Beware More than the Ides: Shakespeare's Trail of Bodies

Shakespeare's plays read pretty on the eye. Vivid imagery, brilliant wording, poetic turns. But those plays are meant for the ear, to be performed. Lustily, for the player to chew the scenery amid ghosts and mix-em-ups and especially his many death scenes. 

A general consensus puts Shakespeare's onstage death count at 74 characters. This is in just 38 plays, 17 of which were comedies. Many more characters shuffle off the mortal coil offstage for practical or emotional reasons. Estimates of Shakespeare's full carnage range to well over 200 characters, depending on how the count defines a killing. 

And I've counted. The tragedies, anyway. I can't get excited about the historical plays. My math is as follows: Body count equals (a) clear deaths during the play, (b) clear deaths pending at the final curtain, and (c) deaths immediately before Act I where the character pops up later as a ghost. 

It's March, so let's open with Julius Caesar. Famously, Caesar is first to meet his maker, and things get out of hand from there -- the whole point of the play.

1. 
   Julius Caesar: group stabbing;
2. Cinna the Poet: torn apart by mob;
3. Portia: suicide offstage, swallowing hot coals;
4. Cicero: executed offstage;
5. Cassius: assisted suicide, sword; 
6. Titinius: suicide, sword;
7. Young Cato: death in battle; 
8. and finally Brutus: assisted suicide, sword. 

That's a lot of suicide, but the play orbits around honor and what's honorable. The losers take the high road out. Brutus and Cassius are so concerned about honor, or status really, that they have to find somebody else to do the bloody part.

If eight deaths sound like a pile, it's middle of the Shakespearian pack. Slightly less stabby is Romeo and Juliet, at six: 

1. Mercutio: swordfight;
2. Tybalt: swordfight;
3. Lady Montague: grief, offstage;
4. Paris: swordfight, 
5. Romeo: suicide by poison;
6. and Juliet: suicide by dagger. 

Othello takes out only five and only after Iago has head-cased everyone: 

1. Roderigo: stabbing; 
2. Desdemona: smothered;
3. Emilia: stabbing;
4. Othello: suicide, dagger;
5. and Brabantio: grief, offstage.

Desdemona gets an extended I'm-not-dead-yet revival despite having been suffocated. That kind of suffering and speechifying end isn't unusual for Shakespeare, but showing her murder onstage is. He preferred to kill off his men for the crowd, usually by sword or such carving. Shakespeare wrote in and for his time. 400 years ago, the main characters were men, so following the action to the tragic end was important to the drama. 

By contrast, the women tended to die offstage. Being a man of his times, his female characters were often thematic devices for the main men. Shakespeare also wrote for patrons and royals, and he would've thought twice about offending his meal tickets. Of course, it wasn't even women playing his women back then. Lads got those parts, and a good director wouldn't risk a grand death scene on a young actor's chops.

Whatever the reasons, the lead woman dying offstage sets up the bring-out-her-body moment. Cue Hamlet. Hamlet gets a bad rap for inaction, but he's responsible, one way or another, for every death other than the father he wanted to avenge. 

1. King Hamlet: Poisoned shortly before play, a ghost;
2. Polonius: stabbed, mistaken identity; 
3. Ophelia: drowned offstage, possible suicide and duly brought on;
4. Rosencrantz: executed offstage;
5. Guildenstern: executed offstage;
6. Gertrude: poisoned by mistake;
7. Laertes: poisoned stabbing;
8. Claudius: stabbed, then poisoned;
9. and finally Hamlet: poisoned stabbing.

Poisoning is my favorite Shakespearian gimmick. Most often, he can't be bothered to specify the actual poison. It's just boom, you're poisoned. But that was a way to do it back then, which goes double for those stabbings. Were Shakespeare writing today, his swordfights would be shootouts.

King Lear edges ahead with eleven deaths, most in its grim finale: 

1. First servant: stabbed;
2. Cornwall: stabbed;
3. Oswald: stabbed;
4. Gloucester: shock of joy, offstage;
5. Regan: poisoned by jealous sister, offstage;
6. jealous sister Goneril: suicide by dagger, offstage;
7. Edmund: killed in duel;
8. Cordelia: hanging, offstage;
9. Lear: Grief and exhaustion;
10. Fool: fate unknown, presumed dead;
and 11. Kent: resolved to commit suicide. 

Speaking of grim, there's Macbeth. Its death count is whatever anyone wants it to be given the major battles, violent repression, and general mayhem. The confirmed dead is eleven. You have to believe Macbeth cleaned up his assassin situation before anyone talked, but here's the confirmed eleven. 

1. 
   Macdonwald: killed in battle offstage;
2. Thane of Cawdor: executed offstage;
3. Duncan: stabbed offstage;
4. Duncan's Guard #1: stabbed offstage;
5. Duncan's Guard #2: stabbed offstage;
6. Banquo: Stabbed in ambush;
7. Lady Macduff: stabbed;
8. Macduff's son: stabbed;
9. Lady Macbeth: suicide offstage, unspecified;
10. Young Siward: killed in battle; 
11. and Macbeth: killed in battle on or offstage, beheaded offstage.

Those deaths happen in perfect order to frame the tragic fall. For all of Macbeth's carnage, most of the killing happens offstage unless a director loves an opening battle scene. Instead, the scenes follows Macbeth between the violence and wrestling with his conscience. It starts with arguably the most important but overlooked death, Macdonwald. Macbeth disembowels the guy offstage, showing both his heroic loyalty and the killer within. When he finally goes full tyrant, the murder moves onstage, with Banquo and Macduff's family. 

Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy, though, is way bloodier. His top massacre is Titus Andronicus, an early play that wallows in its violent excess--on purpose. The play is about brutality and how far people will take their grudges. Death count, here we go:

1. Alarbus: ritual sacrifice;
2. Mutius: stabbed, filicide;
3. Bassianus: stabbed;
4. Martius: beheaded, offstage;
5. Quintus: beheaded, offstage;
6. Tamora's Nurse: stabbed;
7. the Clown: hanged;
8. Chiron: slashed throat, ground into powder, and baked into pie served to his mother;
9. Demetrius: same;
10. Lavinia: stabbed;
11. Tamora: stabbed and fed to wild beasts;
12. Titus Andronicus: stabbed;
13. Saturnius: stabbed;
and 14. Aaron: buried up to neck and left to die. 

Take that, Game of Thrones.

Stabbings and poisonings were his old reliables, but Shakespeare had a full arsenal when it came to dispatching characters. Guilt and served as pie, as examples seen above. A few others:

• 
  Snakebite;
• Heavy sweat;
• Indigestion;
• Dismemberment and tossed into fire;
• And the topper of toppers, bear. 

Poetic turns or not, it's a mistake to read Shakespeare as stilted or stuffy. He was putting on a show, blood, guts and all. It's endless amusement for a literature nerd, almost as fun as watching actors land those deaths in the footlights. 

Remembering a Master of the Short Story

There's an old joke in the literary world: thousands of people make a good living every year teaching others how to write short stories; eight people make a good living every year writing short stories.

The exact numbers may be wonky, but the sentiment is true. Since the demise of the pulp fiction marketplace in the 1950s, novels have been the coin of the realm in publishing, not short stories, particularly within the genre fiction arena. That makes the career of Edward D. Hoch seem all the more remarkable. 

Ed Hoch (pronounced hoke) was born in 1930 in Rochester, New York, and he never strayed very far from his hometown. At the time of his death in 2008, he had published only a handful of novels, but nearly one-thousand short stories. His ground base was Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which for years featured a Hoch story in every issue, though Ed published just about everywhere else (except Playboy, to his disappointment) and was highly sought-after by anthologists.

Ironically, even though he'd been writing since high school, it took Ed a while to make his first sale. After a stint in the military, he supported himself as a library researcher, ad copywriter, and PR agent, finally achieving authorhood in 1955 with a story in Famous Detective Stories. That tale's protagonist was "Simon Ark," who was not simply an amateur sleuth by an immortal, more than 2,000 years old, cursed to wander the earth and root out evil. Ark would go on to appear in forty-five more stories and would soon be joined by a phalanx of other series characters marching from Ed's fertile imagination. Among them were "Captain Jules Leopold," a conventional police detective operating in a mid-sized New England town; "Nick Velvet," a thief for hire; "Dr Sam Hawthorne," who specialized in locked-room mysteries' British cypher expert "Rand;" international couriers "Stanton and Ives;" Romany royal "Michael Vlado;" Revolutionary spy "Alexander Swift;" retain executive "Susan Holt;" mystery writer/amateur sleuth "Barney Hamnet;" private eye "Al Darlan;" "Sir Gideon Parrot," a gentle spoof of Golden Age cozy characters; and "Ben Snow," who solves mysteries in the Old West.

Ed also found time to pen a science fiction series centered on "The Computer Investigation Bureau" and several Sherlock Holmes pastiches. He also ghosted an Ellery Queen novel, The Blue Movie Murders (1972), though his best-known novel is probably The Shattered Raven (1969), a Barney Hamnet adventure set against an Edgar Award ceremony. Of the lot, Ed considered Nick Velvet his most profitable character, not because there were more Velvet stories than any of the others, but because he optioned the rights to television. Even though a series was never made, it was the gift that kept on paying. 

In addition to the "Ellery Queen" byline, Ed wrote as "Irwin Booth," "Stephen Dentinger" (Dentinger being his middle name), "Pat McMahon" (McMahon being his wife's maiden name), and "R.L. Stephens." He even turned out a string of stories featuring "David Piper, The Manhunter," which were bylined "Mr. X." Ed saved his most whimsical pseudonym for his non-fiction writing: "R.E. Porter."

Under any name and in any sub-genre, all Ed Hoch stories shared the same elements: intriguing and unusual characters, endless invention, and construction as solid as the Roman aqueduct. He was particularly adept at locked-room mysteries, creating astounding conundrums whose explanations turned out to be perfectly logical. Over his career, Ed received an Edgar, two Anthonys, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and a Grand Master Award from the MWA. Regarding the latter, Ed was one of only two authors who primarily wrote short stories to receive such an honor, the other being Stanley Ellin.

In 1999 I had the chance to chat with this genial master wordsmith at that year's Bouchercon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While I believe there is a special lava pit in Hell reserved for authors who ask other authors where they get their ideas, I had to ask Ed how he was able to come up with so many. His reply: "Something hits me, either a news article or some odd fact, and I say, 'Hey, I never knew that before, I could make that into a story.'"

Another technique of Ed's was to use ideas he'd seen elsewhere as a springboard for his own tales. "If I'm reading something or seeing a movie, even a mystery, sometimes it will occur to me how it could have been done better, and I take off from that point," he said. "The stories that I come up with will have no relation to the ones that first gave the thought to me."

He had more words of wisdom regarding mystery story construction. "I rarely have the murder right at the beginning of the story," he told me. "You can fool the reader if you introduce some of the actual clues before the murder, because they [readers] are not thinking of them, and they don't know what's going ot happen."

Edward D. Hoch's last published story appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. Ed never saw its publication, having passed away the previous January at the age of 77. He published in excess of 950 short stories during his half-century career, in later years averaging about twenty a year. For someone with that kind of output, there seems to be one obvious question: did Ed Hoch every experience writer's block?

"Sometimes I get caught up and I don't have any ideas," he confessed, "but then I think about it, or thing about which character I haven't used in quite a while, and the plot tends to come to me. I think the longest block I ever had was probably a day."

On a personal note, I experienced one of Ed's story inspirations first-hand. Picking up a copy of EQMM one time, I turned right away to that issue's Edward D. Hoch story and then did a spit-take as I read on the first page, "Father Mike Mallory..." I immediately emailed Ed to thank him for the honor. He replied, "Sorry for ordaining you."

Oh, the Stories That Will be Written...

