Cover Up

Here’s an oddment.  Cover Up, released in 1949.  William Bendix, Dennis O’Keefe, Barbara Britton, Art Baker.  Directed by Alfred E. Green, whose career goes back to the silents; first picture of note is the pre-Code Stanwyck, Baby Face; did biopics of Jolson, Jackie Robinson, and Eddie Cantor.  Original screen story by O’Keefe, under a pseudonym.  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo, who also shot D.O.A., Stalag 17, and Kiss Me Deadly, before going on to Judgment at Nuremberg, and an Oscar for Ship of Fools.  The razor-sharp black-and-white in Cover Up is the best thing about it.  The picture is less than the sum of its parts – not incoherent, but lukewarm – and you can wonder why I was curious about it in the first place.

For openers, Bendix.  He gets top billing, although he plays second banana to O’Keefe.  Bendix did a lot of lovable saps, the best-known being The Life of Riley, but he did solid work for Hitchcock, in Lifeboat, with Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, and as Babe Ruth.  You could do worse, though, than to check him out in The Dark Corner, a nifty little noir where he plays very much against type.  Dark Corner has two serious weaknesses, Clifton Webb doing the same character he did in Laura, a year or so before, and Mark Stevens, who’s a Godawful stiff, as the hero.  It has two serious strengths, Lucille Ball, as the private eye’s Girl Friday, who gets him out of the frame, and Bendix, who has the part that used to go to Raymond Burr, before Perry Mason.  Bendix plays the muscle with alarming menace, thick-tongued, and his eyelids shuttered.  His body English is top-heavy, but he has a predator’s grace.  He’s sly, like many stupid people, and gets what he deserves, in the end, spoiler alert. 

Secondly, we’ve got Dennis O’Keefe.  You either know or you don’t.  O’Keefe did a lot of amiable and undemanding B’s, but in 1947 and ‘48 he made two pictures back-to-back with Anthony Mann, T-Men and Raw Deal.  Raw Deal is probably the best part O’Keefe ever got, and it features Claire Trevor, along with both John Ireland and Raymond Burr as the bad guys.  T-Men, though, is the one that really holds your attention.  Undercover cops, infiltrating the mob.  Alfred Ryder, almost invariably a yellowbelly and a slime, in over a hundred features and TV episodes, here gets to play the stand-up guy, who goes down without ratting out his partner to the mob torpedoes.  Charles McGraw, who once in a blue moon got to crack a smile or even be the hero (in Narrow Margin), is the torpedo in this picture, and one of the chilliest psychopaths in the Anthony Mann stable, which is going some.  O’Keefe, at the end, coming after McGraw, is past the point of no return, and clearly off the leash.  He heaves himself up the gangplank, in a fury, and you can feel his physical force.  It isn’t a shock cut, or a sudden scare, or some camera trick.  The camera’s steady.  He’s coming at you, and you shrink back.  His forward movement is that implacable.  You can’t help it.  Raw Deal and T-Men were both shot by the great cinematographer John Alton.

So, what is it with Cover Up?  It just doesn’t have any tension.  You keep wanting it to go somewhere, like it’s the Little Picture That Could, and the air keeps going out of its tires.  O’Keefe comes to town, he’s an insurance investigator, he’s going to file a report on a suicide.  He meets cute with Barbara Britton.  They’re a little old for their characters, but believable, and kinda sweet.  He checks in with the local sheriff, Bendix, and begins to smell a rat.  The guy shot himself, but the gun’s gone missing.  Bendix affects unconcern.  O’Keefe pokes around.  The town clams up.  It doesn’t take long for O’Keefe to figure out it’s murder, staged as a suicide.  Bendix, no fool he, already knows.  The question is, why is Bendix covering it up, or is he in fact the killer?  But mostly, O’Keefe is sticking around because he’s moony over Barbara.  Her dad, the local banker, turns out to be a suspect.  O’Keefe, however, is half-hearted about all this.  Oh, and it’s Christmas.  You can tell because they keep playing the opening bars of carols on the soundtrack.  Then, the only real suspect, the saintly retired doctor you never actually get to see, dies off-screen of a convenient heart attack.  The best moment in the movie, coming up.  Barbara finds the missing gun, at her dad’s, and goes to plant it, at the doctor’s.  O’Keefe shows up.  She hides.  He finds the gun.  Over his shoulder, you can see her reflection in a framed picture on the wall.  He sits at the dead doctor’s desk, and you realize at the same time he does, that the dead doc was left-handed.  Of course, so was the murderer.

