Have You Seen This Book?

PBY Catalina

I once read a wonderful non-fiction book about a man who flew early seaplanes -- including the PBYCatalina . Though, due to his nationality, I believe he called it a Canso in his book.

He didn't start out in a PBY, however. Suffering from malaise brought on by his experience as a pilot (fighter pilot, I think) in WWI, he bought a small second-hand seaplane. He also purchased a tent, packing it and his few belongings into this fragile, floating biplane built of canvas stretched across a light wood frame. I suspect the plane may have looked a bit like the one of those below.

This work was autobiographical, you see, and the man who wrote it lived in Australia or New Zealand. I’m not sure he was originally FROM that down-under portion of the world; he may have been born and raised in England, or one of the other Commonwealth countries. I’m afraid I just don’t remember. I read the book too long ago. But, I know he knocked-around there after the war.

He and his dog spent a few years flying that tiny, wood and fabric seaplane from secluded inlet to unoccupied small bay, around Australia or New Zealand, sometimes venturing to a deserted island or two. They’d fly in, and he’d anchor the plane off an empty beach, fishing for food, camping on the coastline, playing with his dog, staying for a day, a few days, maybe a week or two before moving on.
He rigged a rod on a spring, which he dropped down to hang vertically from the side of the fuselage when landing at night. He called this “my fishing pole,” and used it to gauge his altitude above the waves when landing during low vision conditions—not a stupid guy. When he needed fuel or foodstuffs he couldn’t scavenge, he’d land in a harbor and find work to supply the funds he needed to keep going.

His was a happy vagabond’s lifestyle during that time, chosen in order to escape the bonds of gravity, freeing him from the earth and worldly cares. An antidote to civilization, we might say. Though, to him—and I don’t believe he ever states this outright—I think it proved an antidote to the mechanized mayhem he’d witnessed on the battlefields of Europe. A sort of mental pressure relief valve, perhaps. He took the one, really good thing he’d gotten from the war: his knowledge of aviation. And he used it to erect a gateway to the rest of his life.

He and his dog bummed around the world down under, until he was approached by a fellow looking to build a new airline there. Then, he began flying for pay, charting flyways across the continent and to local islands, with his boss, later flying passengers and freight along the routes they’d laid down.

As I mentioned, I read the book several years ago. But, if memory serves me right, that airline job didn’t last too long, before he was tapped to fly anthropologists, geologists, geographers and other explorers among the islands of the south Pacific. His flying and navigational knowledge soon led to
his being asked to staff aircrews trying to set new distance records, or connect spots on the globe by air for the first time. I believe he even helped scout and establish the routes Pan American would use for their trans-Pacific flying boat service.

In truth: His writings came as an unexpected, and extremely pleasant surprise to me: an aviation book, written by an aviator, filled with technical information presented in an exciting manner, because this technical data was all part and parcel with the decades of flying adventures described in his narrative.

Over time, he found himself at the controls of larger, more expensive and more powerful flying boats, capable of covering much longer distance between refueling. I think he even wound up flying several of the early PBY models during this time, such as the aircraft in the photo on the left.

He worked with others, setting distance records, or making first-time flights between remote, tiny specs of land dotted among the vast enormity of the indifferent Pacific Ocean. An ocean known for devouring even the bones of many adventurers, swallowing them whole into its mysterious depths, leaving only a question mark to float through history. His was not a boring life.

When WWII came along, he volunteered for the air corps, and was stationed in Nova Scotia, or
Iceland, or somewhere like that, flying PBY’s on search and rescue and anti-submarine patrols. After the war, he returned to the south Pacific, helping to set records by flying between South America and Pitcairn Island and Australia—places like that at least. I no longer remember most of the details.

I recall, however, that at one point, while crewing a PBY on a distance record flight over the ocean, they suddenly ran into a problem. They couldn’t transfer oil from one engine to the other, and one of their engines needed more oil, or it would soon burn out. He pulled the short straw, and thus—in mid-flight!—had to climb out onto one of the angular struts holding the wing up. 

This photo shows the angular wing struts on the PBY pretty well.

There, he tapped that engine’s oil pan and filled a can with oil. Then he struggled back inside the fuselage, clambering back out on the other side to partially fill the other engine’s empty oil pan. This process had to be repeated several times, during the flight.

Can I vouch for the veracity of such an occurrence? How could I? I have no idea if such a thing would be possible. The way he wrote it, however, I could feel his sheer terror while out on that wing strut, frigid wind whipping his hair and clothing, making his eyes water, the vast unforgiving Pacific yawning far below his tightly grasping feet and hands as the wind whipped the oil everywhere, turning the strut slick between his fingers. Yet, he presented the information almost as if saying: “Well, you know, that’s the sort of thing you had to do back then. It was just a job.” In sum, I wound up believing his story completely. I don’t doubt it at all—impossible as it may sound.

I learned a lot from this book.

I learned that the way to look for an island in all that empty ocean, was not search for the invisibly small speck of land, but to look for the clouds that always rose up over land in the middle of the sea. These clouds were the flag that spoke of the islands below, and a good pilot listened with his eyes to what they told him.

So too, he knew the proper sound and feel of his aircraft, the way I know the sound and feel of my wife’s car or my jeep. When something went wrong, he could hear it, feel it through the controls, as if the plane were a living thing in his hands. He spoke of the gauges, and what they meant—usually when describing what he suspected had gone wrong with the plane, nearly always when they couldn’t land.

I learned that seaplanes, flying boats, can’t land on the open ocean. Not really. Not without running a high risk of coming to grief. The swells of the open sea are just too much for a seaplane to take, on landing. Instead, landing requires a bay or inlet, some stretch of water protected from such high seas, so the surface is calmer, flatter, smoother, giving the aircraft a much better chance of staying in one piece during the touch-down impact.

As I say, this book taught me a lot. But, much of it has fallen out of my memory over the years. And, now, I find I need this technical information he shared.

