Alimentary, My Dear Watson!

I blame Dickens for my household’s attempt to cook a Christmas goose some years ago. My wife and I had always been charmed by the Cratchit family’s dinner of goose and Christmas pudding depicted in the 1999 TV version of A Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart. We followed Julia Child’s instructions to the letter, but did not have the “tight-fitting lid” for our roasting pan that is so critical for properly rendering the bird prior to roasting. For weeks after, I felt as if everything I touched in the house—my eyeglasses, my computer keyboard—was coated with a fine film of goose fat. It’s not a fowl I desire to ever eat again. The Cratchit bird fed eight, and I get it. One slice of that rich meat is all anyone needs to survive winter.

I’ve since come to respect geese. The living specimens are fierce protectors of their turf who figure prominently in ancient art. In Rome people told us that if you didn’t have a dog, you could rely on a goose to keep your yard safe from intruders. No one wants to be bitten in the butt by an angry honker.

Alas, when the fowl shows up in literature, it’s usually on someone’s plate. The “unimpeachable” goose who is the star of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” starts out alive, then ends up dead and the centerpiece of a mystery. Interestingly, as we shall see, that goose kept coughing up mysteries well into the 20th century.

The 8,000-word story is the only Christmas tale in the Sherlock Holmes Canon. It first appeared in the January 1892 edition of The Strand magazine. (You’ll find it in the first book of collected stories, The Adventures.) If you know your Holmes, it’s the story that starts with the great man deducing the heck out of a bowler hat that has lost its owner, and later confronting a nervous amateur jewel thief who has stolen a precious gem—a blue carbuncle—from the belongings of a countess lodged at a London hotel. To keep the jewel safe until he can consult with his fence, the thief thrusts the gem down the throat of a living goose in his sister’s backyard. The goose gets switched on him, is sent to market, and zaniness ensues.

I reread the story recently to see what sort of Christmasy details Conan Doyle folded into his prose. They’re sparse; mostly Watson describing cold weather, warm fires, a cast of chilly characters, and ice crystals forming in windows. There are no Christmas trees or presents. Since the story is nearly 133 years old, I don’t think I’m spoiling anyone’s enjoyment by revealing that in the end, Holmes lets the repentant thief off scot-free. Because, he argues, “it’s the season of forgiveness.”

I enjoyed the story immensely this time around, and then foolishly read all the notes about it in my copy of Leslie S. Klinger’s The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. That’s how I learned that serious Sherlockians have long quibbled with fine points of the tale.

Some examples should suffice. A carbuncle is a garnet, which are typically red. Though they have been found in other colors, there’s no such thing as a blue carbuncle. No garnets have ever been found in the Chinese river Holmes mentions as the origin of this stone. The detective botches a discussion of the jewel’s weight, presumed value, and chemical composition. The law enforcement official in the story conducts a hardness test on the stone that does not prove what he thinks it does. Moreover, of the eleven or so deductions Holmes makes about the bowler, Sherlockians dismiss at least four as highly illogical.

But hey, if our author couldn’t get the number of Watson’s wives straight, or the location of the shrapnel the good doctor brought back from Afghanistan, why do we expect him to get such details right? Conan Doyle wrote to make glad the heart of geekhood. He was a little like the Hungarian-American director Michael Curtiz, who when someone pointed out all the implausibilities in the script for Casablanca, replied, “Don’t worry. I make it go so fast nobody notices.”

Sometime after WWII, however, a clever female reader proved just how much the largely male membership of Holmes societies knew about geese. Throughout the story, we are told repeatedly that the stolen gem was found in the goose’s crop. That word is mentioned five times in the story. Since many birds do not have teeth, they pre-digest their food by funneling items into a separate anatomical pouch, which is sort of a pre-stomach.

I remembered seeing such a thing as a child, watching my mother butcher a backyard chicken. The bird’s crop was filled with tiny pebbles, which chickens instinctively swallow in their pecking. That grit is later used by the gizzard, the muscular end of the stomach, to grind bugs and vegetation so they can more easily be digested.

In a sidebar in Klinger’s Annotated Holmes, our editor tells us that the “Blue Carbuncle” was referenced during Christmas season 1946 by Chicago Tribune columnist Charles Collins, who was a friend of Vincent Starrett’s and a founding member of the Chicago chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars. A longtime journalist, Collins wrote a popular column called A Line o’ Type or Two for the newspaper. Some days later, astute reader Mildred Sammons fired off a note, taking issue with his six-paragraph summary. Her brief note appeared in the newspaper the day after Christmas that year. 

Regarding the Sherlock Holmes Christmas story, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” discussed in the Line o’ Type column on Dec. 17: It contains a statement that the missing jewel was found in the crop of a goose. Let me remind you that a goose has no crop.

You could hear a feather drop in the great and glorious Kingdom of Holmesiana. By then the tale was 54 years old; in all that time none of the geniuses had spotted this error.

After consulting various waterfowl experts and butchers, the U.S. experts conceded: “[T]he lady is correct. Holmes made an alimentary error, which the Baker Street Irregulars should have noted long ago.” There was talk in the pages of The Baker Street Journal of granting Mildred Sammons some sort of award “in gratitude for her discovery.”

I don’t know if she ever collected, because of course it didn’t end there. Scholars on both sides of the pond kept interrogating poultry experts, further beating a dead goose. The problem went all the way to the UK’s office of the Minister of Agriculture and Fish. The Ministry’s Chief Poultry Adviser—who of course turned out to be a Holmes geek—weighed in, saying that the American experts were correct. “However,” he added, “as a Sherlock Holmes fan I am glad to say that this fact does not necessarily invalidate the theory in the story of the ‘The Blue Carbuncle.’”

The reasoning: Yes, chickens and turkeys have a separate organ or pouch called a crop. Waterfowl such as geese and ducks have no such pouch, but their gullet is just long and extendable enough to accommodate food—or the occasional precious gem—that will be stored and later digested. If the goose’s stomach is full, a swallowed item might well remain lodged in the gullet, awaiting its turn. (I beg your indulgence here. I am not an expert on poultry anatomy. I am relying on articles such as this, on the glories of the digestive tracts of waterfowl. Feel free to cry fowl if I've screwed anything up.)