Yadda-yadda-yadda. It isn’t Bendix, and it isn’t the dad.  O’Keefe and Barb realize the only obstacles to their happiness are their own cold feet, the stage door closes as Dancer and Prancer lift off.  Inoffensive.  It’s a pretty poem, but you can’t call it Homer.  In other words, it’s not noir enough.  O’Keefe pretends to be hard-boiled, but come on, he’s soft on the girl.  Bendix tries on some ambiguity, but too much Dutch uncle, not enough sinister.  The dad, with his rosy cheeks and white hair, is he cooking the books at the bank?  Not.  You want the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden.  I expected a little less sugar, and a little more bite.  The snake never shows up.

Author, Author

 I'm making a nontraditional distinction between "writer" and "author."

When I last blogged three weeks ago, I celebrated the release of my debut novel, The Devil’s Kitchen. Since then, I've been writing very little. Instead, I've been busily forcing myself on audiences to talk about the book. It's been exhilarating. The process has left me thinking about the terms “writer” and “author.”

While acknowledging that the words are often treated as synonyms, dictionaries and the web distinguish the two. The line they draw gets squiggly. Most sources suggest that the key distinction lies with publication. All authors are writers, but only those writers who put their work into the public realm are authors. Using this definition, we might quarrel about the meaning of publication. 

Other definitions reserve the title of author exclusively for those who have published books. Sorry, short story crafters, a writer is all we can ever be.

A different definition focused on intention. It's an internal/external distinction. Writers are scribes who create content for others. Journalists and ghostwriters are perhaps the foremost examples. Authors, on the other hand, are internally driven. They create for themselves and the satisfaction they derive from the creative process. This one seemed a tad pompous. 

I'm sidestepping the debate. The last few weeks have left me thinking about another way to define the words. It’s a solo/social distinction.

As a writer, I sit alone at my keyboard. Sometimes, the dogs join me, but that's about it. I type. I edit. Occasionally, I talk to myself. "Writer" emphasizes the introverted side of my soul. The craft is a solitary activity. Remembering an admonition from Joyce Carol Oates that “constant interruptions are the destruction of imagination,” I block off time when I won’t be disturbed.

“Author,” conversely, is the public face of my writing. It’s me talking about my work in the hope that someone will give The Devil’s Kitchen a try. It's me, standing in a bookstore, giving a public reading, or sitting alongside mystery lovers at a book club talking about the characters’ paths. It's me attending conferences and signing books.

"Author" is my narrow, extroverted, social side. He is the promotional arm of book writing.

Just as there are guides for writers that propose effective ways to develop plot twists or characters, there are also a variety of resources offering advice on how to  inhabit the "author" persona. As a novice, I delved into a few of them and learned everything I needed to know.

The pen—The expert community strongly recommended gel ink as the best pen for book signing events. Rubber grips, with their ergonomic benefits, also received high marks.

The autograph—I found a surprising amount of advice about changing my signature for book signings. I was told that I needed enough swoosh to project style. I should strive for heightened legibility, yet with an economy of motion allowing for speed in a signing line. The blogosphere recommended practicing my signature. Too late, I’m afraid. I’ve been signing too much for too long. My default signature emerges unless I go slow and concentrate hard on my swooshy author script.

