-seen male commentator behind the camera. He occasionally questions or seeks clarification, and her responses demonstrate she’s done her homework.

The couple created a three episode series on real life Squid Game, and no doubt, she believes it to be true. Further, she provides considerably more detail than I’ve found elsewhere, more than three and hours of presentation. And she names names.

But…

Is Snopes wrong? Both could be right. Note the site’s careful wording repeatedly states they found ‘no evidence’ of a real-life torturous work facility. That may be true as far as it goes, but given Mango’s aggregation of detail, it’s eminently possible Soo's Korean contacts uncovered facts and evidence not readily available to the rest of us. I’ve watched a few of her podcasts that demonstrate her attention to detail and her researchers’ knack for collecting, collating, and validating information from disparate sources. In general, she knows what she’s talking about.

Watch Stephanie’s podcasts and let us know what you think.

1. Thousands of Koreans Forced to Play Children’s Games to NOT Be Killed
2. South Korea ‘Erased’ 4000 People to Host Olympic Games
3. Man Survives Real Life Squid Game That Killed 551 People Funded by Rich Australian Family

We Can't Bury Her THERE

  

I don't know about my fellow SleuthSayers, but the columns I write for this blog usually come to mind only a few days before they're due, and they're often triggered by a recent event or a conversation or a new publication, etc. The idea for my post today popped into my head while I was out in our back yard this past week, when I happened to hear our behind-our-house neighbors chatting to each other in their back yard--we're separated only by a six-foot-tall cypress fence.

Anyhow, hearing those voices made me think of something out of the past--an incident that happened out there in almost the same spot (though we had different neighbors then), and it's memorable only because it proves that real life can sometimes be a lot stranger than fiction.

Here's some background. Twenty years ago, a film producer who lives about three hours north of us had contacted me several months earlier about a Western story of mine that he'd read in a Canadian magazine. He said he thought it would make a good movie, and (of course) I agreed. After a lot of discussions and negotiations he asked me to write a screenplay for it and was soon in the process of putting together a crew, equipment, casting calls, music, locations, etc. Fortunately he allowed me to take part in most of that --I've never had so much fun--and we were swapping phone calls pretty regularly. (NOTE: Alas, that movie never saw the light of day, but for a year or so it was a real possibility, one that now reminds me of the old joke about the airline pilot who announces to his passengers, "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, we're lost. The good news is, we're making damn good time.") 

Anyhow, while all this was going on and we were making good time even though we were lost, my Movie Man had decided he also wanted me to come up with a second screenplay, this one a contemporary murder mystery. And here's something else you need to know: Our neighbors in the house behind ours were fairly new to the area, and we hadn't yet met them. All I knew about them was that the husband was tall like me, because we occasionally caught a glimpse of each other over the top of the board fence. 

Okay, back to my story. On this particular day, a Saturday afternoon, my wife Carolyn was in the kitchen and I was out in our back yard, talking on my cell phone with the producer about the plot of my aforementioned in-progress mystery screenplay. The call lasted a long time, as our calls usually did, and when I disconnected and walked in though our back door, Carolyn looked up at me from whatever she was doing and said, "Do you realize what you just said, out there?"

I stopped and gave her my usual clueless stare. "What do you mean, what I just said?"

She pointed to our breakfast-room window, which looked out onto our back yard and--on that day--was open to let in the cool breeze of a nice spring weekend. "For one thing," she said, "you were talking too loud. I could hear every word."

"So, what'd I say?"

"You said, 'We can't bury her there.'"

Then I remembered. We'd been discussing the plotline, and my producer friend had suggested that one of my main characters, who had murdered his wife, should plant her body in a flowerbed on their property, which I didn't think was a good idea.

Continuing, my wife said, "You almost shouted it. After that, you said, 'We should bury her down by the railroad tracks instead, where nobody'll ever find her.'"

I still didn't see what the big deal was. I said, "So?"

She rolled her eyes. "So, our new neighbor was out in his back yard, the whole time you were talking. I saw the top of his head go by a couple of times, above the fence."

Understanding finally dawned. "You think he heard what I said?"

"Unless he's stone deaf, he did."

Well, I remember thinking, Even if he did hear me, he probably thought nothing about it. Besides, what was done was done. I shrugged and asked, "What's for supper?" 

And seriously, I thought no more about it. Until two days later, when I was mowing the grass.

We live on a big corner lot, and at the place where our side lawn bordered our neighbor's lawn, outside the fence and between it and the side street, I saw a shiny new sign, about a foot square, one of those flimsy metal Ten Commandments-like signs with two little wire legs, sticking up out of the grass on our property line. The sign was aimed at our house, and it said, in big printed letters, YOU ARE BEING PRAYED FOR. 

When I finished mowing, I came into the house, hot and sweaty, and reported this news to Carolyn. As it turned out, she'd done some research the previous day, and she now informed me that the husband half of the neighbor couple was the new youth minister at the local Baptist church. For some reason that struck me as funny, but she was not at all amused. I think she strongly suspected that the police might soon show up with drawn guns and a lot of questions about my future plans for burial sites and who might get buried there.

The cops and FBI never arrived, but what did happen was that our backyard neighbors moved away the following week--I swear that's true--and to this day my wife is convinced it was because of my big mouth and my announce-it-to-the-whole-neighborhood plot plans.

Final note, just to ease your mind: Unlike my suspicious wife, I'm fairly certain that (1) our neighbor did not hear what I was saying that day, (2) that sign probably had nothing at all to do with that incident, and (3) neither did our neighbors' sudden relocation to greener pastures. And you might be pleased to hear that I do now try not to talk so loudly on the phone (especially if my immediate family is listening). 

As I said, all this happened long ago, and in all the years since, I have never attempted to use that goofy incident in one of my short stories. Why?

Because fiction must be believable to the reader--and I doubt that this story, even though it's true, would be able to pass that test.

That's one thing that's always bothered me, about writing: Nonfiction is more easily accepted; it doesn't have to be believable. If it happened, it happened, strange or not--in fact, the stranger the better. With fiction, there are restrictions. If it's too strange, it won't work. On the one hand, we as writers are encouraged to mine our past experiences to come up with compelling story ideas, and on the other hand, we have to be careful not to make it too true. Has that kind of thing ever happened to you?

Real Life, as they say, is a trip. You can't make this sh*t up.