Naturally, this engendered a flurry of further academic papers, the most hilarious of which was written by a Sherlockian who posited that the hullabaloo was all beside the point. Maybe, just maybe, quoth he, “the long debate is centred on a printer’s error, which substituted an o for Watson’s a.”

And on that note, I’ll wish you all the best of the season, however you celebrate and whatever graces your table.

* * * 

Please use the comments to share some of your favorite holiday stories. I could use a few suggestions.

I recommend Connie Willis’s 544-page A Lot Like Christmas, if you can stomach that much Christmas, much of it novella-length SFF. I also recommend Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Holiday Spectacular, which she describes as a virtual advent calendar that delivers one new story—a romance, mystery or fantasy by various authors—to your inbox every day from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day. All holidays are represented, not just Christmas.

See you all in the New Year!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

 

Writers, Black Friday's on You!

Hello? Hello? Is anyone actually there?

As long as I am once again stuck posting on Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving that marks the start of the Christmas shopping season, I might as well take a bold, clickbaity tack and blame the commercialization of Christmas on short story writers.

Yes, fellow scribes, j’accuse!

In years past, I talked about how Christmas in America went from being a holiday marked by drunken hooliganism to one supposedly dedicated to blissful domesticity. The agent in that drama was Santa Claus, whose literary popularization in the 1820s allowed civic-minded adults to focus the holiday on children. That twist also forced young men to be responsible. They could no longer wander the streets on wintry days off; they had to earn and spend wisely if they were to produce presents for children (and eventually all their loved ones) on Christmas Day.

I am not making this up. It all comes from a fantastic book, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, by historian Stephen Nissenbaum. (A terrible title, but a wonderfully instructive book nonetheless.)

Americans had a huge hurdle to overcome to finally embrace Christmas. The nation’s earliest settlers, Puritans, banned the holiday. But by 1680, Professor Nissenbaum argues, their cultural impact had begun to wane in the colonies and in England as well. Slowly, printed materials such as almanacs began denoting December 25th as Christmas-Day once again. Hymnals began including Christmas hymns. By the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin prescribed what Nissenbaum calls “temperate mirth” (Nissenbaum’s italics, not mine or Franklin’s) for the season.

And when our historian studies the diaries of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, he finds that Mrs. Ballard often worked on Christmas. By the 1790s, if Mrs. Ballard did anything special at all to mark the holiday, she and her husband visited friends and family. She shopped for ingredients such as rum, sugar, ginger, allspice, and other fancy ingredients, and spent the run-up to the Christmas week baking cakes or pies. The implication was that good, honest, industrious folks did moderately festive things for Christmas. They might sip a cup of drink or eat a slice of mince meat pie. They’d sit in someone’s home and chat or sing. They didn’t extort money from their neighbors on a wanton parade of inebriated wassailing, as was the custom in big cities. They also didn’t buy presents for each other. That just was not part of the early U.S. Christmas tradition.

Mrs. Ballard—who was, remember, a midwife—did note that young people of her acquaintance did apparently go a-courting during this time of year. (Dutiful historian Nissenbaum notes that, statistically, babies in this era were often born in great numbers in September or October, indicating that Christmas-time was indeed busy for some people.)

The poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” became popular in the 1820s, and by the 1830s publishers in the U.S. major cities cranked out annual books intended to be purchased by adults to give to children. They had names like The Girl’s Own Book, or The American Girl’s Book, and were filled with stories, games, puzzles, poems, that promised to be absolutely wholesome and edifying for the child you loved. There were books for boys, too. In one of these books in the 1840s, Nissenbaum discovers a reprint of E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker,” which was first written in 1816.

The earliest advertisement for “Christmas Gifts” that Nissenbaum was able to find dated to 1806, in a Salem, Massachusetts, newspaper. Tellingly, the ad was placed by a bookseller. Eventually, adults also became recipients of the book-buying tradition. These books were more lavish, with gold-leaf paper edges, embossed covers, colored engravings, and “presentation plates”—a page at the front where the giver would inscribed the book to their loved one. Husbands and wives gifted each other these books; suitors presented them to young ladies who were the object of their affection.

Today, we would call these books anthologies, because they included a mix of stories and poems by different writers. Back then, they didn’t yet have names for such tomes. At first, these books—whether for adults or children—were called “Christmas Boxes,” co-opting the term Brits used for the tradition of Boxing Day. Eventually, these books and any other gift offered to a loved were dubbed Christmas presents. (Hence my italics in the previous paragraph.) 

And because tokens of love back then were typically jewelry and flowers, these hardcover volumes were often named after those things, suggesting that they were of equal value. Indeed, these were probably the most expensive books Americans of this time ever bought, aside from fancy family Bibles, which were also bought in profusion at Christmas.

Nissenbaum enumerates a long list of the annuals:

“Thus, for jewelry, there were the Amaranth, Amethyst, Brilliant, Coronet, Diadem, Gem, Gem of the Season, Jewel, Literary Gem, Lyric, Opal, Pearl, and Ruby. For flowers, there were Autumn Leaves, Bouquet, Christmas Blossoms, Dahlia, Dew-Drop, Evergreen, Floral Offering, Flowers of Loveliness, Garland, Hyacinth, Iris, Laurel Wreath, Lily, Lily of the Valley, Magnolia, May Flower, Moss-Rose, Primrose, Rose, Rose Bud, Violet, Winter-Bloom, Wintergreen, Woodbine, and Wreath.”

To carry the analogy to the present day, it would be as if readers in our genre looked forward to year-end anthologies such as Mr. Pachter’s Christmas annual, The Poinsettia, or Mr. Bracken’s Christmas Silver Bell.

Cover of the 1844 edition of The Opal.

I tracked down a 1848 copy of The Opal: A Pure Gift for the Holy Days. With nine engraved plates and gilt-decorated moroccan leather, this copy will sent you back $3,000 today, not because of the book’s scarcity, but because this particular copy was once owned and inscribed by FDR. The scanned copy I found online contains 42 different poems and stories, written by as many writers and poets.

During the colonial period in America, publishers in the colonies and across the pond shamelessly plagiarized works to fill their newspapers, almanacs, and magazines. But the 1820s and 1830s marked a shift, a time when editors began paying decent rates to writers for original work. For the first time in U.S. history, one could earn a living as a writer.