Okay, I had a retro post all set up and ready to go, because I have a deadline for something else that I'm working on, but then came two news stories that I found necessary to share:

Exclusive: US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say

"Foreign adversaries including Russia and China have recently directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of US federal employees working in national security, targeting those who have been fired or feel they could be soon, according to four people familiar with recent US intelligence on the issue and a document reviewed by CNN.

The intelligence indicates that foreign adversaries are eager to exploit the Trump administration’s efforts to conduct mass layoffs across the federal workforce – a plan laid out by the Office of Personnel Management earlier this week.

Russia and China are focusing their efforts on recently fired employees with security clearances and probationary employees at risk of being terminated, who may have valuable information about US critical infrastructure and vital government bureaucracy, two of the sources said. At least two countries have already set up recruitment websites and begun aggressively targeting federal employees on LinkedIn, two of the sources said." (LINK)

AND

Exclusive: Hegseth orders Cyber Command to stand down on Russia planning

"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

"Hegseth gave the instruction to Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh, who then informed the organization's outgoing director of operations, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, of the new guidance, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity."  (LINK)

Philip Kerr died way too soon...  

Then again, we still have Mick Herron...  There's a lot of stories to come from these two together.

***

Meanwhile:  

"Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace." - Agricola, ostensibly quoting Calgacus.

"Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children." – Alexei Navalny, Prison Diaries

"Scream at God if that's the only thing that will get results." - Brendan Francis

"HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE!!!!"  

                            - Shakespeare, The Tempest

A Jury of Her Peers

Something different today.  This is the anniversary of the publication of a classic short story, which happens to be a tale of murder and detection.  Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" first appeared in Every Week Magazine on March 5^th, 1917.  It was based on a play she had written called Trifles, which itself was inspired by a murder case she covered as a reporter.

It is considered a classic early feminist tale.  It appeared on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Among the authors who borrowed Glaspell's major plot conceit are Roald Dahl and W.P. Kinsella.  

You can read the story here. Or watch this Academy Award-nominated short:

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Stop me if you’ve read this before, but I just had a story accepted by...

I’m uncertain when short-story writers started doing this, but my social media feeds are regularly packed with posts from writers announcing their most recent acceptances.

I get it.

Writers have few enough victories that they want to stand on the mountaintop and shout to the world about every one of them. They want to celebrate, and they want us to celebrate with them, and we do because tomorrow we may make similar announcements.

I, on the other hand, rarely announce my acceptances, limiting most of my social media announcements to actual publications.

I’ve been burned so many times I’ve become leery of announcing anything until it is part of a finished product.

Early in my writing career—back when telephones were attached to the wall and social media involved postage stamps and months-long waits for responses—I told friends and family about all my acceptances.

And then anthologies were delayed or cancelled, magazines ceased publication or bumped my work from one issue to the next, and (these days) electronic publications disappeared from the internet, leaving my non-writing friends and family thinking I’m delusional.

So, rather than having to explain the vagaries of publishing, I mostly stopped announcing acceptances and now wait until I hold a physical product or have a URL I can link to before making announcements.

I’ve experienced the same dilemma from the editor’s side of the desk, when projects I’ve worked on have gotten cancelled or delayed. Sharing that news with writers who have already made public announcements about their acceptances leaves them in a similar bind. It isn’t fun.

So, should you announce all your acceptances or should you, like me, hold off announcements until you have a finished product in hand?

There’s no right or wrong answer.

And whether you announce your acceptances or wait until publication, congratulations for every one of them.

* * *

Earlier this week, Tough published my story “Family Business.”

Shakespeare, the bedroom, and Liz as prophet

Rootling in my virtual files for material old enough to recycle, I found the following post from my first group mystery blog, Poe's Deadly Daughters, which I wrote with fellow authors Sandra Parshall, Julia Buckley, Darlene Ryan not yet aka Sofie Kelly, and others. On rereading, it struck me as still a propos, even prophetic in its time.

June 24, 2010

English, the Language of New Words

My husband, who has limitless intellectual curiosity, informed me the other day that Shakespeare added 1,700 new words to the English language, including “bedroom.” Googling for confirmation, I found that figure came from a Dutch techie named Joel Laumans. Other online sources put the figure at 2,000 and even 3,000. Laumans explains that many of the new words were not pure original constructs, but the result of Shakespeare’s willingness to juggle parts of speech, turning nouns and adjectives into verbs and so on.

I nearly drowned in the deep end of Google, as one can so easily do while surfing the Net, checking out this claim. The Random House Dictionary puts the first use of “bedroom” around 1580-90, while the earliest performances of Shakespeare’s plays took place in roughly 1590. My husband suggested that the use of a room dedicated to sleeping was an innovation at that time. I had no trouble believing this when he said it. I know that privacy in the bedroom is a modern concept. Royalty in Queen Elizabeth I’s time had scads of people present when they got up and dressed, and the poor shared quarters out of necessity—as indeed they still do. We take the function of our rooms for granted. But when I lived in West Africa in the 1960s, even sophisticated urban locals kept the refrigerator in the living room, where everyone could see they had one (and handy for serving cold drinks to visitors as well), though that had changed by the time I visited again in the 1980s. It was a grand theory, but my husband was wrong. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which puts “bedroom” in the 1610s, points out that it replaced the earlier “bedchamber."

Laumans’s other examples range from “addiction” to “zany.” Random House puts “addiction” at 1595-1605, right in Shakespeare’s period, though the Online Etymology Dictionary points out that the original usage referred to a “penchant” rather than “enslavement,” from the Latin addictionem, a “devotion.” “Zany” comes from the Italian dialect zanni, a second-banana buffoon in the commedia dell’arte. I didn’t find any date or attribution of its use in English to Shakespeare in the online dictionaries.