Unfortunately, I can’t find the book! The library I checked it out of, says it was almost never borrowed (a truly sad fact imho—It’s a glorious read!), so they sold it for probably around 50-cents. 

I’ve Googled and searched and tried library sites. But, I don’t know the title or author. I’ve even tried looking up the names of men who crewed aircraft on record-breaking runs in the south Pacific—all to no avail.

So, if you, or someone you know, happens to recognize the book I’ve described, and you can give me any info that would help me find it again, I’d really appreciate it.

You can just place the information in the comments section. I’ll have my notification button turned on.  So, even if you’ve stumbled across this post years after I’ve put it here, please leave me any info you have: I’ll get an email notification that you’ve posted here.

Thanks! And, I hope the rest of you have gotten some little something out of this post.

See you in two weeks,
--Dixon

15 Tips For Writing Your Novel With An Exotic Setting

By Jenni Gate 

Note: friend and colleague Jenni Gate (who does both mystery and travel-writing) is pinch-hitting for me in my regular spot in the Sleuthsayers line-up today. Her subject: exotic locations in fiction writing–a timely subject during high vacation season! I'll be back in two weeks with my regular helping of half-baked ideas, sentence fragments, and poor spelling. In the mean-time, enjoy! –Brian

"To either side of the long-tail boat, dark and mysterious mangrove swamps shrouded

their secrets from view. The long-tail boat driver hefted an elongated pole with an antique, four-cylinder Fiat engine sputtering to life at the end over the back of the narrow vessel into restless water. Engines roared as diesel fumes and greasy, choking smoke billowed, launching our craft into the murky, gray-green Andaman Sea. It was a wet day to tour James Bond Island, known as God’s Nail to the Thai people. I should have listened to the ironic gut-ache I felt when I boarded the boat, its blue, green and yellow-patterned colors dimmed by dark, angry skies. Asian coastal monsoons whipped wind, rain, and frothy salt water into my face. I felt alive, yet exposed, the weather mirroring my turmoil. Like the other tourists on board, I snapped photos through a fogged lens of karst mountains rising from the sea, their limestone facades like candle-wax dripping over temples hidden deep within gloomy jungle caverns below. As we sped towards the island, I noticed the long-tail boat driver, thin, dark brows lowered over his anguished face. He searched the swamps to either side, their hidden waterways a perfect hiding place for modern-day pirates in the Strait of Malacca."

The place described in the piece quoted above: James Bond Island

Writing a story set in an exotic location is challenging. Too many details, and we risk losing our reader; too few, and we fail to anchor a reader into the world of our story. An opening paragraph needs to set the scene and give a sense of time and place, yet push the action forward. Our reader needs to know that the exotic setting is as integral to the story as the plot and characters. In stories where the setting is common or familiar, fewer details may be needed to set the scene. In fantasy novels and in mysteries set in uncommon locations, we need to hook our reader while threading details and references into setting descriptions to place the reader deep into the scene.

A childhood growing up overseas without TV and reading mysteries for entertainment led me to notice when a setting in a novel did or did not ring true, based on my own experience of a place. Get the details wrong, and a multi-cultural reader will notice.

Here are a few tips for setting your story in an exotic location:

1.     Know how to pronounce the name of the place, the names of people, and common objects in the setting. In news stories and books on tape, it grates to hear Kabul pronounced as Ka-Buwl, sahib pronounced as sa-heeb, Celtic pronounced as Seltic. If you write about a place, you should know how it is pronounced locally. It will come through in your writing.

2.     With exotic locations, including fantasy locations, maps can help orient a reader to the setting of the world of the story. Whether it is a map of a world or a map of a floor plan, consider including one or some either within or appended to your story.

3.     Research the people, culture, and subcultures of the location. Interactions between subcultures and counter-cultures with the main culture of a place are ripe with conflict for your story. Another source of potential conflict is when your protagonist is an outsider to the culture. If people in the setting are closed in outlook and limited in their experience of others, your character could have a challenge learning how to maneuver this new world. If people are open and friendly there are still clashes of culture, customs, and belief systems that can play turmoil with your character’s goals. Remember that what may be exotic to you as a writer is home to the people who live there. Knowing traditions and cultural norms, and understanding how those systems affect the daily lives of the people living there may help you find the elements necessary to craft a story with universal appeal.

4.     Know the history of a place and thread those historical details and references into setting descriptions to give the reader a deep sense of setting, layered with meaning. This works in fantasy settings as well. In Game of Thrones, for instance, frequent references to historical events and to legacies of the various family lines add meaning to the actions of the characters and provide a sense of their birthright.

5.     Setting impacts different people in different ways. Know your character before setting a scene in that character’s point of view. To write the paragraph at the beginning of this post, I created in my mind a character full of secrets who is ripe for an adventure. A romance novel with a wistful protagonist looking for love, would focus on the romantic elements of the setting instead. The details you choose to include should have something to do with the point of view character and the genre of the story. Setting also impacts characters in different ways when they are under pressure or out of their element. This can be a source of instant conflict.

6.     Any setting is exotic to someone who has never been there. Sometimes a fresh description of a well-known location can make a common setting exotic again.

7.     When researching your location, remember that photographs you may find on the internet or in a book can’t show the temperature or humidity or the insect life of a place. For example, on a recent trip to Thailand, my husband and I took hundreds of photographs. None showed the smothering effect of the heat and humidity, how simple actions became more difficult in that environment. All around us, ants of different sizes scurried everywhere. When we noticed a bright orange beetle at an elephant camp in the jungle, our guide vigorously stomped on it. He showed us a scar on his neck and said the beetle exudes an acid that eats through skin and gets infected in the muggy heat. Details like these can be used to add depth and texture to the theme and to the world of the story.