That said, the only two bylines I recognized in the 1848 Opal were those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the book’s editor, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, aka “The Mother of Thanksgiving.” And yes, as I began reading some of the pieces at random, my eyes began to bleed. Victorian prose is not my cup of tea.

Mrs. Hale, you might recall from one of my earlier posts, was once the most influential “editress” in the country. For Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had the highest circulation of any publication in the nation, she bought the work of countless writers, now famous or otherwise. Throughout the year, as she worked on her lady’s magazine, she also compiled stories destined for her Christmas edition. In May 1844, when she was buying for the 1845 edition, to be published in the fall of 1844, a writer wrote to say that he’d offered a story to one editor, N.P. Willis, who declined it, suggesting he send it to Mrs. Hale for her Christmas Opal.

Under these circumstances, I have thought it best to write you this letter, and to ask you if you could accept an article from me—or whether you would wish to see the one in question—or whether you could be so kind as to take it, unseen, upon Mr Willis’s testimony in its favor. It cannot be improper to state, that I make the latter request to save time, because I am as usual, exceedingly in need of a little money.
With high respect
Yr. Ob. St. Edgar A Poe

Those of you who write short stories really ought to try this gambit sometime.

Hi. Remember me, the penurious writer? Will you buy a story someone else rejected sight unseen because I need a little casheesh?

This becomes all the more hilarious when you consider that the story Mr. Poe offered Mrs. Hale was in fact “The Oblong Box.” Good editors then and now hew closely to some sort of theme when selecting their stories. Mrs. Hale would later tell readers of the 1845 Opal that she choose stories that “all harmonize in one deep holy sentiment of Christian love.”

Gee—I suppose we cannot fault her for choosing not to include a seafaring tale of a dead-wife-in-a-wooden-crate in her pure gift for the holy days.

Pure and holy: the title page of the 1845 Opal.

But she did dangle a carrot before Mr. Poe, who had written a snoozer of a travel essay (“The Elk”) for the 1844 Opal. He jumped on it:

New-York. May 31rst 44.
My Dear Madam,
I hasten to reply to your kind and very satisfactory letter, and to say that, if you will be so good as to keep open for me the ten pages of which you speak, I will forward you, in 2 or 3 days, an article which will about occupy that space, and which I will endeavour to adapt to the character of “The Opal.” The price you mention—50 cts per page—will be amply sufficient; and I am exceedingly anxious to be ranked in your list of contributors.
Should you see Mr Godey very soon, will you oblige me by saying that I will write him in a few days, and forward him a package?
With sincere respect.
Yr Ob. St
Edgar A Poe

At the time he accepted her $5 payment, which amounts to about $210 in 2024, his most famous stories (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug,” etc.) were all behind him, and he was a well-known lecturer, poet, and critic. It was also five years before his death.

The “Christmas” article he submitted, and which Mrs. Hale did publish, was a ruminative essay about art, its creators, and personal growth entitled “A Chapter of Suggestions.” As one modern writer says, it’s an article filled with “profound sh*t” that discusses, among other things, why artists tend to drink heavily, and why creators are never appreciated for the genius they inject into the world. As for Mr. Godey, Mrs. Hale’s Philadelphia publisher, I cannot imagine what Mr. Poe was sending in that package. 

COPY BOY: Mr. Godey, sir? You have a package from Mr. Poe in New York. It’s..um… leaking.

History reveals that Mrs. Hale was just crazy enough to print “The Oblong Box,” his horror/detective tale, in the September 1844 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which did not at all scare the bloomers off hundreds of thousands of American women living in remote areas of the country with taciturn husbands and poor night-time lighting.

So you see, Christmas shopping would not be what it is without the contributions of us short story scribes. From Christmas annuals, it was a hop, skip, and a jump to expensive kicks, Gameboys, the sports car with a giant bow parked in the driveway, piles of shredded gift wrap, and gluttonous feasting in the company of family members we detest. If you give an American a great short story, in three decades or thirty, they will crave Burberry scarves and winter trips to Turks and Caicos. It’s inevitable.

And when it all became too much, Professor Nissenbaum says, everything we complain about today—the crass commercialization and materialism, the fatigue, the unflagging sense of obligation—was also expressed by a writer in a Christmas short story entitled “Christmas; or, the Good Fairy.” In that piece, a harried female character muses:

“Oh dear! Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody! Dear me, it’s so tedious! Everybody has got everything that can be thought of… 

There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.”

The writer of those words was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she expressed them in a story published in 1850, not long before Americans heard of her bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Christmas shopping is a horror, and short story writers helped make it so.

The Oblong Box card
from the Poe Tarot Card Deck.

* * * 

Happy Thanksgiving to readers who are celebrating it this week.

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Fascists in the Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "Doll Dance":

Mom, second from left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seething, Mike waited for this Italian soldier to descend.

Mike asked him the question.

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

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

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

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

Angels and Devils.

Mom, first, top row left.

---

Thanks for reading. See you in three weeks!

— Joe josephdagnese.com

My Resiliency Bucket Needs a Refill

 

Dog and Denise by candlelight.

My friend Tom, who lives a somewhat eremitical existence in a rural part of our North Carolina mountains, woke the morning after Tropical Storm Helene to find that the gravel road at the end of his property was blocked by downed trees and bisected by two raging gullies of water. He and his neighbors were cut off from civilization. If they didn’t do something to help themselves, they knew it would be days, possibly weeks, before city workers cut them out.

Tom cobbled together a brigade of can-do folks with chainsaws to get the job done. His A-Team consisted of characters I would hesitate to put in a fictional narrative because they would seem too far-fetched. Tom, a wild-eyed building contractor and the scion of a Texas oil family, was assisted in his endeavors by a puppeteer, a falconer, a nonagenarian bison herder, and a guy everyone on that road calls “the friendly hermit.” As the men worked, they were kept happily fed by an 80-year-old neighbor who fried up savory helpings of Spam out of her pandemic pantry. You can’t make this stuff up.

