They Done Parker Dirty

One of the pleasures of mystery fiction is finding those series characters you love--the ones you can't get enough of, the ones whose adventures you snap up on sight.  We all have our own list of favorites.  Mine includes Robert B. Parker's Spenser, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters, Max Allan Collins's Nate Heller, Andrew Vachss's Burke, Kinky Friedman's, um, Kinky Friedman, Gregory Mcdonald's Francis Xavier Flynn, Warren Murphy's Digger/Trace, and Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley.

Anybody besides
me remember this?

If I had to pick a single favorite character from all crime fiction, though, I wouldn't hesitate.  My favorite is Parker.

If you're reading this you probably know Parker, and if you don't, you should.  Created by the great Donald Westlake (writing under his pen name, Richard Stark), Parker is a single-minded, ruthlessly efficient thief.  He'll kill if absolutely necessary--or occasionally out of revenge--but for the most part Parker is interested in only one thing: getting away with the money.  Most of his adventures see him recruited by or putting together a team to pull an ambitious heist.  It inevitably goes wrong in some way, and much of the pleasure of the books is in watching Parker deal with that.  Often this involves finding himself at odds with The Outfit, which is what the mob calls itself in Parker's world.  There are 24 Parker novels, from 1962's The Hunter to 2008's Dirty Money.  All are richly deserving of your time.

Now, a nail-biting moment of suspense for a mystery fan is finding out that one of your favorite characters is getting a movie.  Will the makers of the film get them the way you do?

Parker has been put on film a number of times (though usually under a different name), played by actors ranging from Lee Marvin to Jim Brown to Mel Gibson.  Earlier this month, the latest Parker film dropped on Amazon Prime: Play Dirty, starring Mark Wahlberg as Parker.  If you're mostly familiar with Wahlberg from his meathead roles in various comedies and action franchises, this might seem like an odd choice, but Wahlberg is also capable of doing serious work and being appropriately intimidating--witness his performance in Martin Scorsese's The Departed.  The new Parker movie was co-written and directed by Shane Black, who's made some solid films in the crime genre--Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, for example.  When I watched the trailer, I was impressed that one of the other characters was Alan Grofield, a character from the books who steals to fund his acting career (and who was popular enough to star in four spin-off Stark novels himself).  I figured that the presence of Grofield meant that real fans were behind the movie, so I approached it with high hopes.

Those hopes came crashing to the ground fast.

I'll acknowledge the positives first.  Wahlberg is, I think, perfectly acceptable as Parker, capturing the character's intensity well.  He's almost always the smartest guy in the room, but if brute force is called for he won't hesitate to use it, and he'll usually win.  LaKeith Stanfield is even better as Grofield, the more affable, but no less competent, sidekick.  Tony Shalhoub does good work as the head of the Outfit.  Several other characters from the books are part of Parker's crew--the married thieves Ed and Brenda Mackey, the driver Stan Devers--indicating, again, that somebody who knows the books well was involved at some point.

The basic setup is also solid.  Play Dirty isn't based on a specific Parker novel, but the elements of the plot are familiar (I won't reveal anything here that isn't in the trailer).  At the start of the film, Parker is part of a racetrack robbery.  One of the crooks, a woman named Zen, betrays the crew and runs off with the take.  Parker sets out for revenge.  Learning that Zen took the cash as seed money for another, much larger job, he deals himself in.  Complicating this is the fact that three years ago Parker made a deal with the Outfit requiring him to stay out of New York City--and guess where Zen's heist is happening?

So far, so good.  So where does it all go wrong?  Well, on a technical level, the special effects in the action scenes are horrendous, completely taking me out of the world of the film.  The opening racetrack heist ends up with a cars v. horses chase on the track, with such bad CGI that the horses look like something out of Grand Theft Auto.  The cheap CGI gets even worse in later scenes, culminating in a subway crash that is utterly unconvincing.

I can forgive bad effects.  I can't forgive the fact that Parker acts less and less like Parker as the film goes on.  One of the hallmarks of the character is his determination to avoid unnecessary heat and exposure, but this Parker, by the halfway point of the film, is plotting an absurdly overblown heist that would have every federal agent in the country descending on New York and result in hundreds, if not thousands, of civilian casualties.  If that wasn't bad enough, he casually kills a celebrity (in what's meant to be a humorous cameo) for no good reason in the middle of a restaurant full of witnesses and cameras.  The real Parker would shoot a member of his crew who did something so dumb.

The movie's also full of logical leaps and absurdities totally at odds with the basically realistic content of Westlake's stories.  One of the targets of the New York heist, for example, is a figurehead recovered from a sunken treasure ship.  The thing is massive, and surely weighs tons, but it's moved easily from place to place by Parker's crew and others--at one point being transported in what seems to be an ordinary NYC subway car.  Watching how they managed to get it in there would have been more entertaining than the actual film.

The second half of the movie, with the crew bantering playfully and dealing with ridiculously contrived obstacles popping up at the most inconvenient times, doesn't play like a Parker plot.  It plays like a Dortmunder plot, so much so that it feels like this must have been a deliberate choice.  If you know Parker, you probably also know Dortmunder, Westlake's other hugely popular thief character.  The Dortmunder books (which Westlake published under his own name) are comedies--for my money, the best comic caper novels ever written.  There's a reason Westlake never wrote a Parker/Dortmunder crossover (not counting the book where Dortmunder's crew draws inspiration from a Parker novel).  The ice-cold Parker simply doesn't fit in Dortmunder's farcical world.  Trying to shoehorn him into it makes both him and the plot look silly.

The end result is a film that's just over two hours long, and feels twice that.  It's a shame.  My understanding is that this was meant to be the start of a new series, with Grofield even getting his own spin-off movies.  That would have been fun--if only Play Dirty was worth watching.  About the best I can say of the movie is that it's marginally more watchable than 2020's dreadful Spenser: Confidential, in which Wahlberg played Robert B. Parker's seminal Boston PI as a brutish ex-con vigilante.  I have no idea why a significant part of Mark Wahlberg's career is suddenly ruining my favorite characters.  I suppose in a few years he'll be playing Nero Wolfe, probably as a streetwise boxer or something.

