Mysteries of the Magi

A writer woke one winter morning in his apartment south of Gramercy Park, in New York City, and remembered that he had promised to deliver a short story to an editor that very day. He sat and composed a 2,000-word story in three hours. Needless to say, the story was perfect. The editor ran it exactly as written!

No—wait. I have it on good authority that what really happened is the editor sent one of the newspaper’s illustrators trudging through the snow to bang on the writer’s apartment door, bug him about getting his story turned in, and elicit some glimmer of an art concept. Admitting the idea was still hazy, the writer instructed the illustrator to draw a young couple standing by the window of their furnished flat—and sent him on his way.

Oh. Sorry, folks. I’m glancing at my notes now, and it seems the writer didn’t write the story in his apartment at 55 Irving Place, but a few doors down in the second booth of Pete’s Tavern. And he was three sheets to the wind when he wrote it!

Who knows how short stories spring to life? How many writers meticulously document their process, beat-by-beat, when they could be working on the piece instead, getting it submitted, and getting paid? In the absence of a solid record, if the story becomes famous, legends of its writing pop up and kick truth to the corner.

Guests who stay at the O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro, NC, find this paperback in their room, which they are welcome to take home.

All we really know is, this particular story appeared in print on December 10, 1905. The newspaper was The New York Sunday World. The story, then dubbed “Gifts of the Magi,” was retitled when it appeared in the author’s 1906 collection, The Four Million. Today, it’s regarded as O. Henry’s finest, but I doubt he ever saw saw it that way. Why would he? When William Sydney Porter died five years later, at age 47, “Magi” was just one of the 600 stories he wrote in his lifetime. And he wrote it for Joseph Pulitzer’s World, which is the newspaper that invented yellow journalism. Porter probably never envisioned that the piece would be performed on stage and screen by human actors, Mickey Mouse, and Muppets alike.

What Porter (1862-1910) thought of the story, the creative decisions he made while writing it, are lost to history, though numerous books share sweet anecdotes about its writing, like the ones I mentioned above. I love the last graf of the story, and never tire of rereading it. But there is a genuine mystery embedded in the first graf of the story. Let’s all play detective, and see if we can spot it:

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

You spotted it, didn’t you? If Porter took pains to spell out that sixty cents of Della’s money is in the form of pennies, then what coins made up the remaining one dollar and twenty-seven cents?

When I was editor of a children’s math magazine, I briefly thought of posing this question in an article, until I realized that in order for this to work as a solid classroom activity, I would need to print O. Henry’s entire story, and take pains to spell out for kids and teachers all the story’s nuances. For example, I myself first heard the story read aloud by my fifth grade teacher. Afterward, I remember him stopping to explain, “You see, she sold her hair. To make wigs.” He probably also explained that pocket watches needed a fob, lest they go missing. I suspect that these sorts of historical facts need to be explained to adults, even today. I never ran that article; it would run too long for our desired length.

But I digress. Let’s take a look at the math. Quick note for readers beyond America’s shores: US currency is largely unchanged since 1905, when Porter wrote the story. Until last month, Americans could settle their debts with paper currency, quarters (25 cents), dimes (10 cents), nickels (5 cents), and pennies. Dollar and half-dollar coins would have also been plentiful in 1905, but today are mostly relegated to collectible sets issued by the US mint. Pennies were popular in 1905, but died an ignominious death on November 12, 2025. They will remain in circulation for the foreseeable future.

So, on the face of it—or shall I say obverse?—Della could have had one dollar (in coin or paper currency) and a quarter, but that means she would have needed another sixty-two, not sixty cents in pennies.

If we look earlier than 1905, we find that the US Mint did issue a two-cent coin, and that coin could easily solve our problem. Della could have a paper dollar, a quarter, a two-cent coin, and sixty pennies. But the two-cent coin was minted between 1864 and 1872, and many online wags insist it is too much of a stretch that Porter would write a story that relied on the existence of a coin that went out of service when he was ten years old. The US mint did issue a three-cent coin that could also easily resolve the question: 9 x 3-cents = 27 cents. But the last three-cent coins were struck in 1889, sixteen years before “Magi” was written. Still, that number of years sounds more reasonable than arguing for the two-cent piece.

Another wrinkle to iron out: As we writers know, just because Porter wrote his story in 1905 does not necessarily mean he was claiming that the events of the story were set in 1905. Personally, I don’t think this applies in this case. O. Henry was not a practitioner of historical fiction...mostly. His pieces typically appeared in newspapers printed for working-class readers of his day. Read today, fish wrappers tomorrow. Throughout “Magi,” he quotes figures that readers would have recognized as authentic and appropriate for their time. Della’s husband Jim earns $20 a week, the couple pays $8 a week for their furnished apartment, Della sells her hair for $20 and uses the money to buy Jim a platinum watch fob. That precious metal became popular in US jewelry design in the early 1900s, supporting the argument that the story takes place in the 20th and not the 19th century.

But here is my biggest argument for accepting the two- or three-cent coin “solution.” As a kid growing up in the US in the 1970s, I remember finding coins in pocket change that were minted in the 1930s. Occasionally we’d find “Indian head” pennies, which were last minted in 1909. So, in my own lifetime, I was accustomed to finding coins that were close to seventy years old without much effort. (One of my brothers collected coins, so we were really looking.) I know without asking that many of you fine readers and scribes have had the same experience. Americans used to routinely find Canadian, Mexican, Irish, and UK coinage in their pockets. I’ll bet citizens of those four nations had similar experiences with US coinage. 

Who’s to say Porter didn’t see the same thing in his day with supposedly extinct American coinage?

If you refuse to accept vintage two- and three-cent coins as solutions to the “Magi” mystery, then the only acceptable theory is that Porter picked figures that emphasized Della’s poverty without bothering to see if the math worked. Artistically speaking, one dollar and eighty-seven cents sounds better than one dollar and eighty-five cents. Telling us that sixty cents of it is in pennies illustrates the point of the paragraph, that Della is literally saving one penny at a time.

But I struggle with the notion that he did not care, for what I think is a good reason.