The reading—Here, things got controversial. Some sources recommended tabbing my book and reading directly from it. This approach flashes the cover to the audience and helps market. Other experts suggested printing the pages so an author can enlarge the font for easy reading. Printed pages in sleeves mean that the reader will not have to battle with a book's bound spine in a public forum. The debate raged.

Everyone agreed that authors practice their corporate reading and hone their style. Don't read as one normally would. Focus on enunciation and clarity over theatrics. Find your Goldilocks moment, the advice guides suggest—neither too long nor too short. Choose an excerpt with a stand-alone value that emotionally engages and reveals the essence of what the book is about. That asks a lot from a few short paragraphs.

The presence—Almost all the guides recommend that the author do something to ensure that the audience remembers the writer. Several suggested that authors consider coming in costume. I don’t have a National Park Service uniform, so I can’t dress like the main characters in my book. I still have my Boy Scout uniform in the back of the closet. The shirt is festooned with a variety of patches. Maybe that would work. I can promise that if I show up in my BSA shorts and neckerchief, I'd  give bookstore patrons something to talk about on the drive home. 

The recap: The guides I reviewed suggested that I change my pen, signature, voice, reading style, and clothes. Most, however, concluded by reminding me to be authentic.

I’m seizing on the last bit of advice. I’ll be attending Malice Domestic at the end of the week. I won’t be in costume. My signature will be the typical scrawl, and I will likely sound like I always have.

But I will remember to bring a gel ink pen. It proves I've learned something.

BSP: April has been a good month. In addition to the novel’s publication, the anthology Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun with my story "A Placid Purloin" was released on April 14^th. Trouble in Texas, an anthology from Sisters in Crime North Dallas, dropped on April 15th. It includes my story, “Doggone.” Michael Bracken edited both anthologies. He blogged about them last week. 

Until next time.

”Parents in Tech Want Their Kids to Go Into the Arts Instead.” — Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2025.

             The sub-head was:   “Hands-on jobs that demand creativity are seen as less vulnerable to artificial intelligence.” 

Before all us underpaid artists and writers start letting the Schadenfreude sneak in, our chosen path is still a chancy way to make a living, and always will be.  That is, if you put all your financial eggs in one basket.  I’ve always believed that picking between science and the arts, or business and the arts, is a false choice. 

There’s no law that says you can’t do it all.  I have friends from college who went all in on careers in music, or photography, or theatre, or dance.  Some of them made it, and though now elder statespeople in their fields, many of their names, and certainly their achievements, are recognizable.  You haven’t heard about the ones who failed, now dead, embittered, or wistfully resigned. 

 I’m sorry for them, but I have little sympathy for those who regarded their art as a higher calling, superior to anything one might do to just make a little money.  This is nonsense.  I believe that all honest work is equally honorable.  My son is a working artist who also helps run a sawmill.  He paints and pays his bills.  The art might be more enriching, but he loves wood and delights in the associations he’s developed inside the woodworking community.  He also knows how to run giant mill saws, shop tools, laser cutters. CAD/CAM and C&C machines, computers in the service of art and commerce. 

You want to give your grandkids good advice?  Just say “Man-machine interface.”

I’ve been entangled in the building trades my whole life, mostly as a designer and cabinetmaker, and you won’t find a more intelligent and engaging bunch of people in any profession.  None of them ever thought I shouldn’t be writing books.  One of them is in a band with a standing gig at a local bar.  Another is a carpenter and phi beta kappa graduate in English literature.  Do not challenge him on how to cope inside crown moldings or the rankings of the best books of 2024.

I have another carpenter friend who’s also sort of a career criminal who loves my books and shares them with his fellow inmates.  He wrote me once to say he’d convinced the prison librarian to stock my whole list. 

This might be the definition of a captive audience. 