What Parker should you watch instead of Play Dirty?  The conventional choice for best Parker adaptation is John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin in an adaptation of the first novel in the series (which was also filmed in 1999 as Payback, with Mel Gibson in the lead).  Point Blank is a good film, and Marvin is well-cast, but for my money it's a little self-consciously artsy, leaning into impressionistic and pseudo-psychedelic style at the cost of a straightforward story.

I prefer Taylor Hackford's 2013 Parker, based closely on the Stark novel Flashfire and starring Jason Statham as Parker.  Statham is terrific in the part, believably capturing the character's intelligence, determination, and menace.  There's a strong supporting cast, including Jennifer Lopez, Wendell Pierce, and Nick Nolte.  The plot and action sequences are exciting without ever being ramped up into the unbelievable.  I really regret that it apparently didn't do well enough for Statham to return to the part, but for fans of the character, it's very much worth seeking out.

(I'll also confess to a lingering fondness for a kind of alternate universe version of the character.  In the TV series Leverage, about a crew of con artists and grifters who team up to use their skills on the side of justice, Beth Riesgraf plays a master thief named, you guessed it, Parker.  I've never seen any confirmation of this, but that's surely a tribute to Stark's character, particularly since, to my knowledge, the character's first name is never revealed.  Riesgraf has a lot of fun with the part, and I really enjoyed the first run of the series, but I've never watched the reboot, Leverage: Redemption, in which she continues the character.  If you have, let me know if it's worth checking out.)

If you're looking for a truly great Parker adaptation, though, don't look to the screen--get thee to your local comics shop.  In 2009, the writer and artist Darwyn Cooke, with Westlake's blessing and endorsement, released a graphic novel version of The Hunter that is a pure pleasure to read, or even just to look at.  Cooke's monochromatic art is stunning, and his sense of pacing and design keeps the story humming along.  He's obviously a huge fan of the novels, and his love for them is apparent in every line.  It's a very faithful adaptation, set in the 1960s rather than being updated to modern times.

Cooke went on to adapt several more Parker books--The Outfit, The Score (my personal favorite among the novels), and Slayground--and had hopes of covering the entire series, but, tragically, his own death in 2016, at the age of just 53, prevented that from happening.  His Parker adaptations are still in print.  I particularly recommend the Martini Editions, gorgeous, oversized, slipcased hardcovers that feature a wealth of bonus features and let you really luxuriate in the art.

And of course it goes without saying that if you haven't read the Parker novels themselves, you need to close this window and go do so now.  You'll thank me later.

---

Living the HI Life

This one may ramble a bit, folks, and the connection to writing mystery fiction may be a bit oblique--except in the sense that what I'm concerned about is, in part, the state of essentially all reading and writing. Earlier this month I had the chance to take a scenic train ride through the Rocky Mountains. It was breathtaking, and inspiring (in no small part because of the stories of the fierce, ongoing efforts by a lot of dedicated people to minimize and mitigate the ecological damage humans have done in that region).

One of my favorite things about it? The parts of the trip when the train was remote enough from any town, or deep enough in some canyon, that there was no Internet service. This seemed to cause some of my fellow travelers a touch of consternation, but I found it to be an almost physical relief. Being online started out as a luxury, then became a convenience, then a necessity, and now it's basically, for most people most of the time, an obligation.

For me, it was a pleasure to just sit back and watch the world go by, unconcerned with the digital "life" I was mercifully cut off from.

This experience got juxtaposed, in my mind, with the growing evidence that the use of AI is actively making people dumber. A lot of people are getting very concerned about this; there's more and more reason to think that becoming dependent on AI substantially reduces people's critical thinking and creative skills, and that it does so pretty quickly and pretty substantially. If you need a connection to writing, that's a pretty good one. People need critical thinking and creative skills to write. They need them to read, too, and the last thing we need right now is yet another reduction in the ever-shrinking percentage of the population interested in (or capable of) reading for pleasure.

I'm fifty-five years old. It seems to me that these have been, and continue to be, the dominant political and cultural trends of my lifetime, the things that have transformed the world I was becoming aware of fifty years ago into the world (and most specifically the US) that exists today:

• A massive redistribution of wealth upward, at the expense of education, healthcare, the environment, workers' rights, social mobility, infrastructure, and the arts.
• A movement away from direct engagement with the world and toward engagement with computer-driven simulations--first video games, then the internet (particularly social media), now AI, and, looming on the horizon, virtual reality.
• Skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, particularly among young people.

These aren't really separate things. They reinforce and magnify each other. Depression and anxiety can start to seem like awfully rational reactions to a world in which your chances for real economic success are severely limited and you spend basically your entire life staring at screens.

I don't think there will be any real effort to mitigate the intellectual cost of AI. There's too much money to be made.

More importantly, the fact that it actively makes people stupider is, from certain points of view, awfully convenient. Critical thinking skills are inherently threatening to those who benefit from manipulating and exploiting the populace. Critical thinkers are less likely to vote against their own interests– or to choose not to vote at all. Critical thinkers don't support policies that further enrich the obscenely wealthy because they anticipate, for no coherent reason, someday being among them. Critical thinkers don't blame their problems on others because of their racial, political, sexual, or national identities.

Critical thinkers understand that fascism is not the same thing as patriotism. I'm as guilty of falling into the traps as anybody else. I, too, have the nasty habit of reaching for my phone in any idle moment. I have to actively resist buying video game systems because I know how addictive they can be for me. I know the endorphin rush of social media– something else I've learned to try to avoid, with only partial success.

Some days I swear I can feel my attention span shrinking. There's nothing I can really do to reverse all this on a cultural or collective level. All I can do is try to make decisions and take actions that move me, personally, in a different direction. All any of us can do is, whenever it's possible to do so, choose HI– Human Intelligence– over Artificial Intelligence.