8.     Comparisons of an exotic setting with the more familiar settings of a character’s home can provide conflict as well as an emotional appeal to the reader. A character who is homesick and feeling isolated and distant from his or her family will experience a location differently from a character who has adapted to the place and feels at home among its people. Choose the details that mirror the emotions of the character or foreshadow the plot or theme. As with any story, don’t over-describe a palm tree if that tree will have nothing to do with the storyline. Unless your character is going to hide behind the tree, the reader does not need to know every detail about it. The details you choose to include, woven into the action of the story, help bring the scene alive. A list of setting details will lose your reader and distance them from the world of the story.

9.     Determine the purpose of a scene before adding exotic details. The details chosen to flesh out the setting should progress the goals of the scene, whether it is to advance the action of the story, highlight theme, or move a character from one location to another. A refugee forced to hide under a pile of snake skins to cross a border in the open back of a cargo truck will notice specific details such as the stench of the skins, the thick or smooth quality of the scales, and will know what type of poison her guards dipped their spears into. A tourist crossing the same border would notice other details such as how old the border guards are, the red tape required to cross, how close the guards scrutinize the vehicles and the individuals crossing at any given time. The details chosen for your scenes should mirror the characters’ emotions, expand the theme, and add tension to the story. Details set the mood, help the reader see the setting, and further the plot.

10.  To help anchor the reader in an exotic setting, sprinkle in similes and metaphors so that there are comparisons to what the reader may know of their own world.  

11.  Use all five senses, if possible, in each scene. The scent of Thai chilis cooking can make your character’s eyes water, choke their sinuses and fill the air with an unforgettable aroma. If your character’s respiratory system is in full reaction, coughing and sneezing from the pepper scent, they may not notice an attacker enter the room.

12.  Themes that can be paired with exotic locations include environmental themes such as deforestation, development, resources, exploitation. Conflict of indigenous populations with modern ones. Lifestyles vs. traditions. Fragile ecosystems, natural and un-natural boundaries and limits, blurred and disrupted borders. Ruins and crumbling structures contrasting with a jungle as a labyrinth. Mysterious creatures, monsters, spirits, enigmatic figures with supernatural powers. Found artifacts and gems, special objects. Dread, fear, darkness, horror, contrasted with awe, wonder, peace, and acceptance.

13.  Identification between a reader and the story is crucial. A familiar element to the story may help maintain a connection. If the setting is too different, or what happens in the plot is too shocking, readers may disconnect. Just as showing the photos of your last foreign trip to friends may cause their eyes to glaze over, readers may get bored if they don’t feel a connection or have a reason to care about the exotic setting and the lives of the characters in it. A shocking experience such as a coup, riot, or war, can be difficult for someone who has never left the U.S. to relate to. Our readers may understand the experience of a soldier in these situations to some extent, given that many Americans have either served in the military or know friends or family members who have served. Most Americans have no frame of reference for empathizing with a civilian caught in that sort of violence. There is a fine balance in the telling of these experiences. Careful selection of the details that will make a connection to keep our readers with us must be made early and kept in mind throughout the story.

14.  Be careful of making assumptions that may seem biased, racist, or offensive to a reader who is native to your chosen location. Be wary of using your setting as a backdrop for the bizarre or irrational as this has become a cliché in stories with exotic settings.

15.  Finally, a thought to keep in mind as you craft your story. “We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.” Albert Camus.

The mantra to write what you know about the emotions and motivations of human nature still apply, but it is possible to write about an unusual location just with careful research. A setting your protagonist is unfamiliar with immediately puts the character under some level of stress. An exotic setting can be treated like a character in your story, its characteristics naturally generating conflict, themes, and plot.

Jenni Gate is an accomplished wanderer and aspiring writer. Born in Libya and raised throughout Africa and Asia, Jenni’s upbringing as a global nomad provided a unique perspective on life. As a child, she lived in Libya, Nigeria, the Congo, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the Washington DC area. As an adult, she has lived in Alaska, England, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Much of her work draws on her extensive experience in the legal field. Her published work includes several articles for a monthly business magazine in Alaska and a local interest magazine in Idaho. She has written several award-winning memoir pieces for writing contests. Jenni currently writes non-fiction, memoir, and fiction, drawing upon her global experiences.

To read more about Jenni's adventures around the world, visit her blog at Nomad Trails and Tales, like her page on Facebook, and follow her on Pinterest.

The Leslie Howard Mystery

by David Edgerley Gates

This is about a personal enthusiasm - although I might not be the only one, if you're into older, classic movies - and it's also a little bit about eating crow.

Leslie Howard was a big star, between the wars. He made his bones as a stage actor, and then hit the big-time when he came to Hollywood. His best-known pictures are THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, PETRIFIED FOREST, and, of course, GONE WITH THE WIND. As it happens, he hated playing Ashley Wilkes. He thought he was way too old for the part, and he remarked that when they got him in costume, he looked like "that sissy doorman at the Beverly Wilshire." Which raises the following question.

I always thought Leslie Howard was kind of effeminate. He certainly camped it up in SCARLET PIMPERNEL. But it turns out, in real life, that he was a disarming charmer, who may very well have slept with most of his leading ladies. ("I don't chase women, but I couldn't always be bothered to run away.") That languid persona he developed for the movies wasn't him at all. He was in fact an earthy kind of guy.

He was also extremely loyal to his friends. The story goes that when PETRIFIED FOREST was made into a movie, from the stage play, Warners wanted Eddie Robinson for Duke Mantee - the character based on Dillinger - but Howard held out for Bogart, because they'd done the play together. Bogart runs away with the picture, and it made him an A-list star.

