Guest Post: Tara Laskowski on Writing Crime Fiction (Without Being a Writer of Crime Fiction)

Tara Laskowski

Today, I'm pleased to welcome a very special guest: my wife, Tara Laskowski! Tara is the author of two collections of short fiction, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders, and since 2010, she's edited SmokeLong Quarterly, one of the leading flash fiction journals in the business. As she'll explain, while much of her success has been in more literary circles (including the Norton anthology Flash Fiction International), she's also published short stories in the anthology The New Black: A Neo-Noir Anthology and in both Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; in fact, she was the sole American author in EQMM's recent All Nations Issue, celebrating the magazine's work with writers around the globe. While many of our SleuthSayers have written for non-mystery magazines and are planning to share stories about that crossover, today Tara talks a little about moving in the other direction and the challenges and pleasures she's found in the process. Hope you'll enjoy! — Art Taylor

Writing Crime Fiction
(Without Being a Writer of Crime Fiction)

By Tara Laskowski

Earlier this year, I tried for the first time to write an actual mystery story.

While I’ve had a few stories published in crime magazines and anthologies, they were never stories I had intentionally written for those audiences. I am, for the most part, considered a literary writer, and most of the publications I have on my resume are in literary and general fiction journals, books, and magazines. My stories tend to hover on the themes of family, friendships, and women's issues. I write and edit flash fiction, which is often experimental and focused on language and rhythm over plot—closer to poetry in some ways.

But I also love the dark side. I grew up reading Nancy Drew and The Three Investigators and Stephen King's novels and stories. I was born on Halloween and am obsessed with horror movies. I love a good scare, a good creep-out, a wicked villain.

So my stories usually have some of that crime, noir, supernatural element to them—although those darker elements usually creep in after the fact. That is, I don’t intend to write a crime story—and most of the time my crime stories hover in the gray areas between genres, part domestic drama, part murder mystery, part ghost story.

So intentionally sitting down to write a traditional mystery story? The thought kind of gave me hives. Plot and all its intricacies do not come easily to me, and I struggled with how to drop clues and red herrings in ways that weren't completely obvious and stupid, all while trying to move the story forward, make sure the characters were interesting, and not drive myself completely batty in the process.

(Side note: I have profound respect for Sophie Hannah in her plotting of the new Hercule Poirot mysteries. I have no idea how she does it. I cannot even keep a 25-page story straight, let alone a massive novel. Standing ovation, Ms. Hannah. Standing ovation.)

It is a completely different way to write a story. Usually when I am working on something new, it starts with a character and a moment and unfolds from there. I discover what the story is about as I’m writing it, and the language and descriptions carry it forward. But in this case, I started with a scenario and had to build out the plot. I had a character named Nancy Drew who hated the fact that she was named that and who was on a date with a man who thought it was funny to bring her to a murder mystery dinner. And of course, I knew that in the middle of the dinner, someone at her table would have to go missing. But who? And what happened to that person? And how would she solve it? And what would happen with her and her boyfriend? Would this mystery bring them together, or pull them apart for good?

All these questions were swirling around in my brain, and I felt that I had to know what was going to happen before I started writing the story. I sketched an entire outline. Then deleted it. Then reworked it. Then put it aside. Then tried again.

Want to know how long it took me to finish the story after I got the initial idea? Ready?

Ten years.

Nope. Not kidding. Ten years.

Clearly those “putting aside” moments were long ones—in some cases, years—but from initial idea to completed, submitted story draft, it was almost ten years in the making.

The good news: the story recently was accepted by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, so you’ll be able to find out what happens to Nancy soon—sooner than it took me to figure out what happened to her, anyway.

My point in all this is that mystery fiction does not come easy to me. I love writing it, and I especially love reading it, but I don’t naturally think that way and it’s been interesting to focus my efforts in that direction. For one, the mystery community is extremely generous and welcoming. Despite all the folks killed off in the pages of their books, crime writers are quite lovely and kind in real life.

Plus, there are great reasons to expand your style and topics. I feel like the stories I publish in crime and mystery publications are more widely read than the ones I've published in before. Or, at least, I get a different audience than what I normally would get. Exposure to new readers is always good—and if a writer can expand outside her normal genre she might find new fans and bigger book sales. When I publish in a lit journal, the folks who I hear from who read it are all people I know. But when I publish in a mystery magazine, I will hear from readers I don't know at all—and that's always a treat.

The other perk for me is that crime pays! No, not that crime, silly. Crime fiction. Selling one story to a major mystery magazine gets me more money than the royalties from my books. Getting paid for your work is something that most literary writers aren't used to. We're used to giving away our work for free. We're used to running online journals as labors of love. The idea of paying artists for their work is refreshing to see in the mystery world, and an idea that I hope spreads and grows.

All that said, I love having the privilege of publishing widely, in both crime and mystery publications and in university journals, online and print literary magazines, and anthologies. No matter where my stories show up, they are always in good company with writers I admire and continue to learn from, and that's one of the best perks of being a writer in the first place.

Thank you to everyone for allowing me to contribute here! I recognize I am the other perspective in this special series, and I look forward to hearing what crime writers say about writing for non-mystery publications.

Messages in a Bottle, or Notes from the Pen

For the next several days, our band of authors will be writing about writing— for magazines, especially non-mystery magazines. We’ll have a couple of surprises and a lot of expertize. Thanks to Eve for kicking off the program with non-traditional penmanship. You'll see.

—Velma

by Eve Fisher

I just got back from a weekend workshop at the local penitentiary, which (as always) was full of interesting moments, hard work, and definite characters.  If nothing else, the weekend confirmed (even if I do say so myself) that I really nailed the young meth-head who's the centerpiece of my latest story, "Iron Chef", in the November, 2016 issue of AHMM.  ("He thinks he's a lady's man because he wants to get laid," and more here...)

I did not tell the guys that.  Actually, I don't tell them much about my writing, because (1) That's not why I'm there (I'm there to facilitate an Alternatives to Violence Project Workshop, not talk about myself all the time) and (2) most of them don't really want to hear it.  Including the writers.

(Sometimes especially the writers.  Recent dialog between myself and an inmate:
Me: "There's a place on-line that lists publishers and -"
Inmate (interrupting): "I HAVE an agent. Or I will soon."
Me: "Okay."
Inmate: "Yeah.")

And there are a lot of writers (and artists) at the pen.  Interestingly, I haven't met one yet that writes mystery or crime stories.  I'm not sure if that's because it doesn't interest them, or they don't know how to do it, or if they're afraid if they put anything in writing, it might be held against them in a court of law.  Like a confession or a plan for future criminal activity...  Anyway, most are poets and/or songwriters.  Some write sci-fi and/or supernatural/horror. And a few write autobiographies.

Getting prison writing published is easier than you might think, thanks to the internet.  Here are just a few of the on-line resources for magazines, newsletters, anthologies and e-zines dedicated to prisoners' writing:

From South Dakota, The Prisoners for Prevention blog.
The Prisoner Poetry Page.
The on-line Prison Poetry Workshop podcasts.
The Prisoner Express which publishes poetry, journals, essays, etc.