So I'll go for a walk instead of falling into YouTube rabbit holes. I'll reach for an actual, physical book instead of my phone. And I'll keep writing, and have faith that there are people out there who still want to read things written by actual people. I'll try to choose, as much as I can, to lead a HI life.

There's Always A Catch

Because I work at home, I've been looking for opportunities to get out into the community and have some social contact with actual … um … what are they called again?

Right: PEOPLE.  I gotta write that down or something.

A couple of weeks ago, this quest led me to a book club meeting at my local independent bookstore (yes, those still exist, thankfully).  They meet monthly, and this month they were discussing one of my favorite books, a novel I'd rank high on the list of best American fiction of the last century: Joseph Heller's 1961 Catch-22.  Most of you are probably familiar with the book; for those who aren't, it's the story of an American bomber squadron stationed in Italy during World War II.  It's probably best known for its unconventional structure (the book jumps back in forth in time, in a way that's deliberately disorienting) and wild, slapstick humor, though the tragedy, pain and anguish of wartime are much in evidence.  In short, it's a good 'un.

I'm glad I went to the meeting, and I'll certainly be going back.  They were a charming, lively, intelligent group of about a dozen people.  They've obviously been meeting for a while and know each other well, but were welcoming and friendly with this newcomer.  I enjoyed myself thoroughly.  It turns out that getting out of the house is a good idea!

Here's the thing that surprised me, though: as a group, they hated the book.  The book that, once again, I love, and assumed most readers would.

It was too long (a number of them didn't finish it).  It was too repetitious, returning to the same events and themes multiple times.  They didn't think it was funny.  It was misogynistic.  With only a few exceptions, they didn't like the characters.  The kindest thing they could find to say about it was that it probably paved the way for later writers to handle such material better.

Now, I will concede that, in terms of gender, the book hasn't aged especially well.  Most of the significant female characters are prostitutes; those who aren't are still discussed mostly in terms of their actual or potential sexual activities and tastes.  When Heller introduces a male character, he starts by talking about the man's face and general emotional demeanor.  When he introduces a female character, he generally starts by talking about her breasts and sexual availability.  At one point Yossarian, the book's central character and most sympathetic figure, grabs a nurse in a way that in Heller's day probably counted as "harmless horseplay" and which today would be considered "sexual assault."

None of that looks very good through 2025 eyes.  On the other hand, the book is about a group of young men being subjected to the continual stress and terror of war; it's not surprising that when they get a weekend in Rome, they're not out looking for a knitting circle to join.

Rereading the book in preparation for the meeting, I actually found it even more relevant to today's issues than I had remembered.  I think it's fair to say that a fair number of the book's most reprehensible characters would be right at home in today's administration.  The book's great villain, Milo Minderbinder, is the embodiment of completely unfettered capitalism, a man for whom the only true God is profit.  Hmm.  If I thought about it real hard, that might remind me of more than a few folks regularly turning up in headlines today.

As I say, though, despite having a radically different opinion from anyone else in the group, I enjoyed the meeting a lot.  It's good to hear different opinions, and good to be reminded that there's no such thing as a text (or movie, or painting, or whatever) that is truly univerally beloved.  There are people who don't like Hamlet, people who don't like Citizen Kane, people who don't like Van Gogh, people who don't like Sherlock Holmes.  And that's okay.  As a writer, I can even see it as liberating.  You can't possibly please every reader, so just write what you want to.  The right readers will find it.

Have you had the experience of being startled by criticism of something you held in high esteem?  For that matter, do you belong to a book club?  And by all means, feel free to pass along other ideas for ways to get myself out in the world.  The walls, they do start to close in after a bit.

IN OTHER NEWS

One very social activity, of course, is Bouchercon, which will be starting its 2025 iteration in New Orleans shortly after this is posted.  To my great regret, I won't be able to attend this year, and I'll very much miss seeing all my mystery writing buddies (including a number of my fellow SleuthSayers) and the opportunity to meet new ones.  I hope everyone has a great time, and raise a glass to me if you get a chance.  With a little luck, I'll be seeing you all in Canada next year.

Now, while I won't be at the con, I do have a story in the 2025 Bouchercon anthology, Blood on the Bayou: Case Closed, published by Down & Out Books.  I'm thrilled to be included in the volume alongside a host of terrific writers, especially since, after eight straight rejections, this is the first time I've made the cut for a Bouchercon book.  My story, "Final Edit," is actually set at a convention very much like Bouchercon, and concerns a famous author who has crossed a number of moral lines.  If you're at the con, pick up a copy!  If not, there should be a way to order one soon from the usual suspects.

As long as I'm plugging stuff, I'll mention that I have a story, "High in that Ivory Tower," in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which should be on shelves now.  Last week also saw the release, from Down & Out, of Better Off Dead: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, edited by D. M. Barr and including my story "All the Young Girls Love Alice."  Happy reading!

Guest Post: What Kind of Relationship Do You Have With Your Writing?

This month, I'm turning my column over to a guest, Eric Beckstrom. I've been friends with Eric, a talented writer and photographer, for some thirty years, and I'm pleased to have the chance to let him address the SleuthSayers audience on a topic I'm sure many of us can identify with. As Eric mentions here, his first published story appeared in the 2017 Bouchercon anthology--an enviable place to make your debut, given the competition for those spots! What's even more remarkable is that he's since placed stories in three more Bouchercon anthologies (how many other writers have been selected for four? Certainly none I know of). His latest, "Six Cylinder Totem," will be in the 2025 edition, Blood on the Bayou: Case Closed (available for preorder here). Without further ado, here's Eric!

— Joe

What Kind of Relationship Do You Have With Your Writing?