English in particular, perhaps partly thanks to Shakespeare, lends itself to the creation of new words. We have beat out the French, who codified their language in the 17th and 18th centuries and have been fighting to keep it stable ever since, as the global lingua franca for just that reason. We say “restaurant,” “boutique,” and “savoir faire.” But they say le weekend, le brunch, and le Walkman. Also le blog, googler ("to google"), and surfer sur ("to surf on") Internet. [In 2025, as I have written on other occasions, the French have given up. English is the new lingua franca, and they say okay, cool, and shit with the rest of us.]

As an old English major, I can still rejoice in Shakespeare’s linguistic exuberance. My husband googled the playwright’s language in the first place because we had just watched the movie Shakespeare in Love for the umpteenth time, enjoying the in-jokes and how brilliantly writers Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman caught the Shakespearean voice. The other reason the topic is so fascinating is that we are currently living in a period when the invention of fresh language rivals that of Elizabethan times. In my high school math class, a “googol” was merely a big number: one with a helluva lot of zeroes after it. A “weblog,” didn’t exist, so it couldn’t be abbreviated to “blog.”

“Surf” was certainly a word. Yes, we had oceans in the 1950s, and they featured what Random House calls “the swell of the sea that breaks upon a shore” or “the mass or line of foamy water caused by the breaking of the sea upon a shore.” The noun had even been turned into a verb, “to float on the crest of a wave toward shore.” But now we channel surf and surf the Web. It’s an apt metaphor, because [here comes the prophecy] these days we seem to be rushing toward an unknown shore, much like that in the final image of Shakespeare in Love. It’s exciting and scary, because it seems equally likely, at least to me, that this shore could turn out to be planet-wide destruction on which our species breaks or further proliferation of technology that leads us toward a destiny in the stars.

Soliloquies

Wɱ Shakespeare and characters

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether this nobler to suffer the zings and perils of outrageous inner dialogue…

Crime writers seldom deal with soliloquy in novels and short stories. Hardly surprising: glaringly obvious but seldom mentioned, virtually all great examples come from live drama such as stage plays and movie sets. Unlike our romance sisters, we seldom delve deeply into matters of the heart… not until someone contemplates murder.

Unless, of course, we categorize 1^st person as presumed soliloquy.

[An exception occurs to me: graphic novels, particularly Marvel’s contributions. Young Spiderman had no one but his audience to confide his teenage problems, responsibilities, and financial and female woes.]

Soul System

Soliloquy includes a number of kinds, subsets if you will. These include:

• Soliloquy
• Monologue
• monodrama (Strindberg’s The Stronger)
• self revelation (Othello)
• solo soliloquy (Iago)
• said to object (Hamlet: Alas poor Yorick) 
• exposition, explanation
• dramatic monologue (Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess)
• Aside
• Lampshade (dealing with improbable story point)

Lampshade Hanging

Let’s break out lamp shading for a more thorough explanation. Think of it as drawing attention to it to disarm the audience. For example, the rest of the world doesn’t pack guns like characters in American novels. Agatha Christie handled this issue in And Then There Were None, by having Dr Armstrong say, “It's only in books people carry guns around.”

In classical literature, Dante addressed this a couple of times:

Inferno

That is no cause for wonder
for I who saw it hardly can accept it. (Inferno)

Paradisio

This cry of thine shall do as doth the wind,
    Which smiteth most the most exalted summits,
    And that is no slight argument of honour.
Therefore are shown to thee within these wheels,
    Upon the mount and in the dolorous valley,
    Only the souls that unto fame are known;
Because the spirit of the hearer rests not,
    Nor doth confirm its faith by an example
    Which has the root of it unknown and hidden.

In other words: sure, I speak of only celebrities because you wouldn’t pay attention otherwise.

Soliloquy Examples   ☞

Breaches of Etiquette (Writingwise)

 

Writing for publication is a crazy business. For me, it's probably more of a hobby/pastime than a business, since I've already had and finished my career (at IBM)--but writing is certainly important to me, and I try to obey its rules and do what's acceptable and proper.

Theory

As it applies to short fiction, one of the things that I've always been told to avoid is the possibility of having two editors or publishers wanting to buy the same story at the same time. It's a result of what's called simultaneous submissions--the practice of sending a particular story to more than one market at the same time, or sending it to a second market before hearing back from the first.

On the surface, it sounds like a smart approach. How could it not be good to have more than one person considering buying what you're selling, and even better to have three or four possible buyers for what you're selling? Well, sometimes it's not. Consider this: Let's say you want to sell your car, and you can think of two different people who might be interested. So you contact Prospect #1, make your pitch, and tell him you'll give him the first shot at buying it. Then you contact Prospect #2, make your pitch, and tell her you'll give her the first chance to buy it. As it turns out, if either one of them says yes, you've probably made the other one angry with you, or at least disappointed in you. Maybe you think that's fine: after all, you've sold the car. But in the publishing world, you'd like to be able to work with these editors over and over again--and you don't want to burn any bridges.

Simply said, the advantage of simultaneous submissions is that you increase your chances of publishing a story soon, and the disadvantage is that you risk upsetting an editor. 

Which, one might ask, is the correct choice?

Reality

I'm posting this today because of something that happened to me just last week. I had sent a story in late 2024 to what we'll call Market #1 and never heard anything back from them. (That happens, right?) So after four months of getting no response, I figured it had been rejected, and I sent that story to Market #2. A month later, Market #1 contacted me and said, lo and behold, they liked my story and wanted to publish it. They even told me when it would be published, so they'd already started planning the layout. So--wasting no time--I contacted Market #2 and said, as politely as I could, that I would like to withdraw that story from consideration. 

My problem, here, was that both of these were magazines I like and respect, run by editors I like and respect. I even confessed to the editor of Market #2 that I had first sent the story someplace else and that I'd thought they had rejected it, etc. As things turned out, the Market #2 editor was extremely kind and professional, and said no problem and no worries. So that editor removed it from their queue and all was well. But . . . would that editor later remember what I'd done, and maybe be less receptive to one of my submissions? I don't know--but I know I really, really hated to have to write that email and make that request to withdraw the story. At the very least, it was an admission of failure on several levels, and something I wouldn't want to have to do often. Things would of course have been much worse if Market #2 had said they'd decided to accept the story also--that, thank God, has never happened to me--but it was bad enough just to have had to confess my mistake,

Because it was definitely my mistake. What I should have done was officially withdraw that story from consideration at Market #1, via email, before submitting it to Market #2. But I didn't, and that caused an uncomfortable situation that could easily have been avoided.

