The 7 Lives of Léa

7½ months or more ago, Rob and I wrote about an unusual English manor mystery, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Much of the surrealism comes from what we’re not told. We’re given damned little in framing and a backstory.

Compared to the British title, The 7 Deaths… both Rob and I prefer the American variation, The 7½ Deaths. The novel left an impression– Four years after publication, I’m still yakking about it. But this isn’t about that.

The 7 Lives…

When NetFlix presented a French miniseries, The 7 Lives of Léa, based on the novel, Les 7 vies de Léo Belami by Nataël Trapp, I couldn’t help comparing. Like 7½ Deaths, each day the protagonist in 7 Lives finds herself jumping from one body to another, trying to learn what is happening, trying to figure out who killed Ismael, a nearly forgotten boy thirty years earlier.

Think of it as a French episode of The Twilight Zone.

Raïka Hazanavicius as Léa

Conceptual Issues

Hard sci-fi proudly embraces the physics of its world, whether real-life or a well-defined fictional model, the science in science fiction. Time travel novels and films may or may not succeed in the redefined reality of their new world. Laws of physics disallow a traveller meeting a past or future version of himself. A traveller must be careful not to alter his ancestral line that might preclude his own birth… while sometimes trying to disrupt the lineage of an adversary.

The average time travel story earns perhaps a C. I’ll award Léa a B-/C+, reasonable for the tale in question. It doesn’t pretend to be more than it is.

The 7 Lives of Léa follows a recent pattern of recasting male leads as female. Some reimagining works better than others. Without having read the book, I felt comfortable with a heroine instead of a hero. And indeed, the story zeroes in on unsung heroism.

The multi-generation actors of 7 Lives seemed to have been cast while wearing blindfolds. Virtually no teenage character resembles its much older adult version, which made it trickier to track the plot.

Léa manages to squeak past a couple of incestuous make-out close calls. Perhaps the funnest part, so to speak, occurres when she lands in the body of Pye (Pierre-Yves), the town’s rich kid, who’s not only popular but a snobbish bully. Léa alters the timeline to make a clumsy fool of him (with the result of making him somewhat endearing), but hooks him up with Jennifer, the school’s picked-on homely girl. Time travel should be built for anti-bullying alone.

Although a suspected murder is involved, The 7 Lives of Léa isn’t truly crime fiction, but it is an enjoyable journey into an imagination Rod Serling would have been proud of.

Time Share

I have a story in the June issue of Mystery Weekly Magazine, and for that I must thank Barb Goffman, who was my inspiration.  Sort of.

I came up with the idea and the title for the story decades ago but I couldn't see a market for it so I never bothered to write it.  Then, last year, Barb announced that she was going to edit an anthology called Crime Travel, featuring crime-related tales of time travel.

And I realized my old idea fit. Sort of. It was about a physicist who hoped to invent time travel, only to discover that that is impossible - however, it turned out that he could travel through an apparently infinite number of universes.

I asked Barb if that concept might fit in her book, and she said it might.  So I wrote the story.  And Barb rejected it, as she had every right to do.

But heck, I had my story now.  Might as well look for a market.  Mystery Weekly Magazine had published one of my stories last year, a tale with a science fiction bent.  So I sent it to them and voila.  Decades after it was first dreamed up, "In Praise of my Assassin" is available now for your reading pleasure.

It's about time.

Life on Mars

Life on Mars is another one of those oddball Brit TV shows you come across from time to time. It ran in the UK from 2006-2007, and then fell off the radar, although David Kelley produced a short-lived American remake, and there were Spanish, Russian, and Czech versions. Later on, the original creative team developed the sequel Ashes to Ashes, which BBC One broadcast from 2008 to 2010.

I came to Life on Mars backwards, by way of an entirely different series called Island at War, about the WWII German occupation of the Channel Islands. Island at War had a high-powered cast, for those of you familiar with British TV - Clare Holman, Saskia Reeves, James Wilby, Laurence Fox, along with a guy who hadn't caught my eye before, Philip Glenister. The show's a little reminiscent of Foyle's War, because of the period, for one, but also the slightly off-center POV. The crushing weakness of Island at War is that it stops dead after six episodes (it apparently didn't pull in enough audience share), so what happens to these characters we've become invested in can never be resolved. They're marooned, foundlings, lost from view. The fates we imagine for them go unsatisfied.