Eric Beckstrom

We all have a relationship of craft to our writing, or however you choose to put it--relationship, interaction, approach--but I find myself wondering whether other writers also think about their relationship with their writing as a truly personal one--a nearly or even literal interpersonal one, as distinguished from simply craft-centered and intrapersonal. Maybe every writer reading this column experiences their writing in that way, I don't know. That is my own experience– closer to, or, in practice, even literally interpersonal. It is intrapersonal, too, but I also relate to my writing as this other thing outside of myself, like it's a separate entity. The relationship has been fraught. Sometimes– much more so now– it is functional and healthy, sometimes less so, and, for an interminably long time, it was dysfunctional right down to its atomic spin. It includes compromise, generosity, forgiveness, impatience, resignation, joy, trust, fear, just like any other important relationship in my life. The current complexity of the relationship is a gift compared to when it was an actively negative, hostile one, defined by avoidance, fear, and resentment, with only the briefest moments of pleasure and appreciation.

That was years ago. Then, one night, I made a decision that changed my relationship with my writing forever in an instant: I let myself off the hook. More on that later. I understand, of course, there are many very accomplished writers among the SleuthSayers readership, and that perhaps everyone moving their eyes across this screen has also moved well beyond anything I have to say here; but if you ever trudge or outright struggle with your writing--not the craft connection, but the relational one--then maybe there's something here for you.

One of the most common pieces of advice or edicts offered by established writers to budding or struggling writers is, "Write every day," "Write for at least an hour each day," or some variation thereof. This advice is always well-intended, but in my view it seems awfully essentialist. Sometimes it even seems to stem from writers with--I'm being a little cheeky here--personality privilege, such as those who have never or rarely had difficulty with motivation; or from other forms of privilege, like growing up in an environment that encouraged and nurtured creativity or was at least free from significant obstacles to creativity.

© Eric Beckstrom,
LowPho Impressionism

Or maybe those edicts about the right way to approach writing aren't nearly as pervasive as I have thought, and it's more that my (more or less) past hypersensitivity turned my hearing that advice four or five times into a hall of mirrors back then, fifty-five times five in how I felt it reflected negatively on me. Back when I was struggling for my life as a writer, I heard it as judgment. "Eric, you don't writer every day, let alone each day for an hour or two. Therefore, you are not a real writer because you obviously don't have the passion everyone says you'd feel if you were. You are a piker: you make only small bets on yourself, and to the extent that you make writing commitments to yourself, you withdraw from them."

While advice around commitment, writing schedules, regularity, and habit, is, on the face of it, sound, it has a hook on which I used to hang like someone in a Stephen Graham Jones novel or the first victim in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That hook has barbs of guilt, fear, imposter syndrome (not to mention nature-nurture baggage). It also has barbs forged from practical challenges like having to work full-time and having other commitments, and being too mentally exhausted to sit down and write at the end of a day of all that. Until the night I let myself off the hook, I used to absorb those writing edicts as barbs into flesh. As profoundly, debilitatingly discouraging.

For sure, that's also on me. Also, on my upbringing. Also, on the third-grade teacher who called my very first story silly and unrealistic. But, at the end of the day, it was on me to change how I relate to writing. From the age of ten and decades into my adult life, yearning to write, but blocked by inhibitions and other stumbling blocks I'd never learned to turn into steppingstones, I absorbed the standards set by established writers as slammed doors, guilty verdicts, and commandments I had broken.

Here's what happened the night I let myself off the hook– off other people's hook.

I was sitting in front of the TV feeling conflicted, as I felt every night. I knew I ought to go into the other room, turn on the computer, and write. I longed to do so– it was a physical sensation– but couldn't bring myself to. I hadn't been writing, so I wasn't a real writer, right? And since I'd finished very few writing projects, I had limited evidence of talent anyway. All my Psych 101 childhood baggage was there, too, present, like that longing, as something I felt as you'd feel someone slouching behind you in the town psycho house, reaching for your shoulder.

Then, for some reason– and I don't know where this came from– I said out loud to myself "You know what? Screw all that. Screw the edicts and other people's standards. Screw the judgment you feel from others and screw the self-judgment. If you write tonight, great. If you don't write tonight, then don't castigate yourself. Maybe you'll write tomorrow."

In that moment, a strange kind of functional (as differentiated from dysfunctional) indifference triggered a profound letting go which permanently changed my relationship with my writing. And, finally off the hook, having made a deliberate, defiant choice to stop judging my writer self by others' standards and even by my own standards at the time, that very same night, I turned off the TV, turned on the computer, and started writing. Years later (not all my hangups disappeared in one night), after I began making the effort to submit stories for publication, one of the first ones I ever completed, over a single weekend just weeks after I finally began writing in earnest, landed in the 2017 Bouchercon anthology as the first story I had published.

Since then, I've encountered, or perhaps just become more capable of seeing and absorbing, more down to earth, approachable advice and insight offered by others. William Faulkner said, "I write when the spirit moves me." Now, he also said, "The spirit moves me every day," but his words contain no edict or implied universal standard, no judgment. Jordan Peele added an entirely new dimension to my relationship with writing, and, I will share, to my approach to life, with his suggestions to, "Embrace the risk that only you can take." One of the most practical, wise, simple, and compassionate insights I've gotten from another writer– and because of that component of compassion, this insight most clearly describes my current, far more healthy interpersonal relationship with my writing– came from a good writer friend, who, when I described my ongoing struggle with tackling large writing projects, said, "You know, I think it's just about forward progress, whatever that means to you." I also recall the wisdom of another friend who, when I told him about some life issues I was struggling with at the time, said, "That's good. If you're struggling it means you haven't given up. Don't stop moving, don't stop struggling." It's not advice specific to writing, but it sure works.

Nowadays, for me, forward progress could be a single sentence I drop into a story right before my head hits the pillow. It could be a cool ending to an as-yet nonexistent story. Or an interesting first sentence. An evocative title without even the vaguest notion of what plot it might lead to. A single word texted to myself at 2:00AM because it strikes me as belonging to whatever I'm working on. I often do research on the fly, so forward progress is sometimes a link to some article I drop into a given story doc, which I keep in the cloud so I can do that from wherever, whenever. And yes, sometimes forward progress is pages of fast, effortless, final-draft quality writing.

