The Little Drummer Boy

John le Carré changed the landscape, no question. It’s not accurate, though, to imagine he sprang fully-formed from the brow of Zeus. He was a hundred-and-eighty degrees from the shockers of John Buchan and E. Phillips Oppenheim, and it’s often remarked that George Smiley is the anti-Bond, but Fleming was himself a real spy, Naval Intelligence in WWII (le Carré worked for both MI5 and MI6, during the Cold War), and Bond is clearly a conceit, an exaggeration of Fleming’s own masochism and snobbery, not to mention a curious sort of inversion: Bond (and Fleming) parallel the career arc of Kim Philby.

Smiley, on the other hand, might be an internalized version of le Carré’s own habits of concealment and emotional avoidance, and Philby’s treachery - which is plainly one of le Carré’s touchstones – might parallel on a national or historical scale, le Carré’s personal betrayal by his father Ronnie. This isn’t some startling apotheosis; le Carré has spoken and written about it with self-deprecating chagrin.

His literary precursors are Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler. He didn’t exist in a vacuum. But the influences we recognize aren’t necessarily literary. Film noir isn’t exclusively an American province, there’s a healthy dose of it British postwar movies (along with an equally irreverent streak of comedies). Brighton Rock, based of course on a Greene novel, is one example. Even better are the Carol Reeds of that era: Odd Man Out, Fallen Idol, The Third Man. Not to mention the Dickens movies that David Lean made. It’s no surprise that these pictures contribute to a climate of mistrust and class resentments, or that they pave the way for the thickening claustrophobia of the Red Scare.

Not everybody reads pulp, either, and I’d like to make a case for Donald Hamilton. Dean Martin played Matt Helm as a Bond parody, but Hamilton’s books were darker. I’d recommend The Steel Mirror, not a Helm novel, but a standalone. It’s a Nazi war criminal/Commie menace hybrid, frightening and effective. And then there’s Richard Condon’s Manchurian Candidate. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was, yes, a game-changer, and fifty-odd years on, it’s worth remembering how it moved the goal posts, but not without context.

Le Carré is about betrayal. This is his consistent theme. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is about a deception operation. Leamas describes it at the end. You had a smart guy who suspected his boss of treason. We laid down a trail of bread crumbs, but artful, so it wasn’t that easy to follow. The smart guy was caught in his own snare. In fact, his boss was an asset of British intelligence, but we made him invulnerable by discrediting the investigation. The subtext of the story is class, a peculiarly inflexible British resonance. And the East German investigator, Fiedler, is a Jew, which comes in handy, some Hebe slyboots with a grudge.

The point wasn’t despair, or cynicism. The point was: These guys aren’t playing by the rules. And if we were still thinking, Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail, we were going to get our ass handed to us. Le Carré, in that sense, isn’t that far from Bond after all.

I read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1965, when I was taking Russian at Syracuse, a nine-month immersion course, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. The next year, I was in Berlin. I read The Looking-Glass War, and from a more informed perspective, I thought the book was complete baloney. You wouldn’t need to put a live agent in place, you could get everything you needed from electronic intercept. It made me doubt le Carré’s credentials. On the other hand, there was a lovely piece of tradecraft at the end, when the Vopo sergeant starts pulling the fuses in the breaker box in the apartment block.

Off and on, I ran hot and cold. A Small Town in Germany felt very authentic, from my own experience, but it was kind of inert. Then came Tinker, Tailor, and The Honorable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People. Honorable Schoolboy is, I think, a misfire, but necessary. Smiley’s People - the title alone a nod to Kipling – is something of a summing up, and the nuts and bolts are worth the cover price all by themselves. George at Otto’s boat camp?

Then we have The Little Drummer Girl. “Sooner or later, they say in the trade, a man will sign his name.” Probably the best of the books. Le Carré got a lot of grief over it, because it gave a sympathetic picture of Palestinians in the camps, and a decidedly unsympathetic picture of Arik Sharon and the Israeli war hawks, but the story is about hunting a terrorist, and it’s in no way sympathetic to the murder of innocents. It’s completely involving in its spycraft, Winding the Clock, Shaking the Tree, and it’s of course about betrayal. There’s an extraordinary line at the end of the book, “… the last thing Becker wanted was to invent anybody.” This is le Carré’s own admission.

I wouldn’t say he fell off, not by any means, but I began to fall away from him. Our Game, and The Tailor of Panama, are very engaging books, but somehow not entirely present. I liked The Russia House, with its circular-error-probable, but not as much as I should have. I absolutely despised Absolute Friends. Not that it couldn’t happen, but that it took an unworthy shortcut, and an easy out.

My pal Michael Davidson, also a spy novelist, and career CIA, thought le Carré was guilty of moral relativism. I’m not so sure. There’s an interior monologue in Smiley’s People, when Smiley goes to Hamburg, and looks east, across the Baltic, and thinks to himself, this is where the Iron Curtain starts, this is where the prison of thought begins, in the barbed wire. Smiley’s generation fought Hitler. Stalin’s legacy is just as poisonous. Smiley uses doubtful means, but he believes in the mission, and the end game.

Ambiguity perhaps defines le Carré. The Secret Pilgrim is one of his later titles. Too easy, of course, to try and pin a writer down through his admitted weaknesses. I think le Carré is more than the sum of his parts. Early on, in Call for the Dead, he says, “the warmth was contraband.” I can imagine he found warmth. His work is chilly enough.

All We Want for Christmas is a Fair Shot

Earlier this year, Alex Acks, in “Slush v Solicitations: Just tell us where we stand,” wrote about magazines’ and anthologies’ “complete lack of transparency regarding just how much of their content they actually take from the slush pile versus how much is solicited.” Though writing primarily about SF/F markets, Acks’s comments apply equally to other genres.

TRANSPARENCY

Before I react to Acks’s blog post, perhaps I should provide some transparency about my editorial work.

I edited my first five anthologies more than a decade ago. So, while I’m pretty sure every story in them was selected from slush piles, I don’t honestly remember. I can, however, discuss more recent editorial work.

The Eyes of Texas: Almost every story came from the slush pile. The one that didn’t was an anomaly. At the Toronto Bouchercon, I discussed the anthology with another writer and mentioned that I was surprised I had seen no stories involving a certain historical event. He asked several questions and later submitted a story in which that event played a role. I accepted the story.

Mickey Finn, volumes 1 and 2: I invited four writers to submit to the first Mickey Finn because I felt they would deliver solid stories around which I could shape the anthology. Three of the writers submitted stories, and I accepted all three. Other than my own contributions, the rest of the stories in MF 1 and all of the stories in MF 2 came from the slush pile.

Guns + Tacos, seasons 1, 2, and 3 (coming July-December 2021): All of the stories included in the first three seasons of G+T were solicited.

Jukes & Tonks (coming April 2021): All of the stories in J&T were solicited.

Black Cat Mystery Magazine: I suspect several stories in the first issue were solicited (mine wasn’t; I invited myself). I wasn’t involved with the editorial side for the first few issues, but every issue since I joined the staff has been filled from slush pile submissions.

