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?

Taking Stock, Moving On

Sports franchises going through poor seasons say they're having a "rebuilding year" because it sounds better than "terrible year."  There is something to be said, though, for the basic concept of a rebuilding year--taking stock of where you are and trying to put the fundamental pieces in place for moving forward.

The end of the year is a natural time for writers, like everyone else, to take a step back, see what they've done, and think about building that foundation for the next twelve months.  As a writer, I wouldn't go so far as to say I had a terrible year.

But a rebuilding year?  Yeah, I'll cop to that.

By my count, I wrote thirteen new stories in 2024.  That's not bad, but I've had years when I wrote more than twenty (26 being my high).  My 2024 stories totaled roughly 52,000 words, for an average of 4,000 per story.  Of the thirteen, three were submitted to open-call anthologies, seven were written for anthologies I was invited to contribute to, and the remaining three were submitted to magazines.

I had fourteen stories published in 2024, which, again, is down considerably from my 2022 high mark of 21.  Ten were in anthologies, four in periodicals.  Two were reprints (details and links can be found on my website).

Other writing-related 2024 moments worth noting: I attended two conferences (Bouchercon and ShortCon), joined the Sleuthsayers, was nominated for a Shamus award, signed a contract for a collection of some of my stories, and was elected the President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (since I ran unopposed, it was a landslide).

My work with the SMFS probably accounts for some of my decline in production.  Before I was the President, I was the Derringer coordinator, as I discussed at (probably excessive) length in my very first Sleuthsayer column.  Both positions took up a lot of time I might have spent writing, but I don't regret  holding them.  The SMFS has been enormously important in my development as a writer, and if I can give something back that helps other writers in similar ways, I'm happy to do so.

What I ultimately think was more damaging was something that offers far less fulfillment or meaning: social media.  I allowed myself, at various times this year, to get sucked into the vortex of Facebook and (shudder) Twitter/X, as well as, to a lesser degree, other platforms.  It's astonishing, and distressing, to realize how much time and mental energy this can take up, if you let it.

The conventional wisdom is that social media is vital to the life of a writer these days.  We need the connections.  We need the leads. We need to actively promote ourselves.  This is unfortunate, because I'm increasingly of the opinion that social media is also toxic to the writing life.

That's only in part because of the time it sucks up.  It also promotes a mindset that is actively destructive to the kind of quiet contemplation and reflective thought vital to productive writing.  It shreds the attention span.  It offers a constant stream of distraction.  It promotes a continual buzz of anxiety, because in the world of social media everything is a crisis, everything is dramatic, everything is conflict, and the ways in which the world is on fire just multiply the longer you look.  At least, that's what it was doing to me.  How can I write a nice little murder story when hundreds of people are screaming at me that the collapse of civilization is just around the corner?

Since a certain event in early November that I will not discuss directly, I've been off social media almost entirely.  I haven't been on Twitter once, and I deleted the app from my phone, keeping my account only to prevent anyone else from taking the name.  I've made a few Facebook posts to promote new publications, but avoided looking at anything else on the site.

I'm finding this is very good for me.  I'm less anxious and depressed.  I'm writing more, and enjoying the process more.  I'm also reading more, with more sustained attention.

The problem, of course, is that to a certain degree social media is important to writers today.  It's not just a matter of promoting our work, though that is important.  It's also the place where we establish and maintain our relationships with other writers, with publishers, with readers.  Lord knows not many people are writing emails these days, let alone letters (I have no idea what the literary biographers of the future are going to have to work with).  Since the social aspect of being a writer is important to me, it feels impossible, and unwise, to sever my ties with social media entirely.

So this is the dilemma I face going into 2025: how do I reap the benefits of social media without paying the costs?  I'd honestly be interested in hearing how other writers deal with this problem.  Do you use social media?  Which platforms, and how much?  How do you keep it in check enough to not interfere with your writing?  Is social media, for you, ultimately a boon or a curse?

Whatever your answer, I hope everyone reading this had a productive 2024, and I wish us all a better 2025 than we might be expecting.  See you in January!

Don't Speak

For a brief period in my life, I got somewhat serious about playing chess.  I bought and studied books on the game, joined a local club, and even played in a few tournaments.  I never got great--it could be argued, with some justification, that I never even got good.  But I got better than I was when I started, and I enjoyed the process tremendously.  Eventually, I came to a point where I felt like I had to focus my time and energy on either chess or writing, and for me the choice was an easy one.  

While I don't study chess rigorously any longer, I still play the game recreationally, and it influences the way I see and think about the world in some respects.  For example: every move in a game of chess has a gain and a cost.  Move your knight to a new square, and you've gained an attack on enemy pieces that were previously safe.  On the other hand, you've endangered pieces or squares your knight was defending.  This may seem like a rather obvious observation, but it's a useful way of thinking about choices.  What am I going to gain, and what do I have the potential to lose?

A friend who coached me in the game--and who happens to be one of the top-ranked players in the state--told me something when I was starting out that has stuck with me as a particularly valuable lesson: "You're going to lose a thousand games before you win one that means anything."  Anybody can luck into a win if your opponent makes a blunder or simply isn't paying attention, but a win like that isn't significant.  It's a fluke.  The only way to truly get better at the game, and to win games that feel significant, is to play people better than you are and get your brains kicked in, time after time after time.  Failure is built into the process.