My wife and I were safely out of town at a three-day book event when the storm passed through, so I cannot share any anecdotes of those harrowing days and nights. I only know that since chainsaw-slinging puppeteers are in short supply, most of my neighbors closer to our little city of Asheville, North Carolina, were trapped in their homes as tree after tree fell and utilities gave up the ghost, and were forced to wait for help.

Our friends Jimmy and Heather found their college-aged daughter’s car squashed flat in their driveway under a massive tree. A few other trees dropped on their property, none on the house. They were the lucky ones.

Most of the neighbors on my cul de sac were equally lucky. A few trees down here and there, but their homes high, dry, and intact. Inez, the inveterate gardener at the end of the block, lost a beautiful magnolia, which fell toward the road, damaging nothing but itself. When I asked how she was, she said that after hearing how others in the surrounding region had fared, she felt “Lucky, and heartbroken.”

She did not know it, but she was speaking for many of us in Western North Carolina.

Denise and I had been in Charleston, four hours south. We returned three days after the storms to find a massive tree on our roof, and about a dozen trees down on the property, several of which smashed through the wooden privacy fence that keeps our dog from tearing after squirrels in distant yards.

For a few days I walked around measuring these behemoths. The smallest diameter I encountered was 16 inches. The tree removal estimates alone were close to $20,000, before we entertained the notion of repairing the roof, gutters, and fences, replacing the dog’s invisible fence line and the spoiled food in our fridge. In other words, we too were lucky.

We and the older couple next door have since become the de facto rulers of the street, because as soon as Good Samaritans cut the trees blocking their way out, many of our neighbors fled to places rumored to possess electricity, Internet, mobile phone coverage, and copious hot water. I don’t blame them. Some of those neighbors have kids, some are older, and some simply don’t like to be inconvenienced.

For a few nights we roamed our home with flashlights, cooked on the gas stovetop, listened to news on a hand-cranked radio, and went to bed to the sounds of sirens, chainsaws, Chinook helicopters, and humming natural gas generators. Gasoline was scarce, so we walked a few miles everyday to a guardrail near the highway that for some reason had great cell coverage. From that strange spot, we wrote everyone we could think of to assure them that we were okay.

On those cool fall mornings, when the nabe was silent, nature returned. A flock of wild turkeys traipsed through everyone’s yard. Three deer, tails twitching, skipped along the lawn across from us. And a mother bear arrived one afternoon with two cubs to investigate the trash people had left behind in their haste to bug out. For several nights, successive waves of bears feasted while our dog went nuts.

It is a mistake to think, as humans often do, that we are the masters of all we survey. No—we’re just the ones stupid enough to pay for it.

Family and friends insisted that we too consider fleeing for our own safety as soon as we could procure a full tank of gas. We have been offered guest rooms and cottages in Knoxville, Chapel Hill, Brooklyn, Idaho Falls, D.C., and Sleepy Hollow. And much as I would LOVE to spend Halloween in the reaping grounds of the Headless Horseman, we have chosen to stay.

My brother, in particular, took me to task. Denise and I were safely out of town! Why on earth would we return?

Here’s why. We felt compelled to check on the house, to see just how bad the damage was. And we needed to retrieve our dog, who was staying at the home of a trainer who worked at the kennel we normally use. This wonderful person and her family were safely out of harm’s way, not in a flood zone, but it was too much of an imposition to leave the pooch in their care indefinitely. They had a motorcycle dealership on one of the rivers to muck out. They didn’t need the extra hassle of our dog while doing so. (The grounds of the dealership have since become a staging area for helicopter search and rescue operations.)

The kennel, I should mention, had been evacuated two nights before Helene’s arrival, and is now completely wrecked.

The French Broad River that flows through our mountains is the third oldest on the planet. (Yes, I know that strains credulity. Look it up.) It is 340 million years old, four-and-a-half-times older than than the Nile.

Pardon my French, but when the old Broad gets angry and swollen, she lashes out. Nearly every business on that stretch of road near the dog kennel was erased. The brewery we’d never had a chance to visit. The artisanal tea company that formulated a brew to celebrate the launch of my wife’s Thanksgiving book. The glass company that installed our shower doors. The plumbing supply company that sold me parts for my various DIY jobs around the house. The legions of antique places. The FedEx store where we’ve shipped editorial projects. The restaurants in the historic village outside the Biltmore Estate that we adored and championed. The one-man auto body shop that repaired the dings I keep putting in my fenders. All gone. Washed from the face of the earth. That’s only one stretch of road along a tributary of the French Broad.

The River Arts District, where artists maintained studios and sold to the public, is a moonscape of twisted sheet metal, upended vehicles and trailers, scoured terrain, and toppled trees festooned with fluttering plastic. We used to call this area the RAD, but now the D in that acronym stands for debris. When we drove down to take a look, I felt numb. Tears sprung to my eyes.

The people who lived and worked here, the ones I know and the ones I don’t, are the legions of the unlucky. Their homes and livelihoods were destroyed, and they are in shock. Rescue workers continue to pull the bodies of humans and livestock from waters in the region.

I could go on. There are tons of these stories, and the list will only grow because as I write this, the news tells me that there are still—three weeks after the storms passed—600 impassable roads in the state. In a mountainous region with challenging terrain, that means people are still trapped, hungry, ill, or even dead in or near their homes, and no one will know until the roads that lead to their doors are rebuilt, or someone helicopters in to check on them. The body count keeps climbing. Power restoration efforts will take time because in so many of these areas, workers must rebuild roads or else hike into an area on foot and hand-dig holes before new electrical poles can be erected and strung.

We are proud of these mountains and their history, but they have a distinct disadvantage when dumped with excess water. On flat terrain, rainwater has a whisper of a chance to seep into the earth. When it lands on slopes, rain doesn’t so much seep as it rushes downhill, seeking the lowest point. This process happens with alarming speed. This simple concept had never occurred to me until it was explained to me by a climate scientist I interviewed when I first moved here twenty years ago. As a species, we should cultivate the habit of shutting up and listening to scientists speak more often.

That’s another reason why we remain in our home. We are safe. We have a roof over our heads. Electricity, Internet, and cell coverage work but remain erratic. As long as I can communicate, I will do so. We were trained as journalists. Stories are important to us. Someone’s got to collect them, and share them with others. I don’t own a chainsaw. I don’t keep an excavator on my property like my pal Tom. But I do what I do. They also serve who sit and write.