FOUR TYPES OF SUBMISSIONS

In “Slush v Solicitations: Just tell us where we stand,” Acks describes four types of submissions—slush, solicited, backdoor, and select/private—all of which can or do serve as barriers to new writers.

Unsolicited submission via the slush pile is the primary way new writers break into publishing short fiction. However, the slush pile may offer false hope at publications that acquire only a small percentage of their stories from the slush.

So, is it fair to dangle hope in front of new writers by having a slush pile without acknowledging the other three types of submissions and how they impact story acquisition? Acks doesn’t think so and advocates for transparency. If editors are transparent about how they acquire stories and how many stories are actually plucked from the slush pile (as a percentage of total published stories, not as a percentage of total submitted stories), then writers will “know not to waste [...] time or emotional energy on a useless want” where slush piles are more for show, and writers can therefore target submissions to where they feel their stories have the best chance of acceptance.

FROM THE WRITER’S SIDE

Granted, the more information available to writers, the better their odds of success, but in addition to Acks’s desire for transparency, there’s an equally important question that new writers should be asking: How does one rise from the slush pile to become a writer whose work is solicited, whose work will be considered by publications that say they’re closed or that allow submissions via a “submissions portal” with a URL that is “not public”?

The answer is simple: Hard work, good writing, and professional attitude.

Every single magazine with which I have or have had a working relationship began when the editor plucked one of my stories from a slush pile. Almost every working relationship I have with anthology editors began when those editors plucked my stories from the slush piles of open-call anthologies.

I began writing professionally in the 1970s, so much of the information available to new writers today either was not then available or was much harder to acquire. What I knew about publishing came from the pages of Writer’s Digest and The Writer. What I knew about open markets came from the back pages of those same magazines and from the annual Writer’s Market. Later, I discovered newsletters such as Janet Fox’s Scavenger’s Newsletter and Kathryn Ptacek’s The Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets.

Even so, I had little or no information about how many published stories were discovered in slush piles, nor how many in a given issue of any magazine were slush pile finds vs. stories that were acquired through some form of “insider” submission (solicited, backdoor, and select/private). What I did know was that the only way out of the slush pile was to submit a well-written story that met the publication’s guidelines.

So I did it. Again. And again. And again.

And now, though I’m a writer whose work is sometimes solicited, I’ve yet to encounter any publication with formal or informal backdoor or select/private submission policies. That may be the difference between SF/F markets and mystery markets, or it might just mean I haven’t yet reached that level of success.

FROM THE EDITOR’S SIDE

You may have noticed that some writers appear in several of my projects, regardless of whether the projects are open-call or invitation-only. If there isn’t some secret handshake, how does this happen?

The reason is simple: these authors provide good stories, well-told, delivered on time and on theme, and they have proven themselves easy to work with throughout the editing process.

YOU GET A FAIR SHOT, AND YOU GET A FAIR SHOT, AND YOU GET A FAIR SHOT

So, yes, there may be publications and anthology editors with backdoor submission policies and secret/private submission portals, and there certainly are many invitation-only projects, but one’s goal as a writer should be to reach the point where one no longer has to battle through the slush pile on a regular basis.

So, should editors be transparent about their processes? I’m with Acks on this: Yes.

Will complete transparency create a level playing field for new writers? Alas, no.

But, really, all a writer wants is a fair shot.

So, for Christmas this year, let’s ensure that every writer has a fair shot.

Report to the Shareholders

In 2020, I wrote 16 stories and sold seven. That's nothing compared to several other SleuthSayers, but it shows how I reinvented myself in the year of Covid and other misadventures. I received 14 rejections, too, which means I'm not submitting often enough. 

In spring of 2004, I was struggling with two different novels and heard that you could get attention from agents and publishers by selling a few short stories. I've always liked shorts, but never felt comfortable with the form until I attended the Wesleyan Writers' Conference that summer. Alexander Chee, Roxanne Robinson and Chris Offutt gave me good advice and great writing prompts, so by year's end I submitted seven stories to various markets. None of them sold, but they taught me a new process. The following year, I wrote and submitted ten more stories. None of those sold, either, but each rewrite sucked a little less.

Between then and 2017, I only submitted 13 new stories, mainly because I sold my first novel late in 2009 and published it in 2010. By then, I had six or seven versions of various other novels on my hard drive. I sent some of the older stories out in revision (some sold), but I concentrated on those novels in various degrees of development.

Late in 2019, I published Words of Love, my 15th novel, and it changed my landscape. For the first time since 2003, I had neither a new idea nor an old manuscript loitering on the computer. My writing workshops earned more than my book sales, anyway.

Then came 2020. In late January, I had a minor traffic accident that aggravated a pinched nerve in my neck. My left arm went numb, and the ER doctors thought I'd had a minor stroke. They prescribed blood thinners, pain-killers and other meds for a month, then decided it wasn't a stroke after all. I'd said as much, but the drugs scrambled my concentration. I went off them at the end of February, but by then the pandemic was shutting us down and I had two workshops cancelled. I wrote a novella for a contest, but that was the only fiction I produced in the first half of the year. More about that in a minute (Like the foreshadowing?).

In March, I was diagnosed with cancer for the second time (I hate reruns). Between April and July, I had eight sessions of chemotherapy, followed by surgery in August. The chemo didn't give me the nausea I heard so much about, but my hairline is higher now, and my remaining silken silver locks are a lot thinner. I also have enough unused meds in the bathroom to stock a small CVS.

Fatigue and the new pills disrupted my thought process even more. By May, I didn't think I could plot out a novel again even if I had a decent idea, and it seemed clear that I had to write shorter.

So I did.

Since May, I have written 15 new stories, and the seven sales doubles my personal best for the year.

Between chemo treatments, I self-published a novella that won Honorable Mention for the Black.

Orchid Novella Award last December. Last week, I learned that the novella I wrote last spring earned Honorable Mention again for 2020. The announcement will appear in the Wolfe Pack newsletter, but I receive no certificate or any other proof of the honor. It won't even be mentioned in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which publishes the winner. Novellas are a hard sell, which is why I self-published last year's near-miss in July. Both other markets turned it down...

I also won my fourth Honorable Mention for the Al Blanchard Award. Again, no money or publication, but I get an impressive certificate and I was recognized at this year's virtual New England Crime Bake, where I've appeared often enough so they know I pronounce my name with a long "O." Eventually, I sold all three of my previous winners, so this story should find a good home, too. 

Since I'm reinventing how I write, I've examined my output for this year much more carefully than I would have a few years ago.

Four of the sales were to anthologies, one a story I wrote in 2007 and another in 2009. Both those stories were fewer than 3000 words, short for me. Another story will appear in a bundle next year, and two stories became only the third and fourth I've sold on the first submission.

Excluding the novella, my average word length was about 4700 words, which didn't surprise me. For years, my comfortable length has been between 4K and 5K. That seems to be my attention span.

Three new stories are between 3K and 4K, seven are in my usual 4K to 5K, and two fall between 5K and 6K. One is over 7K, and the novella is not quite 17K.

All those stories involve a crime but only six of them involve someone solving a mystery. The others feature the protagonist getting away with something or deciding that justice has already been served. I don't describe myself as a noir writer, but many of my stories tilt in that direction.