This has fairly obvious parallels with writing.  We tell beginning writers that they can expect to get drawers full of rejections (or rather, these days, email folders full of rejections) before they get an acceptance.  Every successful writer I've ever talked with recalls the months and years of toiling away without ever seeing their name in print.  As in chess, it's learning from failure that makes this experience essential.  If you're serious about the craft, you use rejections to figure out what works and what doesn't.  You build on your strengths, and find ways to minimize your weaknesses.  (If you're not serious about the craft, like one member of a long-ago writing group convinced she was the next Toni Morrison, you threaten to sue the editors who had the temerity to reject your divinely inspired prose, never mind that it jumps between first and third person twenty-seven times for no reason.)

If you're determined, and lucky, you'll eventually reach the stage where you're getting acceptances on a regular basis.  Once you reach that stage, how do you keep growing?  What's the writing equivalent of continuing to challenge players better than you?

You find ways to challenge yourself.

I love writing dialogue.  It's one of the most fun parts of writing crime fiction, maybe in part because most of the writers I came up idolizing (Robert B. Parker, Donald Westlake, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Rex Stout, etc.) were themselves masters of the craft.  I don't pretend to be on their level, but I like to think I have a certain ability to turn a memorable line or convey information through dialogue in a painless way.

(On reflection, it's interesting that there's such a strong connection between crime writing and dialogue, going all the way back to "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."  Are there science fiction or horror writers who are especially admired for the ways their characters speak?)

So last month I set myself a challenge to do something I'd never done before: write a story without dialogue.  In the attempt, I drifted into using a collective narrative voice, something else I hadn't done before.  The story is structured as a shared flashback, using description and narration, but no dialogue, to revisit a tragedy that happened to a group of people decades earlier.

The thing is, I failed.  Near the end of the story, the villain has two lines of spoken dialogue.  I wrestled with this for a couple of days, but in the end I just felt like I needed to "hear" that voice, almost as a counterpoint to the way the rest of the story is structured.  A better writer probably could have found a way to stick to the original mission, but then a better writer probably wouldn't need to set themselves such hoops to jump through.

Is the story successful?  I like it, but in this game that doesn't count for much.  We'll see what the editor thinks.  Either way, I feel like I learned something, simply by forcing myself to frame a story in a way I never had before.  It's something I'll try again, though not immediately.

Have you written stories without dialogue, or set yourself similar challenges?  What did you learn by doing so?

Is That a New Derringer in Your Pocket?

The Short Mystery Fiction Society was formed in 1996, and presented the first Derringer Awards, recognizing excellence in short mystery fiction, in 1998.  Not surprisingly, the awards have changed in many ways over almost thirty years, and they're about to do so again.  

Taking a look at Derringer history is illuminating.  Over the last few months, the Society's current Assistant Derringer Coordinator, Mark Schuster, has put together something long overdue: a database of all the nominees and winners over the lifetime of the awards.  Thanks to his outstanding work, we've been reminded of some awards presented in the early years--Best First Short Story and Best Puzzle Story, for example--that have fallen by the wayside.

  

There have also been shifts in the categories which have stuck around.  The initial definition of flash stories was 200-400 words.  For several years the three main categories were flash (up to 1,200 words), short (1,201-10,000 words) and novella (10,001-25,000 words).  By 2004, there were categories with the awkward labels short short, mid-length short, and long short.  

It seems to have been about 2010 when the categories settled into the four competitive Derringer categories used today: flash (up to 1,000 words), short story (1,001-4,000), long story (4,001-8,000), and novelette (8,000-20,000 [the upper limit has changed a few times]).  In addition, the society presents an annual Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement in Short Mystery Fiction, and selects one deceased writer to enter the short mystery Hall of Fame.

Earlier this year, the Society voted to add a new Derringer award for the first time in many years: Best Anthology.  This idea originated with Josh Pachter, himself a Golden Derringer recipient, one of the best writers in the field today, and, not incidentally, the editor of many a fine anthology (including an upcoming anthology of Derringer-winning stories celebrating the 30th year of the Society).

Making changes to an institution like the Derringers shouldn't be done lightly, but the time is ripe for an award recognizing that anthologies have become more and more important in recent years.  I've heard more than a few writers suggesting that we're living in a golden age for the form, in fact.  

In part this may be, unfortunately, due to a decline in the number of magazine markets open to short crime fiction.  To be sure, there are still some fantastic traditional magazine markets out there, and there's an undeniable thrill to selling a story to Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock.  There are also great online periodicals, like Tough.  The recent demise of Mystery Magazine (formerly Mystery Weekly), though, was only the most recent of many such losses.  Even if a magazine still exists, finding it can be a challenge.  I live in a fairly large town with a big university, but when I recently had a story published in The Saturday Evening Post, I couldn't locate a single store in my community that actually carries it.

For writers in our field looking to get their work in front of readers, then, anthologies have become increasingly important.  Many of them come from smaller publishers, run by people passionate about fiction: Down & Out Books, Misti Media, Level Best Books, others I'm sure I'm not thinking of right now.

About two thirds of my own stories have been published in anthologies.  For writers, these markets have a lot to offer.  They usually have entertaining, inventive themes, encouraging experimentation.  They offer the chance to work with highly skilled and engaged editors (I know my own work has benefitted tremendously from working with anthology editors like Josh, Barb Goffman, and Michael Bracken).  They have the potential to reach new readers who might otherwise never encounter our work.  They're likely to remain available for several years, long after a magazine publication has faded away.  