You may recall that Porter did time for embezzlement. Money went missing when he worked as a bank teller in Texas. He fled to Honduras to escape prosecution, returning only when his first wife was dying of tuberculosis. After she died, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in an Ohio federal prison.

Turns out, standards were so sloppy at that bank that everyone—from the execs down to the tellers and clerks—“borrowed” from the till as if it were a petty cash cigar box, intending to repay it...eventually. Shockingly, the only person who ever got busted for the missing money was the person who called attention to the bank’s lax practices: Porter. A psychologist who interviewed him in prison in Ohio said that he had never encountered a more embarrassed inmate. Porter’s only child did not learn of her father’s criminal past until after his death.

Considering his record, does Porter sound like a writer who would dash off a few lines concerning money without checking to see if the math worked?

Regardless, “The Gift of the Magi” remains a charming story, infused with all the self-sacrifice that love implies. Why not leave it at that? At this point in my ruminations I told myself that I needed to move on so I could contemplate more important literary inconsistencies such as Dr. Watson’s middle name, his number of spouses, and in which limb he carried back that shrapnel from the war in Afghanistan.

If there’s a postscript here, it’s the fact that I left my house one recent morning and paid a visit on Porter and his family.

He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, you see. His second wife hailed from a town not far from my house. Their marriage lasted four minutes, and he skedaddled back to New York.

He died shortly after, of diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, and various complications. His ex, who was also a writer, lived well into her nineties, and spent the ensuing decades regaling reporters with stories of “Will’s” time in Asheville. She even wrote a novel about a couple in love, and quoted from his love letters to her. 

“He was a citizen of asphalt,” Sarah Coleman Porter shared in a newspaper column in 1921. For a while, she said, Will rented an office in downtown Asheville. But he never got a lick of work done, preferring to hang out an upstairs window, watching people pass by. After his death, she acknowledged in letters to friends that his health was ruined, and if the couple had just had a little money saved up, he might have been able to rest and rebuild his health. He tried to stoke his strength by venturing on manly hunting trips in the local mountains, but that really did not work.

She quoted him as saying:

“I could look at these mountains a hundred years and not get inspiration—they depress me. A walk down Sixth Avenue—a face glimpsed—a snatch of conversation was heard and I have my story.”

The weather was cloudy and cold the day I visited. I have lived in the Asheville area 20 years but have never been before now. The cemetery is built on hilly ground, its roads narrow and lacking guardrails. Workers are still repairing damage visited upon trees and headstones by Tropical Storm Helene last autumn. I drove through twice, passing Thomas Wolfe’s final resting place, looking for a solid place to park that would not send my car tumbling into a ravine. Porter is buried beside Sarah, and mere feet from his daughter.

Two ironies leapt out at me. Perfect, I thought, for the man who was famous for his masterful twist endings. 

Ironic fact No. 1: The writer’s grave faces the road and looks out eternally over those mountains—not Broadway, Sixth Avenue, or the Bowery.

Ironic fact No. 2: I need not have worried my pretty little head over Della’s pennies. O. Henry’s grave is strewn with them! So many, I might add, that some have spilled off the stone and now litter the dormant grass. 

Tourists apparently leave them in honor of the man and his most famous tale, which says everything about the power of a good story and the wisdom of small gifts.

Happy holidays.

* * * 

Some resources:

Virtual tour of the O. Henry house in Texas.

Audio version of “Magi.”

Next time you are in NYC, you really must try the twenty-dollar O. Henry Chicken Wings.

See you in three weeks!

Joe 

josephdagnese.com

Sudden Death Syndrome and the Missing Corpse: The Walshes

Mostly from CNN, but this picture is from the Boston Globe:

Ana Walshe

Ana Walshe was 39, a Serbian immigrant who worked for a real estate company in Washington, D.C. She made $300,000K a year (which wouldn't be that outrageous in our capitol city). Ana had over $1 million in insurance policies and substantial amounts of money in her bank accounts.

Brian, on the other hand, had pled guilty to federal crimes over a scheme to sell counterfeit Andy Warhol paintings, and was awaiting sentencing at the time of Ana’s disappearance.

The Walshes and their 3 children lived in Cohasset, Mass., but Ana worked in DC and stayed in a townhouse there. Brian claimed Ana left for work on Jan.1 between 6 and 7 am he hadn’t heard from her after sending a text message that her plane landed in Washington, D.C. Ana’s phone last interacted with Verizon on Jan. 2, at 3 am near the Walshe home. Brian and a coworker alerted authorities on Jan. 4, 2023, that Ana was missing.

Cohasset Police Department Detective Harrison Schmidt, the lead investigator on the case, responded to the Walshe home on Jan. 4, 2023, where he found Brian with his three children (ages 2, 4 and 6) eating McDonald’s. He testified that Brian claimed Ana left early Jan. 1 for an emergency work meeting in DC, and showed him texts and photos Ana sent about her JetBlue flight. Brian also claimed he lost his phone New Year’s Eve but his son found it later in the son’s room.

BTW, the detective conducted a walkthrough, they drained the pool, and probably the most interesting feature was that the trunk of the family's Volvo was lined in plastic.

And now, Brian Walshe's Google search history on multiple devices including his son's iPad: [my emphasis, because that's just plain COLD]

January 1:

4:55 a.m. - How long before a body starts to smell.

4:58 a.m. - How to stop a body from decomposing.

5:47 a.m. - 10 ways to dispose of a dead body if you really need to.

6:25 a.m. - How long for someone to be missing to inherit.

6:34 a.m. - Can you throw away body parts.

9:29 a.m. - What does formaldehyde do.

9:34 a.m. - How long does DNA last.

9:59 a.m. - Can identification be made on partial remains.

11:34 a.m. - Dismemberment and the best ways to dispose of a body.

11:44 a.m. - How to clean blood from wooden floor.

11:56 a.m. - Luminol to detect blood.

1:08 p.m. - What happens when you put body parts in ammonia.

1:21 p.m. - Is it better to put crime scene clothes away or wash them.

January 2: Walshe went to a Home Depot and paid $450 in cash for supplies, including mops, a bucket, goggles, tarps, a hatchet and baking soda.