But I never measure my "progress"--those quotation marks are important--by the number of words or pages, though if I make good progress in that way I consciously, usually out loud, give myself credit. And, submission deadlines notwithstanding, I rarely measure my progress according to some timeline. Some days, and I hate to say, sometimes for weeks, I don't write a word, though if that happens now it's almost always due to external constraints rather than resistance; and that is in itself forward progress with respect to my relationship with my writing, upon which the writing itself, and really everything, depends. But that doesn't mean I'm not making forward progress with respect to writing itself, because during those stretches of not writing paragraphs and pages I'm still doing everything I've noted, like simmering ideas, writing in my head and emailing it to myself later, reading like a writer. It's a delicate and, yes, sometimes fraught, balance between self-compassion and self-discipline--after all, what relationship is perfectly healthy?--but these days my relationship with my writing is more characterized by compassion, generosity of spirit, and confidence. Stories have greater trust that I will finish them, and I have greater trust that stories will lead me where they want to go. Even if I don't know where a story is leading me, or I think I do but it changes its mind, or if my confidence flags, or it just seems too difficult to finish, the two-way charitable nature of the relationship between my writing and I has transformed how I approach these situations: at long last, more often than not, that is in a healthy, functional way.

And it's a good thing, too, because for reasons I won't get into here the relationship between my writing and me has become a truly existential thing that sways the cut and core of my life. This thing has been described as a need, a compulsion, a yearning. In Ramsey Campbell's story, "The Voice of the Beach," the protagonist-writer says, "If I failed to write for more than a few days I became depressed. Writing was the way I overcame the depression over not writing." I am grateful to have reached the point where writing is something I want to do, not just something I must do to reduce bad feelings. Writing has become something that I do because, yes, if I don't then I feel sad and unfulfilled, but that's no longer the principle motive. For decades, I yearned to reach a point where I would write because it brings fulfillment and pleasure, even when it's hard or I don't feel like writing in a given moment or on a given day. I am relieved to have reached that point, even if I'm not very "productive" compared to most other writers I know of. That's no longer a hook I hang on. These days, for me a hook is a good story idea, a good opening line or a great title, and the only barbs are the ones my characters must contend with.

That is what I wish for every writer, whether well-established or yearning to begin: a satisfying and healthy relationship with your writing, and, in the words of my friend, forward progress, whatever that means to you.

© Eric Beckstrom, LowPho Impressionism

Finding A Glimmer of Hope, A Thousand Pieces at a Time

Anyone who's taught writing (or, I suspect, most other topics) in the last few years would have found little surprising in the recent news about an MIT study revealing that people who make regular use of AI tools like ChatGPT quickly show a serious reduction in cognitive activity.  After only a few months, such users "consistently underperformed neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."

Lydia the Tattooed Lady
Magnolia Puzzles
Artist: Mark Fredrickson

I've certainly seen evidence of this in my own students. (For those unaware, I teach composition and literature courses for a number of online schools on an adjunct basis.) More and more of them are not just choosing to make use of AI, but fundamentally feel they have no other option, because they lack the reading and writing skills necessary to complete assignments on their own.

The situation isn't helped by the increasing number of schools that have essentially thrown in the towel, designing courses that actively encourage or even require the use of AI while giving lip service to the idea of training students to use it "ethically and responsibly."

This makes about as much sense as training someone to run a marathon by having them drive 26 miles a day and eat a meal from every fast food restaurant they pass on the trip.  And yes, in case you were wondering, it does make teaching depressing as hell.

An aside: I want to be clear here that I'm not blaming the students, certainly not on an individual level.  They can't help growing up in a world where literacy is consistently degraded and marginalized; they can't help having screens shoved in front of their faces all day long, starting before they can talk. What I can say is that, if I was under 25 years old, I would be in a constant state of white-hot rage over the world previous generations propose to leave me: a world that is less safe, less clean, less kind, less thoughtful, and far lonelier than it should be.  I would be furious to live in the richest, most technologically advanced society in human history, while millions have no access to healthcare or secure occupations.  It's no wonder so many of them are on antidepressants.

Aspic Hunt
Art & Fable
Artist: John Rego

But to get back to today's specific crisis…

AI has, in a very few years, become a source of existential terror for writers and other artists--not to mention those in a score of other occupations it threatens to wipe from existence (including, ironically, computer programmers, since it turns out AI is great at writing code).  It's a little quaint to look back at the many giants of science fiction who confidently predicted that robots would free humanity from dangerous or tiresome tasks like mining or washing dishes.  We've still got plenty of people dying of black lung or scraping by on scandalously low minimum wage gigs, but folks who want to write or create art have to compete with machines pretending they can do the same thing.

Believe it or not, I've painted this picture of doom and gloom because I want to share a tiny glimmer of hope I've found in an unexpected place: jigsaw puzzles.

Puzzling as a hobby exploded during the pandemic, when so many of us were looking for ways to pass the time, and my household is one of many that got caught up in the craze (see the pictures here of a few puzzles we've completed in recent weeks).  Even now that the pandemic is (sort of) over, it continues to be a thriving activity and means of connecting a huge number of people.  There are puzzling competitions around the globe, popular puzzling websites and content creators online, forums for discussion and news, and a lot of companies (many small, many new) turning out high-quality, beautiful puzzles in every corner of the globe.

Princess on the Pea
Enjoy Puzzles
Artist: Larissa Kulik

Not surprisingly, some of these companies use AI to create the artwork for the puzzles.  I can't report that these companies are immediately run out of business, and no doubt they're doing fine, for the most part.  But I can report this: there are a lot of puzzlers who actively refuse to buy those puzzles, and they tend to be fairly vocal about it.  They want to know that the puzzles they do were created by real artists, they want those artists to be clearly identified, and they (or at least some of them) are willing to pay a little more for puzzles that meet those demands.

As AI writing and art becomes more widespread, maybe it's people like these we can invest a little optimism in.  Maybe there will come to be people who demand this of their fiction and poetry and essays, and who aren't willing to just hop on Amazon and download one of the 5000 AI "books" that pop up every day.  Maybe they'll be willing to pay, just a little more, for the knowledge that a real person created the thing they're looking at, and will benefit from their patronage.