What's a boy to do? I went looking for more Philip Glenister. There's a fair bit of it, he's got a solid list of credits, and as luck would have it, the first thing to turn up on my researches was Life on Mars, two sets, eight episodes each. I could see heartbreak ahead yet again, but I took the plunge.

Here's the premise. The hotshot young DCI, rising star Sam Tyler, is knocked flat by a hit-and-run, and when he wakes up, the time is out of joint. It's thirty-odd years in the past. 1973. Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Mott the Hoople. There are basically three alternatives. Sam has actually traveled back in time? Um. He's stark raving nuts? Could be. Or is this all a figment of his imagination, because in the real world, his own world, he's in a hospital bed in Intensive Care, in a coma? Which is what Sam decides to believe. He's hearing voices, having hallucinations. He must be elsewhere, if he's somehow generating this fiction, this vivid alternative reality.

And into this vivid fiction swaggers Philip Glenister, playing the juiciest part in the show, DCI Gene Hunt, the 'guv,' or as the local Manchester accent has it, Dee-See-AH Hoont. Life in Mars, see, is a police procedural, but the era of Hawaii Five-O, if not Barney Miller. In point of fact, what Sam wakes up to is a cop shop filtered through a TV sensibility. There's enough "Book 'em, Dan-o" to go around, and a grab-bag of generic conceits, but the characters play both into and against type - at the same time - which keeps you guessing. Glenister certainly plays Hunt as larger than life, and Hunt is often shot from a lower camera angle. He looms. Glenister voices him at a rough pitch, too, so he seems more villain, in the Brit sense, than copper. Which makes the moments when he unbends all the more affecting. Hunt isn't confessional, he doesn't admit his vulnerabilities, you'd never catch him getting teary. Sam puts a sympathetic hand on the guv's shoulder in a scene, and Hunt shrugs it off. "Don't go all Dorothy on me," he says.

I'm showing my own hand here, because one of the guilty pleasures in watching Life on Mars is its gleeful political in-correctness. The coarse jokes, the raw vocabulary, the constant smoking - somebody's always lighting a cigarette or putting one out, it's a signature. Less comfortable is the casual violence. The lack of self-discipline is itself corrupting. This isn't a subtext, either, it's front and center, woven into the fabric. I might be reading the signs too closely. Then again, the reason a show like this strikes a nerve, and creates brand loyalty, is because it reflects some hidden thing or open secret, whether it's played for laughs or not. Life on Mars doesn't take itself too seriously, but it invites our complicity.

What, then, accounts for its extended shelf life? People keep discovering or rediscovering the show, the sixteen episodes of those two seasons out on DVD. (Ashes to Ashes, the sequel, is only available so far on Region 2, which makes it more or less out of reach in the U.S. Get a clue, guys, this is a neglected market.) For one, maybe I haven't made it plain that Life on Mars is extremely funny. Sometimes it's gallows humor, sometimes pure burlesque. For another, the cast is terrifically engaging. Glenister owns DCI Hunt, but John Simm as Sam Tyler is the tentpole character. And counter-intuitively, maybe we don't want all those loose ends tied up, everything unambiguous, the answers packaged and portion-controlled. Always leave them waiting for more.

Best New TV Show of the 2016-17 TV Season

There are a lot of new TV shows this year, and while I haven't seen them all, I am staking my claim here and now: NBC's Timeless is the best new TV show of this season. And I am not alone in this belief.
What is Timeless? It's hard to believe I need to pose this question, but I know I do. Not everyone has heard of, much less seen, this great show.

Timeless is an hour-long drama involving time travel. (Don't stop reading if you don't like sci fi. This is worth it!) The show begins with a so-called bad guy, Garcia Flynn (played by Goran Visnijic), stealing a newly invented time machine and going into the past to change history so he can keep his late wife and children from being murdered. For reasons that are explained as the season goes on, Flynn's quest requires killing a number of famous people in the past in an attempt to stop a powerful secret organization called Rittenhouse, which aims to change the past to control the future. The government has a second time machine, and it sends a team of three to follow Flynn each time he jumps, trying to stop him from hurting people and changing the past.

Each episode showcases different famous historical times and figures. The main "good guy" is Lucy Preston (played by Abigail Spencer), a whip-smart historian. Her backup, Wyatt Logan (played by Matt Lanter), is a military guy with his own reasons to want to change the past. Rounding out their trio is Rufus Carlin (played by Malcolm Barrett), also super smart, who is a scientist and the only one who knows how to drive the time machine.