12:45 p.m. - Hacksaw best tool to dismember.

1:10 p.m. - Can you be charged with murder without a body.

1:14 p.m. - Can you identify a body with broken teeth.

January 3:

1:02 p.m. - What happens to hair on a dead body.

1:13 p.m. - What is the rate of decomposition of a body found in a plastic bag compared to on a surface in the woods.

1:20 p.m. - Can baking soda mask or make a body smell good.

No grisly searches about how to dispose of a body or clean up blood occurred before the morning of January 1, 2023. (HERE)

Items found in a dumpster included Ana’s Hunter boots, a hatchet, and a hacksaw with DNA evidence linking to both Ana and Brian.

Evidence recovered from dumpster in January 2023
shown during Brian Walshe's murder trial. — Pool

Now the defense attorney, Larry Tipton, admitted that Brian lied to the police and made incriminating searches, but said he didn’t kill his wife and only panicked to dispose of her body, because Brian thought that no one would believe he didn’t cause her death (which is a very nice euphemism for 'kill her'). 

NOTE:  Whatever you do, do not "dispose" of a body the way Brian Walshe did, because it's illegal.  He pled guilty to illegally disposing of his wife's body and misleading police after her death - something, BTW, that the jury (so far) doesn't know.

He said there were loving text messages between the couple, and while there was stress, it was from the fraud case, not Ana's affair (with William Fastow, who helped her buy the townhouse in DC), which Brian knew nothing about. The defense attorney also declared that Ana died of Sudden Death Syndrome (at which point I nearly spit my hot tea across the room), and that he would bring medical experts to inform the jury and all the rest of us just what that is. [I can hardly wait to hear that…]

BTW, I can't help but think of the married Colorado dentist who fell in love with another woman & started looking up things on the internet like, “is arsenic detectable in an autopsy?” and “how to make murder look like a heart attack." And not only left a suspicious internet trail a mile long (PRO TIP: never use your own computer, cellphone, or your child's cellphone), but he actually ordered a rush shipment of potassium cyanide that he told the supplier was needed for a surgery. To his office. Where, of course, an employee opened it and went, "Wait, what does a dentist need with cyanide?" And that wasn't the only poison he ordered delivered. Sadly, all of this did not come out early enough to save his wife's life. (AP News) (Originally cited in my blogpost, "Great Mistakes in Criminal History" HERE.)

MY QUESTIONS:

1. Isn't Sudden Death Syndrome just a fancy term for murder?
2. And how can you prove that it is or isn't SDS if you can't find the body?
3. And if the only way to prove SDS is to look at the body, or at least the parts that might be recoverable (ugh…) then why won't Brian Walshe provide that, and prove himself stupid and panicky, but inherently innocent, albeit with a strong stomach?
4. My standard question whenever people murder their spouses - isn't it easier, cheaper, and safer to just get a damn divorce?
5. What part of "dying in prison" do they not understand?

Saying Goodbye to Maisie

 

We have lifelong connections with fictional characters.  Winnie the Pooh is hugely real for many of us, or Charlotte and Wilbur, or Sherlock Holmes.  I’m using examples from childhood or adolescent reading, but I don’t think it’s that different with characters we’ve met as grown-ups.  And we feel their loss as strongly, particularly when a series ends.  Ace Atkins took over from Robert Parker, after his death (and with Joan Parker’s blessing), so Spenser is still with us, but there won’t be any more Kinsey Milhone stories, since Sue Grafton died, or Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, or Bruce Alexander’s Sir John Fielding.  And most recently, we have Jackie Winspear’s announcement that The Comfort of Ghosts, her 18^th Maisie Dobbs book, is their swan song.

I hasten to add that Jacqueline’s very much alive and well, and her decision to retire Maisie after twenty years is consciously the closing of a circle.  She begins Maisie’s story with the years leading up to the First World War, and ends in the aftermath of the Second. 

I came late to Maisie, and I’m well aware she had a solid fan base already, but the novels snuck up on me from behind, after I’d read Jackie’s extraordinary memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing.  I’ve talked about that book before, and in this space, and I’m happy to talk it up again.  But as an introduction to the Maisie books, This Time Next Year is evocative and sly – mischievous is perhaps a better word, in that there’s no intent to deceive the reader, only to conjure up a sense of anticipation.  The memoir fills in some gaps, and echoes moments in the novels, which of course you only realize when you read the novels: if you’d read them first, you’d have the frisson of recognition, like the smell of harvested hops. 

 Speaking of, I don’t think it’s the best idea to pick up The Comfort of Ghosts as your first Maisie.  Much of it depends on your familiarity with Maisie’s history, which in turn informs and enlarges your engagement with the story.  It’s a kind of memory puzzle, in that Maisie herself is interleaved with her own past – as we all are – and she’s drawn back through the keyhole, the lock to an old doorway, into a place of shadows. 

Maisie’s story arc, for those of you new to the series, is that she starts as a domestic, pre-WWI, but through luck and diligence, rises upward into the professional classes – she becomes a triage nurse at the Front – and although cruelly disappointed in love, during the War, eventually finds her feet.  Part of her uniqueness is that she slips through the permeable membrane of the British class system, and shape-shifts.  Her other memorable quality is her empathy, both her readiness to help and her ability to feel her way into another person’s sensibility. 

(There is, in fact, a self-help book titled What Would Maisie Do? that came out in 2019, and culls commonplaces from the Maisie mysteries.  You might find this terminally cutesy, but no.  Maisie is eminently straightforward.  Some of us might benefit from her counsel.)

The best advice I can give in this circumstance is to go back and read the books in order, from first to last, knowing they’re a story cycle.  They weren’t intended that way, in the beginning, and Jackie says she was surprised when her editor assumed there was a planned sequel to the debut Maisie novel, but now we have a complete scheme, laid end to end, the learning curve, caught in the act. 

 And without further ado, reward yourself with a copy of This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing.  I promise.  It will both comfort you and cause reflection, in equal measure. 

 

Lair, Lair

What does it take to make a good secret lair?