Now that utilities are less crappy, and gasoline is easier to come by, we have the luxury of moving on to other chores. Every morning, we get up and make a run to grab some non-potable water with which to flush our toilets. On the drive back home, we roll past a gauntlet of friendly strangers who offer us everything from free drinking water, free MREs, free ice, free cereal, free baby supplies, free bananas. It’s the bananas that kill me. Free bananas—seriously? Bananas are part of the reason we’re in this mess.

Saturday we went to the farmer’s market, where growers sell food that was coaxed from local soil, not shipped in from the tropics. Since this was the first market since the storms, the gathering was about so much more than buying groceries. A lot of hugging, a lot of swapping of stories.

My favorite farmer, the dude who always teases me with the term paisan, was not there. He, like me, is an Italian American guy from New Jersey. Earlier this spring, I texted him to ask when was the best time to get my meatball starts in the ground. He reminded me to mulch mine deeply with lasagna noodles. He’s got a beautiful sense of humor, and a smile that lights up hearts.

Why wasn’t he there? As soon as I could get back home and in range of our temperamental Wi-Fi, I dug around the web. I learned that Gaelan and Nicole’s farm was largely destroyed by Helene. Her brother-in-law had a GoFundMe site up to help them rebuild. The photos of their collapsed barn, shredded hoop houses, gullied-out crops, and upended farm equipment were horrifying.

A few days ago, my friend Steve wisely observed that everyone has a small bucket of resiliency that typically serves us in good stead, but it is surprising how quickly that bucket empties. Sitting on my patio Saturday, surrounded by piles of shattered tree limbs, a few feet from my patched roof, I broke down and wept. Can’t even call the guy to say how sorry I am about his farm. He’s out of touch until they erect temporary cell towers in his town, which is about an hour from me.

I turned 60 that weekend, and while I didn’t feel like celebrating, I certainly felt like stewing. I have literally become the old dude who shouts at clouds because they are blocking the tiny solar generator in his driveway.

Because I’m lucky does not mean I am not angry. Angry at climate change deniers. Angry at corporations who refuse to take a temporary hit to their profits to ensure that we live safely on this planet for a few more centuries. Angry at the billion-dollar corporate dickheads who own our severely understaffed local hospital, and whose rapacious greed has invited the scrutiny of our state attorney general and the feds. (This is the same hospital you may have heard about in the news, whose emergency room is so screwed right now that staffers were instructing patients to “go in buckets” that would later be emptied by nurses. The city’s lack of water means surgeons cannot easily scrub in, so please don’t need surgery, folks…)

I am angry at politicians who keep texting me to offer their thoughts and prayers during my hour of need, to tell me that they are “with me,” only to remind me a sentence later that they’re counting on my vote on November 5th.

I am angry at the jerks who jacked our local postal workers in the early days of the recovery to steal Amazon packages. Angry at the narcissists who so badly needed gasoline that they felt it necessary to threaten their neighbors at gunpoint at the pumps, then—as in one instance—run those poor people over as they drove away.

And let’s face it, I am angry because I could really use water in my damn pipes. In recent years I have become a profligate drinker of water. The cancer treatment I had back in 2022 robbed me of fully functioning salivary glands, so even the slightest physical effort leaves me parched. After a day of hauling wood and buckets of water, I am desperate to guzzle whatever is handy.

Okay, true, I sometimes slake my thirst with beer. But my tipple of choice is mostly FEMA’s bottled water. I feel increasingly guilty about the rising tide of plastic in my recycling bin.

My attorney neighbor, who grew up here, tells me that the mayor and city council have fought for seventy-five years about doing something about our rickety and woefully outdated water treatment facility. Successive administrations kept passing the buck on upgrades, because no one had the balls to come clean about the costs and probable property tax hikes, nor did they have the political will to inconvenience citizens and tourists with what could be a months-long process of interruptions at the tap. Well, guess what? The plant flooded, must now be rebuilt from scratch, and our much-vaunted tourism economy is destroyed. Great work, guys.

As the lady says, I am lucky and heartbroken. I have dry mouth and I must scream.

* * *

Apologies for the long post, and the paucity of photos.

I can only share my experience, but I’d remind visitors here that these storms impacted much of the American southeast. If you are moved to donate on the national level, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are good options.

If you want to help my city specifically, two good organizations are Manna Food Bank and BeLoved Asheville.

Since we’re a literary blog, I’m posting links to bookstores in the region. If you’re contemplating buying books online, I’m sure that they would appreciate your business. (Before you buy, check websites to see if they are able to fulfill orders.)

Malaprop’s - Asheville, NC
Firestorm Co-op - Asheville, NC
Bagatelle Books - Asheville, NC
Plott Hound Books - Burnsville, NC
Blue Moon Books - Canton, NC
Blue Ridge Books - Waynesville, NC
Sassafrass on Sutton - Black Mountain, NC
Sassafrass on Main - Waynesville, NC
City Lights Bookstore - Sylva, NC
Little Switzerland Books & Beans - Little Switzerland, NC

Two wonderful local sources for used and rare books are:
Biblio - Asheville, NC
Irving Book Company  - Asheville, NC

Hopefully, I’ll see you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

And to Think It Was All Started by a Fish

I was ten years old when Jaws hit movie theaters in 1975. There was no particular reason why my parents would take me and my siblings to see such a movie. Even after the movie became the hit of that summer, one that forever altered the summer movie-going experience, we still didn’t go. In general, the ‘rents didn’t like shelling out for theater runs, and they certainly didn’t relish the thought of dealing with the nightmares that would inevitably ensue among their three young sons after such a viewing.

How wise they were! A few summers later, when we visited a beloved aunt who lived at the Jersey Shore, she unhesitatingly took us to see the sequel at a drive-in. It’s generally acknowledged today that that movie (and all the sequels that followed) were terrible, but tell that to a kid who refused to enter the water for the rest of his so-called beach vacation.