       The standard advice by the self-important is to follow your passion.  Well, I’ve aways had a passion for regular meals, a decent place to live and a serviceable car.  You can achieve all this and still have plenty of time left to write novels, paint landscapes, play funky bass or imitate Sir Laurence Olivier at your community theater.  Or all the above.  (You could also watch a lot of sports and work on your handicap, but these are different ambitions not addressed in this essay.)

Since this is a project in alienating as many people as possible, I also have little sympathy for those who talk about writing a book, or learning guitar, or playing Lady Macbeth, but never get around to actually doing any of it, blaming their demanding job/kids/wife/husband/Pilates class.  The same rules of time apply.  There’s plenty of it in a day, or weekend, to pack a lot in if you really want to do it.  I suspect that many of these people have learned that it’s really hard to be good at anything in the arts.  That it takes tremendous discipline, hard work and sacrifice.  So it’s a lot easier to talk about than actually do.

            I might have had a bigger literary career if all I’d done was write books.  I’ll never know, and I really don‘t care.  Instead, I got to do an awful lot of interesting things, meet a wildly diverse array of people, master several different commercial and manual skills (like playing the funky bass), and pay all my bills.

Mostly on time. 

 

 

Wabbit Time

The celebrated actor with the most unusual command of the English language never stepped into the Globe Theatre or on any other London stage, nor Broadway for that matter. His enunciation of Shakespeare brought down the house. Consider these famous lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

“A wose by any other name…”

and

“Woemeo, Woemeo, wherefwore art thou?”

Yes, this is the megastar who uttered arguably the cleverest, wittiest, most famous applause-winning line in any theatre:

“My twusty wifle 
  is a twifle wusty.”

You nailed it, we’re talking Elmer Fudd, the thespian who put the ‘warning’ in Warner Bros.

A Fudd by Any Other Name

Unbeknownst to many fans, shotgun-toting big ‘El’ had his name appropriated by outside forces. Nay, not those words of conspiracy theorists: FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) or its variant, FUDD (fear, uncertainty, disinformation, doubt).

Instead, dictionaries define fudd as an old-fashioned person. More narrowly, NRA fans derisively refer to non-militant gun owners who use rifles made of wood and steel exclusively for hunting rather than weapons of war fabricated from carbon fiber, and esoteric ceramics and polymers.

Generally, fudds of this sense don’t see the necessity of tactical weaponry. They are thought to side with more restrictive pre-Clarence Thomas interpretations of the Second Amendment. Personally, I thought they missed a bet by not using fuddite. Luddite… Fuddite… Never mind.

The above are North American denotations. Among British definitions of fud is a Collins entry of Scottish root meaning tail of a rabbit or hare. Which brings us to today’s terrible Easter crime. No, not the terrifying Skeezicks or Pipsisewah weirdly nibbling the souse off Uncle Wiggily’s ears, but handling an over-population of Beatrix Potter bunnies.

Oops. Sowwy

One childhood Easter my young brothers, friends, and I thought abusing the Peter Rabbit song would be hilarious. I’m not sure if the real crime was the homicide of Peter or that we drove parents nuts singing it to the saturation point. So on behalf of disturbed third graders everywhere…

Here comes Peter Cottontail Hopping down the bunny trail. ★BANG!★ Thud. Thud.

{sigh} Children can be horrible little delinquents. And along with millions of children everywhere, we bit the ears off chocolate bunnies! (although I preferred giant coconut eggs.)

Plotting 101

I've said before, at this blog, that the two things I enjoy most about writing short stories are plotting and dialogue. I think most of my fellow writers agree with me about dialogue---it's just fun to write--but very few agree with me about plotting. And beginning writers seem to be either confused about it or terrified of it. One asked me, "Why do I have to worry about the plot? Can't I just dream up some interesting characters and give them something to do?" Well, sure you can. But what they do is the plot.

It's not as hard as it seems. One way to address this, I think, is to talk about some plot techniques, or devices. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Foreshadowing

Wikipedia says foreshadowing is "a narrative device in which a storyteller gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story." I like to think of it as something you put into a story, usually early on, that makes later action believable. It's not always used, or always required, but it's helped me many times when I needed to make something work in what would otherwise be an illogical sequence of events.