For a project I’m working on, I’ve been giving the topic some thought. The appeal of secret lairs seems universal, although the forms may vary. As a child, one of my favorite books was The Secret Hideout by John Peterson. Two brothers, Matt and Sam, find an old book describing the Viking Club. They resurrect the club and locate its hidden hideout. The story was the stuff of childhood dreams.

My traveling companion, on the other hand, leaned more towards The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It is impossible to calculate how much money has been spent at Home Depot over the years pursuing a fantasy of replicating the garden. 

The secret garden isn't a traditional lair but sometimes my traveling companion gets to make the rules. 

(She also promotes Flavia de Luce's chemistry lab in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and subsequent books. I'm not sure it's secret, but no one else is allowed inside Flavia's workspace.)

Lairs come in all forms, though they share common elements. Typically, they are away from civilization. Think Superman's Fortress of Solitude tucked away in the frozen tundra. Isolated and high-tech, the lair provides a sanctuary for the superhero. The Batcave follows this model. I grew up watching the Caped Crusader slide down a fire pole hidden behind the bookcase in Bruce Wayne's study. This seems the second-best reason to have a house lined with walls of shelves.

Secret technology doesn't have to be the sole purpose of a hideout. In The Count of Monte Cristo, we find many of the familiar elements. On a secluded and deserted island off the Tuscan coast, Dantes finds a secret cave. When he gets by the seemingly impenetrable rock blocking the entrance, Dantes is led down a path built from a series of crafted and natural formations. In the back of a dark cave, he discovers a chest filled with unimaginable wealth.

Lairs offer a place to privately display treasure or trophies, a laboratory to craft new and better weapons, and a sanctuary for rest and recovery. The best hideouts have all these elements stashed in a secret location. The surrounding environment is either so tranquil or forbidding that no one suspects what lies beneath the thin outer shell. 

A lair might be a laboratory or a vault. It might even be an entire country, as in Wakanda. Perhaps it’s just a piece of one. If you have a free month, pick up Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. (Spoiler alert) She describes Galt’s Gulch, an isolated place tucked deep into the mountains. The men of the mind have run away there, striking against the government in the dystopian United States. They hope to prove how desperately the world needs original thinkers. They hide away until society collapsed. According to Wikipedia, Rand based Galt’s Gulch on Ouray, Colorado. If you choose to hide out somewhere, Ouray is a pretty good place.

Secret lairs don’t have to be fancy. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles retreat to their sewer headquarters when they need to rest, work out, and eat a pizza. But even this subterranean hideout has a laboratory and dojo.

Of course, when I think about writing a secret lair into my story, the archetype will always be James Bond. Every movie had a visual stunner. Blofeld’s headquarters in Spectre had elegant lines and a desert atmosphere. A viewer could compare it with Gustav Graves’s Ice Palace in Die Another Day. It may also hearken to the Fortress of Solitude.   

The contrast is Raoul Silva’s hideout in Skyfall. Silva's lair challenges many of the tropes. It is ugly and crumbling. Still, this abandoned mining island holds a wealth of technology. It creates a potent image of a deteriorating world. The location matches Silva’s decay.

Personally, I like Crab Key. It could be because Dr. No defined the Bond standard. It has everything: a remote location, a tranquil tropical setting, and secrets, including a nuclear reactor. Crab Key established the Bond tropes. I like it. I’m a company guy.

What about you? Do you have a favorite hideout for either heroes or villains?

---

BSP: Thanks to all who have helped make the release of The Hidden River, the second book in the Johnson and Nance series, a success. The series publication has been the highlight of my writing this year. I'm also proud to be included in The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year for 2025.

Until next time.

The thing about fiction and poetry

As a fiction writer who’s also a poet, I was happy to receive an invitation to talk about how one literary art informs the other on a podcast interview. The series was canceled, sadly, for reasons beyond the podcaster’s control, before I could have my say. That left me popping like a firecracker with thoughts on the topic. Luckily, as a SleuthSayer, I have a forum close at hand.

Decades before I ever wrote a publishable novel or short story, I was writing poems that did the same thing in fewer words. What is “the thing,” you ask?

Some poems tell a story.

on the stage of Carnegie Hall
rich and dark and gleaming
they seem to surround me
each tier’s apex a velvet throat
hidden in the depths, the rows of jaws
yawn wide as if to snap
on this twelve-year old girl

from “Orchestra Class,” first published in Yellow Mama; in my new collection, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle

Some poems make people think.

I am the daughter of the son of the daughter
of a woman whose name no one remembers
though all the oldest still alive and sane
were there last time I asked

from “I Am the Daughter,” the title poem in
my first collection, I Am the Daughter

Some poems make people laugh.

my mother rejects the unconscious...
her house is clean...
when she visits the optometrist
she peers fiercely at the eye chart
and tries to put her glasses on
she is 20-20 at life
but wants an A in both eyes too.

from “My Mother Rejects the Unconscious,” first published in Sojourner;
in my first collection, I Am the Daughter

Some poems make people cry.

when I sleep in my parents’ house
they make up the bed I traded in my crib for
the pine tree outside my window
still catches stars in its branches
the pine tree is still growing
it frightens me
having so much to lose

from “On Borrowed Time,” in I Am the Daughter

Some poems surprise people.

then there was the day I took them to the zoo
riding the subway up to the Bronx...
we looked as normal as anyone in the car...
three of the paranoid schizophrenics took a ride
on the aerial tram, but I was too scared
of heights to go along
they snapped my picture smiling

from “Outing,” first published in Home Planet News; in my second collection, Gifts and Secrets

Some poems hold up a mirror to our conscious or unconscious selves.