Maybe there will be just enough of these people that reading and writing– real reading and writing, not a simulation– will continue to be a worthwhile, and occasionally even rewarding, way for a lot of people to spend their time.

It wouldn't take much.  After all, the number of people willing to pay money to read, say, short mystery stories has been a small part of the population for a long time.  It doesn't seem unreasonable to hope that it won't die out completely.

The Happy Sheep Yarn Shop
Ravensburger Puzzles
Artist: Nathanael Mortensen

That's my hope, anyway. In the meantime, I'll be continuing to follow my personal policy of never using AI– not for brainstorming, not for drafting, not for editing.  What possible satisfaction could I get from asking a machine to write something and then putting my name on it?

---

A Year In, A Month Off

My first regular SleuthSayers post went up in late April of 2024, so I missed the opportunity to mark the occasion of my first anniversary as a member of this crew. In that first post, I somehow tried to make a connection between writing and a specific approach to baseball strategy. Since then I've talked about ShortCon, shelf shortages, musical anthologies, Walter Mitty, writing dialogue, the creation of a new Derringer Award, and a number of other topics. Hopefully, some of you out there have enjoyed reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it, and I look forward to continuing to offer my rambles for a some time to come.

This particular month, I'm finding the shoebox of ideas a little empty. In fact, I haven't really written anything this month.

 That's after writing five stories in the first four months of the year, ranging from 2900 to 5800 words. I wouldn't call what I'm going through at the moment writer's block. It's not that I want to write but can't. It's more a matter of having other things to do and no pressing need to get back to the keyboard.

There was a time when this would have bothered--even frightened--me. I would have felt like if I didn't get back to writing ASAP, I might never get back to it at all. I'd be obsessed with the opportunities I might be missing. I'd be thinking about all the interviews I've ever seen with writers who say that ""real" writers write every day. I'd be thinking about Ray Bradbury's advice to write a story every single week, on the theory that nobody can write 52 bad stories in a row.

I've never come close to hitting that mark. The most stories I've ever written in one year is 26; over the last several years, I'm much closer to a one-story-a-month pace.

OK, so I don't write as much as this guy

The difference between the earlier me, who would have been panicked at a month without writing, and the current me, who's handling it fairly well, comes down, I think, to experience. I know that I've been through periods like this before, and invariably come out of them. I know that, sooner or later, I will sit down at the keyboard again and turn something out. A little time away from writing isn't necessarily a bad thing. It might even be a good one.

I'm confident that, somewhere in the back of my head, ideas are bubbling. Sooner or later, one will break the surface. And I understand that "real" writers come in all varieties. Yes, some write every single day. Others need breaks. And that's okay.

Even if it makes for what is almost surely my shortest column so far.

How about you? Do you take breaks from writing? Do you think doing so ultimately helps you?

Joe's Jukebox

Fans of contemporary short mystery fiction know that, over the last decade or so, there have been literally dozens of anthologies collecting crime fiction inspired by songs– usually those of a single artist or band, but sometimes a genre or specific era of music. In her column earlier this month, my fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman discussed her contribution to one of the most recent, IN TOO DEEP: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF GENESIS, edited by Adam Meyer (fair disclosure: I also have a story in this book). She shared a piece of valuable advice from another SleuthSayer, John Floyd, on how to write a story inspired by a song: not to get bogged down trying to work in every detail, but to find a piece of it to build on.

These musical anthologies started coming out at roughly the same time that I started publishing stories, and I've written for quite a few of them, so I thought I'd offer some of my own thoughts on the subject, in a scattered kind of way.

By way of credentials, I've written stories, for current or upcoming anthologies, based on songs by (deep breath) Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, The Ramones, Pink Floyd, The Allman Brothers, Waylon Jennings, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Aerosmith, Dexys Midnight Runners, Lyle Lovett, Genesis, Timbuk3, and Elton John– plus, just to round things out, numbers from the musicals Grease, Do I Hear a Waltz?, and Spring Awakening. There's also an orphan to mention here: a story I quite liked based on a Eurythmics song, for a project that ended up being cancelled. I hope that one eventually sees the light of day somewhere.

The first inspired-by-music story I wrote was in response to Sandra Murphy's call for stories for PEACE, LOVE, AND CRIME: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE SIXTIES. Figuring that Sandy would be swamped by stories inspired by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Beach Boys, I used a favorite song by a different artist, one I hoped nobody else would light on: Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman." I guess writers aren't supposed to say things like this, but the resulting story, "Mercy," remains one of my personal favorites. It's a little unusual in that the lyrics do inspire specific scenes, but the record itself is also an object within the story. The central character is a young woman, Lila, whose brother is killed in Vietnam, after which their abusive father destroys his treasured record collection. The 45 of Orbison's song is the only survivor, and the story concerns what Lila is willing to do to preserve it and find her own freedom.

Most of my musical yarns take an approach much closer to what John advised Barb to do: find a few details in the song to hang a story on. Over time I've combined this with another way of thinking about the task at hand; instead of writing a story inspired by the song, I ask myself what series of events might have inspired someone to write the song. I'm not entirely sure why this seems to work for me, but it does.

As Barb noted, there can be special challenges in using a song that already has a fairly coherent narrative plot. Michael Bracken was kind enough to invite me to write the title story for his anthology JANIE'S GOT A GUN: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE MUSIC OF AEROSMITH. That song already has an explicit story embedded within it (and fleshed out in the music video, which helped to make the song a monster hit) about a girl who shoots her abusive father. I didn't want to simply retell the story, but it seemed silly to pretend it wasn't there, so I decided to make my version a kind of sequel, in which we find out what happens afterwards.

On the other end of the spectrum, many of the songs of the Grateful Dead are little more than collections of trippy images and seeming free association, allowing plenty of room for play. When I wrote a story inspired by their "The Music Never Stopped," for Josh Pachter's collection FRIEND OF THE DEVIL: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD, I chose five or six of the most vivid lines and tried to weave them (or rather references to them, as, for legal reasons, these stories generally cannot quote lyrics directly) into a story about a couple of drug dealers drawn into an act of violence at, appropriately enough, a concert.