Even today, I don’t really “do” horror. Don’t read or watch much of it, because, well, it scares me. The Jaws movie poster and the gigantic black-and-white ads that appeared in our local newspaper that year both mesmerized and scared me off. But this was also a transitional period for me, during which I routinely dipped in and out of grown-up books. And wherever I prowled garage sales, flea markets, and library sales, the Bantam paperback edition of Jaws was ubiquitous and dirt cheap. The going rate for used paperbacks then was ten cents. Who could resist?

The book scared the bejesus out of me, of course. It was coldly scientific, and occasionally salacious. The affair between Chief Brody’s wife and ichthyologist Hooper, for one thing, is something I can recall with a crazy amount of detail today, though I haven’t looked at the book in forty-plus years. Guess their sex scene was seared into my brain. For years after, I didn’t rush to read other books Peter Benchley wrote, but they were always on my radar. I read one of his later thrillers as a slightly older kid who was now interested in writing, and I remember mulling it over for days. How few characters he needed to create conflict, how the action of the book neatly shook down into three decent acts, and so on.

After college, a girlfriend dragged me to see Jaws: The Revenge, which I frankly found repellant on so many levels that I never dipped into the franchise again.

I had occasion to reconsider my Jaws experience sometime last year when my wife bought the first and arguably only watchable film, and started leaving it on while we cooked dinner. It’s crazy; this film was such a huge part of American culture, but I don’t think I had ever watched it all the way through until now.

Once, for work, I had traveled to Martha’s Vineyard—where the movie was shot—to interview a coppersmith for a home magazine. I spent an entire day with the (now departed) Travis Tuck, driving around the island to look at all the weathervanes he had designed and constructed for his high-end clients. But the very first weathervane he created, which launched his career, was a raging shark for the top of Quint’s shack. (The artisan firm Tuck started still sells replicas, and they’ve since created a velociraptor for one of Spielberg’s homes.)

T-shirt No. 1

I knew Tuck’s story. I had seen photos of the weathervane he created, but I still never watched the entire film. And when I did, finally, two things leaped out at me. One: Hollywood would never allow such normal-looking people in movies these days. The film looks like Spielberg went to Martha’s Vineyard and just started shooting ordinary people he saw walking around. Not even the movie stars—Shaw, Scheider, Dreyfuss, etc.—look like movie stars. Two: the film adheres to a nearly flawless story structure better than Benchley’s book.

Some people call it a horror movie, but most describe it as a thriller. Our own Fran Rizer called it a “howdunnit,” because the killer is known from the beginning. We watch, she said, to learn how our heroes will catch and kill it.

Most stories need a character in a setting with a problem. The character tries to solves the problem, and fails. Their try/fail cycle continues as the stakes rise. Things go south, leading to a moment when all is nearly lost. The character must do or die. And lo—he/she succeeds and triumphs. That’s police chief Brody in Jaws.

The biggest chunk of action happens when these three very different men hit the open sea to kill the shark. Their skills levels vary, but each has their own reasons for being there. In the end, the guy with the least shark experience defeats the monster. Holy crap—a great story.

I dug deep into the lore of my new favorite old movie a few weeks ago. When my wife returned from a trip to Martha’s Vineyard with a girlfriend, she presented me a couple of Jaws T-shirts that will I never wear for fear of coffee stains. And when she told me that Vineyarders are gearing up to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the film next year, my mind was blown. The significance of the dates had escaped me.

Gee—time flies, huh, folks?

This April 1974 New York Times Magazine
cover story offered a comprehensive
behind-the-scenes look at the
book’s journey to publication.
(Link to story below.)

It’s actually a dual anniversary. The book pubbed in February 1974, which makes 2024 a 50^th anniversary suitable for a lesson in the changing world of book publishing. Imagine: a writer meets for lunch with a book editor, sketches out an idea for a book he thinks he might want to write, and the editor offers to pay him a $1,000 just to write the first three chapters, and see what they all think about the concept.

After the editor buys the full manuscript, he circulates a few chapters around the office daring his fellow staffers to read the first chapter only. They all know they have something potentially big, but they waffle on the title and cover art. I don’t think the book would have had the same punch if it had been called Leviathan Rising, or The Stillness in the Water, as originally proposed.

When the book launched, it was reviewed twice by the New York Times (something that still happens to this day), with both reviewers dismissing it snottily. Lord, what fools these mortals be! The hardcover parked itself on the Times Bestseller List for 45 weeks, and the paperback sold 9 million copies by the end of 1975, after the movie came out. (The book sales figure stands at an estimated 20 million today) Bantam’s paperback, which is the one I read and the edition we all know, is the first one to carry that indelible shark image that made the franchise. (You can read the story behind the book’s covers at a link below; apparently the original painting has been lost.)

T-shirt No. 2. Wish I knew who designed it.

The movie was Spielberg’s third. It was a big deal to entrust an $8 million movie to a neophyte director who was not yet 30. His decision to shoot on the open sea instead of a backlot tank was a choice that nearly bankrupted the production. Saltwater wreaked havoc with the pneumatic guts of “Bruce,” the three mechanical robots that brought the monster to life, causing the production to fall behind by about 100 days.

We, they, all of us laugh about this now. The finished film was the first to earn $100 million, and it taught Hollywood the wisdom of releasing summer “tentpole” or (must-see blockbusters) films. It also taught them that sequels could be a great thing for them, albeit only occasionally for us. The success transformed author Peter Benchley into a lifetime activist and advocate for marine life. A longtime lover of the sea, he was horrified to learn that the thing he created was now responsible for the wanton slaughter of sharks by macho idiots who believed that they were purging the seas of manhunters. Before he died in 2006 at age 65, he told interviewers that he regretted creating the impression that a great white would intentionally attack humans out of spite or malice.

Script is currently only available
from the licensors of the play.

It’s interesting to see how the book and film keep spawning new creations, and no, I’m not just talking about T-shirts, yellow drum earrings, and Jaws-themed etsy swag. Right before Covid, a small stage play called The Shark is Broken debuted in London, co-written by Ian Shaw, the son of actor Robert Shaw, who so masterfully portrayed the shark hunter Quint in the film. Poignantly, Ian Shaw played his father in both the London and New York productions.

The 90-minute comedy-drama is takes place during the filming of Jaws, when the three main actors—Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfuss—are stuck aboard the set of their boat, the Orca, killing time, playing pub games, drinking heavily, and bickering while Spielberg’s team tries to fix their famously temperamental mechanical “co-star.”