It's been that kind of year, hasn't it?

I'm doing a desultory edit on a novel that received 50 rejections between 2006 and 2008. Five different agents asked for the full MSS and passed on it without explanation, but I think I finally figured out the problem. If I publish it, it will only be as an eBook.

I am working on two more short stories and one that feels like another novella.

If it gets to a point where it's not fun anymore, there's always piano.

The Skating Mistress Affair, Part III

Part I and Part II provide the background of a unique bank fraud investigation. Last time, Sandman, influenced by his interfering inamorata, could not grasp that having cheated a bank once, he was no longer in a position to negotiate tough deals to make matters right.

No one had any notion of the unreal turn the case would take.

---

Off-Court Serve

A sizable entourage gathered in North Carolina: the vice president, a local consultant, a legal assistant, two attorneys, a company officer, Chase, and a brace of company people who stayed in the background.

I hadn’t previously met the bank’s attorney, a pretty, dark-haired girl with beauty, brains, and a beguiling sense of humor. Diane and I hit it off immediately.

The vice president introduced the other attorney, a local Greensboro man who’d made good. He’d graduated Harvard summa cum laude, then returned home to practice. His Clark Kent glasses lent a vague, intellectual uncertainty that would fool most people. Women zeroed in on tall, dark, and handsome, although he’d probably suffer an academic stoop in later life. Chase used the term ‘Esquire’, which became the man’s sobriquet for the rest of the trip.

The attorneys laid out a simple plan. They intended to search Sandman’s residence and, if necessary, his workplace for the source code. Since Sandman worked nights and slept days, they hoped to catch him napping– literally.

Esquire’s clerk had filed a brief and affidavits, including a couple from me, in support of search warrants for Sandman’s residence and place of work. They drafted carefully the motion to search the workplace, Carolina Steel. They weren’t Sandman’s employer, they merely let Sandman use their computers for development in exchange for his software and services. Two of their employees, Harry Church and Charley Barley, collaborated with Sandman.

Guilford County courthouse

An out-of-state entity requesting to search a local company might give a judge pause, but banks enjoyed certain federal privileges and protections. Trailing after the attorneys, we convened at the Guilford County courthouse to obtain a judge’s signatures on the court orders and warrant.

And then we waited. And waited. The courthouse’s architecture would have given Howard Roark apoplexy, a dull cell block unrelieved by a Greco-Roman temple façade. Its uncommonly hard benches had been cunningly copied from a Spanish Inquisition design. After painful hours of aching back and backside, I’d have confessed to assassinating Warren G Harding.

Once we discovered judges had adjourned for lunch, we followed suit. Esquire stayed behind in case a magistrate returned early. We need not have worried. The clock read well after lunch hour when Esquire came dashing back.

Why Southern Deputies Have Stereotypes

Sheriff J.W. Pepper		Sheriff B.T. Justus		our Deputy I.B. Dimbulb

The next step entailed the sheriff’s office executing the search warrant. While we waited, the Sheriff’s Department assigned a deputy to us. Jaws dropped. I wasn’t sure about the others, but I gulped in dismay.

Sheriffs J.W. Pepper and Buford T. Justice– movie fans might recognize them as the fat, stogie-chomping clichés portrayed by actors George Clifton and Jackie Gleason, respectively. Our guy looked like their bigger, nastier, meaner brother, the Southern deputy the South has done its best to stamp out.

Mean little eyes peeked out from the fat pads of his cheeks. His hair was losing the follicle war fought on an oily battlefield. He chewed a fat cigar mashed out so often, its end looked exploded. This good ol’ boy had worked hard developing a beer gut, the kegger kind that gave meaning to barrel-chested.

Chase and I’d been chatting up the pretty attorney between us, idly flirting to keep in practice. The deputy looked around at the gathered crew, hitched up his gunbelt and seized upon her to impress.

“Lil lady, whuz this here all about?”

Diane explained we were waiting for a warrant.

“Whut, you’re a legal lady? Purty lil theng lack you? Listen here, I’ll check on it, pull a few strings.”

He wandered off, came back, and glowered at Chase and me still sitting on either side of her. He plumped down next to the law clerk, facing us, legs apart to accommodate the sag of his kilderkin belly. Guilford County law enforcement shirts were made out of sturdy twill, not flimsy civilian fabric that might rupture at the next Big Mac.

“We wait a bit. At least this here’s simpler than last week. Yes sir. We wuz down in n-town, middle of the night, had my nightstick out whaling away, an’ you wun’t believe how shy them dark ones gets facing real lawnforcement.”

A man with a gun, a prejudice, and a loose screw had been turned loose on the streets of Greensboro.

The rest of us sat aghast. The local paralegal looked as if he wanted to shrink out of sight. Our VP, lounging against the wall, grimaced in disgust and departed the scene of the crime.

Next to me, attorney Diane tried to reassure me, the Yankee in the group. She whispered, “Believe me, this is not what Southerners are all about. This moron is… is…”

“An abomination,” muttered Chase. “Pardon the expression, but an utter asshole.”

His eye-watering cigar breath wilted most of us. I couldn’t decide if the deputy was oblivious to our reactions or encouraged by them. Had some of us managed to conjure obsequious interest, the course of events might have changed.

He continued. “Yep, now you takes a good oak nightstick, it makes a real good impression. It’s a grand persuader and if someones gets a bit messed up, you don’ gotta file no reports lack if you draw down. Nows this one darkie…” He didn’t use the word darkie.

I worked and traveled throughout the South, but I never encountered anything like this. More than sickening, this guy frightened us.

Once upon a time, the don’t-tread-on-me temper I inherited from my mother would override the quiet reason of my dad’s DNA contribution. Chase glanced at me in alarm. He’d seen me erupt once before. He leaned over and rested a calming hand on my wrist.

“Leigh, don’t, man. Don’t let anger cloud your vision. We need this guy on our side; it’s too important.”

Chase was right. We didn’t need to antagonize the repellant lawman assigned to us. I stalked toward the restrooms.

Hands on the marble counter, I leaned forward gathering myself. The vice president stepped out of a stall. He washed his hands and said, “Piece of work, isn’t he.”

“That bastard gets his jollies clubbing kids. Makes me sick.”

“That’s why I left before I told him off. We can’t change him now.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “C’mon, we endure.”

And we did for two more hours. None of us knew how much more of the deputy we could take before one of us turned homicidal.

Chase and the VP grew increasingly agitated the warrant was taking so much time. As shadows grew long, legal delays put at risk the plan to surprise Sandman asleep. Now past mid-afternoon, the time neared for his inner vampire to stir.

Esquire appeared and waved the vice president over. Minutes later they handed the deputy the court order.

The deputy squinted at the documents.

“Whut’s this here software?”

Chase said, “Computer programs, apps. Software runs the computer.”

“Whut’s it look like?”

“It could be listings, discs, hard drives, or even tape.”

“Yuh, but which?”

“It could be any of the above: print-outs, discs, cartridges, or tape.”

“Yuh, I said which?”

Chase turned helplessly to me.