I find writing these musical stories to be enormously fun and satisfying, and I hope I get to do a lot more of them. They offer inspiration, but also constraint: you have to evoke the original song clearly enough to amuse and engage its fans (but without making use of actual lyrics!) and at the same time craft a story strong enough to satisfy readers who might not know the song at all. Some of the best art, I think, resides precisely at this intersection of boundless freedom and rigid guidelines.

It will be interesting to see how long the current fad for these collections will last. It might seem like there have been so many of them that the trend must be nearer its end than its beginning, but on the other hand there is a long list of artists who haven't yet had inspired-by anthologies (note: it's entirely possible that some of the folks I'm about to name have inspired books I'm not aware of; if so, please let me know). Off the top of my head, I'd love to see (and contribute to!) collections based on Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, U2, Madonna, REM, The Rolling Stones, Kinky Friedman, Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls, Aimee Mann, Taylor Swift, or John Prine.

I also can't help but notice that the vast majority of these anthologies (again, at least the ones I'm aware of) focus on white musicians. Maybe the single most glaring omission from the list of honored artists, given the sheer volume of his output and the incredible depth and richness of his lyrics, is Prince. Or how about a collection inspired by the hits of Motown? The blues giants of Chess Records? There are great stories just waiting to be written for "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" or "Mannish Boy."

I also can't be the only one who'd love to see crime writers taking on a comic musician. Bring on DARE TO BE STUPID: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF WEIRD AL! Bring on Spike Jonze and Spinal Tap! Bring on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem! And save me a slot on the table of contents!

Can you picture that?

What acts do you hope to see honored with one of these volumes? And if you've written for some of them, how do you approach the songs?

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

I've obviously dedicated most of my writing career to crime and mystery fiction, and as you might expect I read a great deal of work in that field growing up.  I also had a deep love for science fiction, though, and while I've read relatively little new work in the genre in the last few decades, as a kid I delighted in the classics by the giants of the field--Asimov, LeGuin, Silverberg, and so on.  Recently, going through a box of books from my childhood home, I came across an interesting artifact by another of those giants, Arthur C. Clarke, probably best remembered today as the author of 2001.  I thought it worth looking at, both as an example of the perils of writers imagining the future and as a lens on the world writers are working in today.

In 1986, Clarke published a book titled July 20, 2019.  The date, of course, is the 50^th anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and the book is a series of essays in which Clarke predicts what the world would look like in that then far-off year.  I bought and read the book when it came out.  I don't remember what I thought of it then, but reading it now, almost six years beyond the date Clarke chose for his prophecy, was certainly eye-opening.

So how did Clarke do with his predictions?

Well, there are a few hits.  He thought that the field I work in, distance education, would be huge, though he assumed it would operate via teleconferencing rather than being online (more on this later) and largely text-based.  He said that cars would still be much the same and still mostly gas-powered, though he thought they'd get 100 miles per gallon.  He thought entertainment would reflect an increasingly fragmented culture with more books, movies, music and so on aimed at specialized audiences, and he predicted the boom in self-publishing as part of that.  He was right about shortened hospital stays and the fact that medicine would still be largely controlled by corporations, though he didn't seem to give much thought to the social implications of the rich having care most people can't afford.

There are, however, far more misses, some amusing, some depressing.  Examples:

SPACE.  Clarke believed that by 2019 there would be a permanent manned outpost on the moon with perhaps as many as 1000 inhabitants.  There would be several manned orbiting space stations as well, and we would be routinely mining asteroids and preparing the first manned mission to Mars, with an eye to exploring the outer solar system.  He discussed in detail several conceptual engine ideas then being theorized which could cut the voyage to the red planet from months to a few weeks.  It's interesting to contemplate how much of this might have happened if NASA had gotten, say, a third of what the US has spent on the military since 1986.  Incidentally, earthbound transportation in Clarke's 2019 is similarly advanced, with magnetic trains and advanced hovercraft linking cities and jets that go from Shanghai to Los Angeles in two hours.

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies

SPORTS.  Clarke predicted that steroids, hormones and other chemical enhancements would be made so safe that there would no longer be any reason to ban them from competition.  In addition, many athletes would have cybernetic parts, or even nerves cloned from legendary competitors to improve reaction time.  Elite athletes would be identified through genetic testing by the age of five and spend much of the rest of their lives being rigorously trained, using computers designed to enforce the most efficient way to perform any motion.  In baseball, for example, batters using boron bats would routinely hit home runs, though the fences had been moved to 500 feet from home plate.  They would do this facing pitchers who could throw 125 mph and pitch every other day.  The NBA would have to raise its hoops to 12 feet and make them smaller, since the average player would be over eight feet tall.

Offered without comment

THE MIND.  Clarke had little patience for the idea of therapy.  He thought that, by 2019, genetic mapping and brain imaging would make it possible to produce a vaccine preventing schizophrenia, drugs to prevent highly specific phobias and complexes, and compounds that would induce any desired mood.  For example, there would be a drug whose only effect is to enhance music appreciation, which would be routinely taken before attending any concert.

OK, maybe there's something to that one

ROBOTS.  Clarke would have been stunned to know there are still people making their living as coal miners today.  One of his most confident predictions was that virtually every job involving elements of danger or drudgery would have been taken over by robots well before 2019.  He honestly didn't think there would any longer be people working in factories, aside from very occasional repairs and inspections.  He also thought that most homes would have robots to handle routine domestic chores, and he dedicates considerable thought to how home design would emphasize simplicity and reduce clutter to make it easier for the robots to get around.  Clarke is very clearly NOT thinking of computers, but of humanoid robots.  He honestly thought they would be everywhere.  On the other hand . . . 