Whether I’m writing a poem, a short story, or a novel, the creative process is the same. Some call it it inspiration or being "in the zone." The process of writing a new short story may begin with what I call “my characters talking in my head.” A novel requires such a long period of sustained effort that it demands a high ratio of slogging to inspiration. But those moments are equally familiar to my inner poet. I wrote about one such moment long before I realized that other writers had the same experience.

it's like The Red Shoes only instead of dancing
I keep getting up to write poems
a dozen times between 3 and 6 AM
I curl back around you in the dark
and pull the blankets up
but then a line tugs at my mind
and I go stumbling through the hall
groping for light and pen
each time I lie back down
the images pop up like frogs
clamoring to be made princes
and you grumble and roll over
as I shuffle into my slippers once again
and go kiss the page

from “Night Poem,” in Gifts and Secrets

For me, the main difference between the two crafts is that, like other fiction writers, I say, “I tell lies for a living,” and I’m only half kidding—well, completely kidding about the “living” part. As a poet, I say, “All of my stories are true.” In my novels and short stories, my goal is to create fictional characters who leap off the page, made-up characters so real that the reader not only believes, but falls in love with them. In my poetry, the ring of authenticity comes from lived experience.

Some poems have something to say.

The poet’s craft is speaking my truth and turning it into art as opposed to hitting you over the head with it. My new book, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle, took more than two years to write. When I started writing poetry again for the first time in twenty years, I was much too angry at the state of the world to create art rather than polemic. It took everything I’d learned about patience as a novelist and about revision as a short story writer to write good poems that said what I wanted to say. Over that period, as the world got even more chaotic and the future more uncertain, I learned that I also had something to say about hope, connection, love, and peace of mind.

but ah, the whale! there’s a creature of the now
no anxiety, no regret, a vast serenity
in the greater vastness of the sea
singing while we moan about how to fix it all
swimming parallel to our troubled world

from “Afternoon On the Beach,” first published in
Yellow Mama; in The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle

All poems © Elizabeth Zelvin
The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is available as paperback or e-book.

Liz's other poetry collections, short fiction collections,
and novels are all available as e-books.


Poetry by Elizabeth Zelvin
Bruce Kohler Mysteries
Mendoza Family Saga

AIn’t Necessarily So

It’s no secret AI can operate as a powerful research tool, especially when requiring ‘fuzzy’ searches. ‘Fuzzy logic’ is a computer term referring to imprecise inputs or output. Digital computers like exactitude. In practice, ‘approximately’, ‘about’, ‘almost’, and ‘nearly’ are anathema to traditional programming.

Until now.

“Oh please, ChatGPT / Copilot / Gemini / Grok / LLaMA / Claude / Deep Seek, please help me identify a summer television series with a mystery theme broadcast on ABC, CBS, or NBC in the late 1970s or maybe 1980s…”

Google and Bing won’t help much but a well-phrased AI query can give your research a fighting chance. It can process your conservational request, understand what you’re looking for, and relieve you of the burden of searching by year and perhaps by network.

In recent decades, programmers cracked the hard nut of pattern matching, essential for AI in many ways. The front end of many AIs use an LLM, large language model, which not only parses spoken (and written) word, but can now understand it.

Our friend ABA (Hi Cate!), once under contract to the South African government, hired a small bevy of assistants to sort through historical photographs, identifying and labeling their content, e.g, ‘Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Background: Tabletop Mountain, 10 June 1994’.

At present, an automatic document loader and AI processor can accomplish the same job in moments. AI can understand the contents of a picture. Unfortunately, that sort of thing could put a coterie of girls out of a job.

And yet…

AI can make mistakes, sometimes huge ones. We’ve learned particular AIs can be politically manipulated. An old computing rule states that results can be no more accurate than incoming data– Garbage in, Garbage out. And it’s early days… We’re barely in the Model T stage.

An early bugbear that should be fixed by now came from a simple question: How many Rs are in the word strawberry? A programming quirk would return an answer of 2. Does your AI get it right?

I’ve listened to a number of AI generated stories. Some are ‘okay’ but most fall prey to one problem or another, especially word repetition, i.e, ’smirked’. The phrase a ‘smile didn’t quite reach her eyes’ is a dead giveaway. And plot holes. Lordy, lordy, the plot holes, not to mention failed opportunities to wring drama out of confrontations.

That said, I wish posters would explicitly tag AI generated works. AI dreck shouldn’t drag down the arts.

On the other hand, AI can make a halfway decent editor if you’re having difficulty with a scene that might be overwritten or too flowery with overflowing modifiers. It might stimulate your thinking in a different direction. Be aware, major public-facing AIs have bowdlerizing limitations regarding adult topics, limits ranging in the GP to PG category.

Note: Generally speaking, works created largely or wholly by AIs cannot be copyrighted.

What about…

We’ve heard more than once AIs can write better computer code than professional programmers. For the moment setting aside massive matrix programs, I ordered applications in various procedural and object-oriented languages. The first two attempts suffered bugs even in the simplest code. Once fixed, program efficiency was merely so-so.

Experiments suggests AI might write scripts and program code at an average programmer level, but can’t presently compete with top-tier ‘super-programmers’ (a term coined in the 1970s).

Where AIs can excel are in massive table driven or matrix based programming, where, thanks to incredible processor speed and memory, they can populate many millions of array cells when a human cannot hope to compete.

Armed and Dangerous

Requesting pictures gave me fits, beginning with over-saturated color, and botched eyes and mouths. A photorealistic mother had two and a half arms, a dancer had three legs. Once I thought I’d finally received a perfect rendering with no extra limbs or major body parts. My friend said, “Oh yeah? Count the fingers.”

Examples have been too creepy to keep, but I slipped one example into an article. Turns out my audience was too polite to mention the armed conflict.

The toughest challenge I never did resolve. My query went, “Create a pencil sketch  of a father carrying his young teen daughter upstairs.” Once or twice, I suggested a point of view: “From floor level, angle the camera from the side of the stairway.”

Results were a mess. Often, the AI positioned the camera from above rather than below. Sometimes it had a little girl carrying the father. The most bizarre attached the father’s left arm to his right shoulder socket and right arm to his left side, and carrying the girl like a monstrous backpack.

Holy Heavens, Hannah

Recently, I asked an AI a research question: “Kindly give me a list of words where the first letter is a silent H.” Here you see the results.

A couple of years into public release, AIs remain subject to errors and restrictions. Yet with informed practice, they can offer considerable research assistance.

Note: Be impressed how au fait my colleagues are with AI, both good and bad aspects.

Game On … or faster versus smarter?