I heard someone ask if Timeless is a reinvented Quantum Leap. That's a big no. Nothing against Quantum Leap, but that show from the 1980s was highly episodic; it didn't have the overarching storyline that ties every episode of Timeless together.

So what makes Timeless so great? Let's count the ways. I interviewed a few friends who love the show, and I'll share their and my thoughts below.

Time Travel

First of all, time travel is interesting and cool and fun. You just have to say time travel, and I'm intrigued. But so many time travel shows follow what fans of Star Trek might know as the Temporal Prime Directive: don't change the past; don't tell anyone in the past about the future or else it may be changed. In Timeless, the good guys believe in the concept of the Temporal Prime Directive (though they don't use that name), but they don't succeed in following it, and that has interesting ramifications. Imagine if the Hindenburg didn't catch fire, as happened in the pilot. Or if Eliot Ness didn't get to take down Al Capone. And imagine if changing these events in the past changed the personal lives of our main characters in the present. Lucy returns from the past in the pilot episode to find that the sister she's had all her life has now never existed. She's determined to change the past again to bring her sister back.

"I was kind of meh on the first episode," author Janet Halpin said. "But when they actually changed history with no do-over (the Hindenburg lands, no fire!), I was all in."

Fan Michaela Shannon-Sank agreed. "I love Timeless! It's a classic time travel plot with a twist--when things are changed in the past, they stay changed in the present. I was at first confused about it. Like, really? They're seriously rewriting history? The Hindenburg? But it works, and it works well."

One reason it works well is the show's writers really know how to draw the viewer in. This isn't a show just for people who like time travel. It's a show for people who like history and complex characters and romance and angst. Yep, it has it all.

History

As the good guys follow Flynn into the past, they go from one historical episode to another, giving viewers a glimpse into the past--the people, the dress, the limitations, and the real history (until it gets changed). Thinking about the Al Capone episode, author Sherry Harris said, "I've learned something new in every episode. Al Capone had an estranged brother who was a cop? Wow!"

Friend Meghan Gray agreed. "The dramatization of historical events is what we are enjoying. Particular favorites are the Lone Ranger and the NASA plots." In the latter, the characters travel to Houston, Texas, in 1969 and interact with African-American mathematician Katherine Johnson. "I love that they are putting people who have been erased from these stories back into the narrative," Gray said.

Even the characters get excited by history--learning it and participating in it. Lucy goes all fangirl when she meets Abraham Lincoln and his son. In another episode Rufus is excited to learn that the Lone Ranger was black (as he is). When the trio team up with the Lone Ranger (identified as Bass Reeves), Rufus excitedly says to Wyatt, "We are in a posse with the Lone Ranger!" And when they all team up with Eliot Ness, Rufus says quietly, "We are so the Untouchables right now." The show has pop culture references weaving throughout the episodes that add an extra element of fun.

Complex Characters

But the show is more than fun. It has complex characters, which in turn results in angst and big questions. Wyatt is a soldier. He is trained to follow orders and do the right thing, but he is compelled to try to change the past when the opportunity presents itself. His wife was murdered a few years back, and he'd do anything to fix it, no matter the cost. It's a good way to encourage the audience to consider if the ends really can justify the means.

Rufus's race figures into several of the episodes. In the pilot, he's not too keen to start on these adventures, saying, "I am black. There is literally no place in American history that'll be awesome for me." Harris remembered watching that scene with her daughter, Elizabeth, and said that Rufus's take on time travel was Elizabeth's favorite part. "It really puts things into perspective for both of us," Harris said.

But it's not just the good guys who are conflicted. In another episode, Flynn goes back to the beginning of the Rittenhouse conspiracy, during the Revolutionary War. He could save the future, he believes, by killing a certain child. He'd hate to do it, but he would. In the meanwhile, Lucy has come to believe Flynn is right--but she won't let him take that drastic step. We see Flynn struggle throughout the episodes. In one, he sits in church for hours, seeking absolution. In other episodes, he tries to show Lucy how the people she works for aren't really all that good after all and he's not a bad guy. Rather, he's trying to right history, not ruin it.

"I love that the lines start getting blurred between saving history/doing what's right/self-interest," said fan Abby Fabian. "I also love the character Flynn, because even though he is the 'bad guy,' he's also a 'good guy,' which can make things confusing for Lucy, Rufus, and Wyatt."