Most of all, they're just plain fun, as much for writers as for readers.  I sometimes feel I should be writing more for magazine markets, but at any given time there are anthologies open for submission on topics I just can't resist.  This year alone, I've published stories in anthologies themed around sports, one-hit wonders, fairy tales, the solar eclipse, sex and classical music, 21st century noir, and the songs of Aerosmith and the Grateful Dead.  Could one of those books take home the first Derringer for Best Anthology?  Stay tuned!

If you'd like to nominate an anthology, or stories for the other Derringer categories, you must be a member of the Society by the end of this calendar year.  Membership is free, and offers you the chance to rub virtual elbows with many of the leading writers in the field, along with readers, editors, publishers, and various others invested in short mystery stories.  In the interest of full disclosure, I am the current President of the Society--but I'd be telling you to join even if that wasn't the case.

So what are some of your favorite recent anthologies?  

As a writer, what draws you to certain anthology calls?  

As a reader, what are you looking for in an anthology?  Familiar authors?  The editor?  The topic?

     

Musing on Mitty

 At the just-completed Nashville Bouchercon, I was on the panel "Is It Over Now?: Bringing Characters to Life in Short Stories."  I always find these panels fun, a chance to meet some fellow writers and have engaging exchanges with the audience.  Our moderator, Meagan Lucas of Reckon Review, had some lively and insightful questions for us, including this: who is your favorite character from a short story?  For this particular question, I didn't have to think very hard.  My all-time favorite character from a short story is the protagonist of my all-time favorite short story: Walter Mitty, from James Thurber's masterful 1939 "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

If you haven't read "Mitty," you're missing something special, and you should go do so now.  It can be found in any number of anthologies and collections, and a little light Googling just might turn up a PDF version on the web, if you're not picky.

Am I going to spoil the story as I discuss it here?  In a way, although "Mitty" is a hard story to spoil, because, in some ways, it's barely a story at all.  It's very short, coming in at just over 2000 words, and strictly speaking almost nothing happens.  There's certainly not much that you could describe as a plot: Walter and his wife dive into the town of Waterbury to run a few errands.  That's it.

James Thurber

So what makes the story so memorable, and why is it worth talking about on a blog about crime fiction 85 years after it was published?

It's all about Walter.

Walter Mitty is fiction's ultimate daydreamer.  As he goes about the crushingly dull chores of a perfectly mundane day, he repeatedly slips into highly detailed reveries in which he is the world's foremost surgeon, or a crack pistol shot on trial for murder, or an RAF pilot stoically preparing for an impossible mission, and so on.  He's always jerked back to reality, but invariably returns to his inner world of fantasy, to the imaginary existences where his true life is lived.

As far as everyone else in the world is concerned, Walter is a shlub.  His wife nags and infantilizes him.  Cops yell at him to move it along.  Parking attendants and mechanics sneer at him, and store clerks condescend to him.  In his fantasies, however, he is powerful, accomplished, confident, feared, adored.  And here, perhaps, is the first reason for any reader or writer to love this story: it's a tribute to exactly the kind of enrichment and empowerment we have all felt in reading and writing; in slipping away into a story, of our own making or someone else's; in the world of fiction itself.  To be sure, Walter's specific fantasies owe more to the movies than to written fiction, but in a very real way Walter Mitty is a writer.  He may not be a great writer, or even a particularly good one; his fantasy life does lean heavily on familiar narrative tropes and genre archetypes.  Still, there are some inspired stylistic touches (I love the "pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" noise he imagines every machine as making), and you certainly can't fault him for lacking narrative energy.

What really makes the story work is that Thurber doesn't look down on Walter or condescend to him.  He shows us all the other people who feel disdain for Walter, but, right up through the story's perfect closing line (which I will not spoil here), he himself understands, sympathizes with, and even admires how Walter has made an interior life for himself that is so much richer and more fulfilling than his reality.

It hardly needs to be said that the story itself is masterfully written.  Thurber was a great prose stylist in the style of The New Yorker, where "Mitty" first appeared: sophisticated, witty, expressing tremendous emotion through restrained, carefully selected detail.  He creates one of literature's most enduring characters and his entire world in what amounts to about five pages, something anyone interested in short fiction can respect.  I particularly love the way small details are woven through through the story, linking Walter's inner and outer lives in clever ways.  

For example: remembering how he's been humiliated when his wife makes him take their car to a mechanic, Walter decides that next time he'll wear a sling on his right arm to show why he couldn't do the work himself.  In the meantime, he can't remember what it was his wife asked him to go buy, and while he's thinking about it, a passing newsboy shouts something about a trial.  In a flash, Walter is on the stand being interrogated by a district attorney about his ability to fire a fatal shot at a great distance with a pistol.  Walter's lawyer protests that his client had his right arm in a sling on the night of the murder, but Walter immediately and calmly asserts that he could have easily made the shot with his left hand.  A woman screams, the DA strikes out at her, and Walter punches him on the chin, calling him a "miserable cur"--and the physical Walter, standing on a sidewalk, says "puppy biscuit" out loud, having suddenly remembered what he's supposed to be shopping for.

A lot of what a writer needs to know about transitions and focus can be found in that passage.