One of the main problems, of course, for prisoners is that these days so many places only accept on-line submissions, and access to the internet is hard to get in the pen.  And sending out ms. in hard-copy is expensive when you only make 25 cents an hour.  (Not to mention that getting access to a typewriter is hard to come by, too.)  And almost all of the markets specifically set up to publish prisoners' work are non-paying.

In the search for paying markets, Writers' Digest is invaluable to prisoners:  I'd bet there's a (more or less) old, battered copy in every prison library.  I know inmates who've sent stories to Glimmer Train, Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Playboy.  (No, I don't know any who've been accepted yet, but at least they're trying!)  I've read a couple of the stories, and even given a critique here and there. When I am specifically asked.  Again, not every inmate wants to hear any opinion other than that it's a great poem/story/song.  For that matter, not every writer OUT of the pen wants to hear anything else...

Another place where inmates writers can get published is with the PEN Prison Writing Contest. Prizes and publication in an anthology make this very prestigious.
And, for all of us, let's not forget sites like Angie's Desk and My Little Corner, both of which list anthologies and markets of all genres (although primarily mystery and science-fiction/fantasy).  Thank you, ladies!  Your hard work has opened up markets for us all!

Most of the work the inmates finally do get published is and has been edited by someone outside for content.  What gets passed around in the tier, chow hall, and our sharing circle is unedited, raw, and cannot be reprinted on this family blog.  Besides the poems of suicidal despair (since this is NOT the Gingerbread House of Corrections)

http://rhymeswithorange.com/comics/november-20-2016/

gangsta rap is HUUUUUGE.  Personally, I get bored with gangsta rap, because they all say pretty much the same thing:  ultra-explicit rap symphonies in F Major on drugs, bling, fights, arrests, killings, and sex.

(It's like the prison tattoos:  the first few times you go in the pen, you see these guys who are absolutely COVERED in tattoos, and it's hard to look away.  But after a while, you realize that they're mostly skulls, naked women, snakes, names, etc., in endless repetition, and the only reason you study them is to figure out what gang they're in.)

But there are those stories that show real creativity and thinking, and poems that take your breath away, like the following from PrisonerExpress.org/?mode=poetry

The thirteenth amendment, Amended

by Name Withheld by Request

A coffle of state slaves shuffles
Slowly into the radiant rays
Of dawn's early light.
Spartacus nowhere in sight.
Flight scarred all, and bone
Weary from strife and stress,
Destined to toil under the sun til
Twilight's last gleaming brings rest.

The tools are issued:
One hoe per man, each
Dull the blade, each
Seven pounds of sweat-stained misery,
Each, in proper hands,
Seven pounds of peril.

Let there be no peril today, we pray:
No quick and vicious fights, where, sweat stinging,
Fists flying, we cull living from dying:
No riots fought for fast forgot reasons__
Swinging steel scintillating in sunlight,
Blood gouting from the too slow heads__
Brown, black, white___
Our blood ruby red and thick with life,
No respecter of color or creed.

Let there be no peril today, we pray;
No dry crackling reports of leaden soldiers,
Chasing wisps of smoke from forge fashioned barrels,
Speaking the ancient tongue of Authority;
Guns guardgripped fast by bossfists,
In confederate gray cloths,
Their fire felling friends, freeing foes.

Let there be no peril today, we pray:
Today only__hard work, for no pay.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except
as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

So let it be rewritten.
So let it, at last, be done.

How I Conceived

photo by Peter Rozovsky

Last month I reviewed a story by Jeffrey Siger, which resulted in some e-conversation, and that led to what you see below. Jeffrey  is an American living on the Aegean Greek island of Mykonos. He gave up his career as a name partner in his own New York City law firm to write mystery thrillers. His books have been nominated for the Left Coast Crime and Barry Awards.

The New York Times called his Andreas Kaldis series “thoughtful police procedurals set in picturesque but not untroubled Greek locales.”  Today he will tell us how he wrote the latest and eighth in the series, Santorini Caesars.                                                - Robert Lopresti .

                                                                          

by Jeffrey Siger

I never thought when Robert Lopresti generously offered me the opportunity of posting as a guest on SleuthSayers that I’d be talking about conception, but hey, nothing surprises me these days, and if it’s details on how I conceived my latest Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novel the SleuthSayers faithful want, that’s what they shall get! 

A dozen years ago, when I decided to walk away from my life as a name partner in my own New York City law firm to unite my loves of Greece and mystery writing, I said to myself I would not write fluff.  I would write what I thought should be said in a way that told the truth as I saw it about a country and a people I cared very deeply about—little realizing at the time how applicable my observations on Greece would be to so much of the rest of our world.

When I started writing the series, I didn’t intend on becoming a chronicler of Greece’s trials and tribulations, but things just sort of turned out that way, as each novel gravitated toward exploring a different aspect of Greek society, and before I knew it I found myself immersed in creating a collage of what Greece is all about.   

For example, I’ve written about the relationships of Greek islanders and mainlanders, Greeks and their government, Greeks and their church, Greeks and immigrants, Greeks and their families, Greeks and their financial crises, and in my just released #8 in the series, “Santorini Caesars,” Greeks and their military. As important as are the elements making up that collage, is the glue that holds it all together—the unvarnished perspective of my protagonist, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis.

Andreas is a politically incorrect, second-generation cop, and an honest observer of his times, who despite all that life and the system throw at him, retains his integrity.  Perhaps most significant for purposes of my stories is the unfettered access he has to all levels of Greek society, be it the seamy underbelly of its most degenerate bottom rung as head of Greece’s special crimes unit, or the glittering lifestyles of Greece’s movers and shakers by reason of his marriage.

The idea for writing about the Greek military in “Santorini Caesars” had been percolating in my mind for quite a few years. After all, much of the nation’s modern history stands shaped by the Greek Military Junta Years of 1967-74, and until the financial crisis struck a few years back, Greece numbered among the world’s five biggest arms importers.  Even today Greece has four times the number of German made top of the line Leopard tanks as Germany’s own military. 

But how to tie it all together in the context of a fast-paced mystery thriller was my dilemma. Then one day it all came together, inspired by a simple passing thought on the predicament known as Greece: “The fragile fabric of a nation hangs in the balance.” 

Greece stands before the world in perilous straits.  With its government and economy in disarray, its goals and leadership suspect, and men like Kaldis undoubtedly at odds with its direction, life is not the same, nor likely to return to better days any time soon, and many wonder if carrying on the fight matters any more.

Sound familiar?

Yes, Greece’s situation inspired the story, but as I wrote it, I could not help but sense how many other places in the world faced nearly identical circumstances. Here’s the plot line for “Santorini Caesars” that evolved from that thought.

When a young demonstrator is publicly assassinated in the heart of protest-charged Athens, the motive is murky and the array of suspects immense.  Kaldis’ investigation leads him and his team to Santorini—an Aegean island of breathtaking beauty which legend holds to be the site of the lost island of Atlantis—and a hush-hush gathering of the Caesars, a cadre of Greece’s top military leaders seeking to form their own response to the crises facing their country. Is it a coup d’état or something else?  The answer is by no means clear, but the case resonates with political dimensions, and as international intrigues evolve, the threat of another—far more dramatic—assassination looms ever more real. As does the realization that only Kaldis can stop it.  But at what price?  It is a time for testing character, commitment, and the common good.  And for saving the nation from chaos.