Questions for the Class

What are your thoughts on this? Does the advantage--better odds for a prompt sale--outweigh the disadvantage? Many writers feel that it does, especially in these days of longer response times. It's hard for a writer to send a story off to a market that takes from three months to a full year to make a yea/nay decision on your submission. (There are even several how-to-write books that will tell you that editors expect you to submit simultaneously, even if the publications' submission guidelines tell you not to.)

Or . . . do you err on the side of caution, and never ever have the same story under consideration at more than one market at the same time? I've found that writers tend to be as equally divided on this issue as they are on plotting vs. pantsing. What say you?

Meanwhile, have a good March (to wherever you're going), and keep writing good stories.

Just don't get yourself two dates to the prom.

 

Adventures in Dictation

Shortly before lockdown, I talked to a science fiction author named Rick Partlow about getting on board with his publisher. He said, "Sure, if you have a good indie backlog (I did.) and can spin up stories quickly."

Um...

Holland Bay took ten years to hammer into publishable form. The Dogs of Beaumont Heights, the sequel, took only two because I knew the setting. But it was still a struggle. A trilogy? I thanked Rick and decided science fiction as TS Hottle would remain a not-for-profit venture. There was no way I could spin up a character arc for the mysterious pilot calling herself Suicide. (It's a call sign, based on her penchant for taking risks no one else ever would.) I thanked Rick and moved on. I was at work, took a restroom break. 

By the time I got back to my desk, I had nine story germs spun up in my head. Maybe I could toss these out and make it a trilogy about Suicide and not the seven kids (now adults) from earlier books I'd written. I messaged Rick back. Rick manages a 90,000-word novel a month! I said, "Ass."

"You're welcome."

But how would I make that work? My wife had suffered a major health crisis and needed more attention than before, when she was working and could deal with my man flu. (Spoiler alert: I've only had the flu once since 2002, and my bout with Covid I mistook for a bad cold. Sadly, it hit the same day I got my first booster. That was fun.)

At the time, I drove Uber, but I didn't want potentially sick people in my car. And Uber's isolation practices, when everything was unknown and no vaccines existed, didn't cut it. So I switched to Door Dash. Pick up food, drive to the customer, go to the next restaurant. I also found Rick's secret. He dictated.

Well, I knew these characters intimately. And I'd started outlining more. One reason Holland Bay took so long was that I'd pantsed a story in a fictional city with a cast of characters that would give Dickens pause and a level of detail Tolkien would have balked at. I was trying to write all five seasons of The Wire at one time. Nine science fiction novels? I'd better at least sketch them out.

I quickly developed a system to write while I worked. The restaurants all tended to be in the same location. So I didn't use GPS. Driving to the restaurant or waiting on a run? I dictated the story into Google Docs on my phone. Driving to the customer? I listened to audio books, tolerating the GPS's interruptions along the way. Suicide Run, the original book in the arc, took a month and checked in around 85,000 words (if memory serves.) The longest is the next unreleased book (8 of 9, with a short story collection as a coda), at 92,000 words.  In a year, I managed to dictate the entire story arc of nine novels. 

What did I learn?

It was a weird time, requiring weird approaches. I might have done Holland Bay parts 2, 3, and 4 that way, but somehow, that didn't seem right. Nor did I want to resurrect my PI, Nick Kepler. Kepler is done, anyway. But the arc is not so much a nine-book series-within-a-series as it's a really long story about the seven young people and their mentor in the events following my original trilogy. And if you've read this space for any amount of time, you know I have a penchant for settings and world-building. Probably why Ed McBain appeals to me like he does.

 

Update From The Lazy Writing Front: Mental Illness

Okay so everyone has their lazy moments. Everyone.

When you're a writer, sometimes those moments get published.

So today I'm going to talk about a trend I have noticed over the past couple of years in crime fiction in particular and in entertainment more broadly. And it's lazy writing at its finest.

I'm talking about fictional portrayals of mental illness.

The Cliff's Notes version: mental illness seems to be the latest in a long line of props lazy writers use as convenient plot devices.

Go ahead: ask me how I know.

Okay, just kidding. I know because I have mental illness all around me. And so do you, whether you know it or not.

The big, dark, unsurprising secret that has gone unreported down the ages, is that mental illness has always been with us, always will. It is an inescapable aspect of the human condition, just like love, happiness, reproduction, aging and eventually, death.

I was recently reminded of this fact by a series of events that occurred while I was working away at my day gig (for those of you playing at home, I teach history to teenagers). Let me repeat: I am a teacher. I manage young people and attempt to educate them for a living. And if I'm being honest, I'm pretty okay at it. 

This is because I continue to be fascinated by history and I like people. More to the point, I find teenagers fun and worth getting to know. This is in part why one of my daily mantras currently is "Gen-Z is gonna save the world." And I really believe that.

But sometimes my experience, optimism and ability run smack up against a wall. And that is exactly what happened over the past couple of weeks. In sum: I had to do my job while trying to navigate the massive distraction of a mentally ill teenager in love for the first time.

Yep. You read that right.

One kid. 

I'm no mental health professional, and I would never even think to try to diagnose someone's particular pathology. That said, this kid has been driving the Struggle Bus for most of her life, especially emotionally.

Here’s how it went down. I clued in pretty quickly that this child Had a tendency toward wild mood swings, deep despair, giddy, highs, and tendency to always, always, always over share what was going on in her life at that very moment.