I said, “We don’t know, sir. If this order was for music, it could be on a cassette, a CD, a vinyl record, or even sheet music, see? Same idea; we don’t know if it’s on a hard drive, CD, or printed sheets. It could be any or all.”

“Listen up. If you don’ know whut you’re lookin’ fur, we jez ain’t goin’.”

Attorney Diane stepped forward. Beguilingly, she said, “This is a court order signed by a judge; you have the warrant. Leigh here can recognize the software.” She rested her hand on his forearm. “We need an experienced officer like you to execute the warrant.”

“Thet judge pulls bogus orders outta his ass all the time. It don’t spell out what it is, I don’t execute it.”

Esquire hadn’t been regaled with the deputy’s adventures like we had, but the antipathy between the two men had blossomed, instant and intense. He said, “Come, Deputy, explain that to the judge.”

“Folks say you got fancy-ass Harvard law school, but that don’t cut no ice. I don’t tote for you. I works for the Sheriff.”

“The judge hears this, you might not work for anyone.”

The deputy stared at Esquire. He unhurriedly took the cigar out of his mouth, pulled out a paper pouch of tobacco, tucked in a chaw, and reinserted the cigar. He gave the distinct impression he’d like to address Esquire with the nightstick. Finally, he said, “Let’s git.” He turned and stomped away.

The Raid

The deputy’s heavily muscled Dodge led our convoy of four cars. The paralegals and staff came along as witnesses. We pulled in front of a modest house in a suburban neighborhood.

Chase stayed back to avoid antagonizing Sandman. I was kept waiting in the last car, I was told, for the premises to be secured.

Four got out. Both lawyers and the vice president followed the deputy up the walkway. The deputy banged on the door.

A spikey-haired, sleepy-eyed Sandman came to the entry, tying the belt of his bathrobe.

“We lookin’ for a Daniel Sandman. You happen to be him?”

“Yes.”

“We got a warrant for software. You got any this here software?”

“No, no sir, I don’t.”

“None at all?”

“No sir.”

“Well, then, a good day to you.”

“But… but…” said Esquire. “We came to search.”

“No, we ain’t gonna do no search.”

“But we have a warrant, a search warrant, as directed by a judge.”

“You heard the boy: He ain’t got none of this software. His word’s good enough for me.”

The vice president spoke up. “He has the software and we have a court order.”

The deputy spoke in mean, measured words. “You heard the boy. He said he ain’t got software. Now, you wantin’ to mess with me?”

Thwarted, the lawyers trudged back to the cars. Revving the Dodge’s big engine, the deputy whipped the powerful car down the street and out of sight.

“We still have the court order for his workplace,” said the vice president.

“A lot of good that will do us now,” said Esquire. “But let’s try.”

Nervy Steel

He directed us to Carolina Steel’s headquarters. As if anticipated, we were swept straight to the top floor where two company officers and their lawyers met us. Clearly, they knew we were coming.

The company attorneys blathered and blathered, made phone calls and blathered more. They claimed they were waiting for senior counsel. Outside the conference room, security gathered.

One of the executives said, “Our boys downstairs assure us they don’t have any of this software mentioned in the court order.”

Chase muttered in my ear. “Least not anymore.”

“That’s why we brought an expert and a court order to search,” said our vice president.

“Now, now. Normally in Carolina, police or deputies conduct searches. You don’t do it differently in Old Vir-gin-I-A, do you? All y’all can’t expect us just to let you poke around, can you, especially since our boys assure everyone nothing’s to be found? Certainly you don’t mean to question our veracity or abuse our hospitality?”

A legal argument ensued, but it grew clear that without police presence, we wouldn’t be allowed beyond the boardroom.

Security personnel moved in to escort us to the parking lot. The burly males looked menacing enough, but the much scarier short female guard appeared itching to shoot one of us in the kneecap.

Thwarted yet again, we adjourned for a post-mortem. It felt like our own. What should have been a simple mission, abjectly nosedived.

---

Days later, talking to Sandman, he told me what happened behind the scenes.

“Man, the deputy gave me a scare. As soon as I closed the door, I lit the fireplace. Middle of summer and I get a blaze roaring. I’d stacked listings all over the house, one of them on an end table next to the door, not more than two, three feet from where the deputy stood.

“I gathered them up, feeding them piece by piece to the fire, burning the evidence. I also had a couple of mag tapes around. You wouldn’t believe how Mylar stinks when it burns. Gives off this black ash. The stench still reeks in my nostrils. That left a disc cartridge. I figured if worse came to worst, it might anciently sorta get dropped.

“Simultaneously, I called the computer room, and told Charley and Harry the situation. The entire time you were upstairs with the lawyers stalling you, they were downstairs erasing everything they could off of disc and tape, shredding so many listings they fried the shredder and had to roll in another.

“Every ten minutes the CIO would call in. ‘What’s left? What’s left?’ By the time our lawyers let you go, we’d hidden the key pieces and destroyed the rest.

“Harry, Charley, and me… we worried one or all of would be let go, but Carolina Steel’s attorneys nixed that, saying terminations could be used as prima facie evidence we’d done something wrong like destroying the programs specified in the warrant.

“Man, I shouldn’t gloat, but our insane clown deputy beat your Harvard summa cum laude lawyer. Lot of good he did y’all.”

Post Mortem

I accompanied the bank people back to Virginia. It wasn’t a happy trip. The vice president needed to prepare an explanation for the stockholders. The rest of us and Data Corp’s general manager met at the Arbor, a favorite restaurant for dinner, overeating, and imbibing. Comfort food and drink.

We agreed not to talk about the debacle while we ate, but we couldn’t bear the tension. We cursed the deputy, Sandman, Carolina Steel, and software in general. Finally we pushed fried chicken aside and sat back.

“Well,” said the bank’s attorney, dabbing lipstick where it had worn thin. “That was a right fiasco.”

“And other words that begin with ƒ,” Chase said.

Diane put her lipstick away. “What I don’t see is an option anymore.”

“That was it, the end of the line.”

“We’ve got to consider our exposure, to customers, to shareholders, to ourselves. We face serious liability if customers discover we don’t possess the source code.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Damn,” said Chase, far down in his beer. “I have clients who want to buy it if we can add features and support for new hardware.”

“There is one option,” I said, but no one was listening.

“Oh Lord,” said the attorney. “I wonder if we’ve stepped on any state or federal banking regulations. We could be accused of fraud here.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“Even worse exposure,” she groaned, “most of our sales have been out of state.”

I said. “Folks, listen a moment. I can decrypt the code.”

Chase peered at me speculatively, the lawyer skeptically, and Data Corp’s general manager like I was crazy.

Chase said, “Danny told us over the phone it’s too complex even for him. It can’t be done.”

“When do you stop believing the guy who screwed you and start listening to the guy hired to save your butts?”

For the first time in weeks, Chase looked more relieved than morose. He gulped like a man given a Heimlich maneuver.

The general manager reached across for the last piece of chicken. “I’m pretty certain we can’t afford for Leigh to write us an entirely new program.”

Diane’s paralegal had followed both the legal and technical discussions. She had drafted the original purchase contract with Sandman.

“Leigh, what makes you think you can do this?” she asked. “Not only would you have to figure out the program in the ordinary course of events, but a brilliant and devious guy has done his best to see it can’t be done.”