Hollywood has taken two passes at adapting "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," and while both films have elements of interest, neither completely lives up to the source (surprising, I know).  The first version, released in 1947, starred Danny Kaye as Walter and was directed by Norman Z. McLeod, who made some truly great comedies with people like the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields. Thurber was consulted at various points by the filmmakers, and there are small moments lifted more or less directly from his story, but he ultimately didn't care for the result.  The film's narrative and style were so directly shaped around its star's persona that Thurber is said to have referred to it as "The Public Life of Danny Kaye."

Kaye's Mitty is a proofreader at a publisher specializing in pulp and adventure magazines (in the original story, we're given no hint of Walter's occupation, and he may well be retired).  He's had this job for eleven years, but still lives at home with his overbearing mother, who tucks him in at night and brings him warm milk.  His abusive boss steals his best ideas while mocking him for his daydreams, and his fiancé is an empty-headed young woman who cares a good deal more for her dog than for Walter.  

The film is not, of course, content to let Walter remain just a daydreamer.  A chance encounter with a mysterious woman on a train draws him into a real-life adventure revolving around the location of Dutch treasures, hidden prior to the Nazi invasion and now sought by government agents and a gang of crooks.  The plot makes virtually no sense, but there is some fun to be had, particularly in Boris Karloff's turn as a malevolent psychologist who tries to get information from Walter by convincing him that it's all just been another daydream.  In the end, Walter asserts himself, foiling the bad guys, marrying the girl (the one from the train, natch) and demanding a promotion.  He thus earns what Thurber's Mitty never earns, and does not need: the validation of the external world.

Danny Kaye was known for comic songs built around nonsense patter, and the movie obliges him by shoehorning two of them in for no very good reason.  The first is particularly jarring.  It comes at a moment when Walter is having his fantasy of being an ace RAF fighter pilot, much of which--including some of the specific dialogue--is lifted directly from Thurber's text.  Suddenly, however, one of the other pilots remembers that when he and Mitty were in college together, Mitty did a hilarious imitation of their music professor.  Everyone present immediately demands that he do the imitation, causing Walter to shuck his RAF uniform, don a waiter's coat as an academic gown, and launch into a German-accented musical "lecture" about the history of a symphony.  When I watched the film, I felt as though the song lasted just a bit longer than WWII itself (the YouTube link above is only a portion of the number).  Danny Kaye was a talented man who did a lot of great things in his career, but this scene is the reason fast-forwarding was invented.

The other song, "Anatole of Paris," is somewhat more bearable, if only because it is shorter and easier to understand.  It comes when Walter, for reasons I won't even try to explain, is trapped at a fashion show and daydreams about being a famous designer of women's hats--not, I think, something that would have much appealed to Thurber's character.

The next big-screen version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty arrived in 2013 and starred Ben Stiller, who also directed, in the title role.  This version is even further removed from Thurber's story, but is, in my view, a considerably better film than Kaye's vehicle.  Stiller's Mitty works in the photo department of Life magazine, which is about to publish its final print edition before becoming Life Online (it's interesting that both movies have Walter working in publishing).  He has a crush on his coworker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), but can barely bring himself to speak to her, let alone send her a wink on eHarmony.  He's good at his job, but his family and coworkers are accustomed to the moments when he "zones out," entering one of his daydreams and becoming completely oblivious to what they're saying.

The daydreams in the 2013 Mitty are largely confined to the first half of the film, and none have any connection to the specific fantasies in Thurber's original.  They're mostly brief action sequences, like an elaborate, physics-defying martial arts battle with his smug jerk of a boss.  Inevitably, this Walter is also drawn into a real-life adventure.  A legendary photojournalist (Sean Penn) has sent in a picture to be used as the final Life cover, but it's been lost.  Walter sets out to track the photographer down, pursuing him first through Greenland and Iceland, then across "ungoverned Afghanistan" into the Himalayas.  Along the way he jumps from a helicopter into the shark-infested North Sea, flees an erupting volcano, plays soccer with warlords, and so on.  Once again, by the end of the film, he has gained the courage to act, making a date with Cheryl and telling off his boss.

Like the earlier film, this adaptation of "Mitty" inverts Thurber's story by presenting Walter's daydreams as a childish habit that must be left behind, rather than a defiant act of resistance again drudgery.  Still, the Stiller version is much more worthy of your time.  The central plot is engaging and reaches a satisfying resolution, the cast is stacked with talented performers (Patton Oswalt, Shirley MacLaine, Adam Scott), and much of the movie, particularly the sequences in Iceland, is stunningly beautiful.  It's also interesting as a kind of time capsule of the cultural moment when the old, analog world vanished into a new, digital one.  The film is explicitly an elegy for the print version of Life, and thus an elegy for the world of newsstand magazines--like the one that gave birth to "Mitty" to begin with.

We really did lose a great deal when we let that world slip away.  Computers can do a lot, but they hardly ever go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

   

In Which A Line of Dialogue is Written

 The woman came back, followed by a man Menger had seen before.  Kirby.  It came to Menger that the man's name was Kirby.

The name brought more fragments of memory.  Denver.  The jewelry exchange.  The job that went sideways.

"It's about time you woke up," Kirby said.  "I was just about ready to start digging a grave."

I stop writing.  I read back over the last few paragraphs.  The voices in my head start chattering.

"Clumsy dialogue," the Editor says.  "Wordy.  And that repetition of 'about' is just ugly."

"Blech," Distraction chimes in.  "Hey, it's been a while since you checked your email.  You never know, there might be a story acceptance.  Plus you're waiting on your Bouchercon panel assignment."

"Probably won't even get one," Doubt moans.  "Certainly don't deserve one, since this is only the sixth story you've written this year."