Howard was deeply loyal to England, as well. He described himself as a man with two homes, America, which had made his fortune, and the UK, where he was born. When the war broke out, in 1939, he went back, and he wasn't the only one. There was a big Brit colony in Hollywood, and some of the guys who could have made a bundle, sitting the war out, went home instead and applied for active service. David Niven, for one, had been to Sandhurst, and was commissioned in the Highland Light Infantry, before he got into movies, and he got his commission back. Noel Coward, who was arguably the most famous of the Brits expats at the time, volunteered for war work, and found himself seconded to the Secret Service. All three of them wound up making propaganda pictures, too. Niven did THE WAY AHEAD, Coward wrote and directed IN WHICH WE SERVE, Leslie Howard put his shoulder to the wheel with 49th PARALLEL.

Niven and Noel Coward survived the war. Leslie Howard didn't. He was on a civil aircraft, flying to Lisbon, when the plane was shot down by German fighters over the Bay of Biscay, in 1943. There's a lot of speculation about this incident. For one thing, the Luftwaffe pilots were operating well beyond their normal patrol zone. For another, did German intelligence know Howard was aboard the plane? Evidence suggests they did. A lot of the German spy nets in Britain had been rolled up or turned, but some were still active, and it wouldn't have been that hard to get the passenger list. Howard was regarded by the Germans as a very able and dangerous propagandist for the British war effort, even possibly a covert agent. But maybe he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Knowing how he died, if not exactly why, puts a different spin on things, in retrospect. Here's where I eat crow. Maybe he really was the Scarlet Pimpernel, masquerading as a hapless fop, an exaggerated stage Englishman, languid and fey. Far from it, it appears.

What changed my mind about him is 49th PARALLEL. This is one of the many collaborations between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger - the most celebrated being THE RED SHOES - but the real muscle behind it is Leslie Howard, who takes no on-screen producer credit. In brief, here's the storyline. It's 1939, and Canada, as a Commonwealth country, has entered WWII in support of Great Britain (the US, as yet, is still sitting on the fence). A roving German sub attacks Allied shipping off the east coast of Canada, and is then hunted down and sunk, but they've left behind a landing party, sent ashore to forage. The surviving U-boat crew tries to evade pursuit, and runs all the way across Canada. Little by little, their numbers are whittled away until only one of them is left.

The trick of the movie is that the fugitive German is the common thread, although he's not sympathetic, but he meets all manner of people while he's on the run, Eskimos, Hudson Bay trappers, Hutterite farmers, Indians, you name it, and it doesn't make a dent. He's a convinced Nazi, and his exposure to these other people only hardens him in his conviction. You'd think he was on a journey of redemption, but it ain't so.

The line-up of cameos is pretty amazing. Laurence Olivier, Finlay Currie, Anton Walbrook, Glynis Johns, Raymond Massie, Leslie Howard himself. They play the characters whose lives the German interrupts, and it's no stretch to imagine Howard, as unnamed executive producer, getting them on board. What - a couple of days on the shoot, and ten minutes of screen time? Olivier, bless his heart, is terrible, phony French trapper accent and all. But when, near the end, you get to the Leslie Howard scenes, it's incredible. He plays his trademark lightweight, silly and dandyish, a sheep to be sheared, and then he suddenly turns into an Old Testament revenge figure, iron in his bones. 

So who was he, really? A shape-shifter. A guy who worked at his trade, enjoyed it enormously, and made good money at it. He once remarked that an actor can't conceal himself. He did a fair job of it, though. The mystery of Leslie Howard isn't in his self-deprecating appeal, but in what he didn't often show. The naked steel.

Friends & Influences

In the late summer of 1988, I spent a week living inside a novel. I was staying with a friend (Albert), who himself was staying with a friend (Victoria), at a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of a town that didn't seem to have anyone in it or even a name. There was a school house, closed for the summer (or maybe forever), and a general store that had a CLOSED sign in its door (also probably forever). The town was about forty minutes out of Hamilton, in a direction I couldn't tell you.

A long dirt track led up to the farmhouse through fields of corn, and Victoria's landlord, the farmer of said corn, who I never saw, apparently had a limp and only ever came to collect the rent after dark. Apparently, he'd turn up, like a character out of Dickens, clutching a lantern, his raincoat damp with the rain, even if it hadn't rained all week.

I was starting a screenplay (at that time of my life, I had wanted to be a screenwriter). Albert was writing a new play (he was a reasonably successful playwright), and Victoria was learning lines for two different upcoming productions (she was an actress). Victoria and Albert are not their real names. There was also a cat at the farmhouse, whose name I don't remember at all, and for the purposes of this telling, I'll call William Makepeace Thackeray.

Victoria and Albert were both ten years older than me; and Victoria probably a further ten on top of that. If a movie could have been made of that week, I would have cast George Sanders as Albert, Ida Lupino as Victoria, and in the part of "me" that confused-looking bystander who is always the last one to get the point and run when the foot of Godzilla slams down.

A condition of my staying over, as a guest of a guest, was to paint the living room -- in any color I liked. The farmer had left behind some leftover buckets of paint: beige and yellow. I painted the living room in a curious shade of sunshine. The front hallway, by contrast, had been painted (by Albert, a month earlier) entirely in black (walls, ceiling, and floor) and he'd trimmed it with a band of silver foil. It looked like the inside of a packet of cigarettes.

The days of that week were largely made up of writing; rehearsing, in the case of Victoria; and additionally in my case, an hour or two of painting. The evenings were given over to discussion and alcohol. Albert and Victoria were professional drinkers. I was (and still am) a mere amateur at that game. The paint fumes kept us out of the living room, and our nights were confined to the kitchen.

The kitchen was the heart of the house: a bare wood floor, off-white paint peeling off the ceiling, and a blue brick fireplace, which had been bricked up a decade earlier on account of the aged chimney being a fire risk. Irony in blue. Commanding the center of the room stood the kitchen table: a wide, worn, bare wooden artifact that had probably been in the farmhouse since it had been built (circa. 1920). It was the type of table on which you just knew a dead body had been laid out, many farmers' stubby fists had been slammed in anger, and more than one couple had made love. The kitchen was also William Makepeace Thackeray's bedroom.