Example: If you want your story hero to be rescued from attacking headhunters at the last minute by a helicopter, you must at least mention that helicopter earlier--maybe there's a military training base nearby, etc. If you don't, nobody's going to buy that too-convenient ending. Or if the murderous bad guy is sneaking up on the good guy during their hunting trip and falls instead into a bear pit, be sure to have a guide warn them earlier to "Watch out for bear pits." That kind of thing. The best movie example I can think of is Signs (2002)--there are at least half a dozen instances of foreshadowing in that film, little things that are casually introduced during the story that seem meaningless at the time, but later turn out to be necessary to the ending.

There's also another kind of foreshadowing that can come in handy. Sometimes a character or a place can  be mentioned early in order to build suspense and anticipation. Example: A counselor is leading a group of campers on a hike when one of the group spots a line of scarecrows in the distance and asks, "What's that?" and the leader says, "Oh, that's the Forbidden Zone. You don't want to go there." If that happens, of course, that's exactly where the unfortunate campers will wind up, before the story's done--and the reader will both dread it and look forward to it. As for using a character for that kind of thing, think of The Misfit, in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." He's mentioned only in passing, in the opening paragraph, but the attentive reader suspects that the traveling family will cross paths with him at some point--and they do. 

2. Raising the stakes

This isn't really a device, it's just good practice, and always a smart thing to do when plotting fiction. Example: Someone comes to a private eye asking for help with a relatively minor problem, maybe to find a missing friend or to shadow an unfaithful husband. That could possibly make for an interesting story in itself, but it's far more interesting if there is then an escalation of some kind, maybe a related murder or a kidnapping--something to make matters more serious and more dangerous. I think I'm right when I say the best and most popular stories, at least if they lean more toward "genre" than "literary," will include situations and villains that are life-threatening.

I've always liked the idea that fiction is problem/complication/resolution. Get a man up a tree, throw rocks at the man, get him down again. It's not enough to just get him in trouble and then rescue him; you must make things as difficult and stressful as possible for him in the middle of the story, with steadily rising action, before his situation get better. 

I'm convinced the biggest reason the TV series Lost was so successful was that it had tension and conflict on so many different levels. First the survivors of a plane crash are trapped on an unknown island, which is scary enough, but then (1) they start fighting among themselves, (2) they're haunted by their own personal demons, (3) otherworldly things begin happening around them, and (4) just when they're getting organized and trying to address all these issues, they hear distant roars and growls and see treetops swaying in the surrounding jungle. Things just get worse and worse and worse. Viewers loved that.

3. The ticking clock

Alfred Hitchcock once said, and I'm paraphrasing, that the best way to generate suspense is to put a ticking clock in your story. In his example, several men are sitting around a table playing poker, and there's a bomb under the table that they don't know about. Hitch said it doesn't matter to the viewer what the guys are talking about--sports, movies, politics, women, anything. What matters is that there's a bomb under the table.

I've done this kind of thing many times in my own stories. It of course doesn't have to be a clock--but it should be some form of countdown or deadline or pending event. It could he a scheduled execution, an approaching asteroid, a sinking ship, a terminal illness, a pilotless airplane, a final exam, a restless volcano, a slow-acting poison, a runaway train, even a trial date. In one of my stories, titled "Twenty Minutes in Riverdale," it was a ticking clock on a bomb--in fact the story consisted of nine scenes, and the title of each scene was a specific time (8:10, 8:15, 8:18, 8:26, 8:28, etc.), counting down until the blast.

One of the best examples, moviewise, is High Noon (1952), where an old enemy is coming in on the noon train to meet his henchmen and kill the sheriff, who can find no one willing to help him stand up to them. Throughout the film there are a dozen images of clocks, ticking off the minutes until the train's arrival and the shootout.