And truth be told, the conflict I found myself in with this student sort of snuck up on me. Now, bear in mind, once again, I’m a friendly person. I like my students, I like my coworkers. I like my boss. I like the parents I me. I can find something to like it just about anybody. And I also find that my job gets easier if kids/parents Realize that not only on my fun, but I care about them, I care about their successes, and to a lesser extent about their failures. I can’t get bogged down in their failures. We do our best to focus on the victories, small and large, and that seems to make all the difference in my classroom.

So the student in question early on developed a habit of dropping into my classroom before school, between classes, etc. And and so doing, she would deliver a piece of art, and anecdote about what was going on with her, ask about my weekend. Pretty non-descriptive stuff. As far as the art is concerned, by the way, she’s not the only one who gives me art. I have a bulletin board full of student art in my classroom.

And then the tenor of our interactions began to change. Because this student fell in love. With a boy. Online. In another country.

And all of a sudden, all she wanted to do, was talk to me about this kid. Coupled with the fact that the student has the aforementioned mood swings, has to be constantly reminded not to eat in my class, and needs almost constant redirection to keep her focused and on task when we’re working, the above didn’t really raise many red flags with me at first.

And then one day it hit me. Kids talk to me all the time about their lives. They don’t talk to me all the time about their love lives. And while I would listen to this student with half an ear, and say things like: “Have you told your mother about this boy? Anything you’ve told me, you should’ve told your parent. Because you have to understand, anything you say to me is not confidential. If you don’t want your parents to know what’s going on with you you shouldn’t tell me. I’m not a counselor, and I’m not a therapist.”

Or, you know, words to that effect.

And then came the day that she insisted on reading a love letter from her to her boyfriend.

Aloud. To me.

And she did this over my repeated requests that she stop. Over my repeated protestations that this was not appropriate behavior. That she was putting me in a tough position, and she was making me uncomfortable.

None of this phased her. I have to admit it’s tough to surprise me anymore. Especially in my day job. I’ve seen a lot of things. I never thought I would get sexually harassed by a student. And talking about your love life in ways that make other people uncomfortable, believe it, or not, dear reader, is a form of sexual harassment.

Now, do I think this kid was trying to upset me? No. Do I think she was trying to make me uncomfortable? No. But just because she wasn’t trying to, didn’t mean that she did not do exactly that.

So, I did the smart thing. I talked to my boss about it. My boss is a great boss. She stepped in, had a conversation with the student, explained to her that I had some concerns, etc. And asked her to stop the behavior.

That worked for about a week. Then earlier this week this student had a meltdown in my classroom. Went off on me. I kept her after class to make sure she was doing OK emotionally. She’s on medication, I don’t judge, I’m not a mental health professional, but I am also responsible for my students, for their health, safety, and welfare. So we had a post class check-in.

Here’s a quick summary of that check-in: this young lady screamed at me at the top of her lungs about a variety of subjects between which she meandered back-and-forth for 22 minutes.

Twenty. Two.

And all I could do was calmly listen, calmly reiterate over and over again, that this was not acceptable behavior. And eventually, With the timely help of a couple of other staff members, she managed to calm down.

Note that I said: “She managed to calm down.” Not, “We managed to calm her down.”

Nope. There was no magic bullet. There was no special phrase, no code, no smoke signals, nothing that would calm this young lady down. She had to do it herself, and she mostly did it because she ran out of steam.

And the irony here is that for all of her focusing on me in her rant, none of this really had anything to do with me. I was simply the object on which she focused her all-out verbal assault.

In the days since this incident, I have been mulling the differences between the mental challenges this child faces and those I so often see in crime fiction.

With a lot of support, effort and some medication, this young lady manages to just get through her day. And she rarely does so unscathed. And yet I see characters in crime fiction all the time who exhibit many of these same debilitating and off-putting personality traits, and they manage to buckle down and shut out their demons and solve the case/use their own pathologies as insight into what another mentally ill person might have done while committing this crime/used their pathologies to successfully plan and pull of a crime themselves.

And it is all a bunch of bunk. I don’t intend to call out any authors by name, but here’s one hint: a budding serial killer adopted by a cop and trained by that cop to use objectively bad people as the outlet for said serial killer’s urges. 

Yuh-huh. And let me know when Elvis gets here.

That’s not how mental illness works. 

And then there’s the dementia/Alzheimer’s craze. I have seen dementia victims in crime fiction do things and say things that none of the countless people in my own family who suffered from dementia seemed capable of once they were past the initial stages of the disease.

One fictional exception that seems to really have embraced taking an unflinching look at mental illness? The first Joker movie. Joaquin Phoenix was brilliant. 

Not the second movie though. A musical adaption? 

Some things are too crazy for real life.

What about you? Experiences with mental illness that don’t jive with all these assorted crime fiction tropes? Tell us in the Comments section.

See you there!

The Gap in the Curtain

John Buchan wrote six Richard Hannay novels, the first and best-known being The 39 Steps, with its propulsive chase story, but he wrote another series, of five books, with a markedly different tone and a very different hero, Sir Edward Leithen.  Hannay is sort of a muscular Christian, brash and unambiguous, Leithen is more thoughtful, and acts less with animal cunning than with his wits. 

The first of the Leithen books is The Power-House, written before the Great War, and serialized in Blackwood’s in 1913.  Conan Doyle had introduced Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” in 1893, and Moriarty is our template for the arch-villain.  All the same, Moriarty is still mortal, not superhuman.The bad guy in The Power-House is modeled expressly on Nietsche, and he heralds a new breed of heavy.  “Someday there will come the marriage of knowledge and will, and then the world will march,” he tells Leithen, and you feel the chill of Mein Kampf, a good twenty years before Hitler makes it come true.

The Power-House is still my favorite of the Leithen novels, and in fact my favorite Buchan, but Buchan explored odd venues in the Leithen stories, not least with The Gap in the Curtain, from 1932, about precognition.  It’s a thriller, with elements of science fiction and the supernatural, the title a spooky evocation of eavesdropping on the future.  Five people attend what might as well be called a séance; two of them foresee their deaths.  Spoiler alert: the predictions come true, but. 