I loved reading the playscript. I think it would make an engaging, funny movie in its own right, but I should probably mention that reviews have been mixed on both sides of the pond. The Shaw character struggles with his alcoholism throughout the play, and twice botches his famous USS Indianapolis scene. He despises the lines the scriptwriters have asked him to speak, and begs Spielberg’s indulgence to rewrite it. (The elder Shaw was an accomplished novelist and playwright.) The play culminates with his rendition of what is now regarded as one of the greatest monologues in cinema. It’s the scene that reveals Quint’s psychology and why he wants the shark dead.

Of course, the larger conceit of the play is that all three actors have no freaking clue how well this movie will do, and how it will forever change their lives. Well, I thought as I read, they were hardly alone, were they?

Thanks for reading. Some background material that you might enjoy:

A look back at the book phenomenon. (NYT)

An article on the making of the iconic cover design. (Print Mag)

The exhaustive 1974 article on the making of the bestseller. (NYT Mag)

Widow of Peter Benchley shares her recollections. (Marthas Vineyard Times)

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Giving It Away for Free, Part II

 

I'll take that with a side of crazy.

Pardon me, dearly beloved, while I rant. I had a weird week that saw me driving to and returning from a long wedding weekend when I shoulda coulda been at Bouchercon. Adding to my exasperation were a couple of weird emails from complete strangers who, on a strength of very slim connections, nevertheless felt compelled to write asking for help with their writing.

Fans of the Joe Show will recall that I have written about the dangers of offering your writing/editing expertise for free to writers who don’t do the requisite work. Since I wrote that post on the topic, I have attempted to change the error of my ways. When a close college friend asked me to read and comment on her nonfiction book proposal, I declined, saying that I didn’t feel comfortable working with friends that way. I referred her to the website reedsy.com, a wonderful organization, which, among other things, allows editorial freelancers to hang out their shingles offering services to authors, most of whom are intending to self publish. My friend did find an editor who had expertise editing titles on the geopolitical subject of her book that I was unqualified to judge. So, in that case, my brush-off was a win-win-win—for my friend, the hired editor, and me.

Years ago, as part of a class my wife and I taught on nonfiction book proposals, I offered to read any resulting proposals the students generated. Only two or three followed through on writing their proposals, and availed themselves of our offer. Which we sorta, kinda predicted. Oddly, the student with the best idea did not contact me until this past spring, a full seven years after the class ended. He offered to pay me to read, since he’d clearly blown through the window of opportunity. But I did not feel good accepting payment since I’d read the work of his classmates at no cost. Before I made a decision, I asked him to send me the first three pages of his proposal.

Holy cow, what a beautiful writer. He had absorbed all the lessons of the class, and applied it to his 19th century true story, and I knew my time would not be wasted. He’s close to submitting to agents, and I’m genuinely looking forward to reading the final draft.

But for every win, there are people like this fellow, who wrote last week. All you need to know before you read his email is that back in 2009 my wife and I traditionally published a book about the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, which has since sold more than 100,000 copies.

Subject: Creating the index for my book

Message: Hello, I am writing a book about the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Naturally, your book has been a valuable reference. I’m to the point of creating the index and I am flummoxed amount [sic] how to do this. So far I have 380 entries in the index. The book has not been paginated yet, but, thinking ahead, is there an easy way to make the page assignments? BTW, I have a PhD from [REDACTED]. I would greatly appreciate any advice you could give me on this. Thanks.

Excuse me while I pick up the pieces of my skull off the floor, and bind my wounds. I don’t know where to start with this. Now, I’d be the first to admit that our big ol’ book of 56 biographies of the Signers is not a terribly original idea. Indeed, the first books of this type were published in the 1820s, when some of the Signers were still living. But still—who writes the author of a competing work with a manuscript formatting issue, and expects a helpful response?

Imagine writing the following email:

Dear Mr. McCullough:
I greatly enjoyed your book 1776, about Washington’s leadership of the Continental Army during the pivotal year of Independence. In fact, it inspired me to write a similar book on the exact same topic, which is also called 1776! The only trouble is, I am having trouble the setting the margins in my MS Word document, so I cannot transmit the book to my editor. Misery me, lack-a-day-dee! If you can help with this, or make time for a Zoom call to discuss, I’m free on the following days…

Holy freaking bananas.

Then, recently, there was the guy who attended one of my wife’s book events, complimented her on her boots, and thus felt entitled to write asking if we could recommend a) an editor who could read his pandemic year memoir and offer advice, or b) a literary agent who could do the same thing. The kicker: He wasn’t sure the book was ready for submission, but he felt if these fine contacts of ours read the book in its entirety, they would know exactly what do with his manuscript.

As it happens, I knew exactly what he should do with his manuscript, but I was too much of gentleman to spell it out in an email.

I know by now that I should not Engage With Crazy but how else could I come up with columns for you lovely SleuthSayers people?

So, yes, I wrote both of these guys back, politely suggesting they consider hiring editors and indexers via the site I mentioned before. (Reedsy, I’m sorry. I love you, but you’ve become my go-to brush-off suggestion.)

To my Declaration of Independence doppelgänger, I wrote saying he could hire tons of freelancers to work on his projects, including—haha—someone who could run a plagiarism check on the doc before it went out the door. Haven’t heard back, so I don’t know if he appreciated my wit.

As for the Covid memoirist, he wrote back saying he liked the online database I recommended but he was a little annoyed because he could not tell if the freelance editors on offer had decent connections to agents. What good was hiring a freelance editor, he asked, if they can’t refer you to an agent?

Did not respond. I can only afford one brain hemorrhage a week.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Mr. Grisham Has Thoughts About Your "Book"

One of the classic tenets of the screenwriting trade is that writers make poor film protagonists. Yes, the writer character has been done well in movies such as Barton Fink, The Ghost Writer, Adaptation, and Stranger Than Fiction. But in general, it’s painful to watch a scene in a movie of someone writing a book. This applies as well to reading a novel in which a character is struggling to write…anything. This too has been done—The Shining, Wonder Boys—but it’s probably not the best premise for anyone contemplating their next book. I mean, where’s the action?