"You could take a break and grade some papers," Responsibility timidly ventures.  There's a chorus of boos and he retreats to a back corner, resentfully planning to wake me in a cold sweat at three in the morning.

"Everybody pipe down," I order.  "Let's take a look at this."  I lean back in my chair and read through the last few paragraphs again.

"It's about time you woke up," Kirby said.  "I was just about ready to start digging a grave."

"Quick review," Exposition offers.  "Menger and Kirby were part of a heist that went wrong, and Menger got shot.  Now he's waking up, not knowing where he is or what happened.  Right?"

General murmurs of agreement.

I read the problematic line of dialogue yet again.  It sounds, to my ear, friendly, almost jovial.  It makes me picture Kirby as a big, grinning guy in a Hawaiian shirt.  "Is this the Kirby we want in the story?" I ask.

"No," says Kirby, who isn't exactly thrilled to be living in my head but at least wants a say in how he's depicted.  "I'm a survivalist, remember?  I think the world is on the brink of complete societal collapse.  I'm not walking around chuckling at people."

"Are you absolutely sure you didn't steal that character from somewhere?" Doubt puts in, leaping at another chance to ruin my day.

"Ignore him," says the Editor.  "Remember the tone you want here.  Tense, suspenseful.  Tighter dialogue moves you in that direction."

Okay.  I put my fingers on the keyboard.  Let's get rid of that extra about.  Which one to cut?  The problem is that Kirby's first sentence needs the word to make any sense.

"Why do you need the first sentence at all?" the Editor asks.

"I was just about ready to start digging a grave," Kirby said.

I read the line out loud.

"Still wordy," says the Editor.  "That 'just' isn't doing any real work.  Neither is 'start.'  How many times do you have to remember this?  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you write that a character starts to do something, you can cut the 'starts' and just have them do it."

"I was about ready to dig a grave," Kirby said.

Everybody thinks about this.

"Still doesn't quite sound like me," says Kirby.

"It's better," says the Editor.  "Still sounds more casual than I'd like, though.  Plus, since he's no longer saying the thing about Menger waking up, it's maybe not completely clear that the grave would be for Menger.  He could just be saying that's what he was doing when Lucia came to get him."

"Sure," says Doubt, who's being especially bratty today.  "The guy just hangs around the house thinking about digging graves.  That makes perfect sense.  What ever made you think you could write?  You'll probably never finish this one anyway."

"You want me to maybe kill this guy?"  Kirby asks.  "I'm going to be living in here, I might as well earn my keep."

I wave all this aside.  I'm almost there, I think.

"I was about ready to dig you a grave," Kirby said.

The Planner, pleased, pipes up.  "Now the line has a little bit of threat to it," he says.  "Kirby's letting Menger know that his death wouldn't be a problem.  That works well, given what we know is eventually going to happen between these characters."

The Editor is almost satisfied.  "I'm not crazy about 'about ready.'  It's too passive, like he was just sitting around waiting to do something.  That's not the Kirby we need in this story, right?"

"Right," says Kirby.  He was in the shadows before, but he's starting to emerge into the light.  He's not jovial, and he doesn't wear Hawaiian shirts.  He's a hard, lean man who rarely laughs, a man who approaches the world as a series of problems to be solved as efficiently as possible.

"I was about to dig you a grave," Kirby said.

The Editor reads this a couple of times, first on its own and then in the context of the previous few sentences, listening for rhythm and pace.  He gives a grudging nod of approval.  It will do for now.  Kirby, having been entirely remade, is satisfied that this is something he would say.  The Planner approves of the slight foreshadowing of future conflict.  Doubt isn't happy, but he never is.  Distraction is momentarily silent, because, at least for the moment, I'm fully engaged, living in the world of the sentence I just wrote.

"Okay," I say.  "Onward."

The first version of the sentence was eighteen words; the final version is ten.  I've successfully written a ten-word sentence that I'm happy--or at least momentarily satisfied--with.

Now all I have to do is write ten words I'm happy with five hundred more times, and I'll have a story.  Nothing to it!

***

If you're dying to hear more of my deep thoughts about writing fiction, I'll be at the 2024 Bouchercon in Nashville, starting just a few days after this is posted.

Saturday morning at 9:30 in the Bayou E Mezzanine, whatever that may turn out to be, I'll be on the panel "Is It Over Now?: Bringing Characters to Life in Short Stories," with moderator Meagan Lucas.

Thursday night, in my capacity as president of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, I'll be presenting this year's Derringer Awards as part of the opening ceremonies.  Fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman is receiving the Edward D. Hoch Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement, so be sure to congratulate her if you run into her!

The Shamus Awards will also be presented at the opening ceremonies, and my story "Making the Bad Guys Nervous" is a nominee for Best PI Story.

Other than that I'll be wandering about, so feel free to say hi.  Hope to see a lot of you there!

  

The Shelf Dilemma

I once read a profile of a famous author (it may have been Stephen King, but my memory for things like this doesn't so much fail me as sit in a corner of my brain and mock me mercilessly) who, when the house next door to theirs went on the market, purchased it and had every room filled with shelves, converting the entire structure into a personal library.  I seem to remember they also had a tunnel built between the two houses, permitting access to the library at all times and in all weather, but I might have imagined that part.