Leigh’s game of senet

Where'd THAT Ending Come From?

One of the things that sometimes bug me, as both a booklover and a movie addict, is watching an adaptation of a novel that I've read and then finding that it has a different ending. Actually, that's not true: It bugs me if the ending is worse. It doesn't bother me at all if the movie ending turns out to be better. 

The difference I seem to remember the most--spoiler alert!--happened when I watched the movie The Mist years ago, after reading the Stephen King novella. In the written version, after the survivors of the monster attack at the supermarket escape and manage to also avoid the other creatures in the area, they drive away toward a possible safe zone, still together and alive and hopeful. But in the movie, their getaway car runs out of gas with creatures lurking everywhere, the leader of the survivors kills the four others in the group, including his son, in order to spare them a gruesome death, and--now out of ammunition– he exits the car to be killed himself … when a military team appears out of nowhere and tells him rescuers are on the way. A real downer of an ending, and I've found that many others agree. But in retrospect, it was probably the perfect ending because it created such emotion on the part of the viewer. It was certainly memorable.

Anyhow– you see my line of thinking, here– I have dutifully come up with twenty well-known novels and movie adaptations, all of which I have read and watched, where the endings were changed. There are of course many, many more, but these came to mind.

Here's my list (I'm hoping I've remembered the details correctly)--and, for what it's worth, I've placed an asterisk beside the versions I preferred. Be aware, more spoilers are here, in abundance:

1. The Natural — Book version: Baseball star Roy Hobbs strikes out in a crucial game and is disgraced. Movie version*: Hobbs hits a home run that wins the pennant, and is hailed as a hero.
2. Cujo — Book: The little boy in the car, Tad Trenton, dies. Movie*: He survives.
3. Jaws — Book: Hooper (the young oceanographer) dies. Movie*: Both Chief Brody and Hooper are alive, and swim together to shore.
4. The Firm — Book*: Mitch McDeere scams the firm out of millions and escapes to the Caribbean with his family and the money. Movie: Mitch makes a deal with the mafia and with the FBI, destroys the firm, and remains a lawyer, in a different city.
5. The Shining — Book*: Jack Torrance blows up the hotel and dies in the explosion, and Dick Hallorann survives. Movie: Jack kills Hallorann and then freezes to death in the maze.
6. Double Indemnity — Book: Neff and Phyllis escape together and commit suicide on their way to Mexico. Movie*: Neff and Phyllis shoot each other, and Neff confesses to his boss before dying.
7. Breakfast at Tiffany's — Book: The two lovers don't wind up together. Movie*: They do. 
8. Hannibal — Book: Lecter and Clarice run off together. Movie*: Lecter escapes and leaves Clarice behind. 
9. The Shawshank Redemption — Book: Red is searching for Andy following their prison break. Movie*: Red finds and joins Andy in Mexico. 
10. Strangers on a Train — Book: Guy kills Bruno's father and goes to prison. Movie*: Bruno dies at the amusement park and Guy is cleared of his wife's murder.
11. Forrest Gump — Book: Jenny marries someone else, and Forrest moves to New Orleans with Lt. Dan. Movie*: Forrest and Jenny get married, she dies, and Forrest raises their son.
12. Rebecca — Book*: Manderley burns down and Mrs. Danvers's fate is uncertain. Movie: She dies in the fire.
13. Black Sunday — Book*: The blimp carrying the bomb is diverted from the stadium, but the hero dies. Movie: The hero survives.
14. The Grapes of Wrath — Book: Sad ending, with the Joad family still suffering. Movie*: Hopeful ending, with the Joads safe for the moment, and pressing on.
15. Jurassic Park — Book: The island is destroyed by bombing, and Hammond dies. Movie*: The T-Rex saves everyone from raptors at the welcome center, and Hammond survives.
16. The Notebook — Book: The couple reunites and lives. Movie*: The couple reunites and dies peacefully.
17. LA Confidential — Book: The villain (Capt. Smith) survives and gets away with his crimes. Movie*: Exley kills Smith in a shootout at the Victory Motel.
18. And Then There Were None — Book*: All the guests, and the judge, die. Movie: Vera and Lombard solve the mystery and survive.
19. First Blood — Book: John Rambo dies. Movie*: Rambo lives (thus enabling four sequels).
20. Planet of the Apes — Book: Hero and his companion escape the planet and go back to Earth. Movie*: Hero discovers that he's been on Earth all along.

I discovered, when I checked the placement of my asterisks, that I seem to prefer either twist endings or happy, neatly-wrapped endings (but not always). My question for you is, do you agree with any of my preferences? What are some novel vs. movie endings that you remember, and which versions did you like, or hate? As I said, I've left out a lot of them.

Okay, back to my books and videos. See you in two weeks.

Road Tripping: Go Bag for Writers

I can’t believe it’s only a few weeks until Christmas. I’ve been traveling a lot. Between writing retreats, conferences, and vacations with family, my life has been less ho, ho, ho and more go, go, go. On the road, I still try to write whenever I can. So, I created a go bag with the tools I need. 

Here is a look at what’s inside:

Laptop

I love a keyboard. I need it to write. I have tried smaller devices to reduce weight and optimize space. I’ve even tried traveling without my MacBook and always regret it.

Lap Desk

At the Austin Film Festival, I heard a writer and busy mother say that she writes between the seams in her schedule. I feel like my life is the same way. I found a budget-friendly lap desk and write during long drives from the passenger seat, in the carpool line waiting to pick up kids, in coffee shops, and in dinky hotel rooms. 

Refillable Journal

I found this Voyager Refillable Journal in Books to Be Red, an independent bookstore, on Ocracoke Island. It holds three notebooks: lined, dot grid, and blank pages. It is great for research notes, sketching diagrams, and jotting down ideas. The notebooks are small and refillable. Until I found this gem, my note-taking system on the road was random scraps of paper and sending emails to myself which was problematic at best.

Travel Power Strip

I hate playing Twister behind furniture searching for outlets. This USB desktop power strip has been a game changer for me.  I love the outlets are easy to access, and I can charge multiple devices at one time. 