Rest easy, humans

COMPUTERS.  Clarke vastly overestimated the importance of the individual computer, and vastly underestimated the importance of computer networks.  He correctly assumed computers would be everywhere, in every home and every workplace, by 2019.  But while he occasionally mentions computers communicating with each other to share information for specific purposes, he still thought of every computer as an essentially distinct unit that learns to master the skills and demands of its particular job and function.  The idea that the computer would be connected to others essentially all the time, and that it would be useful only to the extent this is true, simply never occurs to him.  Thus he could not predict anything resembling Facebook, or Google, or Twitter, or Wikipedia, or Amazon, or the internet itself as it has come to exist.  Nor does he ever imagine anything resembling a smartphone--which might seem odd, from the man who, shortly after WWII, correctly predicted the creation of communication satellites.  This one oversight is so fundamental that it touches nearly everything else in the book, making it much less accurate than it might have been.  There's simply no way to understand almost anything actually happening in 2019 (or 2025) without taking account of the web.

Clearly, he did know there were dangers

GEOPOLITICS.  Again, Clarke was oddly short-sighted here.  He assumed the fundamental structure of world politics in 2019 would still be based on a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact contending with a US/UK-led NATO, with the front lines in a still-divided Germany.  There is virtually no mention in the book of Asia, Africa, or South America, let alone any notion that nations like China and India would be emerging superpowers that would shape much of the 21st century.  Weirdly, despite his ambitious claims for robots elsewhere, he envisions war still being conducted by human operators in planes and tanks; drones are another invention he did not foresee.  Something else he didn't mention, though it will dominate our lives for the foreseeable future: climate change.  Scientists by 1986 were well aware of this coming crisis, but Clarke never mentions it.  Perhaps he assumed the problem would have been solved, given his surprising degree of faith in  …

Not pictured: ice

 HUMAN NATURE.  It's hard to fault Clarke for this: he assumed that humanity, as a whole, would make decisions which might be self-interested, but which would be basically rational and fact-based.  He'd be dismayed to know that, more than fifty years after the first moonwalk, there are a substantial number of people who simply refuse to believe it ever happened because our teaching of science, math and critical thinking has become woefully inadequate.  He didn't foresee the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, the rise in racism and xenophobia, the spread of terrorism, or the willful embrace of ignorance that defines so much of our politics.  I truly wish that as a species we had lived up to the potential he saw in us.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Horror! The Horror?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the places I dabbled in horror

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

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

Or maybe everyone just wants to be Stephen King?

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

Police Reported Ahead

I was driving on the Interstate in an unfamiliar city over the holidays.  I had the GPS on my phone patched through the car stereo, giving me directions to my destination, but I wasn't expecting to hear one thing it suddenly announced: "Police Reported Ahead."

Sure enough, a few minutes later I passed an obvious speed trap.  My first thought: well, that technology would have made things a hell of a lot easier for the Bandit.

My second thought: who exactly did the reporting?  Are there drivers actually logging in to Google Maps, or whatever app I was using (I lose track sometimes) to report police activity?  Or does the thing somehow detect when people using it are pulled over?

I don't know why I found it so surprising.  It prompted thoughts I've had before, about how the very concept of privacy is falling by the wayside.  In this particular case, the omnipresent phone and all it represents may be working to foil police action, but far more often, we find that we've created a world where we take it for granted that our every action is monitored, our every utterance heard, our every message and transaction recorded somewhere.

The vast majority of people in society today willingly carry around a device that makes it possible to know where we go, how long we stay there, who else was present, and a great deal of what happened.  We're not just willing to carry these devices around--a lot of us would get violently upset if they were taken away.

Cash is disappearing from society, displaced by digital transactions that make anonymity essentially impossible.  Want to buy a beer at your local sporting event?  It's increasingly likely that your bank will know about it immediately.  It's not hard to imagine a world where the bank lets your car know how much you've had to drink, so it can decide whether to let you drive.

Security cameras, facial recognition technology, drones--good luck escaping them.  Leave some DNA at a crime scene a few decades ago?  You'd better hope none of your close relatives send a sample in for DNA testing.

We can applaud a lot of this--the Golden State Killer was arrested because a relative sent some DNA to a genetic testing service--while still finding the disappearance of privacy troubling.  From what I can tell, it's already something the younger generations of today don't even think about.  Having grown up in a digital world that's been harvesting data about them since they were toddlers, they regard the notion of a private life as akin to the notion of a horse and buggy.  It's cute, but it's simply not part of the reality they live in.

For we crime writers, this presents some special challenges.  I love the Parker novels by Richard Stark (which is to say, by Donald Westlake), but almost none of the heists that master thief Parker and his cronies pull off would be possible in today's world.  Entirely aside from the inescapable surveillance, there just aren't that many places any longer with giant piles of cash waiting to be stolen.  Today's master thieves use laptops, not handguns.  Not nearly as much fun to read about, and no fun at all to write.

Think about some of your favorite noir and crime films made prior to, say, 1990.  How many of them have plots that would still work if everybody had a cell phone?

So what's a poor crime writer to do?  One solution is to set stories in the past, which is something I've done a lot.  Frankly, it's something of a relief to write about a world where people still read newspapers, go to the library to do research, and sometimes get a busy signal when they try to use the phone.

Of course, the other option is to use our imaginations, recognizing that, however much the world has changed, people still commit murders, still take things that don't belong to them, and are still haunted by the mistakes they've made in the past.  I'm honored to have had stories in all five volumes to date of the superb anthology series MICKEY FINN: 21ST CENTURY NOIR, created and edited by fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken, who takes that subtitle seriously.  He wants stories set in the present day, with killers and crooks and PIs who have cell phones, and reading any edition of the series will demonstrate that it's still possible to tell compelling stories set in that world--which is to say, our world.

None of which prevents me from regarding this new age of surveillance with suspicion, or feeling nostalgic for the time before.  When I was twelve years old, I'd often get on my bicycle and be gone from home all day.  I didn't have a phone.  I didn't even have much cash.  Nobody knew where I was or what I was doing.  Today, for most families, that would be unthinkable.

But doesn't it also sound a little bit wonderful?