“If anyone can do it, Leigh can,” Chase said with perhaps more conviction than he felt. “If you’d heard the two of them on the phone, you’d know he’s got Sandman on the run. I’ve seen his work, even more brilliant than Sandman.”

“Are we talking battle of the brains or war of the egos?” said the GM. “He may be quite the code-slinger, but experts say code-smashing can’t be done.”

I said, “The difficult part was figuring out it was encrypted. The second hardest has been deducing how. I’ve been working that out at home while I’ve been waiting.”

“You’re plugged into NSA or CIA or something?” said Diane’s paralegal.

“No, it’s merely a puzzle.” A famous quote came to mind. “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” They stared at me. The Churchill reference fell flat. I couldn’t blame them; we’d undergone a bad day.

“What’s our guarantee?” the paralegal asked. “We already took the word of one guy. It’s not up to me, but I wouldn’t throw good money after bad.”

I said, “Sandman created programs to strip and encrypt the program. I have to design programs to decrypt and restore the code.”

Diane spoke up. “So why are you saying this isn’t the most difficult thing in the world?”

“Sandman didn’t want to trigger alarms, so no fancy NSA 128-bit encryption. Instead, he scaled up cypher obfuscation to support the legend of a hard-to-comprehend way of doing things. He believed he garbled the code too much to permit serious study. He’s wrong, but it’ll take detective work.”

“Even so,” said Chase, “you won’t get the documentation back, the comments.”

“True, but I’ve been living with this program for months. Once decoded, the label names give clues; that’s why Sandman encrypted them. As for the logic, in a circular way I can learn the code by having to document it and I can document the code by having to learn it. Does that makes sense? I’ll attain a deeper knowledge than if I hadn’t had to do the extra work.”

Chase raised his glass. “I bet on Leigh.”

The attorney– she of little confidence– shook her head. “He’s cute but…”

Chase picked up the check and said to me, “Let’s get sleep and start tomorrow.”

---

Sandman had blown his chance to negotiate a deal that would have benefited everybody. The bank boxed him in legally and I was closing in on breaking his unbreakable code. He still had one more wrong move to make as we wrap up in Part IV.

The Second Time Around

  

I'm a writer who's been fortunate enough to publish a fair number of short stories. And one of the best things about that is something that never occurred to me until after I'd been doing this for a while: a lot of published stories means a lot of opportunities for reprints.

Unlike novels, short stories can be sold over and over again, if you take the time and trouble to find places receptive to previously published work. There aren't a huge number of those, but there are probably more than you might think.

It's easy to understand why some publications are interested in reprints. After all, "used," in this context, doesn't mean damaged or substandard. The words in stories remain the same--although they do occasionally show their age. And some of the best stories I've read are those that I wouldn't have seen at all if they hadn't been discovered by others and republished in another place. Sure, I enjoy opening up an issue of AHMM or EQMM or The Strand and reading a story that's never been seen before. I think everyone does. But I also like finding and reading anthologies of previously-published tales, some of those written by authors I know and some not. I've even met a few folks who say they prefer to read that kind of book because they know an editor considered those stories good enough to republish and redistribute.

Reborn identities

On the marketing side, authors are aware that they usually can't sell a reprint as easily as an original story, or= expect to be paid as much when they do. But that's not always the case, and when you do sell one and get paid for it, you can certainly look at it as found money. How much were you making from it while it sat forgotten and aging like tobacco leaves on your hard drive? And even if you don't get paid again, you might consider it worthwhile just to get the extra exposure a reprint provides. Different writers have different opinions, on that.

As for publication rights, if the only rights a market has bought to your story is "first rights"--sometimes specified as FNASR (First North American Serial Rights)--then you automatically own and keep the reprint rights. I've also heard reprint rights referred to as "second rights," even though I understand that term also applies to its third or fourth or fifth reprint as well. I've had several of my short stories published more than half a dozen times after their original appearances, and every time that happened, my contracts stated that the publication was acquiring one-time "reprint rights."

Info from the sales manual

The usual way to sell reprints is to find possible markets, decide whether your already-pubbed stories might be a good match, and submit them for consideration. Some of these markets are magazines--especially online zines receptive to stories previously published in print only--and some are anthologies for which your story might fit the theme. Sometimes there's no way to know whether a market--mag OR antho--will consider reprints, but their policy on this is usually indicated in their guidelines. They might say "unpublished stories only," "original stories only," "no previously published work," "reprints considered," "reprints encouraged," etc. Strangely enough, most of the places to which I've sold reprints don't seem to care whether the original story appeared in a high-profile market or a lesser-known market. I suppose the assumption is, most people will not have seen the story, period, and if they did they probably won't remember it. In any case, if you submit a reprint you must be sure to include in your cover letter the fact that your story was previously published, and when and where. I usually include these two sentences: "This story was originally published in the July 1998 issue of Gone & Forgotten Magazine. Since they acquired first rights only, I hope you'll want to use it in a future issue of Here & Now Magazine."

One of the best ways to get a story reprinted, of course, is to have it chosen for inclusion in one of the annual "best-of" anthologies. That's something you can't control, but when it happens it's dancing-in-the-street time, and it's great in several ways: (1) It often gets your story wider exposure than the first time around, (2) it often earns you more money than you were paid for the original, and (3) it requires no effort on your part. But those out-of-the-blue bonanzas don't happen that often. When they do, you thank your lucky stars and hope it'll happen again someday.

Old or new?

One question that was usually asked by those in my writing classes was How much do you have to change in a story to make it an original story instead of a reprint? Opinions vary on this, but I'm pretty strict about it. I think you have to do far more than just change a title and character names and place names, etc., to call an already published story a "new" story. I think the plot, as well as those other things I mentioned, must be substantially different in order for it to be considered a new and original story. In fact I have never even attempted to change an already-published story to the extent that I could call it an original. I once tried changing the names of all the male characters in a published YA story about a bunch of boys to names of female characters so I could market it as an adventure story for girls, and changed some things about the plot as well--but I still called it a reprint, and presented it that way. In my cover letter I said something like "A modified version of this story first appeared in . . ." To do otherwise would be unethical, if not dishonest, and I suspect that if you're ever caught doing it, you will have peed in your Post Toasties when it comes to future dealings with editors. In other words, don't do it. Write a truly new story instead.
 

For what it's worth, I've recently found several links that will consider reprints, and these have resulted in the sale of quite a few of my older stories. The first link is a bit outdated but still useful and the second is current. Both are good resources. I also occasionally find reprint markets merely by googling "short story reprint markets," "calls for reprint submissions," and so forth.

One more thing. I regularly visit the ralan.com site when I'm looking for reprint markets. (It's geared to SF/fantasy stories but also includes info on AHMM, EQMM, and other mystery markets.) After choosing one of the categories at the top of the page (pro, semipro, anthology), I type the word "reprints" into the search field so it'll highlight that part of every publication's guidelines as I click through the entries. They'll say either REPRINTS: NO or REPRINTS: YES.

What do YOU think?