Portable Charger

I’m notorious for forgetting to charge my phone. I often use it as a hotspot when I write. This portable charger has saved me countless times. It is also small and easy to carry.

Snack Pouch

There have been days (I wish more) when the writing has been going well and suddenly, I’m hungry. If I stop to find food, the magic disappears. I keep bags of almonds, dark chocolate, and protein bars with me in a pinch. 

[NOTE: All links provided above are solely for your convenience; I have no financial relationship with the brands or retailers.]

Do you have a go bag for writing? Do you have advice on the best way to write on the road? What tools work for you? 

Please share your ideas in the comments.

***

I am delighted to be a recent guest on Elaine's Literary Salon Podcast. I had the best time chatting with Jeffrey James Higgins, about craft, community, and anthologies. You can listen to the podcast here. I hope you stop by.

Alexander the Great: Bastard as Exemplar for an Age (356–323 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week, that most terrifying of ancient conquerors, Alexander the Great!

*    *    *

Alexander ordered all but those who had fled to the temples to be put to death and the buildings to be set on fire… 6,000 fighting-men were slaughtered within the city’s fortifications. It was a sad spectacle that the furious king then provided for the victors: 2,000 Tyrians, who had survived the rage of the tiring Macedonians, now hung nailed to crosses all along the huge expanse of the beach.

— Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni 

Alexander the Great

Held up throughout the ages as a shining example of both the great conqueror and the philosopher-king, Alexander III of Macedonia was considered by many to be the greatest monarch of the ancient world. 

He was also a homicidal megalomaniac who developed a god complex to go along with a drinking problem, likely had a hand in killing his own father, murdered one of his own generals in a drunken rage, conquered the Persian Empire, and unleashed the Macedonian war machine on an unprepared world, resulting in the deaths of untold numbers of people.

Born to parents who could barely stand the sight of each other by the time he came along, Alexander was in his teens and already trained as a cavalry officer and a leader of men when his father, Macedonian king and bastard Philip II, took a new, young wife, whom he immediately got pregnant. When the girl delivered a boy whom Philip promptly designated his heir, Alexander and his crazy snake-cult-priestess mother Olympias fled Macedonia for her native country of Epirus (modern Albania), where they cooled their heels until Philip was assassinated later that same year. Alexander and his mother probably had a little something to do with that. Within weeks, Philip’s new wife, her opportunistic nobleman father, and her infant son had all been quietly put to death. 

The destruction of Thebes

On news of Philip's death the tribes to the north rebelled, and Alexander was forced to take time out to resubjugate them. A rumor that he had perished while doing so sparked a revolt by the Greek city-states Philip had conquered two years previously. Alexander marched south at the head of the army his father had built, and attacked Thebes, one of the cities leading the rebellion, and also where Philip had learned phalanx battle strategy in his youth.

Destroying Thebes' army, Alexander went about making an example of the city so as not to need to worry about further Greek rebellions once he was off in Asia. Six thousand Thebans died in the fighting, and Alexander had a further thirty-thousand sold into slavery.The Greeks never rose against him again.

After this Alexander was finally on to Asia, leading an army that Philip had built, conquering territories left and right. He lived another thirteen years and never again set foot back in Greece.

When Alexander and his army entered Egypt, the priests of Amun there hailed him as a god himself and the son of one of their gods (a syncretic figure that combined aspects of the Greek god Zeus with the of the Egyptian god Amun), a connection that played to both his vanity and his political need to lend legitimacy to his conquests (after all, who can argue with the reasons of a god-on-earth for anything he does?). 

Alexander kills Cleitus

The further he got from Macedonia, the more binge drinking he and his senior officers did, and the worse Alexander’s god complex became. One evening, he got into a drunken brawl with one of his generals, a veteran named Cleitus, who had saved Alexander’s life in battle at the Granicus River years before. What's more, Cleitus's sister Laodice had been Alexander's wetnurse when he was a baby. 

The argument began when Cleitus confronted Alexander over comments he was making about his dead father. Cleitus, who had served as a junior officer in Philip's army, objected to Alexander disparaging the dead king, both men were very drunk, and it was all downhill from there. After a heated back and forth, Cleitus opened his tunic, offering his chest as a target, should his king wish to take his life. In the heat of the moment, Alexander snatched a spear from one of his bodyguards and threw it at Cleitus, killing him on the spot. 

Overcome with remorse once he sobered up, Alexander contemplated suicide but was talked out of it by his entourage, who convinced him that Cleitus was disloyal and since Alexander was a god, he was therefore infallible. 

When he finally died in Babylon of a combination of malaria and exhaustion at the age of thirty-three, Alexander left a changed world behind him. Whether or not it was for the better is up for debate.

Dear Abi, or the Ultimate Unreliable Narrator

 "As for myself, I belong to that delicious subgenre, the self-confessed unreliable narrator." - Matt Coward

Back in 2021 I wrote here about Stuart Turton's remarkable first novel, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.  (Leigh also wrote about it later.)  Turton is a master of mash-ups or genre-blendings, so let's call that book a fantasy novel braided together with a golden-age-style mystery.

I also enjoyed, but never wrote about his second book, The Devil and the Dark Water, which is sort of a seafaring historical mystery with horror overtones.

I just finished his third novel, and it's an amazing tale.  The Last Murder at the End of the World is a science fiction mystery.  It is set hundreds of years in the future (I had to keep reminding myself of that when futuristic technology is used) when all animal life on earth has been wiped out except on an island in the Mediterranean where a village of a few hundred people remain. 

 

When one of the residents  is murdered solving it could literally mean life or death for  the whole planet.  And since their memories of the past night have been wiped - futuristic technology - even the killer doesn't know whodunit.  Fortunately one of the villagers is uniquely qualified to do the detective work.  There is a breathtaking scene in which Emory, the sleuth, looks at a scene of utter chaos and immediately deduces what happened.  Nice piece of writing.

But what fascinated me most about the book is the narration style.  Most of the book is in third person, the classic omniscient narrator who can tell us all the actions and thoughts of the characters.  But every once in a while, well, take a look:

She remembers being out there when she was a girl, hearing this same lesson from the same teacher. She cried the entire way and nearly jumped out to swim for home when they dropped anchor.