But what about a real-life story about a neophyte author who dreams of writing a thriller? The man in question is a former ad exec named Tony Vanderwarker. When we first meet him in his nonfiction memoir, he’s written a slew of unpublished books, mostly comic novels. His latest has recently landed with a splat on the desks of agents and editors in the Big Apple.

He longs to try yet again. Maybe a thriller, thinks he. His got an idea about a missing nuke he’s been itching to try. One night over dinner, he shares his pain with a fellow scribe. Mr. Vanderwarker tells us that while he himself grew up in an affluent Connecticut suburb, his friend is a son of a Mississippi cotton farmer. As the meal wraps, his buddy makes him an offer. What if I coach you through the novel-writing process? You do all the work, of course. It’s your book. But I’ll be on the sidelines, reading your outlines and manuscripts, giving you notes and pep talks along the way. What do you say?

It’s an offer Mr. Vanderwarker simply cannot refuse. The two men are dining in the tony historic city of Charlottesville, Virginia. And his neighbor and friend is none other than John Freaking Grisham.

And so the scene is set for a hilarious, rollicking Bildungsroman as these two nutty guys crisscross the nation in a nifty convertible in search—

Uh, no. Actually, it’s exactly what I told you it would be: a book called about a guy trying to write a book. It’s called Writing With the Master (Skyhorse, 2014).

Speaking as a writer who struggles to juggle my own writing with the demands of ghostwriting clients, admin tasks, my wife’s work, the house and garden, and all the other things life throws one’s way, including friends who want advice on their writing, I was frankly astonished that someone of Grisham’s caliber would surrender so much of his time to help a friend. In promo interviews, Mr. Vanderwarker said Grisham was inspired by his recent reading of an account of Chef Daniel Boulud’s mentoring of a younger chef.

In the course of 196 pages, the two writers embark on a process that is both fascinating and brutal to watch. Fascinating because it’s probably the best look anyone is ever going to get of Grisham’s creative process. (That’s the reason I bought the book. Grisham granted permission to excerpt his critiques.) Brutal because, let’s face it, unless you are a very special individual, the first few books you write will be unpublishable. They’re critical to your development, but they are usually not something you can sell. And thrillers are among the toughest genres to nail.

Mr. Vanderwarker can write. He proves it page after page, with a breezy, conversational, self-deprecating description of their process that will leave writers nodding, “Yep—been there, done that.” I must have found the book suspenseful as well, because I kept reading to find out what happens.

At that first dinner, Grisham tells Mr. V the plain truth: beginnings and endings are easy. It’s the middle that kills you. Grisham’s mantra is SIMPLICITY. The premise has to grab readers fast, hook them, and keep them reading for 360 pages without losing their attention to extraneous subplots. He instructs his pupil to first write a three-sentence synopsis, then a three-act outline.

Personally, I hate creating outlines for books. Never been able to make in-depth ones work. But many people swear by them. (If you have access to Master Class, you can actually download a PDF of one of James Patterson’s outlines.) Grisham shreds Mr. V’s first attempt, telling him to SLOW DOWN. There’s just too much going on in his proposed book. “Most plots fail because they’re too complicated,” Grisham explains. “A strong central plot that stays on track can afford the luxury of spinning off subplots, but not too many.”

Mr. Vanderwarker spends three months writing outlines before Grisham gives him the go-ahead to write—wait for it—a chapter-by-chapter outline. Mr. Vanderwarker splutters but acquiesces. When finally permitted to write the book, his first draft elicits a “Gee—that’s nice, honey,” response from his wife, and is later eviscerated by Grisham, who can only stand to read the first half.

The strength of Writing With the Master is reading the astonishingly thoughtful memos Grisham shoots back to each of Mr. V’s outlines and drafts. Some of them are so punchy and no-BS that they brought a smile to my face. You see, I read every one of my wife’s books, offering copious comments along the way. Her favorite comment of mine is the minuscule drawing I once sketched in a margin. It depicted a tiny Yoda, garbed in Jedi robes and brandishing a lightsaber. Rising from his mouth was a dialogue balloon that read: “A sentence this is not.”

Grisham’s pencil edits pull no punches. He underlines redundancies, questions plot points, tiny details, and calls his pupil out on his occasional authorial pontifications:

• Isn’t Sigma Nu a fraternity?
• not believable
• Isn’t it a Sunday?
• no one would ever trust the goons
• abrupt ending
• way too much plot
• sermon
• bad sermon

It’s tough going for our hero, who speaks often of steeling himself with a manly beverage to re-read Grisham’s notes, even weeks after he has received them.

As I read, I thought of the times I have read the work of newer writers. I wanted to value and honor what had been attempted, but often I found myself thinking, “Wow. The premise is cool. This could be really good…if they were a better writer.”

But I found that it’s really hard to put into words how something can be made better. This should be more vivid. Stronger. Tighten this. You can offer such advice, but unless you’re sitting at the keyboard, literally editing someone’s MS in front of them, they will interpret those words differently, and execute to their current level of skill.

I think that’s what Grisham is up against in this book. He knows when something isn’t working, but not always how to coach a better performance from his mentee. Like many experts, he’s running on instinct. He himself would never waste 100 words on a scene that goes nowhere because his gut just knows that it is a non-starter. But despite his caveats, the neophyte plods on, devoting thousands of words to a subplot that smacks into a wall, and must later be cut.

Years go by. Years. Mr. Vanderwarker’s third draft is far better. Grisham, perhaps up to eyeballs in missing nukes after all this time, announces that he can’t give much more help. The book is about as good as it’s ever going to be. He suggests sending it out to some agents and editors to elicit their verdict. Big shock—the book’s DOA as soon as it makes the rounds.

Mr. Vanderwarker has told interviewers that only after he wrote the nonfiction account of their mentorship did most of Grisham’s notes sink in. With fresh eyes, Mr. V revised his thriller. I don’t want to give too much away, but suffice to say the entire experience results in two published books.

And Mr. Vanderwarker surprises us all in the end with a satisfying career shift that was cleverly foreshadowed all along. Not thriller-worthy perhaps, but masterful nonetheless.

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See you in three weeks!
— Joe
josephdagnese.com