Dinners were conducted like Pinter plays: non sequitur remarks and sullen pauses. Lots. Of. Pauses. With only the sound in-between of crickets in the twilight through the open window.

By the end of the first bottle, the three of us had largely returned to humanity and the conversation unfailingly moved onto the theatre. Ponderables, such as: What if Hamlet had been a decisive alpha-male? What if Martha and George had actually been happily married and really did have a son? What if Godot had turned up? And of course, memories of productions past (such as the murder mystery where the door jammed at the beginning of act two and the cast had to enter the cozy drawing room in London by coming out of the fireplace). I had my own share of those stories, having worked on and off in amateur and semi-professional theatre since I had been a kid (it was how I had come to know V and A).

On the third drunken night at the kitchen table, we got into a long discussion on narrative, and by about 3 a.m., we had drained six bottles of red and had distilled the discussion down to this: What is the most important thing in a story? Any story -- be it a play, a book, or a movie?

Moments of poetry was Victoria's response (an actor's perspective). And she backed up her claim with empirical evidence. An hour's worth of it.  

Structure was my answer. A couple of years earlier, I had embarked on a very long learning curve of story structure (I'm probably still on it) and structure at that time was foremost in my mind.

Get the hell out of my room was William Makepeace Thackeray's answer.

At around 4 a.m., Albert, who had been hitherto staring drunkenly at the bricks of the fireplace, slammed his fist down on the table. Having gotten our attention, he lit a cigarette (he already had one smoldering in the ashtray). In addition to playwright, Albert was a theatre director and, drunk or not, he knew exactly how to direct his audience.

"Characters," he said. "That's what's it all about. The characters are the only thing the audience or the reader cares about. It's the only thing they're interested in or that matters to them. They might recognize the odd passing moment of poetry, they might be peripherally aware if a plot has a solid structure, but what will stay in their minds long after the curtain closes, the end credits roll, or the book is closed, are the characters."

William Makepeace Thackeray mounted the table, strolled its length with bored indifference, examined a leftover slice of bread, and then dismounted.

Albert continued: "A story is viewed through the filter of its characters; it is only through them an audience experiences that story. It is a vicarious interaction."

I'm paraphrasing him from memory, of course, but the sentiments have long remained in my memory, to be revisited and re-examined at odd intervals. And honestly, it took me 20 years to fully appreciate what he meant. Movie director François Truffaut once said (again a paraphrase, because I don't remember exactly where I read it): What is behind the camera is not important; it's what is in front that is.

I lost contact with Albert and Victoria over the years. Albert was probably the closest I ever got to having a mentor. His knowledge slid off in chunks, and I followed him around for a while picking it up. Friends are curious things. Some stick around, some vanish. You can never tell. A great friend this year a year from now could be a distant memory. It's the friends that leave their mark, that induce changes to your sails and alter the course of your life that you never forget. Sadly, sometimes, they're not even aware they've done it.

Somebody asked Jean-Luc Godard why a character in one of his movies suddenly walks off and never makes a return appearance. He answered: Because life is like that.

Be seeing you!

www.StephenRoss.net

Sometimes

by Robert Lopresti


Sometimes when I'm writing well
All the world can go to hell
There's a tale I have to tell
Fiction front page news


Sometimes when I'm in the zone
I just want to be alone
Shut the door and cut the phone
Mingle with my muse


Sometimes when I'm deep in plot
Striking when the iron is hot
Eat or sleep, I'd rather not
Glued into my chair

Sometimes when the words flow through
Every scene is something new
Every word is bright and true
Writing's like a prayer

Sometimes dialog's a dream
Action thunders, settings gleam
Heroes dare and villains scream
Lovers meet and kiss



Sometimes when the muse won't play
I can't find a thing to say
Still I sit here anyway
Writing trash like this

Impossible Things Before Breakfast, 1

by Leigh Lundin

Before writing mysteries, I paid no attention to true crime. I thought it tabloid-lurid, the stuff of National Enquirer and its sisters. The only killer I could name was Richard Speck whose name figured prominently in Simon & Garfunkel’s chilling 7 O'Clock News / Silent Night.

Verisimilitude… When writing mysteries, I feel a responsibility to get details right– biology, criminology, psychology, and technology. Don’t believe this is as onerous as it sounds– I enjoy research and my peripatetic wanderings take many detours.

Go Ask Alice

“Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” said the White Queen.

I’ll ask you to believe only one today, maybe another next week and perhaps another later. First, try to imagine the curve of technology in the thousands of years of human history. My grandmothers and perhaps yours went from driving a horse and buggy to seeing spaceships land on the moon. I feel awed by the jaw-dropping upward progression of technical development that bridges these events.

In the world of crime, technology continues apace. Bad guys figure out ingenious ways of committing crimes and the good guys figure out new ways of solving them. It’s become part of our news and now part of our entertainment. People have come to except high-tech solutions. Not long ago, a lawyer told me that jurors are now conditioned to expect DNA and advanced technologies in the simplest of court cases.

Now that the human genome has been decoded, research presses forward unlocking the chromosomal language that create individual characteristics. We don’t yet know how genes do this, but we’ve come to know what they are. In the world of crime, that means a lot.

Criminalists once needed relatively sizable amounts of source material and once it was used up, that was it. Now microscopic specks can be replicated, 'photocopied' if you will, and tested to a far greater degree of accuracy. Some dream– or justifiably fear– testing for criminal chromosomes might become a dystopian reality. Indeed, states are moving forward in attempts to collect DNA from anyone who crosses paths with the law.

The Impossibility

Now for believing one impossible thing. Wrap your mind around this:

• Victim A is violently killed.
• Victim J is killed 3 weeks later.
• DNA evidence suggests A killed J.

Wh-h-at?

This was the conundrum that confronted British forensic scientist Dr Mike Silverman in a 1997 case: Imagine a woman found murdered; let’s call her June. The lab found DNA under her fingernails, a nearly certain sign she scratched her killer. In fact, authorities identified the murderer as ‘April’ and they had her in custody…

On ice, in the morgue.