As I said, sound familiar?

JFK, the Beatles and the Beginning of the Sixties

What were we doing fifty-three years ago and a day from today? As a country, many of us were listening to and/or watching Alan Sherman, Victor Borge, Topo Gigio, Senor Wences, Mitch Miller, Perry Como, Bobby Darin, the Dick Van Dyke show, Donna Reed, Leave it to Beaver, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Ben Casey, Leslie Gore, Peter Paul and Mary, Sukiyaki by Kyu Sakamoto, the Ronnettes, the Shirelles, the Drifters, Jan and Dean, Vaughn Meader, and Jose Jimenez (yes, I know, but that was then and this is now). And more.

On November 21, 1963, four guys did a gig at the ABC Cinema, Carlisle, England. In the summer and fall of 1963, a young folk singer was recording his third album, but still not too many people were aware of him outside of a small circle of friends (to paraphrase another Sixties folk singer). Some people might have known some of his songs as done by other people, but they didn’t really know him…yet.

The President and his wife spent the day in Fort Worth. A loser and lost soul spent the night at Ruth Paine’s home, a friend of his.

As the sun came up the next day, November 22, 1963, everything seemed fine.  A group called the Beatles released With the Beatles in England, but they’d yet to make their mark on this side of the pond. And that folk singer, Bob Dylan, was a long way off from his Nobel Prize.

And then it all went to hell.

JFK said, “If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's.” Unfortunately this was a prophetic statement. Someone was crazy enough.

There’s been a lot written about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I doubt I can add much to it. Some say it was the end of innocence for the country. The country went into a deep depression after his death. We started slipping waist deep into the big muddy. The 60s happened: protests, riots, hippies, counter culture, the Summer of Love, Woodstock , Altamont.

So where was I that winter day in 1963? I was a school safety, standing in a hallway monitoring student “traffic”.

***

“Stop, don’t run,” I shouted to some kid charging down the hall, wearing my AAA safety badge on

my arm. He slowed down, but I could hear him hard-charge again as soon as he rounded the corner, out of my sight. I could have given him a written demerit, but chose not to. I guess I was in a good mood. Either that or I hadn’t yet learned the power trip that the badge could give me.

A few minutes later, he ran back down the hall. I was already getting my little ticket book out when he shouted, “The President’s dead.” I dropped the book in dazed silence.

In class later, the principal’s voice came over the tinny sounding loudspeaker. “I have the bad fortune to announce that President Kennedy has been shot.” A collective gasp escaped through the room. Even Jamie Badger (name changed to protect the guilty), the class bad boy, was stunned long enough to stop making spitballs. The principal continued, “It’s unknown what his condition is, though it’s thought that he’s still alive.”

But we found out that wasn’t the case after all.

We were young, but that didn’t stop us from being stunned. Even the boys cried. Teachers tried to control themselves, they had to keep it together for their students. Mary Smith (name changed to protect the innocent) nearly collapsed in my arms – she was the first girl who’d ever sent me a love note.

That long weekend and week that followed the assassination, my parents and I (and my younger brothers to a lesser extent) were glued to the television, as was the rest of the country. LBJ taking the oath of office. The capture of Oswald. Speculation on the whys and wherefores and whos. John-John saluting as the caisson carrying his father rolled by. Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. Conspiracy theories forming.

So we watched in silence as the procession marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. And there were no psychologists, no shrinks to salve our wounds. It was like landing in Oz, only to find the Wicked Witch of the East in control in the dark, forbidding forest of snarled trees and flying monkeys. And we hung our heads. And we cried. I cried. And we didn’t know where we were heading on that cold day in November, 1963.

***

The very popular Vaughn Meader, who’d made a living and career impersonating JFK and the First Family, was out of a job. And we were out of laughter and joy. No more touch football on the White House lawn. No more pill box hats and white gloves. And somehow none of our backyard barbecues would taste as good or as sweet for a long, long time to come, if ever.

Here's a YouTube video of Vaughn Meader.

We needed something to buoy our spirits through the dark winter months of 1963/64. And for many of us that something came on February 9, 1964 in the form of those four mop tops from Liverpool and their first appearance on Ed Sullivan, which was most people’s first exposure to them. My dad called me into the den to watch and I’ve been hooked ever since. But they helped a good part of the country bounce back, at least a little, from the events of a couple of months before, with their effervescent sound, happy music and wit. So at least for a while we could forget about the darkness in our hearts.

It’s hard to say when one decade begins and another one ends or vice versa, because the zeitgeist of the times doesn’t necessarily coincide with the years that end in zero. But I think the Sixties really began with those two events, the assassination of President Kennedy and the coming of the Beatles and the British Invasion, and it ended with Watergate in 1973.

Several year later, when I was in DC, I made a side trip to Arlington Cemetery in Virginia in part to see JFK’s grave (see photo). I know Kennedy wasn’t perfect and Camelot wasn’t all that, but seeing the memorial made me remember a time when there was hope and optimism and maybe even a sense of innocence.

So, what were you doing 53 years ago, if you were around?

***

And now for something not quite completely different: My story “Ghosts of Bunker Hill” is in the brand new, hot off the presses December 2016 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Get ’em while you can. And if you like the story, maybe you’ll remember it for the Ellery Queen Readers Award (the ballot for which is at the end of this issue), and others. Thanks.

Oh, and that is, of course, Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, not that “other” one on the East Coast. And more on this in a future blog.

www.PaulDMarks.com

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Dreaming the Life: Self-Publishing Part I

by Steve Liskow

Before I say anything else, if you don't already know this, no legitimate publisher will charge you money up front to publish your work. If someone offers you a deal that involves you paying first, walk away. Once your book is available, you should be able to order as many or as few copies as you want at a discounted price, too. If that's not the case, look somewhere else. These are called vanity presses, and a few in particular have given self-publishing authors a bad name.

Several years ago, Laura Lippman commented that many people ask the wrong question. Instead of asking "How can I get my book published?" she suggested that the better question is "Is my book ready to be published?" While self-publishing doesn't carry the stigma it did ten years ago when those vanity presses ran rampant, you need to work a lot harder if you decide to publish yourself. Find a good editor and conscientious beta readers. Take their advice. Yes, it costs money, and you won't break even financially, but you may produce a book you can show proudly. If you're really lucky, a handful of readers will tell you so, too.

Five years ago, someone asked me if I'd considered self-publishing and I laughed. But things change. As I write this, I have eleven self-published novels available and plan to release two more in the next year or so (I publish short stories through traditional markets).

A small publisher produced my first novel in spring of 2010, but I knew my WIP set in the world of roller derby was too long and too dark for that publisher's catalog. By the time Who Wrote the Book of Death? appeared in print, I was already looking elsewhere.