Buchan wrote fast and loose, and called his penny-dreadfuls ‘shockers.’  He perhaps took his historicals more seriously, The Blanket of the Dark (another knockout of a title), Witch Wood, Midwinter.  He never gave less than good weight.  The Gap in the Curtain is a novel of ideas, along the line of H.G. Wells, with its social and political commentary, but it’s chiefly an entertainment.  You don’t have to give it a lot of deep thought to enjoy the ride, if all the same you swallow some sulfur with the molasses.

Buchan died in 1940, of a stroke.  He was Governor-General of Canada.  He’d been a lawyer, a diplomat, a spy.  His last novel, Sick Heart River, was published after his death.  In the book, Edward Leithen is given but a year to live, and he goes off on a quest into the wooded wilderness of the upper Mackenzie River.  It’s a story about redemption, and clearly Leithen foresees his own death.  Buchan had no such premonition, although you can only wonder.  Leithen is the closest thing to autobiographical we find in Buchan, and his career arc as a character is an alternate history to Buchan’s own.  I’d prefer to think Buchan didn’t see it coming.  I’d rather not see it coming, either, but sooner or later, the curtain parts for us.

They Have the Beat

In late December, an anthology I edited was published by Level Short. It's called Angel City Beat, and it includes fifteen stories by members of the Sisters in Crime Los Angeles chapter about the city they call home. On Monday evening--as I'm writing this--eight authors in the anthology are appearing on a panel moderated by Naomi Hirahara (who wrote the book's introduction) at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California, as part of the book's launch party. I wasn't able to be there, but this is the perfect time to let you know about this book here.

Here is the book's description: The City of Angels has a dark side. Hidden beneath its shiny surface are misdeeds, miscreants, and murderers. From Santa Monica's sandy beaches to Hollywood’s glitzy streets, from Boyle Heights to Holmby Hills to the dirt trails of the San Gabriel Mountains, there are so many tales to tell. So many people on the beat. The police detectives seeking justice. The reporters seeking truth. Writers who build beats into their movies and TV shows. And people who choose violence to beat others and come out on top. Angel City Beat is an anthology of stories that show life behind the plastic smiles of the rich and famous, the desperate pleas of the overlooked, and the promises of dreams forgotten. Angel City Beat is the beat of a city told by those who love her. 

More than anything, what the stories have in common is the setting, the Los Angeles area. But LA is so big and diverse--its geography and its inhabitants--and these stories reflect that. They are, in order of appearance:

"The Missing Mariachi" by Aimee Kluck - this is a police procedural story about a kidnapped woman

"Murder Unjustified" by Daryl Wood Gerber - this whodunit starring a TV showrunner offers a behind-the-scenes look at writing for Hollywood

"Getting Warmer" by Kate Mooney - a newspaper reporter is on the trail of a cold case that is heating up

"What's Really Unforgettable" by Ken Funsten, CFA - an investment manager is determined to help a potential client after the man is attacked and lands in the hospital with amnesia

"The Feast of the Seven Fishes" by Gail Alexander - this is a suspense story starring two caterers who witness a murder on Christmas Eve day

"Death Beat" by Meredith Taylor - a hospice worker notices her patients are dying faster than they should

''Everything's Relative" by Jenny Carless - a dystopian story set in the near future, when water is so scarce, it inspires desperate behavior

"Settling the Score" by Anne-Marie Campbell - a high-tech whodunit involving the LA Philharmonic Orchestra

"A Thesis on Murder" by Paula Bernstein - a graduate student is close to getting her PhD, but someone stands in her way

"Underbelly" by Jacquie Wilvers - when a screenplay is stolen, its author has plans for the thief

"A Dead Line" by Ken Funsten, CFA - a suspense story about a teenager whose summer job involves making cold calls

"Fatal Return" by Sybil Johnson - a whodunit involving a murder at a library

"Crime Doesn't Play" by Norman Klein - a police detective good at puzzles puts his skills to good use

"Unbeatable" by Melinda Loomis - A pet psychic is hired to ensure an unbeaten horse is ready for his upcoming final race just days after his jockey died in a horrific accident

"Byline for Murder" by Nancy Cole Silverman - a newspaper reporter is assigned the explosive story of an A-list actress accused of killing her costar

I hope you are enticed to pick up this anthology and check out its diverse stories. The book is available from the usual online sources. It also is available at Vroman's Bookstore. Click here to order a copy from this independent bookstore. If you live in the LA area, the anthology also will soon be on the shelves at the Pasadena Public Library.

Weather or not.

Elmore Leonard was indeed a great writer.  That doesn’t mean his 10 Rules For Good Writing should be followed.  Some of them make sense, but, “Never open a book with weather?”

     What if your book is set in the Amazon, might your characters take note of a little humidity?  What if your lead guy is a leatherneck working on an oil rig in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska? Can he say, "Gee, it's nippy." How about Monsoon season in Bangkok?  "Before I left the house I had to choose between an umbrella and diving gear."

      I wrote a book set in the Hamptons that starts in the middle of a raging snowstorm, a phenomenon not often observed out there, at least not in fiction.  Not a single reviewer mentioned my flagrant violation of Leonard’s rules.  So there.

            I find the cliché of “setting as character” a little annoying since it’s not.  Setting is the setting.  But there is some truth that a special setting, like Raymond Chandler’s LA, Parker’s Boston or Grafton’s Santa Terresa, California, does have a personality that infects the story, like a member of a series ensemble, familiar and prominent in the narrative.

            You English majors will recognize the term “pathetic fallacy”, a conceit used by Homer, Shakespeare and 18^th century Romantics where the mood and behaviors of the characters both reflect and influence natural forces.  In modern literature, this can be pretty silly, unless it’s deftly metaphorical.  Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is often found trudging through a howling blizzard somewhere in the Upper Great Plains (even in Chapter 1), establishing the promise of savage and frozen-hearted villainy about to ensue. 