4. Plot reversals

I dearly love this plot device, and I use it regularly in my stories. (Probably because I like to encounter those twists and turns in the stories that I read.) I think one of the best ways to keep a reader interested is to have the story change direction unexpectedly--and not just at the end. Everyone talks about twist endings, but this kind of thing is effective anywhere in the storyline. And the reversals don't only provide surprise. They generate constant suspense because now the reader doesn't know what to expect. 

The best example of this, as all of us know, is the movie Psycho. When the most recognizable actor in the cast is killed half an hour into the story, viewers are shocked, I tell you, shocked. If that can happen, they think, hold onto your lap straps--anything might happen. In fact, I can think of only several other movies and TV series where the biggest-name stars died early and unexpectedly in the story: L.A. Confidential (Kevin Spacey), Deep Blue Sea (Samuel L. Jackson), Executive Decision (Steven Seagal), Scream (Drew Barrymore), and Game of Thrones (Sean Bean). I'm sure there are others, but hey, I can't watch them all.

Other examples of mid-movie plot reversals: Gone Girl, Marathon Man, From Dusk to Dawn, and Knives Out. And even though some critics still frown on twist endings, viewers and readers love them (The Usual Suspects, Planet of the Apes, The Sixth Sense, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc.).

There are plenty of other plot techniques writers can use--flashbacks, framed stories, MacGuffins, false endings, red herrings, etc.--and I have used them all at one time or another. When they're well done, they can greatly improve a story.

How about you? Which plot devices are your favorites? Which have you used the most? Which do you think are most effective? As for plotting in general, is that something you enjoy doing? Do you find it easy? Hard? How detailed is your plotting? Do you bother to outline? If you do, is it written or in your head? Do you think in terms of individual scenes?

I heard someplace--I forget where--that a plot is two dogs and one bone.

Let the contest begin . . .

Top Ten Columbos

Columbo © Universal Television

Whodunit mysteries appear to be making a comeback on television, as evidenced by the series Elspeth and the highly touted "remake" of Matlock. But I think it is safe to say that no one would dare to try and reboot what is perhaps the best mystery series ever to appear on the tube: Columbo. (Not the most accurate, mind you, but the best.)

Even though Peter Falk was the third actor to play the rumpled, wily detective after Bert Freed on live TV in 1960 and Thomas Mitchell on stage a couple years later (the fourth actor if you count Mitchell's understudy Howard Wierum, who took over after Mitchell became ill), he is Columbo. Trying to replace him would be sheer folly, no matter what kind of stunt casting was attempted.

Lieutenant Columbo never failed to get his man (or woman), and those killers were played by some of the best actors available. Ten of them, though, proved to be ideal foils for the faux-obsequious detective. Not surprisingly a few of them made return appearances.