April, the believed killer, had been murdered a few weeks before June, her supposed victim.

Excitement at identifying the DNA became consternation. How was it possible June had fresh DNA under her nails from a woman who died nearly a month earlier?

After investigations by separate investigators, police came to believe the two women not only had never met, they had nothing in common except for the London forensic laboratory and the mortuary.

System Reset

Those with training in the sciences can experience a special kind of disbelief, a crashing back to earth and sensing one’s own fallibility. A rule in science and engineering says when something goes wrong, look first to human error. Thus Dr Mike Silverman turned detective.

Could the nail samples have been mislabeled or mixed up in the lab? Dr Silverman examined the clippings with their distinctive nail varnish. They matched June’s fingernails exactly. Records showed the samples had never been checked out at the same times or by the same people. No mix up. Dr Silverman also ruled out contamination by autopsy instruments.

But wait. What about the morgue?

It turned out April’s body had been kept in the freezer during the investigation. A pathologist had taken samples of April’s nails the day before June arrived. The scissors were then routinely cleaned.

But Dr Silverman discovered the same scissors had been used to clip June’s nails. Intrigued, he wondered if cells from April had survived the cleaning and contaminated June’s samples. He tested the scissors and found DNA from three separate sources– material from three different people on supposedly clean scissors.

For the first time, researchers began to understand how powerful and sensitive DNA analysis could be. Refined DNA techniques could potentially detect the faintest touch that might leave body oils or skin cells. Criminalistics would never again be the same.

Murder at the Crime Writing Awards

Okay, I haven’t done it yet.  But I may soon.

I’m a crime author. But I'm also the Executive Director of a well-known crime writing association.  This means I am responsible for the Arthur Ellis Awards, Canada’s annual crime writing awards night, and the resulting gala banquet.

I’ve planned hundreds of special events in my career as a marketing professional.  I’ve managed conferences with 1000 people attending, scarfing down three meals a day.  Usually, we offer a few choices, and people choose what they want.  They’re pretty good about that.  People sit where they want.  Simple.

Granted, most of my events have been with lab techs, doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. 

It is not the same with authors.  Nothing is simple with authors. 

THE SEATING ARRANGEMENT

A can’t sit with B, because A is in competition with B for Best Novel.  C can’t sit with D because C is currently outselling D.  E can’t sit with F because they had an affair (which nobody knows about.  Except they do.  At least, the seven people who contacted me to warn me about this knew.) G can’t sit with H because G’s former agent is at that table and they might kill each other.  And everyone wants to sit with J.

THE MENU

The damned meal is chicken.  This is because we are allowed two choices and we have to provide for the vegetarians.  We can’t have the specialty of the house, lamb, because not everyone eats lamb.  We can’t have salmon as the vegetarian choice, because some vegetarians won’t eat fish.

So we’re stuck with bloody chicken again.

P writes that her daughter is lactose intolerant.  Can she have a different dessert?

K writes that she is vegetarian, but can’t eat peppers.  Every damned vegetarian choice has green or red pepper in it.

L writes that she wants the chicken, but is allergic to onion and garlic.  Can we make hers without?

M writes that her daughter is a vegan, so no egg or cheese, thanks.  Not a single vegetarian choice comes that way.

I am quickly moving to the “you’re getting chicken if I have to shove it down your freaking throat” phase.

Chef is currently threatening the catering manager with a butcher’s knife.  I am already slugging back the cooking wine.  And by the time people get here, this may be a Murder Mystery dinner.

Postscript:
Nobody got murdered, but a few got hammered. 

John, Rob and Leigh are saying I have to introduce myself.  Here goes:

Billed as Canada’s “Queen of Comedy" by the Toronto Sun (Jan. 5, 2014,) some folks would say I’ve had a decidedly checkered past.  Don’t dig too deep.  You might find cement shoes.

My crime series, The Goddaughter, is about a wacky mob family in industrial Hamilton aka The Hammer.  This has no resemblance whatsoever to the wacky Sicilian family I grew up in.  Okay, that’s a lie.  I had to wait for certain members of the family to die before writing The Goddaughter.

My other series is racy rollicking time travel, totally scandalous, hardly mentionable in mixed company.  But I’ll mention it anyway.  Rowena Through the Wall.  Hold on to your knickers.  Or don’t, and have more fun.

The Goddaughter’s Revenge won the 2014 Derringer (US) and the 2014 Arthur Ellis Award (Canada) for Best Crime Novella.  There are seven other short story awards kicking around here somewhere.  I got my start writing comedy and seem to be firmly glued there, after 200 publications and seven novels.  But others know me as the Executive Director of Crime Writers of Canada.

www.melodiecampbell.com

The ARTHUR,
Canada's quirky and much-loved
award for Crime Writing

Taking the Fifth

Lest you become confused by the title, I should probably tell you this blog has nothing to do with the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution. That amendment has to do with the right of not talking about a particular subject which affects you in a criminal manner, whereas I am quite happy to speak about the subject at hand. And,this blog also has nothing to do with the American liquor industry's old way of bottling intoxicating beverages by a certain volume. You'll recall that America has gone to the metric system for some measurements, thus a liter is as close as you can get to the old fifth. No, this title has to do with the editor of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine taking a second and then a third story in my Shan Army (Golden Triangle) series set in Southeast Asia.

Back on 09/27/13, my blog title was "Fist in a Series," which was a pretty bold statement at the time. My short story,"Across the Salween," was being published in the November 2013 issue of AHMM, so I wrote that blog article about the story and embedded a photo of the AHMM cover of the issue into the article. I went on to say this was the first story in the series, while the second, "Elder Brother," and the third, "On the Edge," were then setting in the editor's slush pile. Me calling this a series was a bold statement because one published story does not a series make. This item of clarification was pointed out to me by a fellow writer at the Bouchercon in Madison, Wisconsin, several years ago when we were discussing one of my earlier series set in 1850's Chechnya. He politely pointed out that I could intend to have a series, but one published story was a standalone, the second is a sequel and by the time you get a third, then you can officially call it a series.