"The children are safe with Niema," I say reassuringly.

Say what? Who is this first person narrator suddenly intruding, one who can tell us what the characters are thinking?

Her name, it turns out, is Abi (and I think I was halfway through the book before her gender was mentioned). She can see through the eyes of the villagers, talk with them through their thoughts and, to some extent, control them.

So, who or what is Abi? Obviously that is one of the puzzle boxes that the reader hopes will  be opened before the end of the book.  

But now we're getting to my main point.  Abi sometimes tells us that she is lying to the villagers.  But does she tell us every time she does? Can we  trust anything she is telling us?  

This is a terrific book but not without flaws.  The last quarter is so convoluted you practically need a flowchart and map to track Who is Where When.  And there is something which is described as a major clue which feels to me like an error an editor should have caught.

But it is a stunning read. 

Mining the Files

Some of the many publications containing my stories, including those that were mined from the files.

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, as I have, you likely have a file drawer (or a file folder on your computer) filled with unsold stories.

Likely, some of them are unpublishable under any circumstances. Some, however, are publishable as is or with minor tweaking. Because you were unable to find suitable markets at the time, you disappeared the stories into your files. If enough time has passed, you may have even forgotten writing them.

This is a mistake. Every so often, you should reread your unsold stories and spend time seeking information about markets that have changed or that did not exist when you wrote the stories. You might be sitting on a gold mine (figuratively; you do know how well short stories pay, don’t you?).

This has been one of those years. Though there’re still thirty-one days left (as I write this) and I could receive additional acceptances that will impact the numbers I’m about to share, this has been a good year for mining my unsold stories file.

So, far, I’ve placed eight of those stories. I wrote the oldest—a bit of crime fiction—in 2013; the other seven are short romances I wrote in 2016. I placed them with three different publications, none of which existed at the time I wrote the stories.

Other than correcting typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors I hadn’t caught at the time, I only found it necessary to revise one story. I found a submission call for a winter-themed romance anthology, so I added a few sentences to one story to make it clear the story took place during winter.

UNFINISHED STORIES

I have another, larger, file of unfinished stories, and I frequently mine it as well. I’ve written about this before, but whenever I am not writing to deadline and have no specific project top of mind, I read my unfinished stories until one captures my attention.

Sometimes, I have a burst of inspiration and finish the story. Other times, I add a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire scene. Sometimes I create a rough outline for the balance of the story. If nothing compels me to finish, I move on to other unfinished stories.

Both “Blind Pig” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025) and “The Girl in the Shop” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025) were stories I had started and which lay dormant for four years (“Blind Pig”) or three years (“The Girl in the Shop”) between the time I started them and the time I finished them.

So, whether you’re mining your files for finished stories and seeking new markets for them or you’re mining for unfinished stories in hopes of inspirational sparks that will propel you through to the end of finished manuscripts, mining your files can prove quite beneficial.

I know it does for me.

* * *

“Forever Family” was published in Micromance Magazine, November 22, 2025.

“Writing is thinking.”

             My wife made this observation many years ago, and it has not only lingered in my mind, but grown in significance as I’ve experienced the effects. 

Here’s the premise:  When you’re just thinking something, it’s an undifferentiated ball of feelings, memories, randomly firing synapses, unstructured language, side tangents and fleeting images.  A swirl of disorganized, unmediated mush.  When you have to express all that via the written word, you have to “think it through”.  In other words, your mind imposes order and continuity to the original jumble, recording feelings and vague impressions in a way they can be conveyed to another person, essentially “completing the thought.”  Writing it down makes it real and tangible, and adds a fair amount of useful cognition along the way.

Fiction writers often mention those strange, and unfortunately fleeting, moments when something seems to be writing itself.  It’s suddenly effortless, the words flowing on the page as if directed by divine inspiration.  What could be happening, miraculous though not quite as romantic, is your brain, as your write, quickly sorts out all the inchoate reasoning that’s been going on in the background, and letting you reveal what you’d been thinking all along. 

It's also possible that the language you’re putting on the page is triggering other thoughts, which then express themselves as words, sentences and paragraphs, which then fuels further thinking, and concomitant writing, and so forth in a virtuous circle.

Brain scientists describe a process whereby raw emotions express themselves, spontaneously and involuntarily, as words in the heat of a stress-filled moment.  This is when your amygdala (once referred to as your “lizard brain”) gets so riled up that it sends a message right to your mouth, or in extreme cases your fists, bypassing all that other refining and moderating circuitry.   We usually apologize after one of these episodes by saying, “Sorry, I lost my temper.”  Or “Really sorry.  I guess I lost my mind.”   The latter is technically more accurate.  You have, in fact, lost portions of your mind when they’ve been sidelined, or hijacked (an actual clinical description) by the primitive bits from our evolutionary past.

I bring all this up to illustrate that it’s not unreasonable to assert that thoughts originating in one part of the brain can find themselves transformed for the better as they pass through the other parts.  Why the purely emotional sensations you might feel witnessing the dawn of a beautiful spring day can splash across a piece of paper in the form of a sonnet, and you have no idea how it got there.

 It would be fair to say that speaking serves the same purpose.  It also organizes the cacophony of impulses and feelings that constitute thought into discernible meaning you can communicate to other people.  That’s true, though written language operates at a different level.  It is more structured, intricate and reliant on basic logic.  You are more likely to be working your way to a conclusion, a summation that faces greater rigor than merely thinking out loud. 

            My wife would maintain that the act of writing itself not only harnesses thought, it is a type of thought itself that arrives at a destination unreachable by any other means.  It’s possible that some fiction writers compose their work fully in their heads before delivering it to the page.  But most are like me.  I have some idea of what’s going to happen in the next chapter, but I really won’t know for certain until I get there.  Often, my assumptions are misplaced, and the narrative goes merrily off in another direction entirely. 

You could argue that writing is merely a tool that facilitates thought, and by extension, creativity.  Feel free, but in my experience, no good ever comes from arguing with my wife.