1. Jack Cassidy ("Murder by the Book," "Publish or Perish," and "Now You See Him"). Glib, devilishly handsome, and always seeming to wear his ego like a fancy hat, Cassidy was the perfect Columbo murderer. In each of his guest turns he played a different character, but all three shared a common trait: they were done in by their sheer arrogance in refusing to believe they weren't the smartest person in the room. "Publish or Perish," in which Cassidy plays an unscrupulous and vindictive publisher, contains my favorite Columbo moment of all -- but only for personal reasons. In the episode, Mickey Spillane plays a best-selling author named Allen Mallory, who is murdered by Cassidy. In a typical Columbo scene, the detective is getting on the publisher's nerves by sounding him out about writing a book of his own. At one point, Peter Falk says, "Oh, I'm not a great writer like Mr. Mallory or anything…" Obviously, I always enjoy seeing that otherwise innocuous dialogue exchange.
2. Dick Van Dyke ("Negative Reaction"). If you've only seen him as Rob Petrie or Bert the Chimney Sweep, or any other role that draws upon his comedic affability and essential Dick Van Dykeness, you will be shocked by his performance as one of the coldest and most calculating killers in the entire series. Sporting grey hair and a white beard, and chilling every scene with a frigid gaze, Van Dyke is barely recognizable. "Negative Reaction" also contains one of the series's greatest self-incrimination scenes.
3. Robert Vaughn ("Troubled Waters" and "Last Salute to the Commodore"). Vaughn played the killer in one episode and a victim in the other, but in both he was on a boat. He makes the Top Ten list because more than any other actor, Vaughn projects immense annoyance with the seemingly oblivious detective without uttering a word. He and Falk played off of each other delightfully.
4. Martin Landau ("Double Shock"). Landau did only one episode but in it he plays two distinct characters: identical twins with polarized personalities. "Double Shock" is unique in being the only episode in which, even though you see the murder being committed, you're not certain who did it, since it could have been either one of the twins. Dealing with two suspects offers Columbo one of his bigger challenges.
5. Jackie Cooper (Candidate for Crime"). A child star from the early talkie era, Cooper tended to be underrated as an adult actor, but he is terrific as a gland-handing political candidate who offs his campaign manager and then tries to make it look like someone else is out to get him, someone who killed the manager by mistake. As Columbo begins to reel him in, Cooper's struggle to maintain his "Honest John" persona instead of revealing his true, nasty self is masterfully played. The final clue is a gem, too.
6. Richard Kiley ("A Friend in Deed"). Columbo faces his most dangerous opponent -- his boss! Kiley gets to play a rare villainous role as a corrupt and homicidal deputy police commissioner, who murders his rich wife for both her money and freedom from her. Understanding what a threat Columbo is to him, he tries to thwart the investigation, even threatening to get the detective fired. The ending in which Columbo traps him is a little elaborate and far-fetched, but still clever.
7. Ross Martin ("Suitable for Framing"). Martin channels Waldo Lydecker playing a snide, self-absorbed art critic who murders his rich uncle in an elaborate scheme to gain his art collection (the rich uncle, incidentally, who is only briefly glimpsed, is played by Robert Shayne, "Inspector Henderson" from the Superman TV series). Martin then tries to frame his rather unstable aunt, who actually did inherit the collection, because if she is in prison she cannot receive her inheritance, which will pass to him. The incriminating clue is one of the best of the entire show, as is Martin's moment of dawning panic when he realizes he's been tripped up.
8. Janet Leigh ("Forgotten Lady"). An unusual Columbo episode in that we see the murder in the first twenty minutes, as per the format, but do not understand the motive until the very end. It is also the only show in which the killer appears to get away with it. The episode also demands a second viewing, just to see how skillfully Janet Leigh, as a washed-up movie star, lays down the clues to the surprise denouement without ever tipping her hand.
9. Oskar Werner ("Playback"). Never has Columbo faced a more nervous opponent. Half the fun of the episode is not simply the usual clever cat-and-mouse antics and ingenious clues but wondering when Werner's character is going to finally shatter like a glass bottle. 
10. William Shatner ("Fade in to Murder" and "Butterfly in Shades of Grey"). Shatner was the guest killer in "Fade in to Murder," playing a popular television actor who kills to protect a damaging personal secret, and he's all right. But it was in an episode from the second run of Columbo, which started in 1989 and ran through the 90s, that he really excelled. In "Butterfly in Shades of Grey" (which doesn't seem to mean anything), Shatner plays a Rush Limbaugh-style radio talking head who kills his daughter's lover. Sporting a twinky little moustache, he makes his character nasty, overbearing, and (dare I say?) subtly vicious, so that when he finally gets his comeuppance, it is genuinely satisfying.

Many other actors left distinctive fingerprints over the Columbo saga, such as Lee Grant, Ruth Gordon, Robert Culp, and the two Patricks – McGoohan and O'Neal – but the aforementioned ten presented murder, malice, and mayhem at its entertaining best.

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.