Well, I guess this one is official now. "Elder Brother" was accepted on 02/10/14 and "On the Edge" was taken on 05/13/14. By now, you're wondering what the Fifth has to do with all this. It's because the Shan Army series is my fifth series taken by AHMM. To date, this makes thirty short stories in Alfred, all of them in one of the five series, except for the very first story. That one was a standalone and I felt like I needed something different for the next submission in an attempt to show the editor I was not merely a flash in the pan. (Since the perception of a writer is often only as good as their last story, I think I'm still working on that flash thing.)

Having only two more manuscripts ( one in my 1850's Chechnya series and one in my Holiday Burglar series) currently setting in AHMM's slush pile, I'd best get back to writing before the editorial staff forgets me. Anyone have any juicy tidbits from Chinese history in the Golden Triangle, or any other people involved in that area which would make good background for another story in the Shan Army series? Let me know. That series is still a baby and needs a couple of brothers or a sister or two.

I'll sign off with a note of trivia. Seems I was born three days from being a firecracker. Good thing my grandson is taking guitar lessons, cuz the first song he can play by heart is "Happy Birthday." I'd sing along with him, but my wife always shushes me for being off key. Think she's afraid the boy will grow up to be tone deaf if he listens to my caterwauling.

Anyway, have a great Fourth of July.

Insulus Vitae

by Eve Fisher

I've been working for quite some time with a wonderful group of women artists, called JourneyWomen, in a series of collaborative projects.  We did Altars/Shrines/Boxes one year.  My piece was called "Cache" (accent on the "e"), and looks like this from above:

What we do is, each artist (there are 12 of us) takes a basic shape/thing to start and then passes it from artist to artist, everyone adding something to the work.  "Cache" started with a doll's trunk I found at the local flea market that was extremely old.  People added dried roses; a compass; a half a dollar bill; lace; messages; playing cards, etc.  (In case you're wondering, the woman is my second-favorite portrait by Van der Weyden.)

It's an interesting project, since we all have very different personalities and very different approaches to art. Some of us are darker than others.  One thing I added to a friend's piece was this little gem, lovingly photo-shopped by yours truly, of Anubis giving a massage:

It goes with this poem:
"The Body is a Temple":

          Quiet.  Calm.  Relaxed.
          The soft hiss of candles,
          the scent of wine and bread.
          Massaging hands.  Eyes closed.
          A light scent, sweet wood, rising.
         A thread of song:
                   "You belong to me like this plot of ground
                    that I planted with with flowers
                    and sweet-smelling herbs.
                    Sweet is its stream,
                    dug by my hand."
         Deep, deep, deeper.
         So many knots to be worked out.
                   "Dug by my hand.
                    A lovely place to wander in,
                    your hand in mine.
                   The body thrives,

                   the heart exults."                       

         Heart and mind, body and soul,          

         it takes so long to be made whole.      

                   "How beautiful is your face..."

         A dog barking in the distance.             

         A cry on the horizon.                          

                   "He who is on his mountain    

                    kisses you, caresses you..."  

          Look up:  your time is come.              

                                   Eve Fisher (c) 2011    

                                                       (Verses in quotation marks adapted from Poem 2, from IIc, The Third 

                                                        Collection, Papyrus Harris 500, circa 1000 BCE.)

This year, for one of the Spirit Boats, I photo-shopped (do you see a pattern here?) a variety of islands and named them Juventa, Fortunata, Marita, Aevus and Senecta, swirling around the Mare Memoriae:

With the following explanation:

"The Insulus Vitae, the Living Islands, a/k/a the Islands of Life, are known for their ease of access and their variety, in climate, terrain, flora, and fauna.  The following are some of the islands major sites, in alphabetical order:

• The Broken Bridge
• The Cliffs of Joy
• The Caverns of Fear
• The Dancing Pool
• Heart's Desire
• Hermitage
• Mount Daybreak
• The Mountains of Longing
• The Overlook of Repose
• Passion's Peak
• The Sighing Shoals
• The Slough of Despond
• The Valley of Depression
• Vanity Falls
• Wadi Memoria

"The bewildering thing is that while these and many more sites exist, no one can confirm their exact location. Interestingly, bewilderingly, the location of each site changes with and for each visitor.  Legend says that every traveler will, at some point, reach at least one of these islands.

'Therefore pray, traveler, that thou mayest reach that most fortunate isle which is thine own.'"

Not bad advice, if I do say so myself.  

Use your words! Or don't...

by Robert Lopresti 

"But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you."  -T.S. Eliot.

I've been jotting down words and phrases in my notebook lately, mostly uses that are new to me.  I asked a few people for language that has been bumping in their ears, and added them to my list.  Tell me what you think.

It's a thing.  One day I asked my wife "When did thing become a thing?"  Oddly enough she knew exactly what I meant.  The phrase comes up most often as "Is that a thing?" And it has two meanings: Does that exist? and Has that become popular/a trend?  Ben Yagoda was able to find it used on TV in 2001 in an episode of That Seventies Show (not meaning that It dates back to the seventies, of course).  And naturally there is a website that allows you to pontificate on whether something is a thing or not.

Because grammar.  I had a hell of a time finding an article about this, largely because I didn't know what to look for.  Or should I say "Because ignorance?"  The proper term is apparently "propositional because," and it means a blog-friendly language abbreviation, the word "because" followed by a word or short phrase.  It happens because Internet.  And because attention span. 

What I couldn't find is a discussion of the way I see the expression used most often, which is as a snarky dismissal of the arguments of someone you disagree with. 

Of course, some people insist that gay marriage must be forbidden, because religion.