I pitched The Whammer Jammers to an agent at Crime Bake in November of 2010. She asked for a full MS and rejected it about a month later. Between January and April 2011, I submitted that MS to fifty other agents in groups of ten every four weeks. The book became a quarter-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest and earned a positive review from Publisher's Weekly, but I couldn't sell it. Six years later, I still have seventeen unanswered queries.

That spring, I joined a panel of local authors for a presentation and everyone else self-published. Two of them had been with prestigious firms and left for various reasons. They all urged me to go it alone and one mentioned Create Space. When I checked it out, I was leery, but as more rejections came in, I investigated more fully.

Then I met an actor and designer who created posters for a dozen plays I had directed in a past life and we talked about book covers. He looked at my existing cover and explained how he would change it and why--very specifically. I told him about The Whammer Jammers and three weeks later he showed me a mock-up. I published the book in September of that year, ended my association with my previous publisher a month later, and re-edited and published the first book only weeks after that. By then I was revising two other novels that had collected fifty rejections between them (but positive feedback). I even found established writers to blurb them.

None of that should mean anything to you. That is my journey and my decision, but yours may be different. Self-publishing has advantages and disadvantages, and you need to consider them carefully.

First, you are in charge of everything. You write, you edit,

you draft the cover copy, you oversee the cover design, you develop the promotion, you arrange for the blurbs, you format, you publish, you register the copyright, and you arrange your own events. Maybe you even run your own website. If you're very organized and like keeping control--and actually have expertise in all these areas--it's OK. But the multi-tasking means less time for your primary job, which is to write books.

Whether you know spelling and grammar or not, you need beta readers. I belong to the Guppy (acronym for the Great UnPublished) chapter of Sisters in Crime because they feature manuscript swaps for critiques. You need editing, too. I do most of that myself, but my beta readers are writers and editors. I do my own formatting for Create Space because I figured out an easy visual style that eliminates hassles with different headers and footers, but I have little visual or graphic sense.

Fortunately, my cover designer and I worked together in theater long enough to figure out how to communicate with each other. We live about ten miles apart so we can discuss a synopsis or images in person. That's very helpful. My designer also has a good eye and ear for language and we work together on cover copy--along with my webmistress, my daughter with a double Masters in Communications and Marketing. My wife used to write advertising copy for radio, so she's a huge asset, too.

Ignore what you see on the Internet. Nobody has yet found a one-size-fits-all method of promoting, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, blogs, or anything else. Your friends can come to events and buy books, but asking them to review is risky because most of them don't know enough about reading or writing to craft a review that doesn't look bogus. In the October 28, 2016 issue of Publishers Weekly, longtime agent Peter Riva tells why he thinks Amazon reviews are worthless anyway. I have business cards and bookmarks because I also conduct fiction writing workshops and edit fiction. I know thirty librarians on a first-name basis, but that doesn't mean they can get me into their building. Funding for libraries is diminishing like common sense during election campaigns.

If you conduct workshops, the preparation and promotion also take you away from your "real" writing.

If you're self-published, many established authors will not blurb you. For some, it's a philosophical issue, and for others it's a contractual one. I was lucky to get a few blurbs for early novels because I met many members of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America (I appear on panels for both groups) at events, but I ran out of connections. Six of my last seven novels bear no blurb.

Remember that if you've self-published, most agents and traditional publishing houses may treat you like toxic waste if you query them later. I don't agree or disagree, but that's how it is. I've heard of self-pubbed authors (generally very young) getting picked up by major houses, but what have they produced since then? Amanda Hocking comes to mind.

Self-published authors have trouble getting publicity. My local newspaper, the Hartford Courant, has gutted its staff and is owned by the Tribune. That means it's edited in Chicago and local news is low priority. The reviewer who used to support local authors now sees her work trimmed or deleted. She used to promote my events, but last year I couldn't even get mentioned when the Private Eye Writers of America named me as a finalist for the Shamus Award.

The largest independent bookstore in Connecticut demands a payment of $125 from self-published authors for an appearance there, and they will only do a fifty-fifty consignment split. I would have to bring the books with me, sell seventeen just to pay that fee, and take the unsold copies with me again.

Most bookstores won't carry your books because they can't get the same distributor's discount and free returns they have with traditional publishers. Your book will cost them more to buy, and if you bring your own, they get a smaller percentage from the sale price (see above). That hurts their margin so they probably can't afford you. Maybe you can make a special deal with your local store, but maybe not.

Those are the shortcomings I've discovered so far. Sound bleak? Well, maybe, but next time, we'll look at the advantages. I think those outweigh the problems.

Timeless Prose

by Leigh Lundin

It’s amazing when you realize many of our grandparents were raised in a horse-and-buggy era and eventually saw us land a man on the moon. Yet among us reside Millennials who’ve never been without a computer or HDTV, a microwave or a cell phone. With rapid technological evolution, we can hardly fault them for any lack of historical perspective, never mind survival skills.

Children of my acquaintance were devastated when they wanted to make popcorn and the microwave broke. Their auntie calmed them and found a lidded pot in the kitchen cupboard. As the kids watched in open-mouth wonder, she ripped open the familiar Orville Redenbacher packets and poured them into the cookware, added butter and placed the lid on. Five minutes later the kids happily munched popcorn in awe of their aunt's accomplishment. Who knew?

Working antiques surrounded us kids on a centuries-old, self-sufficient farm steeped in family history. I still keep antique ‘coal oil’ lamps to light when the power goes out. Our childhood provided a sense how our pioneer ancestors lived, so when I read an incongruity, it really jars.

David Edgerley Gates has touched upon the subject of anachronisms. Among other issues, he raises the topic of modernisms in period speech. I agree, although I give British author Lindsey Davis a pass because her characters are so engaging.

Getting it Right

A couple of years ago when I was critiquing a teenager’s story for his literature class. It was set, if I remember right, in the 1980s. His on-the-run hero escapes on a jet-ski and phones his girlfriend. Our conversation went something like:

“He phones his girlfriend? With what?”
“A phone, of course.”
“In 1985?”
“Sure.”
“While piloting his jet-ski?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t see the problem?”
“With what?”
“Cell phones in the 1980s?”
“They didn’t have them?”
“Correct.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“What did you use?”
“Pay phones and you needed a quarter.”
“What about a two-way radio?”
“Sure, a walkie-talkie might work.”
“But no cell phones?”
“Nope. Car phones were available in the ’70s, but they came in a briefcase and were expensive.”
“That’s a real pain.”
“That pretty well sums it up.”

Getting it Wrong

Somewhat defensively, Quentin Tarantino hyped the historicity of Django Unchained. Examples escape me, but the glaring inaccuracies and anachronisms must have jolted historians.

In one of his Rumpole of the Bailey stories, John Mortimer introduces a celebrity historical romance author beloved by the public and especially the judge. Rumpole, however, feels plagued by her wildly inaccurate juxtapositions of people, places and things as much as a century or so apart. Technically, this type of error– mixing periods– is called metachronism.