So . . . If you're a writer, what's your advice and what are your observations on this subject? Do you actively seek out targets for your previously published stories? Do you know of some publications that regularly feature reprints? Are there websites you visit regularly that can help you find reprint opportunities? Have you had any good or bad experiences when getting your stories reprinted in other publications? Have you had many stories selected for renewed life in "year's-best" anthologies? Let me know.

And that's that. Main thing is, don't just let those stories you've worked hard on sit idle after publication and become one-hit wonders. When the exclusivity period in your contract runs out--it's rarely longer than six months--get those stories back out there and into circulation.

Remember: short fiction is 100% recyclable.

The Greatest Christmas Mystery, Ever, Part II

The thing every author creates that marks a work as their own is also the very thing they cannot see. Fans and critics might well rave about a writer’s “style,” but those writers have no clue what these mad people are talking about. A writer can try to imitate another writer’s style, but not for long. Inevitably, the thing that makes a writer unique eventually outs. That’s why those Sherlockian pastiches never really nail Doyle. Close, but no meerschaum pipe.

Writers love to lament quirks of their style. But when they do that, they’re really moping about defects that are painfully obvious to them. When I edit my work, I try desperately to excise the stuff I hate about my writing. I know, for example, that I overuse words like “concoct”—not to mention “desperately” and “excise.” And sure, there are tons of junk words I search for during an editing pass that have been culled, I might as well confess, from previous columns on that subject right here on the Sleuthsayers blog. (A tip of the hat here to Messrs. Lopresti and Floyd.)

But let’s face it: no matter how much I tinker with my paragraphs and sentences, the Joe-ness within me inevitably spills onto the page. I have no idea, for example, how my use of definite and indefinite articles differ from some other writers. And I have no clue how my use of phonemes (don’t ask) punctuate the Joe-itude. For every quirk I prune away, I lay down a thousand more tells that taint the prose with what can probably be described as a sort of invisible literary fingerprint.

And modern scientists can lift those prints.

Toward the end of the 19th century, descendants of a man named Henry Livingston Jr. went public with the shocking truth, as they perceived it: Clement Clarke Moore had claimed authorship of a poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, written by their ancestor.

Livingston (1748-1828) was many things in life—a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a surveyor, a justice of the peace, and an inveterate poet. When Livingston’s first wife died, he married and fathered children with another woman. It was to this second crop of kids that Livingston—who lives in the literature as a light-hearted, jolly fellow—is believed to have first read his Christmas poem sometime between 1807-09. The family suspected that a visitor to Henry’s estate in Poughkeepsie brought a copy with her to New York City, where it somehow ended up in Moore’s household.

Livingston

Of course, there’s no proof of any of this. Livingston’s original text, with numerous cross-outs—was said to have been preserved in the family for decades, until it was lost in a house fire in Wisconsin in the 1840s.

But we do have those marvelous words. If Livingston wrote the poem, his invisible fingerprints would be all over it, wouldn’t they? In 1999, a descendant convinced a Vassar professor to begin a textual analysis of the poem, comparing its signature quirks to other known examples of Livingston’s and Moore’s poetry. After a long study, the first prof, Don Foster, said yep, Livingston did it!(1) If that weren’t enough, a second professor—MacDonald P. Jackson, professor emeritus at the University of Auckland—subjected the work of the two men to numerous tests, producing a 2016 book in the process, ultimately finding for Livingston.(2) I urge you read Professor Mac’s work, if long asides on phoneme pairs, attributive adjectives, and high- and low-frequency words—and the syllables that love them—run to your taste.

Moore

The thing is, we should have known all along. I can’t help imagining Hercule Poirot or Ellery Queen or even the aforementioned Mr. Holmes pegging Moore as the malingerer after a long weekend in the country with him.

On paper, the dude looks temperamentally incapable of writing such a poem.

Item 1: In 1799, New York passed a law allowing for gradual emancipation. That meant that all enslaved persons in the state had to be freed by 1827. Clement Clarke Moore—a biblical scholar, a man of the freaking cloth—held onto his enslaved persons till the very end. The year A Visit from St. Nicholas was published, 1823, Moore owned five human beings. They had to be pried from his grip at the very last gasp of the manumission law. To make matters worse, Moore was rabidly against abolition and went to his grave in 1863 objecting to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Item 2: When Moore sold his Chelsea property in Manhattan, he did it in such a way to exclude working class New Yorkers, and did everything in his power to create an atmosphere modern Americans would associate with a gated community, banning everything from stables to factories to retail shops within the confines of Chelsea’s boundaries. When city fathers announced they wanted to run Ninth Avenue through his estate, he railed against it, saying it was a plot to appease the working class.

Item 3: When scholars speak of Moore, they use words like stodgy, stuffy, elitist, narrow, unplayful, or curmudgeonly. His other writing, especially the other poems he wrote, express a weirdly moralistic tone. He doesn’t really seem to like children. In one of the Christmas poems in his ouevre, Santa comes off like a dick—mocking the children for whom he has left a sackful of coal. As you read this poem, Moore appears in your mind’s eye, sadistically flexing a switch, as if prepping to whip a naughty child’s backside. In 1995, when the New-York Historical Society mounted an exhibition devoted to the poem, the museum’s curator confided to the New York Times, “He was clearly a prig. He had a very closed mind.”

I don’t have to tell you that scholars, academics, and museum curators choose their words very carefully.

Does this sound like the kind of man who could effortlessly write about sugar-plums and dozing tots? In the poem we all know and love, Santa comes to life as a pipe-smoking, soot-covered, working class hero, i.e., a “peddler just opening his pack.” That is not a portrayal you’d expect from the pen of a man who hated filthy tradesmen and their tobacco with equal venom. Could a guy like this really breathe life into a right jolly old elf?

If the modern academics are correct, suddenly tiny bits of the story surrounding the writing of the Christmas poem make a whole lot more sense.

No wonder Moore didn’t want his children and guests to share the poem he read them in 1822. No wonder he downplayed his “creation” for two decades, claiming the poem as his own and inserting it into a published collection of his poetry only after his children pushed him to do so. No wonder he claimed the poem was easy to write. (Trivial works usually are, aren’t they? Compiling a Hebrew-English dictionary, as Moore had, is far more mentally taxing.)

I might add that before Moore published the poem in his collection, he wrote a strange letter to the editor of the Troy, New York, newspaper that first pubbed the poem anonymously. Moore asked if editor Norman Tuttle knew who the author of the poem was when Tuttle first released it in the pages of his publication in 1823. Speaking as a writer myself, that is a very weird question for a writer to ask of his own work. As Livingston descendants and researchers point out, such a query only makes sense if Moore was trying to suss out if the coast was clear before he formally claimed the poem as his own.

Maybe it’s time for us to face facts. Maybe Moore wasn’t a brilliant-but-humble genius at all, as I hinted three weeks ago. Maybe he was just another hypocritical, moralizing, enslaving churchman. A man who willfully perpetrated one of the most outrageous thefts in the history of U.S. literature.

Not the “Poet of Christmas” at all. More like the plagiarist who stole Christmas.

Signed first edition? I think not.

Happy New Year to you all! See you in three weeks.

* * * 

(1) Author Unknown, by Don Foster (New York: Owl Books/Henry Holt, 2000). Chapter 6, beginning page 221, on the Santa Claus poem analysis.