Our opponents feel they must violate our constitutional rights to own guns, because Columbine.

I mentioned this to my son-in-law recently and he told me it was an example of a snowclone.  So...

What the hell is a snowclone?  Glad you asked.  It is a neologism created by Glen Whitman when  Geoffrey Pullam  asked for a term for "a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers."

Let me see if I can make that clearer.  You take a phrase in common usage (especially one that has some pop culture cachet to it) and you substitute a word or two to create a new phrase.  I actually wrote about one here.   Remember Gil Scott-Heron's great song "The Revolution WIll Not Be Televised?"  Well, a quick look at the Internet informed me that:

The revolution will not be blogged
The revolution will not be webcast
The revolution will not be digitized
The revolution will not be effectively distributed
The revolution will not be sexualized
The revolution will not be plagiarized
The revolution will not be satirized
The revolution will not be copyrighted

Many more but you get the idea. 

Curated.  I'm pretty neutral on the ones above, but this one bugs me.  I keep running into stores whose merchandise is "curated."  It has become to furnishings what "artisanal" is to bread.

Whataboutery.  This one, on the other hand, I love.  I saw it once and immediately looked it up on the web.  Apparently it comes from Britain.  The Wiktionary gives it two related  meanings:

1. Protesting at hypocrisy; responding to criticism by accusing one's opponent of similar or worse faults.
2. Protesting at inconsistency; refusing to act in one instance unless similar action is taken in other similar instances.  

I'll offer a third slight variation:
      3. Protesting self-centeredness; refusing to take a complaint seriously because someone somewhere has it worse.  ("There are children starving in China...")

What follows are a list of things people have been doing to ideas lately. Most of them were reported by my friend and fellow librarian, Marian Alexander.

• Interrogating
• Privileging 
• Unpicking
• Parsing
• Honoring

Please tell me what you think of these terms, and the other ones that bug or amuse you.  As for me, I'm done.  Because bed.

Violence

Eve Fishers' recent blog titled, "Peace, the Elusive" was so thought-provoking that it has prompted me to pen something along the same lines.  In her excellent article she addressed the painful issues of both violence and it's impact, and the rage that she, herself, carries and how she deals with it.  And she deals with it in a very constructive way--she works with convicts on this very issue within prison walls.  A bold and a brave choice, in my opinion.

I can certainly relate to her anger when confronted with violence in all it's many manifestations, criminal, political, and domestic.  Violence is a baffling, terrifying, and life-changing (or ending) event for most people.  It's effects ripple outwards from its central act to touch and poison many, many lives.  It's a gift that keeps on giving.  Sometimes for generations. 

As a child, I grew up in an environment that allowed for a good deal of it.  As Eve pointed out, boys of my era were encouraged to stand up for themselves, and that often meant fighting.  And we did.  I literally cannot recall how many fist fights I was in as a kid.  The majority were fairly harmless and were mostly wrestling matches with a few punches thrown in.  Others were more serious.  This was generally because the stakes were higher--personal honor (being called a liar, or a coward, could not go unanswered), or slandered family members (things could get ugly with this one, and sometimes led to fathers duking it out in the street--no kidding).  In some instances, when friends or brothers had been beaten up in an unfair fight (two on one, older and bigger kids, ambush, rocks, etc.) a similar response was crafted and executed.  I planned, plotted, participated, and sometimes excelled in these endeavors… and I hated it.  The only time I ever felt remotely right during all this was when standing up to a bully; an older kid who was picking on me, or my friends.  Even then, I dreaded physical violence.  Yet, there seemed no end to it.

There were fights at home, fights at school, fights on the way to school; fights on the way back.  There were fights at parties, fights with friends, fights with enemies, and fights with strangers.  I was jumped walking down the street– more than once.  Being in the wrong place, with the wrong person, looking wrong, looking at someone wrong, or being friends with someone wrong, could all lead to blows.  Whether I won, or lost, I was miserable… and angry.  Fathers beat mothers and kids, siblings fought, neighborhood kids fought, and sometimes they fought kids from other neighborhoods.  Sometime there was murder.

Then, as I grew up, I realized that to a greater, or lesser, degree, that this was happening all over the world.  I remained angry. As a young man, an older friend, who would later be my son's godfather, said words to the effect of, "You can't make everything better, because you can't control everything.  It's not all about you, and doesn't depend on you.  You can only control yourself.  And that takes work, and discipline.  Just worry about making your little part of the world better, and the world will be better for it… but not perfect.  Never perfect."  He was wise, which is one of the reasons he godfathered my only son. 

Years later, long after I had been a soldier and then a police officer for many years, I found myself in the confessional telling my priest how I sometime longed to do violence against my fellow man; just as when I had been a boy.  Without going into the theological details, he offered me this: Forgive those you most don't want to forgive, and forgive yourself.  Not just because it is what we are taught as Catholics, but because it is the only thing that can set you free and give you any peace.  So long as you rage against the violence in others, you stir the violence within yourself.  Forgive, and violence starves to death.

I suspect most of us on this site can, on one level or another, relate to my experiences. One of the hardest things in life to reconcile is that many people are not like us. And I'm not talking about color, religion, race, or creed, but behavior. They choose to do what is wrong, or certainly what we consider wrong. In some instances it is a result of what they have been exposed to, in others what they believe to be correct and right. In all cases it infuriates us that they cannot see what we see; believe what we believe, especially when it comes to violence. But they don't, and probably never will. It doesn't mean that we should cease trying to make a difference, on the contrary, it is important to always try, I think. Yet we can only control so much, hence the anger. Free will has bedeviled us since man first stood upright, yet without it, and all its demons, everything becomes meaningless.

Finally, in a comment by Janice Law on Eve's blog, she challenged us as writers to do something meaningful when dealing with the subject .  That is a worthwhile challenge, and who knows, by doing so we may make some small, but important, difference in the world.  It matters.