Kick the Can

I was critiquing a Southern antebellum novel about a plantation owner’s wife and a slave. I found quibbles, but a scene in one of the early chapters brought me up short. In it, the slave was drinking from a tin can. Whoa, I told the author, tin cans as we know them are a 20^th century invention. I offered citations pointing out early tin cans, circa WW-I. The writer refused advice, partly because of ‘atmosphere’, but she also claimed an unnamed historical source despite my research. The anachronism spoiled the atmosphere for me.

[British canning technology may have preceded and surpassed that of North America in the 1800s. A reader has pointed out that while cans were a 19^th century invention, the modern tin can as we know them originated around 1900 and came into use by WW-I, not WW-II as the article originally stated. The reader included photos of tins from WW-I and from Scott’s Antarctic expedition dated 1911 that are virtually indistinguishable from modern cans.]

In the Spaghetti Western The Grand Duel (Il Grande duello also called The Big Showdown), the effeminate psychopath, Adam Saxon, mows down a wagon train with a machine gun. I don’t know much about machine guns, but it looked oddly out of place, not like Civil War engineering at all. I suspected it was closer to WW-I era, but I underestimated. It turns out the Maschinengewehr was a German WW-II MG42, first introduced in 1942, about ¾-century after the setting of that Old West movie.

Many movies feature British Intelligence or the OSS infiltrating Nazi strongholds, plots that have fed the film industry for decades. Typical gadgetry features lots of knobs and dials and… LEDs, not commercially viable until about 1970. A few may show Nixie tubes, but even those weren’t invented until 1955.

Listen, Punk

In steampunk, you can invent anything you want– LCDs, Nixie tubes, plasma graphics. If you write historicals, you can’t.

Details, Details

Sometimes writers introduce errors that have little to do with anachronisms. As much as I admire The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, the authors, Larsson and Lagercrantz (or possibly their translators) make mistakes about handguns. They mention a revolver when they mean an automatic, refer to a telescopic sight when Lagercrantz probably intends a laser sight, and portray Blomkvist with his finger jammed in the trigger guard of a machine pistol when the author probably meant between the trigger and the body of the weapon. Small things but I give Larsson credit for portraying computers and networks in a realistic manner. (He also named a couple of characters Lundin, so I can’t bicker too much.)

Without local mystery authors, in my early days I worked with romance writers, particularly my editor/teacher friend Sharon. One of Sharon’s favorite authors referenced a car several times in the novel, perhaps something like a Pontiac Bonneville. Sharon realized the details were all wrong, invalidating part of the plot line in her head.

I’ve saved the worst for last.

Red Sage Publishing specialized in novella anthologies called Secrets. One of their American authors set her story in Scotland… and kept referring to the Scottish mesquite.

Oops.

What errors and omissions bug you?

Past or Present: A Tense Situation

by John M. Floyd





Western actor: Are those our teepees?
Director: We've upsized to wigwams. Teepees are past tense.

Consider this. You've come up with a great idea for a short story. In fact, you've been thinking about it awhile, you know who your POV character is, you have a pretty good feel for the plot, and you've even picked out a catchy title. But when you sit down to start typing the opening, there's something else you'll have to decide on, something you might never have thought about, only a few years ago:

Will your story be told in past tense or present tense?

The truth is, I don't think about it at all. I prefer past tense, and so far that's how all my stories have been told.

Feeling tense?

Here's the strange thing: I don't mind reading stories written in present tense. I just don't like to write them that way. I don't think I'd feel comfortable doing it, and besides, I would probably always be accidentally reverting to past tense and having to correct myself. (As Dirty Harry Callahan once said, "A man's gotta know his limitations.") I sure don't need to be bothered with doing any more self-editing than I already have to do.

Obviously, many of my writer friends don't share this preference. Stories written in present tense seem to be everywhere, nowadays--and, as I mentioned earlier, that was not always the case. The first novel I remember reading that was written in present tense was, I think, Presumed Innocent, back in the late 80s. No criticism, there; it's still one of my favorites. And I think all of John Updike's Rabbit novels were written in present tense as well. I can't recall many old-time novels written that way, though, except Charles Dickens's Bleak House.

Pitching tense

Why is present tense so popular in contemporary fiction? Most writers say it's because it lends a sense of immediacy to the story--a sense that this is happening right now, at this very moment, and we're all witnesses to it. When the robber turns away, the security guard draws his gun and fires. BAM.

That's not a bad idea, and when done well it works well. But writing in the past tense--when the robber turned away, the security guard drew his gun and fired--seems more natural to me. I like feeling as though I'm telling the reader what happened, not what's happening, and I'm not convinced that I give up any suspense by doing it that way. Past tense is traditional storytelling, the old classic once-upon-a-time approach. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Upsides and downsides

From what I've been able to find, it seems that there are several big advantages and several big disadvantages to present-tense fiction. On the plus side of the writing ledger are (1) the aforementioned "immediacy" and vividness of the action and (2) the fact that present tense probably makes it easier for the reader to feel a connection to the protagonist. On the minus side, present tense supposedly makes it harder to (1) manipulate time, (2) generate suspense, and (3) create complex characters.

Arthur Plotnik (what a great name for a writer, sort of like Francine Prose) says, in his book Spunk & Bite, "Present tense . . . imparts a live-camera mood that is relatively new to literary prose, as well as to journalism." Then he adds, "But in lesser hands, present tense can diminish the spell . . . It can seem affected, breathless, and flighty." He says it can be used to keep readers on edge, but that it can also "grow tedious if the inventiveness flags."

The key phrase, there, seems to be "in lesser hands." Maybe present-tense fiction is one of those don't-try-this-at-home endeavors. If you're a novice, proceed with caution. If you're talented enough, full speed ahead. (But watch out for those inventiveness flags, on the side of the road.)

NOTE: It did occur to me, while putting together this column, that there are at least two forms of writing that are and have always been done in present tense: jokes ("A guy walks into a bar . . .") and screenplays. I've never written jokes, but I have created several screenplays--and strangely enough, writing those in present tense seems correct and natural. Go figure.

My tense-sense summary

I would, as always, be interested in hearing your opinions. Do you enjoy reading stories/novels written in present tense? (I do--or at least I don't object to it.) Do you ever write stories/novels in present tense? (I don't. But only because I doubt I'd be good at it.)

He types the last sentence of the SleuthSayers post, clicks "Publish," closes the Blogger program, and pushes back from the computer. His Saturday column is finished and scheduled. "Guess it's time to rake leaves now," he says to his wife.

He typed the last sentence of the SleuthSayers post, clicked "Publish," closed the Blogger program, and pushed back from the computer. His Saturday column was finished and scheduled. "Guess it's time to rake leaves now," he said to his wife.

Different keystrokes for different folks.

It Starts with a Title

by O'Neil De Noux

Can you write a story from a title? Sure. There's a YouTube video of John Lennon claiming his young son Julian rushed into the house once and pointed outside and said something that sounded like LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS and John wrote the lyrics to the song. I saw another YouTube video in which Lennon said something else about how the song was written but both times he claimed he wrote the song from the title. And not from a drug-induced hallucination.

Looking back, I realize how many of my stories started with a title and nothing else. Inspirations from something heard or read.