(2) Who Wrote The Night Before Christmas?: Analyzing the Clement Clarke Moore vs. Henry Livingston Question, by MacDonald P. Jackson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2016).

See also:

* The website/database created by a Livingston descendant. 

* Henry Livingston, Jr.: The Poet You Always Loved, by Mary Van Deusen (Wrentham, Massacusetts: Val Alain Publishing, 2016).

Christmas Gifts and Christmas Coal

by Eve Fisher

Christmas Stocking Stuffer

Been watching a great show on Amazon Prime called Around the World in 80 Faiths.  The presenter, Pete Owen-Jones is straight out of central casting for an almost New Age Anglican vicar with a wicked sense of humor.  And it covers all kinds of faiths that you might never have even heard of.  Any show that talks about Cao Dai works for me.  Oh, and did I mention the scenery?  I had no idea that the Ethiopian highlands were so beautiful...

Also the latest season of Death in Paradise, which changed Chief Inspectors mid-way, but was very entertaining. 

And if you like Rowan Atkinson - The Thin Blue Line is a lot of fun.

Christmas Fruitcake - 

Well, technically Thanksgiving fruitcake; Thanksgiving evening I lost my footing somehow and fell down the flight of stairs leading to the basement.  Good news:  I was dressed to go out, with down coat, etc., which served as my bubble wrap, and the stairs were carpeted.  Better news:  Nothing broken, nothing sprained.  Bruising about as expected.  Bad news:  It made my arthritis / bursitis flare up.  Good news:  Cortisone shots work.  

It's looking like it's going to be a warm(er) dry Christmas.  30s and 40s.  No snow.  This means that I can walk outside (because there's no way I'm going to a gym until the vaccine has trickled down to me) for a lot longer than usual!  But... it's a lot less picturesque.   

Christmas Coal - 

John Le Carre died.  Granted, I didn't expect too many more novels from him at 89, but still...  

Still no charges or end of the investigation in the South Dakota AG Jason Ravnsborg accident in which he hit and killed a Jason Boever and claimed he thought he hit a deer.  Boever was carrying a light, and walking on the side of the road. And it happened back on September 12, so WTF???  Anyway, AV Ravnsborg held a little press conference on Monday, where he said:

“I believe I have not committed any crime. I believe that we will--when we have all the facts, not a selected amount of facts--we’ll know the full story and we’ll make a full statement,” he told a KOTA Territory News reporter. (KOTA News)

Two points:  

(1) Most criminals don't believe they've committed any crime.  And

(2) It's not - it should not be - a matter of your beliefs, Mr. Ravnsborg.

Meanwhile, Governor Noem and the Pennington County Sheriff (Rapid City) would like the Amendment legalizing pot that 2/3 of the voters voted "Yes" on to somehow go away.  Their attempts - and we all know they're gonna try - is going to cost South Dakotans a lot of money.  And most of us - in our rapidly aging state - would love at least some gummy bears before bedtime.

More Christmas Presents - 

Christmas mystery short stories!  

For some OLD golden oldies, try this list provided by East of the Web, complete with links to on-line reading.  Including, among others:

The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle
How Santa Claus Came To Simpson's Bar by Bret Harte
Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
Bertie's Christmas Eve by Saki
Captain Eli's Best Ear by Frank Stockton

Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe - A Christmas Party:

I also love Maigret's Christmas, Hercule Poirot's Christmas and many others.  

Or, if you're in a grim holiday mood (and hey, it happens), there's a major compedium of Edgar Allan Poe at Free Short Stories UK.

Christmas Pudding - 

I'm not a big fan of Hallmark Christmas movies.  But I do love good Christmas TV episodes.  Here are some of my favorite Christmas episodes (in no particular order):

A Charlie Brown Christmas
The Waltons: The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971 - pilot movie)

The Waltons: The Best Christmas (1976)

Twilight Zone:  The Night of the Meek (1959)
The Big Bang Theory: "The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis" (December 15, 2008)

Blackadder's Christmas Carol

Speaking of the British, they're also really good at making things called Christmas Specials which may or may not even mention the Christmas season (other than a party).  But they're hilarious.  From Only Fools and Horses "Heroes and Villains".  

 

See also Only Fools & Horses "Modern Man" and "Time on Our Hands."

Last of the Summer Wine (1973):

Christmas Cookies - 

My favorite non-religious Christmas story, EVER, is still Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales.  The entire story can be found at the Australian Gutenberg  HERE.  From Mr. Prothero's fire 

"Do something," he said.

And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke—I think we missed Mr. Prothero—and ran out of the house to the telephone box.

"Let's call the police as well," Jim said.

"And the ambulance."

"And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires."

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said: "Would you like anything to read?"

to Auntie Hannah, "who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush"; from the endless snow to the "close and holy darkness" - the sheer language gets me as drunk as Auntie Hannah's tea-laced rum.  

Best Christmas Gifts - 

We're still safe and healthy, as far as I can tell, but we have stayed masked and socially distanced, and will continue to do so.  

Meanwhile, the vaccines are being shipped, delivered, and injected!  Huzzah!  My nurse goddaughter got her shot yesterday!  Double Huzzah!

Today in Mystery History: December 16

This is the seventh in my occasional series on the history of our illustrious field.  I chose this date for an entry because of a couple of weird coincidences.  Read on and be illuminated.

December 16, 1927.  Peter Dickinson was born on this date in Livingstone, Zambia. He won prizes for children's books and mysteries such as Skin Deep (1968) and A Pride of Heroes (1969). Two of his crime novels, beginning with King and Joker (1976), were set in an alternative timeline in which Prince Albert Victor (sometimes suspected of being Jack the Ripper) lived long enough to become king.

December 16, 1930. William Brittain was born on this date in Rochester, New York.   He wrote two successful series of short stories: one about science teacher Mr. Strang, and a very odd set connected by only one element: each tale features a character whose actions are directed by their fondness for one famous mystery author.  The first was "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr."  (1965)

December 16, 1933.  Louis Joseph Vance died on this date in New York City, having fallen asleep while smoking.  His rogue-turned-crimefighter, The Lone Wolf, appeared in eight books and 24 movies, plus radio and TV shows.

December 16, 1951.  We just want the facts, ma'am... Today the classic cop show Dragnet premiered on NBC TV.  It had started on radio in 1949 and kept going until 1957.  The TV show lasted until 1959 and, like the proverbial bad penny, returned in 1967.  All versions starred the creator, Jack Webb.

December 16, 1965.  The movie The Spy Who Came in From the Cold premiered on this date.  Based on John Le Carre's great espionage novel, it collected two Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for Richard Burton.    Who can forget that last scene?  By the way if you want to win a trivia point: Who was the first actor to play Le Carre's master spy, George Smiley?  Rupert Davies, in a small role in this flick.

December 16, 1965.  As the spy was coming in from the cold, William Somerset Maugham was exiting this world of trouble.  He wrote tons of famous novels and plays but the important one for us is Ashenden, a collection of short stories based on his own experiences as a British intelligence officer.  Two of those stories were reworked into Alfred Hitchcock's movie Secret Agent.