             (My wife played on a softball team in graduate school composed mostly of PhD candidates who called themselves The Pathetic Fallacies.  Still my favorite use of the term.)

            I’ve written two other books that featured giant storms, which might betray more of a meteorological than literary obsession.  In both, hurricanes capped off the action, a deployment of weather as a plot device Leonard is silent on.  In Black Swan, I was credited with a clever use of the “locked-room mystery” motif (trope?), though my actual intent was to crib somewhat blatantly from the plot of Key Largo.  The concept of being trapped in a claustrophobic space as an uncontrollable fury smashes into the building is pretty compelling.  Especially when you’re trapped there with a bunch of murderous, drunken bad guys.  Weather in this case really deserves to be front and center, open to any metaphorical, theological, existential interpretation you wish to infer. 

            My other book featuring a wild tempest took place on the Jersey Shore, where I actually rode out a hurricane.  I was a lifeguard, and since the town was paying us to protect lives, we had to stay on while the protected fled to the mainland.  After clearing out a few knuckleheads trying to surf in the wrathful Atlantic Ocean, we retreated to our bungalow for the night, when the worst of the storm hit.   So, I too was confined to tight quarters that were being bashed and jostled by the wind with a bunch of people who were not murderous, but decidedly drunk.

            This was an experience that I had to use at some point.  In Homer, to say nothing of the Old Testament, these sorts of events are an act of divine cleansing of the hubris and corruption inherent in ever-fallible humanity.  I didn’t want to go that far, though as we all know, few things impose a greater sense of humility on real people and fictional characters alike than a rip-roaring natural disaster.    

          After that storm in New Jersey, with only the Beach Patrol and other first responders wandering around looking at the damage, the world was strangely quiet, even serene.   For some reason, it evoked the feelings I had reading the last paragraph of Joyce’s The Dead, which I believe is the finest bit of literary language ever composed in English.  So I adapted that for the ending of my lifeguard book, Elysiana. 

            I waited for charges of appropriation but never heard a word. 

The Horror! The Horror?

For the past few years, I've been maintaining a list of markets for short crime/mystery fiction for the members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (obligatory plug: membership is free, and the group is open to writers, readers, editors, and anyone else interested in the form). Several times a month I go hunting for new market opportunities: magazines, websites and anthologies that might be of interest to the writers in our group. This means checking sites like Duotrope and the Submission Grinder, scrolling through social media, doing general Google searches, and so on. New magazines are relatively rare these days, but new anthologies pop up fairly often.

I'm Stephen King, and you're not.

And I've noticed something odd– or at least, something I don't quite understand.

Mystery readers can be a fairly rabid bunch, and there are a lot of them. Walk into any bookstore, and the mystery section is likely to be among the largest. So why is it that there seem to be a lot more markets for short fiction in other genres than there are in mystery?

This isn't new; it's something I was aware of even before I started keeping the markets list. I should also say that it's possible I'm just wrong about this. Maybe my perceptions are skewed somehow, or maybe I'm just not good at this kind of searching.

But, man, it certainly seems as though, for every new anthology seeking mystery stories, there are ten seeking fantasy or science fiction and fifteen or so seeking horror. It's the preponderance of horror that I always find especially confusing. Go back to that generic bookstore, and compare the size of the mystery section to the size of the horror section (you can find it by looking for Stephen King and Joe Hill). In pretty much every bookstore I've ever frequented, the mystery section is larger.

So what explains the seemingly much larger number of markets for horror? Logically, it would seems to suggest a similarly larger number of readers, but I don't see much other evidence that this is the case. Maybe it's just the case that there are a lot of horror readers who don't read anything else? Maybe horror readers are more open to short stories, while most mystery readers prefer novels?

One of the places I dabbled in horror

I should make it clear that I have nothing against horror fiction. I've dabbled in it myself, and I certainly recognize there's a lot of wonderful writing being produced in the field. My first love will always be crime, though, and I guess the bottom line is that I wish mystery writers had more opportunities to strut our stuff.

So: short column this month. It's February, after all. The main reason it's short is because I don't have an answer to this question, and I'm hoping someone will. What do you think? Are my perceptions of the current market just wrong? If they're not, what explains this?

Or maybe everyone just wants to be Stephen King?

The irony, of course, is that horror fiction has its roots in texts like Dracula and Frankenstein. Mystery fiction, by contrast, looks back to the short stories of writers like Poe and Doyle (yes, this is reductive, and yes, Doyle wrote novels about Holmes, but I think there's pretty general agreement that the stories are better).

That First Book You Loved...

What's the first book you remember loving?

When I was a kid, say just learning to read, my favourite book was Mr. Hazelnut. It was about a young girl who meets a tailor who sews magical clothes. He knows just what Alice longs for, makes the clothes for her, then poof! Disappears. But the clothes grow with her over time, so it's a kind-of happy ending.  I still have that book (it was written by a Scandinavian woman) and plan to read it to my three year old granddaughter this winter.

I grew older and devoured Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  By eleven, I was into Agatha Christie and had read most of her books by the age of thirteen.  In high school, I fell in love with Ivanhoe. Then and now, I zoom to my friends' bookshelves in every house I go into.

Were there books in your house?  We had several low-bookshelves lining our living room and dining room.  I was raised by an ardent book-lover. My dad lost his father when he was six, and there was no money for books in his young years. He vowed that - when he grew up - he would buy every book he ever wanted. I grew up in a house full of books and they are still my treasures.

My own home has books in every room.  Filling walnut bookshelves, piled on side tables, bedside tables.  My office is a shrine to books.  And while I applaud the development of Kindle, a shelf-full of Kindles doesn't fill my heart the way book spines do.

Yes, there was magic in the first book I loved.  Sorcery magic, plus the kind that fills your soul.  

Because books create magic, I have found.  They provide a magical escape into a zillion adventures.  

I count myself lucky to have made a career in writing books.  If in my lifetime, I can create that wonderful escape for some readers, then my heart will be full.

What about you?  Was there 'one' book that made a difference to your childhood and stoked your love for reading?