Two of my New Orleans police stories came from old New Orleans sayings - "Love and Murder" (goes together like beans and rice) and "Women Are Like Streetcars" (wait ten minutes and another will come along). Two of my stories came from a word that made me stop and look in a dictionary. The first was "Erotophobia" (fear of erotic situations). That story's been printed five times, including in two BEST OF anthologies. The second was "Romanesque" (a medieval architectural style). I applied it to a woman and it was printed twice, once in another BEST OF anthology.

My wife walked into my home office once with a catalog (either a Victoria's Secret or Frederick's of Hollywood). She declared, "Did you know they make a bra called the Kissable Cleavage bra?"

I told her no and thanked her for the title. She rolled her eyes as I opened a new word file and called it KISSABLE CLEAVAGE IDEA. It didn't take long to figure this needed to be a private eye story so I gave it to my part-time lothario PI Lucien Caye. "Kissable Cleavage" has been published three times, including in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW EROTICA, VOL. 7 Caroll & Graf (US) and Robinson Publishing (UK).

It isn't alwasy easy. Writer-Editor-Publisher Maxim Jakubowski, father of London's MURDER ONE bookshop, explains, "Half of my books/stories begin with a title and somehow I have to come up with the subject and/or plot to suit it! And further, I've seldom managed to get a single piece of fiction started without knowing the title from the outset and only rarely has it changed in the writing process! I wouldn't recommend this way of doing things, but it works, albeit sometimes rather painfully, for me at least."

Reading Harry Whittington's 1958 mystery, WEB OF MURDER, I saw the lines - "Once a man breaks a law, he can expect consequences. Not just some of them. All of them." My story "Expect Consequences" was published twice.

My Cajun grandmother used to sing in French while she quilted in her work room. After I became a writer, I asked an aunt about one refrain that resonated with me. It sounded lovely in French. The English interpretation was - "the heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing." I challenged myself to write something from that saying. I wrote a 7200 word short story, "The Heart Has Reasons," which was published in ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE. The story was awarded the 2007 SHAMUS Award for Best Private Eye Short Story.

Los Angeles mystery writer Paul Bishop, author of the CROAKER novels, among many others, explains, "I almost away have to have a title before I begin a novel. I'm unsettled otherwise and the writing does not go well."

I guess my favorite is another wife-inspired story. One evening she came into the living room and spied me watching an Agatha Christie movie I'd been catching every time it came on. She asked, "Is that Death on The Nile?" Only I heard "Is that Death on Denial?" My story "Death on Denial" featured a gun moll, a hit man and a old gangster who repeatedly watched DEATH ON THE NILE, over and over. That story has been published five times, including in Otto Penzler's BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2003 (Houghton-Mifflin).

In each case there was no story, no plot. It started with a title. How many of your stories or novels started this way?

www.oneildenoux.net

Agon

by Brian Thornton

(No pics this time around, and there's a writing connection, but it only comes at the end. Read on, if you dare...)

I believe that we are defined by struggle. The ancient Greeks had a word for it (of course!).

"Agon."

We get our English word "agony" from it.

Not really the same thing.

The idea behind the notion of "agon" is that working to overcome obstacles placed in our paths by the gods/Fate/Yahweh/Allah/A Head of Lettuce Named Bob improves us. That it is literally not the achievement of the goal, but the effort it took to overcome opposition that kept us from it, which makes us who we are.

I further believe that we as human beings currently inhabit the Age of Agon.

I've been doing pretty lousy in the prediction market lately (*cough*I'm with Her*cough* *cough* *cough*), but I'm going to go out on a limb and make a couple now, just to get them down and out there. At the very least they might be good for a laugh when viewed some day soon with the benefit of hindsight.

Here we go:

FIRST:

I am going to be MUCH more productive writing-wise over the next eighteen months. 

All that time saved no longer checking the 538 blog multiple times per day, and that headspace freed up by no longer following election news in rags like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox*... all much better spent devoted to any number of works in progress.

And it's not just about headspace. There is a school of thought out there that art flourishes in direct proportion to the amount of chaos in the world. The more "unsettled" the society, the greater expression of that societal upset. So collective angst finds its outlet in modes of expression such as art.

Plus, let's face it: writing is cathartic. And writing about what bugs us can be profitable. It's really all about having an audience and finding them. Something tells me that an audience for the sort of fiction I have in mind for the coming months won't be too difficult to find.

As completely arbitrary proof of this, I produced way more in the way of paying and paid-for writing from 2004 (when I signed my first book deal) till 2009 (When I met my future wife) than during the past eight happy years. Some would say that finding a wonderful woman, marrying up, combining our households, buying a nice house in a terrific neighborhood, and having a child might have had something to do with that. And they might have a point.

But if the past two years have proven anything, it's that these days, in the current climate, facts are what you make of them.

Oh, and let's all save our jokes about the coming age being a potential golden age for satire. We've been living in one of those for at least the last two millennia. Maybe the last three.

(*Sarcasm. I don't really think they're rags. I think they collectively blew the single biggest story of the decade, but they had a lot of company.)

SECOND:

The current round of angst in all corners of this country will not pass quickly, but it will pass. And when it finally does come, it'll be swift. Nearly overnight.

Because nothing unites the American people like a common enemy.

Just ask Jimmy Carter.

(I'd suggest asking Richard Nixon, but he's dead.)

And on that optimistic note, I'm going to close this, my sole politically-related post (One and done, I promise. No more after this. There's "grieving," and there's "wallowing." The former is healthy. The latter is the stuff of melodrama.), and get back to talking about the writing craft.

See you in two weeks, on Thanksgiving Day, when the subject will be "plot". Which, when you think about it, is really a completely different form of agon!

The Night The Old Nostalgia Burned Down, Again

Last month I wrote about books I dug up recently  because I remembered them from my childhood.  I ended by saying "Maybe next time I will talk about childhood favorites I bought my daughter when she was a kid."  But instead I talked about my non-conversation with a taxi driver.  So here we go.

If you are familiar with Crockett Johnson it is probably because of his wonderful books about Harold and the Purple Crayon which have inspired children's imagination (and the occasional wall-scribble spanking) for many years. Bill Watterson, the creator of the marvelous Calvin and Hobbes comic strip,  also said that Harold was all he knew of Johnson.

The reason he was asked about Johnson is that Calvin bears a certain resemblance to Ellen's Lion.  Both feature a young kid (Ellen is a preschooler, a bit younger than Calvin) whose best friend is  a stuffed animal.  In both cases the beastie has a completely different personality than the kid, but the animal can't speak if the kid's mouth is covered.  (And now that I think about it, it sounds like both artists were describing a child having a psychotic break.  But put that out of your mind.  Sorry I brought it up.)

What I like best about Johnson's stories is that the imaginary friend, so to speak, is the realist in the pair.  When Ellen asks the Lion about his life before they met she wants to hear about steaming hot jungles, but all he remembers is a department store.