"I don't know about anybody else," Shannon-Sank said, "but I completely sympathize with Garcia [[Flynn]] and would be actively helping him. Except for his killing so many people."

Of course.

"As a writer," Harris added, "I admire how much I care about the characters. I root for them, feel sad with them, and get scared for them. I hate the villains and every week I can't wait for the next episode. It's what every writer hopes they can do in their own writing."

Love and Romance

For those who love a little love in their stories, don't worry. Timeless has this too. We see characters risk their lives for others who they love or grow to love--friends and family. We see sparks growing between Lucy and Wyatt. We see romance bloom between Rufus and Jiya, a computer programmer with whom he works. And as a bonus for the viewer, all these actors are "easy on the eyes," as Harris said.

But perhaps the thing that stands out the most to those of us who loved history in school is that the star of this story is Lucy, a woman who is the brains of every episode, who figures out what Flynn is up to each time he jumps, who knows the history in an instant, and who can figure out how to try to save the future by saving the past. Perhaps Halpin said it best: "a freaking HISTORIAN is the one who saves the day."

What's Next?

I'm thinking about Timeless as I write this on Monday night because it should be on at 10 p.m. Eastern time. That's it's normal time. But the show had its season finale last week. Yep, that's pretty early in the TV season. Timeless is on the bubble, I understand. And NBC needs a push to keep it on. That's where we come in. If you love this show, join the Facebook Timeless page. Every follower pumps up the show's credentials. And tweet about it too. Tell NBC to #savetimeless. And if you haven't seen it yet, you can stream the entire season. It's well worth your time. Every viewer helps.

Shannon-Sank summed things up well, saying the show "is so well written and acted and I hope so hard that it gets renewed and lasts for many, many seasons. I mean, they have a lot of things to set straight."

If you love Timeless, please share your favorite parts in the comments. Maybe someone at NBC will read this. #SaveTimeless!

They Call Me a Literary Slut

"The Princess Bride with Sex” or Why I Write Wacky Time Travel (in addition to respectable crime)

I am best known as a writer of comic crime capers, and in particular The Goddaughter series (Orca Books).  However, I also have a second life as an author of racy fantasy…the sort of thing that has been called “OUTLANDER meets Sex and the City.”

This has gotten me the rep of being labeled a 'literary slut,' in that I 'write around' in a lot of genres.

Why?  Why would a moderately respectable crime author swap genres and write a wacky time travel series, set in Arizona and Alternate-world Great Britain?

1.  I like Arizona.  Especially in winter.  You can fly nonstop there from Toronto.
(Whoops – delete, delete.  Of course, the real reason for using Arizona is I believe in accuracy of setting and doing research, which I take great pains to do once each year in February.) 


2.  I like Great Britain.  And I like to be accurate.  But you can’t travel to medieval Great Britain right
now, at least not on WestJet. (WHY doesn’t someone invent a cheap time travel airline?)  So I can’t be accurate, which bugs me a lot.  But I can be silly, which is almost as good.  Hence, Alt-world.


3.  My cousin Tony’s family, the Clegg-Hills, used to own a Norman castle in Shropshire.  Unfortunately it burned down in 1556.  Damned careless of them.  I had to make up what it would look like from family stories, which are probably dubious at best, and vaguely criminal, on reflection.  Also, I hate being sued. Hence, Alt-world.


4.  Fessing up, here.  I actually didn’t mean to write funny time travel.  I meant to write a serious whodunit that would get the respect of the Can-Lit crowd, and the more erudite members of Crime Writers of Canada.  This ‘veering from plan’ is becoming a nuisance.  Next book, for sure, will be a serious whodunit.  Okay, maybe a whodunit.  Okay, maybe a book.


5.  Okay, I lied.  The serious whodunit turned into a wacky mob comedy series that has won a Derringer and an Arthur.  Still no respect from the Can-Lit crowd.  So I might as well go back to writing wacky time travel.

Why?  ‘Cause it’s a hell of a lot of fun being a literary slut.

Are you a literary slut?  Confession time!  If you write in more than one genre, let us know in the comments.

Flash Update: The Land's End Trilogy featured in this blog started charting on Amazon this week, and on Thursday made the overall Amazon Top 100 Bestseller list, at no. #47!  Author is faint~ 

Land's End Trilogy ("OUTLANDER meets SEX AND THE CITY" Vine review) is on sale for a ridiculous 99cents this weekend!  If you were ever curious about her 'other life'...'nuf said. 

Amazon link