December 16, 200?.  This date begins the plot of The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson's second runaway hit novel about Lisbeth Salander.  

December 16, 2011.  Remember William Brittain, who I mentioned near the top of this page?  He died on his birthday.

 December 16, 2015.  And so did Peter Dickinson. Spooky, huh?

 

Four New Stories, Three This Week, Two Out Today, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

This is a good month for me writing-wise:

• I had a new story published yesterday: "Second Chance" in the anthology Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, edited by my fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken. 
• Today is the publication day for two more stories: "A Family Matter" in the January/February 2021 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and "That Poor Woman" in the January/February 2021 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. 
• A fourth story, "An Inconvenient Sleuth," is scheduled to be published later this month in issue eight of Black Cat Mystery Magazine. 

Except when I had five new stories published at once (when my collection, Don't Get Mad, Get Even, came out in 2013 with five new stories and ten reprints), I've never had so many stories published in one day, one week, or one even month. I've also never had stories published in AHMM and EQMM at the same time. It's a nice way to end a year, especially this year.

I generally like to talk about stories when they're available for purchase. So here's information about the three new stories that are already out:

"Second Chance" is a tale of twin brothers who were placed in separate foster homes at age ten. Now eighteen, one finds the other, but the reunion is not the stuff of Hallmark movies. I hope you'll consider picking up a copy of Mickey Finn. It's published in ebook and trade paperback, with twenty stories perfect for the noir reader on your holiday gift list. You can buy it from all the usual sources, as well as from the publisher here.

"A Family Matter" in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine is set in 1962, the closest I've ever come to a historical story. In this tale, Doris and her neighbors are determined to move up the ladder of success together. When a new family that moves in next door doesn't know the unwritten social code, Doris makes it her business to help them conform. This story was inspired by something that happened to my mom when my parents and siblings (years before I showed up) moved into a new neighborhood.

"That Poor Woman" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is a flash story about a crime victim who takes the law into her own hands.

You can find individual issues of AHMM and EQMM at bookstores and newsstands. For a paper subscription of either magazine--or both, they make a great holiday gift--click here for AHMM and here for EQMM. As of 11 p.m. last night (Monday night), the new issues scheduled for publication today (Tuesday) aren't up yet on the AHMM and EQMM websites, but they should be soon.

You can also get electronic individual issues as well as subscriptions for your Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other readers. Learn more here about EQMM and here about AHMM. (Because I've had friends unable to easily find the Kindle pages before, here's the EQMM Amazon link and here's the AHMM link.)

I'll talk about "An Inconvenient Sleuth" next month, after the issue of BCMM comes out.

It's interesting that these four stories are all coming out in the same month because I didn't write them all around the same time. I wrote "Second Chance" in 2014, "A Family Matter" in January of 2018, "An Inconvenient Sleuth" in February of 2018, and "That Poor Woman" in October of 2019. As you can imagine, some stories take a long time to sell. (I submitted "A Second Chance" five times before Michael Bracken took a chance on it. (See what I did there?)) Other stories sell on their first submission. But no matter how long it takes for a story to sell and then be published, I'm always glad when a new story comes out. So that makes this week--and this month--a good time for me.

I'll be back in 2021. In the meanwhile, happy holidays and happy reading.

My Musical Hallucinations

Speaking of books, one of the things that well-meaning people say when I mention that I have musical hallucinations is, "It's too bad Oliver Sacks is not alive." Sure, I'm sorry the the celebrated popularizer of neurological oddities is dead. But not as sorry as I am that Mozart is dead. Or Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, for that matter. The author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat could have written The Woman Whose Right Ear Played "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." But I'd rather have the composer of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" itself or the guys who wrote "Over the Rainbow."  

Sacks could have told my story entertainingly. But I don't need a ghostwraconteur, thank you. I've got one in my head, as every storyteller does—along with the entity I call the Maestro, who's been giving me private concerts since June 2019. 

Don't worry, I'm not nuts. It's simply the name I've given the neurological phenomenon they call musical hallucinations. They’re not in my head, like an earworm, but more like a radio playing close by or sometimes like earphones in my ears. They come from the unconscious, from the musical archives of the person experiencing them. People who have MH have reported hearing a range from nursery rhymes to Chinese opera. Mine are particularly rich, because I have been listening to and making music since early childhood: Girl Scout campfire songs, Broadway show tunes, union songs, and Appalachian ballads on the one hand, classical music on the other. Mozart in, apparently, Mozart out. 

Musical hallucinations sit at the crossroads of neurology, otology, and psychiatry. I already have migraines and partial hearing loss, and I'm a therapist myself. And I’m Jewish. So doctors, I’ve got. They’re on it, they’re on it. And so am I. Having combed the Internet for the literature, we know a few things. It's not as rare as all that, just poorly studied and reported. The causes vary, and there are no treatment protocols. Not only older women get it as usually reported, but also "youts" (don’t you love that word?) who've been playing too much Super Mario. And not a single expert can tell us how to make it stop.

Why would I want to make it stop? you may ask. It sounds fascinating, I hear you say. At any moment, my private concert may be a  baroque string ensemble improvising theme and variations, a world class symphony orchestra, a cello cadenza (right ear) or a coloratura aria (left ear) in the shower. The stimulus of whirling fans or a humming refrigerator may elicit a choral work, eg the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth to Christmas carols in six-part harmony with pipe organ. A brisk walk may summon up a Scottish ballad with bagpipes or a marching band with tuba and bassoon. Sometimes there’s no special stimulus. The Maestro has been known to burst into a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday” for no reason in particular. Everyone wants to hear the song of the Sirens, don’t they? I get them for free. So what's the catch? 

The catch is that the Sirens have no Off button. As you may remember, Odysseus had to be tied to the mast so that unearthly beckoning wouldn’t lure him to his death. Lovely as the music is,   it eventually becomes frustrating, even agonizing. The proverbial Beethoven ending of one of those world-class symphonies can become the Chinese water torture as it goes on and on and on and on and on. And while I can sometimes influence the playlist with a nudge of the mind, I don’t get to choose it. I’ve had to endure “My Grandfather’s Clock” and “Turkey in the Straw” over and over and over. And the most intractable moment is every night when my head hits the pillow and the music won't shut up.  

For many months after the MH started, I heard it nonstop throughout my waking hours. Then I started getting periods of respite. It was less intrusive if I didn't treat it as a concert, however tempting. Eventually, my neurologist started prescribing small amounts of scary medications. The neuroleptics, meant for schizophrenics (no, I am not now and never have been), didn’t work, but Aricept, for dementia patients, is beginning to.

So now, I no longer get world-class free entertainment, but only occasional tinny humming. On the other hand, because I don't have dementia, the Aricept doesn't have to fix reality for me. Instead, it's straightening out my unconscious. As a result, I'm having excessively coherent dreams. My husband says I'm making speeches all night long. When I step off a ledge, I wake to find myself with my feet on the floor. There's only the thinnest veil between dream and reality.

But I'm not complaining. I was afraid I'd never have a moment free from music I couldn't control for the rest of my life. In general, I still appreciate music. But please don't invite me to a concert any time soon.