In any case, this arrangement immediately became a life goal of mine.  Unfortunately, none of my neighbors have shown an inclination to move lately.  Still more unfortunately, my writing income doesn't quite measure up to King's, so unless this hypothetical neighbor sets an asking price with the decimal point accidentally moved several spaces to the left, practical obstacles abound.

A small part of my Rex Stout shelf

I bring this up because this particular column isn't giving advice or examining the writing process.  Instead, it's asking a question that has haunted my entire life: what do I do with all these books?

What do you do with yours?

I've always had something of an accumulative, pack rat mentality.  I find it very, very difficult to get rid of any object that has any kind of personal association for me.  I have tourist maps from pretty much every trip I've ever taken in my life.  I have a box filled with notes passed in high school classes, many now completely illegible and none having any specific significance I can recall.  I have a closet shelf stuffed full of free tote bags from a variety of conventions and promotional events.  I will never, under any conceivable circumstance, need to tote that much stuff, but what am I supposed to do?  Just get rid of fifty cents worth of canvas bearing the logo of an organization I no longer belong to or a comic book company that hasn't existed in decades?

When I think about getting rid of stuff like this, a corner of my brain starts poking me with either "but you spent money on that" or "you might want it someday" or, on many occasions, both.

The real problem, as you've probably guessed, is books.  There have been a few times, in the last half century, when I've had more shelf space than books to fill them.  Those times can usually be measured in weeks, if not days.  It's the eternal conundrum: no matter how many shelves I add, the books outrun them.

This has been going on, essentially, for my entire life.  As a kid, my allowance money was almost always spent at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton (look it up, youngsters).  Once I started working as a teenager, I haunted the used book stores in my town, always thrilled to find a Rex Stout or John D. MacDonald I didn't already have.  And yes, I also patronized the library, and I love and honor libraries and librarians to this day.  I just never liked the part where you have to give the books back.

This much of the story probably sounds familiar to most writers.  Most of us, after all, start out as avid readers.  But somehow, most other folks don't seem to have my issues with letting things go, or at least not to this degree.  Adding shelves to try to keep up with myself has been a constant theme of my life.  My father built several sets for me in the basement, when I lived at home.  In graduate school I found myself often going to WalMart to pick up yet another set of cheap particle-board shelves to cram into some corner of my tiny apartment.  

In the house where I live now, there's a small room in the basement designated, on the original blueprints, as a wine cellar.  I lined it floor-to-ceiling with shelves.  That worked for a little while, but it's now overflowing again, with books on the floor and lying on their sides in front of the shelved volumes.  There are books stacked on nightstands and coffee tables, books in drawers, books filling an odd space under a desk, cardboard boxes of books in the storage room.

Just between you and me, I'm starting to think I might have a problem.  Not only does the overflow become unsightly, but it's very difficult to put my hands on any specific book, even if I can remember what room it's (supposed to be) in.

It's really a twofold dilemma.  First, there's that "you might want it someday" part of my brain, which becomes particularly energetic on the subject of books.  The emotional toll involved in parting with any book means that even if I can bring myself to do it, the process takes a considerable amount of time.  I wish I could just zip down each shelf, quickly sorting everything into "keep" and "don't keep" piles, but I apparently have to hold each book, read the jacket, and stare into space moodily for a while before making a call--which, all too often, is "keep."

The second part of the problem is that it's not as easy to get rid of books as it used to be.  When I moved to the the town where I live, it had at least five good used book stores.  Now there's one, which is clinging to life, but which understandably is very, very choosy about acquiring new stock.  Selling things one at a time on ebay is too demanding of time and labor.  I can donate books to the local library or Goodwill, but even they tend to get a little grouchy when you show up with too many at once.  Granted, this isn't as big a problem as when I was trying to find someone to take a few hundred old VHS tapes, but it's an issue.

Yes, I have a copy of this

What I really need is a system that would allow me to make quick decisions about each book.  I need a certain, limited set of categories of books I'm allowed to keep, which would turn the books from an undifferentiated mass into a curated collection.  Some categories are obvious.  I have a pretty sizable collection of Harlan Ellison books, many signed and/or small press limited editions that are not easy to come by.  Keep.  Anthologies I have stories in?  Keep.  I want to hold onto most short story collections, because they often have smaller publication runs and go out of print faster than novels.  I want to keep the battered old book club editions of the writers who got me into this genre--Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, Lawrence Block, maybe a dozen favorites all told.

But there are so many marginal cases.  I did my dissertation on novels by Paul Auster and Don DeLillo.  My reading tastes have shifted such that I rarely pick them up, but do I really want to cull so many books with my annotations in the margins?  How about this battered paperback copy of the George Burns autobiography The Third Time Around, which I probably read a dozen times as a kid (I was a weird kid)?  It's long out of print, and there are no audio or Kindle editions.  Why, I wouldn't be able to replace it!  What about this stack of true crime books?  What if I want to write a story inspired by one of them someday?

So: am I alone in having this problem?  And for those of you who are avid readers but who don't have this problem, how do you do it?  What's your secret?  Where do your books go?

Next month I'll be back to writing issues, I promise.  Right now--I need help! 

  

ShortCon and the Long Haul

Subtle clue I got on the correct plane

As I write this, I've just returned from the very first ShortCon, an ambitious new conference specifically for writers of short mystery and crime fiction. The history of our genre is deeply grounded in short stories (think Poe, Doyle, and the golden age of the pulps), but the form often receives scant attention at the major conferences, such as Bouchercon. ShortCon's goal aims to correct that.