By the way, Johnson also created one of the most brilliant comic strips of all time. Barnaby ran during the early forties and featured another preschooler who, in the first episode, wishes for a fairy godmother.  Due to wartime shortages he was instead assigned Jackeen J. O'Malley, a three-foot-tall fairy godfather with a grubby raincoat, magenta wings, and a malfunctioning magic cigar.  Mr. O'Malley introduces Barnaby to such characters as Atlas, a three-foot-tall giant (he's a mental giant), some Republican ghosts, and a talking dog who will not shut up.

The other book I hunted down for my kiddo has nothing to do with Crockett Johnson but does mention Atlas.  The original one.

d'Auliares' Book of Greek Myths, written and illustrated by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, started me on my lifelong love of mythology.  Not only are the pictures unforgettable but the writing is very well done.

One thing I love about it is how cleverly they slip around, well, the naughty bits that you might not want to explain to an eight-year-old.  In the chapter on Theseus they explain that Poseidon, god of the sea, sent a white bull to the island of Crete, which King Minos was supposed to sacrifice to him:

But Queen Pasiphaë was so taken by the beauty of the white bull that she persuaded the king to let it live.  She admired the bull so much that she ordered Daedalus to construct a hollow wooden cow, so she could hide inside it and enjoy the beauty of the bull at close range....

To punish the king and queen, Poseidon caused Pasiphaë to give birth to a monster, the Minotaur.  He was half man, half bull…

Every adult, I imagine, understands exactly what the dAulaires said that the Greeks were saying about Pasiphaë, but it goes right over a kid's head.  (Did mine, anyway.)

The book is still in print.  Unfortunately the binding is not as long-lasting as the text and pictures.  I have had to replace it about once a decade.

Ah well, no mysteries this week, unless you count the mystery religions.  Or Mr. O'Malley's encounter with the fur coat thieves...

Hate Crimes in Canada, Eh

I was supposed to work on my novel on Wednesday. Instead, I found myself on Facebook, looking for wisdom and solace. Most of my friends are either writers, health care workers, or both. I did find comfort in them. But I was also shocked by my newsfeed.
Peterborough is a small city of about 80,000 people and home to Trent University. After I graduated from my program in emergency medicine, I did my first locum in an even smaller town close to Peterborough. Beautiful area, green, lots of smiling people. Almost all white people, but that's the norm in a small Canadian town. Usually, rural-ites are friendly. Not always. In my life, no one has flung urine at me.
Although once, a teenager ran up to my dad in Ottawa with a plastic bag clenched in his hands and said, "Are you Japanese?"
I was maybe twelve and didn't know what to do.
My dad said, truthfully, no.
The guy ran away with his bag, which seemed to contain some sort of brown liquid.
Close call.



This is not isolated to Peterborough. Basically, I'm astonished that some people think they have new and wide permission to spew hate.
It was always simmering. When I took my kids trick-or-treating in Vankleek Hill a few weeks ago, a little girl on Main Street stared at me and starting singing, "I see your Chinese eyes" and more under her breath. I looked at her mother, who was staring blankly into space, and back at the girl, who kept singing. I thought, Do I confront the girl? Do I point this out to her mother?
My kids were tired, and we were heading back to our car, so I opted to glare at the girl and keep going.
Afterward, I mentioned it to my white husband. He hadn't even noticed. He laughed and said, "You like to glare."
Actually, what I like to do is trick-or-treat without racist commentary. Wouldn't that be nice?
If you think none of this is real, or it's exaggerated, or it doesn't matter because no one was beaten or died, you may enjoy reading this report on hate crimes in Canada in 2013: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2015001/article/14191-eng.htm#a2
It has nice charts like this:

I can't not speak.
I respect other Sleuthsayers' right not to engage, but in my mind, there is no point writing about crime fiction and ignoring crimes in real time.
Let me end with some wise words from Dr. Dylan Blacquiere, a neurologist, writer, and friend. I have edited his brilliance for brevity, but you should seek him out:

1. We have to, have to, have to get our own house in order. That could mean engaging with civic politics, writing letters, joining community organizations, running for office yourself. Our institutions are only as strong as the people who participate, and the best way to keep someone like Trump from destroying what we build here is to make sure that we participate fully to strengthen what we have. Clinton lost on turnout. People were not engaged. That means we have to engage. 

2. We have to pay attention to why this happened. Most of his voters are not racists or sexists or stupid. Some of them are, no doubt. But many are people for whom the system is not working, and they saw nothing to lose. That means we have to face these issues head on. Economic inequality. Poverty. Unemployment. Economic uncertainty. Trump's message wins when people are disenfranchised, vulnerable, and uncertain. If our economy is working for everyone in a fairly distributed manner, then a lot of the power of his argument goes away. And ignoring these people, dismissing them, not understanding where they are coming from, not seeing their experiences and not declaring them important, means that they will find some other way to make themselves heard. It's hard to blame them for that; we haven't always been that great at taking their concerns seriously.

3. More than ever we have to stand up and support the vulnerable and stand up for equality. Women, people of colour, LGBT, people with disabilities, immigrants. We have to support our allies and friends in the States who are in a vulnerable and scary place right now. We have to make sure rights and freedoms don't get rolled back here as politicians like Kellie Leitch start rising. 

4. And we have to face some uncomfortable truths - we aren't perfect here, either. Racism exists here. Our relationships with First Nations, especially here, are fraught with broken promises, inequality, and disrespect. Those 
comments that Trump supporters make; Canadians make those too, about women, about natives, about black people and queer people and Muslims and Jews. Many of our institutions have been built on past inequality and oppression. Part of standing against Trump means we have to face up to that and make those things better here. We absolutely do not get to rest on our laurels here; in fact, we have to recognize the fact that in a lot of ways we've done, and are doing just as badly. We need to fix that. If we truly want to stand for something good in a scared and uncertain world it means we have to improve ourselves, too, not just wag a finger at others. 

Bottom line: There's a lot we can't do about this. It's frustrating and it's discouraging and it's depressing. But the sun still came up yesterday. It's going to come up today, and tomorrow, too. There's work to be done. Canada has the chance to be the light the world leaves on for when places like the States and Great Britain come around and come back home. We have to seize that chance by strengthening ourselves, staying involved, and helping to fix the problems that led here and the ones
that will worsen because we're here. 

I spent yesterday numb and avoidant. I plan to spend today roiling up my sleeves and getting to work.

Getting Away with Murder – and Other Things

I have always believed that writers should try to get away with everything they can as far as plot, characterization, and style go. Experimental writers, naturally, have this as their basic brief and a straining after originality is the usual result. But genre writers and contemporary novelists like to push the envelope as well, and two well received recent novels provide good illustrations of blending genres for striking effect: Liz Moore’s The Unseen World and Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines.
Both incorporate elements of mystery and science fiction. Moore’s novel begins as a sensitive account of Ada, a bright little girl in a distinctly unconventional household. Folks looking for thriller velocity here may be disheartened but my advice is to stick with the story. When Ada’s father shows signs of early onset dementia, the novel morphs into a quest mystery with a good deal of information about artificial intelligence.

