You Should Write...

My brother-in-law started writing. Pushing sixty, he's taken to it with a zeal I had in my twenties. At least he knows what he's writing. I dabbled in someone else's sandbox before sending out the first Nick Kepler short around the time we worried Y2K would end the world. Good times!

Since then, I've discovered I can write crime at a reasonable pace expected by traditional publishers. Holland Bay is done. It's sequel is off to the first reader, and I'm outlining the third in the series. One a year? We can do that. I also found I can spin out scifi pretty much in my sleep. It probably comes from that sandbox I played in during the 90s. The serial numbers are even original, not filed off, though I might rightfully be accused of my one protag aiming to misbehave. (If you've read my stuff and got that reference, you know those two characters would not get along at all.)

So while I've worked in relative obscurity for the past 20 years, I've had a decent output. This inevitably leads to that conversation. I'm not successful enough to get the "Hey, I have an idea. You write it. We split the profits" conversation. I have been in earshot of that conversation, and I cringe every time I hear it. The writer is usually well-known. If I know the person well enough, I can rescue them with, "Hey, [insert writer's name here], Ken Bruen's holding court over at the back table. Let's see if we can figure out who in Ireland he doesn't know." Sidenote: When I was temporarily single and at a mixers event, I rescued a woman who turned out to be a neighbor from a rather obnoxious suitor this way, pretending to be her date instead of using another writer's party as an escape hatch. Five minutes later, I was her date. Who says skills learned as a writer don't apply to real life?

 The version of the conversation I now get when someone looks at the combined output of Jim Winter and TS Hottle is, "You should write..."

Uh huh. Holland Bay took forever to write. And I spent quarantine dictating what is now called the Suicide Arc - 9 books, people. Add to that writing a scene that let me get into the heads of two characters, and last week's output - which was supposed to be a crime short - fell only 2000 words shy of a novella. And yet...

My brother-in-law started text bombing me one night about a character named Mitsuko. Mitsuko plays with swords and automatic weapons and hangs out with space marines. She is a supporting character in the two novels currently out and the star of a novella called Flight Blade. And BIL is a fan.

A huge fan.

I appreciate that. If I had the time to talk up my characters and stories in person, I'd probably sell a lot more books. But BIL took it one step further.

"Hey, I got an idea. You should do a whole series about Mitsuko's kids!"

Um... She's not married at this point or even looking to have kids.

"What if [other character] and her hookup?"

One, they'd kill each other, and two, both would say, "Ew!" at that idea.

It went on like this for about twenty minutes. I had to explain I had the entire arc in the can already, and the stories, including one needing a total rewrite, are pretty much etched in stone. I also explained that Down & Out is expecting a final draft of a novel this spring, and I would like to get a follow-up sliding across the keyboard by then.

And anyway, don't you have a novel to finish, too?

He's not the only one, and part of his enthusiasm comes from discovering writing only last year. It helped him forget a recent health scare, and it's also as addictive as I've found it. Maybe he'll start writing under two names, too. (I hope not. If I weren't married to a woman who's good at refocusing my attention, I'd have no life.)

Someone always thinks I'm the perfect vehicle for their political viewpoint. (Don't do that. It doesn't matter your politics. I hate pundits and will likely hurt your feelings.) Or they really do have an idea but don't want to do the work. Or they don't understand how writing works. It took a month to write Suicide Run but three to write next year's The Dogs of Beaumont Heights. Both burned a lot of brain cycles to create. Plus I'm trying to get back into short stories.

Plus, the way publishing works, were I to get enough traction under either or both names, a Baen, a St. Martin's, a Tor, or a Random House is going to want me to send something completely original. At some point, I have to build a new sandbox to play in, maybe two. I have a couple of ideas on the crime side that can go to the next level, maybe allow me to finish Branson's story eventually. Scifi may prove a tad more difficult. I can't seem to extract myself from my sprawling universe. Maybe I won't, just change characters.