Organized by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson (along with Verena Rose, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Angie Carlton, and with my apologies for the oversight in my initial post), the event was held at Elaine's Restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia and was, I think, a rousing success. It's easy to be pessimistic about the future of the form I spend most of my time writing.

Many once-prominent markets have disappeared, and reading in general seems threatened by the ever-shortening attention span of the iPhone age. The ShortCon sessions didn't ignore those realities, but they also provided ample evidence that there are a lot of people, both readers and writers, who remain passionate about these stories.

Certainly there were passionate reactions the night before, when Elaine's hosted a Noir at the Bar event in association with the Con. I was honored to be invited to be one of the readers, and my story "Kindling Delight" (available in this collection!) was well-received, to my considerable relief (this being the first time I'd read to more than five or six people). Though the other readers were all terrific, it was particularly intimidating to follow LynDee Walker, whose lively delivery of an uproarious story about a Piggly-Wiggly cashier with a dark past and just a bit of a violent streak had the audience in stitches.

Noir at the Bar readers (L to R) Jackie Sherbow, LynDee Walker, Brendan DuBois, Tom Milani,
Adam Meyer, Joseph S. Walker, and Stacy Woodson, moderator and host Jeffrey James Higgins

The day of the actual conference was structured around presentations by three speakers who provided a wealth of insight, experience and advice. First, in the morning, Brendan DuBois discussed craft– how to actually create a story with a solid plot, memorable characters and an engaging voice. Then, after a lunch break (and let me take a moment here to note that Elaine's provided excellent food and superb, considerate service throughout the event),

Jackie Sherbow offered behind-the-scenes information about what actually happens to a story once it's submitted to Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock. Also, she gave everyone present a secret code guaranteeing one acceptance per year to each magazine (just kidding! Or am I? Maybe you should register for ShortCon 2025 just to be on the safe side). Finally, Michael Bracken's presentation was a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to making and sustaining a career as a short story writer (and who would know better?). Finally, Stacy Woodson moderated as all three speakers participated in a lively Q & A session.

The second ShortCon is already being planned for June 7 of 2025, in the same venue, with new speakers and content. I'd strongly advise writers interested in maximizing their potential as short story writers to keep an eye out for registration information. I know I will be, and I'm very pleased to have been at the first gathering of what I believe will be many to come.

Before I started writing regularly, I imagined writing to be a solitary pursuit. It often is, of course, with many hours spent staring at the screen, lost in the maze of your own mind. Many of the rewards of writing, however, have proven to be social, as I've gotten to know and befriend many of my fellow writers. This happens on a daily basis through the activities and discussions of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, as well as at events like Bouchercon and, now, ShortCon. It was a real pleasure meeting and talking with a number of folks who, until now, have just been names on discussion posts and Tables of Contents. We may write about terrible people doing awful things, but the mystery writers I've met have been unfailingly wonderful folks, and invariably generous with their knowledge and experience.

(A brief aside: my brain is a strange and often frustrating thing. It's reliably accurate and retentive when it comes to space and geography. Dropped in the middle of Los Angeles today, I could take you directly to the sites of a dozen used bookstores I frequented when I lived there thirty plus years ago. Names and faces, however, tend to fall straight into a memory hole, despite my frantic efforts to retain them. Watching movies, I often have to ask my wife to remind me who the characters are, because I can't tell them apart. If you were introduced to me at ShortCon, and then five minutes later I introduced myself to you again with no apparent knowledge of who you are, please don't take offense. I tend not to be able to link names and faces until I've met a person many, many times. Believe me, I'd fix it if I could.)

A lot of the conversations I had in Alexandria touched on my new role. On July 1, the day after this is posted, I'm slated to take office as the new President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, a prospect I find by turns exciting and alarming. (I assume that readers of this blog are already familiar with the SMFS, ideally as members, what with membership being free and all.)

A room at Elaine's

My fellow mystery writers gave me plenty of encouragement and a good deal of very welcome advice. I have, at this point, little idea of what I'm going to do as President of the organization. Coming out of ShortCon, however, I know that there is a body of very talented writers dedicated to writing short stories in the genre. I also believe that, while the upheavals of recent years have perhaps made them harder to identify and reach, there is and will always be a body of readers who consume such stories with pleasure. In the most abstract terms possible, my goal at SMFS will be to do anything in my power to help those two groups find each other.

If you have anything to say about how to accomplish that, I'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, thanks to everyone involved with making the first ShortCon so much fun. Can't wait for the next one!

ADDENDUM: We SleuthSayers generally try to avoid anything so uncouth as self-promotion, but I can't resist mentioning that I learned a couple of days ago that my story "Making the Bad Guys Nervous," originally published in Black Cat Weekly #102, has been named a finalist for the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus Award for best PI short story. My thanks to the judges, and best of luck to the other nominees. The award will be presented at Bouchercon's opening ceremony. Hope to see you all there!

On Whiteyball

Whitey Herzog, former Major League Baseball player and manager, passed away in April, at the age of 92.  

What does that have to do with writing?  Stay tuned.  I’ll get there, with a little meandering along the way.

I was twelve years old when Herzog managed the St. Louis Cardinals to victory in the 1982 World Series.  You’re never again a fan of anything the way you’re a fan when you’re twelve, and the Cardinals were my team.  Downstate Illinois, where I grew up, was in a perpetual state of simmering conflict between fans of the Cardinals and fans of their fiercest rivals, the Chicago Cubs (plus a few people who rooted for the White Sox, apparently just to be weird).  Now, my father was, and remains, a die-hard Cub booster.  When I was very young, however, I had a crush on a babysitter who liked the Cardinals, which was enough to cause my loyalty to permanently shift to the redbirds.