Sounds like maybe too rich a blend? Actually, no. Moore skips in time from Ada as a child and an adolescent in the 1980’s, back to her father in the 1930’s and 1950’s, and forward to the 21st century. At the center of Ada’s search is Elixir, her computer scientist dad’s experiment in artificial

intelligence. Elixir was designed as a machine that can learn, and precocious Ada, was one of the many people in her father’s lab who ‘talked’ to the program so that it would increase its vocabulary and eventually pass the Turing Test, that is, communicate in a way indistinguishable from human.

As a result, Elixir not only learns a lot of facts about the world, it learns a great deal about the personalities and histories of its lab friends. I won’t spoil how this works out in the novel, but Moore’s conclusion is imaginative and entirely satisfying.

In a quiet way, The Unseen World is a thriller, the novel structured as an investigation with high stakes on the outcome. The Elixir program and even the various generations of computers that Ada uses to connect with it, have surprising personalities, as do the principle characters, Ada, her father, David, his kindly co-worker and neighbor, Liston, and her family.

The Unseen World is a contemporary novel with what I consider welcome genre elements. Underground Airlines is perhaps the reverse, a thriller with serious literary chops that mixes mystery and science fiction with alternative history. In Winters’ novel, the Civil War was averted by a compromise following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Four Southern states are still slave states; Texas is contested ground between an abolitionist faction and the federal government, bound by the constitution to protect the ‘property rights’ of the so called Hard Four.

The protagonist is a former PB – person bound to labor – who has a kind of quasi-freedom as a federal investigator. He’s a cracker jack detective but as his whole focus is runaways, Victor is a modern version of that hated 19th century figure, the fugitive slave catcher.
   
The character of Victor has attracted notice because Winters’ himself is not African-American, but he has certainly made Victor a complex character with a rich interior life. Further, the detective is not exactly our contemporary. He operates in an environment at once recognizable even in matters of race and politics, and peculiar, rather like the Alternate Universe in the old Fringe series or one of Philip K. Dick’s odd cities.
   
Part of Underground Airlines is straight detective work. Victor is a master of aliases and disguises, and, leashed by a tracking chip in his neck, he mostly focuses on his cases even though the poor souls he finds mirror his own experience and fears. His stoic indifference only begins to weaken after he meets Martha, a harried young white woman desperate to find her recaptured PB lover, and Lionel, their charming inter-racial son. But Victor’s rebellion really develops when a new case with an unsatisfactory file opens up unusual moral and physical dangers as well as unprecedented opportunities.

Victor is preoccupied with the various identities and schemes that comprise the mystery/thriller elements of the plot, but increasingly memories of his terrible slave childhood resurface. Later, certain sci fi elements are added to the mix, not, to my mind entirely successfully, but there is no doubt that they add a chilling note and bring into question Victor’s decision to focus on his own self interest.

The Unseen World and Underground Airlines are two novels with literary ambitions but strong genre elements. I think the mix strengthens both.

Lost in the Translation

When it comes to translations, we monolingual North Americans are stuck with (and often stuck waiting for) translations as we catch up to the rest of the literary world. That makes us highly dependent upon the talent of the translator who, if not exactly anonymous, nonetheless wields enormous power over the final result.

The Moving Finger

Upon occasion, translators become almost cult figures. Take for example The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Wikipedia lists about twenty different attempts at translation of the famed Tentmaker’s tantra. (Knowing Wikipedia, we can assume that means between two and twice twenty-two.) Its best known English translator is Edward FitzGerald.

To me, FitzGerald represents an interpreter rather than a translator. He sought more the spirit of the original work than a literal, word-for-word conveyance, but also shaped the product in his own seductive way. Rather than translate the entire body of poetry, FitzGerald chose to transmogrify and rework only five to ten percent of key sections, gradually revising his lexical rendering over time.

The Rubáiyát became highly valued in the latter 1800s and was often printed in gorgeous, gold-illuminated editions. A jewel-encrusted copy was lost on the Titanic. In these days of Middle Eastern xenophobia, it’s worth noting the enormous influence of The Rubáiyát upon our language and culture. It’s difficult to read more than a few dozen quatrains without stumbling upon a familiar phrase such as “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.”

The Rubáiyát is familiar to novelists, especially mystery writers. Many of the golden age authors titled their books or used themes in phrases written by Khayyám. Examples quoting The Rubáiyát include Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novel The Moving Finger, Stephen King’s similarly named short story The Moving Finger, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novel Some Buried Caesar, and Daphne du Maurier titled her memoir Myself when Young. Other genres, especially science fiction, have drawn from the Persian opus.

SleuthSayers

As Rob, Janice, John, Deborah, and I worked to bring this web site to fruition, we struggled to find a perfect name for our cadre. Despite rumors to the contrary, I didn’t come up with ‘SleuthSayers’, Rob Lopresti did and the rest of us burst out with an enthusiastic “Yeah!” Only afterward did it dawn on us the name contained an embedded tip o’ the hat to Dorothy L, kind of a retronym.

By Divine Hand

A couple of my college courses studied Dante’s Divine Comedy, specifically Inferno. One professor required students to purchase two translations, Sayers and Ciardi.

Dorothy Sayers is best known to mystery readers for her Lord Peter Wimsey novels and short stories. To scholars, she’s also well regarded for her analysis of La Divina Commedia. Her translation of Dante’s work focused on maintaining the original rhyming structure, which resulted in occasional idiosyncratic wording. However, her notes are considered unparalleled in their detail and accuracy.

John Ciardi, a highly respected poet, began his translation shortly after Sayers. His version became renown for capturing the spirit of The Divine Comedy. Students read Sayers for the technical aspects and Ciardi for the art. Recently, Mark Musa and Robin Kirkpatrick have published ‘more modern’ versions.

Thumbed by Twain

I often enjoy mysteries by non-English authors– French, Russian, Scandinavian, and of course the famed Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, who’s been mentioned in these pages. Note that Borges wrote a history of The Rubáiyát and Borges' father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, wrote a Spanish translation of the FitzGerald version of The Rubáiyát.

Sometimes translations turn out less than satisfactory. Mark Twain did a literal retranslation of one of his stories in French back into English with hilarious results. Twain made the point that we can’t always be sure how much of the author’s original sound and feel make their way into other languages. In many cases, it’s difficult to connect with a story as if trying to penetrate an unseen barrier.

The Unseen Hand

Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander / Mikael Blomkvist series (AKA the Millennium trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) impressed me so much, I haven’t yet seen the films– I didn’t want the movies to mess with the image in my mind. I credit the translator for making that bond possible.

Despite my name, I know less Swedish than Latin or even French, possibly even isiZulu. Not a lot of novels are published in Latin these days, so I require not merely an interpreter but a spirit guide.

Reg Keeland seems to be the pseudonym of translator Steven T Murray. According to his bio, Murray works not only in Swedish, but Danish, Norwegian, German, and Spanish. I can’t guess how much of a translator’s influence colors the underlying work, but I suspect less is more, the less visible the better.

I don’t doubt that takes considerable talent. North American fans owe a debt to the unseen hand that made Larsson accessible to English audiences.

Clever fans may notice the title of this article contains a double meaning. A well-done interpretation of a good novel can indeed leave an absorbed reader lost in the translation.