Whitey Herzog

(Six years old, and already a femme fatale was alluring me into betraying my own family. Shocking. I was destined to write crime stories!)  

Baseball in the early eighties was a very different game than the one played today, and not just because the abomination known as the designated hitter was still safely quarantined in the American League.  Power wasn’t nearly as central or dominant; the Cardinals, as a team, hit only 67 home runs in their championship year (by way of contrast, in 2023 the Atlanta Braves hit 307, and even the team with the fewest homers, the Cleveland Guardians, hit 124).  Instead of waiting for a shot over the wall, St. Louis followed a strategy widely called Whiteyball, built around sound defense, solid pitching, and, above all, speed.  It wasn’t at all unusual for the Cards to string together a walk, a stolen base, a sacrifice fly, and a squeeze bunt, putting themselves on the scoreboard without ever getting a base hit.  Cardinal broadcaster Mike Shannon described playing the Cards this way: “You think you’re just getting a few mosquito bites, and all of a sudden your head falls off.”

I loved this aggressive style of play.  I still do, though you don’t often see it these days.  Even before Herzog arrived in St. Louis, my favorite player was Lou Brock.  Brock was a member of the elite 3,000 hit club,

My Lou Brock shrine

but more importantly to me, he was perhaps the greatest stolen base artist who ever lived (I know what the stats say, and I hear some of you yelling the name Rickey Henderson, to which I reply, with a dismissive curl of my lip, that I am familiar with his work).  Brock was retired by 1982, but his aura still hung over the team.

In Bull Durham, veteran catcher Crash Davis tells young pitcher Nuke LaLoosh to stop trying to strike everybody out: “Strikeouts are boring.  Besides that, they’re fascist.”  I have similar feelings about the home run.  It can be spectacular, but it’s an individual feat, a single player imposing his will on the game rather than a team working together.  Once the ball leaves the bat, there’s nothing to watch except the hero jogging around the bases.  Give me, instead, a battle of wits between a pitcher and a speed demon on first who keeps edging a couple inches closer to second.  Give me a well-executed hit and run, the ball squeaking under the glove of a second baseman pulled out of position.  Give me a beautifully placed bunt trickling along just inside the foul line, the runner charging from third, the bang-bang play at the plate (and no review via replay, thank you very much). And, what the hell, give me the best defensive shortstop who ever lived doing a backflip as he runs to his position, just for the sheer joy of it.

Ozzie Smith on his way to work

At its heart, Whiteyball is built on a simple idea: make something happen.  If you stand at the plate just waiting to hit a home run, you’re going to fail more often than you succeed.  Often you’ll strike out and turn around to trudge back to the bench.  But if you get a couple of guys on base and just manage to put the ball in play, all kinds of things start to occur.  Aggressive baserunning has caused more than a few defenses to utterly fall apart, after all.  In Whiteyball, every runner and every ball put into play has the potential to bring in a run.  Every pitch becomes a test of strategy and improvisation.  For me, at least, it’s a style that’s a heck of a lot more fun to watch–and it looks like a heck of a lot more fun to play, too.

Which brings me, finally, back to writing.  When I read about Herzog’s passing, and thought fondly back to the way his team played, it occurred to me that make something happen is a pretty accurate description of the way I approach writing, on a couple of levels.

First, on a macro level, I feel like my focus on writing short stories has a certain affinity with the principles of Whiteyball.  A novel, in this possibly tortured analogy, would be a three-run homer.  Instead of building my fiction-writing campaign around that, I’m going for the equivalent of bloop singles, stolen bases and drag bunts: short stories in magazines and anthologies, as many as I have the time and imagination to produce.  For me, at least, it’s more fun, just as Whiteyball was more fun than, say, watching Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa turn games into steroid-fueled home run derbies.  Every story I send out is putting a ball in play–and you never know what might result.

As a career strategy, it seems to be working out.  I’m enjoying the hell out of writing, seeing my name in a fair number of publications and, hey, getting invited to be a SleuthSayer is kind of like being called up to The Show, right?

Words of Wisdom from Bull Durham

Make something happen is also a pretty good strategy on the micro level–that is, within the world of each story.  When you’ve got five thousand words (and sometimes a lot less) to work with, there’s only so much space you can spend on passages of introspection and detailed description.  Those things have their place, of course, but, most of the time, it’s action and incident that drive the story forward and keep the reader engaged.  When I’m working on a story and I just get stuck, I can often get unstuck by making something happen–a new character arrives, a gun goes off, a police car comes around the corner at just the wrong moment.

I’m not suggesting that Whitey Herzog actually directly influenced the way I write. After all, I didn’t publish my first short story until thirty years after his 1982 triumph.  But I do find an affinity between his style of baseball and my style of writing, and I think the central idea is one that can be helpful to any writer–and indeed, in a lot of areas of life.

When in doubt, make something happen.

RIP, Whitey, and thanks for some of the greatest moments of my childhood.

(And now a word from our sponsor: if you're interested in my most recent effort to make something happen, check out today's release of Black Cat Weekly #143, which includes my story "Sunrise at the Moonshine Palace." Thanks to BCW editor and fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman for selecting this tale of music and murder!)