But, reader or writer, we've heard that horror story about someone accosting a writer with "I've got this great idea, and you should write it." Many of them back off when they realize that's not how it happens. Others are a bit disheartened when they realize the idea is not what's copyrighted or what the publisher or readers pay for. It's the execution. My next scifi novel will owe a lot to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse: Now. Unlike Copolla, though, I finished mine. But aside from a real piece of work named Kurz and a bunch of soldiers sailing upriver, the novel will bear little resemblance to either Joseph Conrad's novel or the movie. For starters, I seriously doubt either Conrad's gone-native madman nor Marlon Brando's incoherent colonel had cause to say, "And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids." 

There are stories that come from headlines, from those documentaries on A&E and Netflix, and from stories I hear driving Uber that give me story germs of my own. Many who don't do what we do, and even quite a few who do, think that writing is typing. You can write 1000 words an hour, so you should have a novel in two weeks.

I wish it did work like that. For every Road Rules, though, which I wrote in 13 days, there's a Holland Bay, which I started in 2007, rewrote multiple times over the next 12 years, and finally published in November. Those are extremes. Road Rules was a clearly defined story written on a dare. Holland Bay needed a couple of drafts just to finish the world building. Yes, even crime stories need world building.

The stock answer, which has the answer of usually being genuine, is "Why don't you write it?" Sometimes, they take the bait, and off they go down the rabbit hole.

Like my brother-in-law did. He's on Book 2 and is still revising Book 1. Took me a few years to learn that.

At Loose Ends

Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to the notion of being "perfectly imperfect" when it comes to writing. A psychological term intended to help people embrace the notion that perfection is a worthy goal but an unrealistic destination, attaining the "perfectly imperfect" strikes me as the best of sort of goal for writers attempting to write realistic fiction.

One of the most beloved of the tricks in any stand-up comedian's bag is the so-called "call-back." It's that move where the comedian signals the end of his set with a joke referencing a bit on which he'd earlier elaborated at some length.

Writers of crime fiction do this too. Usually at the end of the story.

One masterful extension of this particular literary form came from the late, great Philip Kerr. In March Violets, the opening book in his unforgettable series featuring Weimar/Early Nazi era Berlin P.I. and former homicide cop Bernie Gunther, Kerr introduces his protagonist to Inge Lorenz, an attractive lady muckraker journalist. The two join forces both professionally and romantically, and the lady reporter proves a welcome resource in Gunther's ongoing search for the stolen necklace of the daughter of a wealthy industrialist.

At one point Gunther leaves Inge waiting in the middle of a suburban Berlin street while he investigates the house of one of the leads in their case. When he comes back just a few minutes later, the street is empty. No sign of Inge.

Gunther looks for Inge, but to no avail. She has simply disappeared without a trace. The case moves on to its inevitable conclusion. The book ends with the case solved, but Gunther never having found out what happened to Inge.

It's a loose end. And a pretty sizable one.

I learned early on  in my crime fiction apprenticeship about the importance of the notion of "fair play with the reader," including, at least implicitly, the tying up of any and all loose ends. This is an unofficial rule of crime writing that goes back at least as far as Agatha Christie.

This "rule" arose in crime fiction writing largely in response to writers who employed all sorts of cheap maneuvers to cover for weak plots and lazy writing: you know, the detective reveals the killer and it turns out to be someone never mentioned, or even hinted at, up to this point in the novel, etc. Cheap bailouts of this type were not to be tolerated in a world where the Fair Play rule in effect.

And yet, is this sort of thing "realistic"?

Of course not. Life is messy. And while "real" and "realistic" are and never ought to be considered the same thing, realism requires at least the imitation of the rhythms and shades, lingua franca and cultural idioms of real life.

The Master

And this is where Kerr's brilliant dead end of the question "What actually happened to Inge Lorenz?" stands as both a hallmark of realistic fiction and a brilliant subversion of the Fair Play rule. Because in reality (as Kerr himself points out using Gunther's narrative in the novel itself), this is Berlin in 1933. The Nazis have just taken over. And people are disappearing without any explanation from Berlin's streets, often taken into custody by the state security forces themselves, frequently never to be heard from again.

And for his next trick, Kerr goes on to "unsubvert" the Fair Play rule. Without giving too much away, Gunther stumbles across evidence of Inge's fate in a later novel. The description of what happened to her is not only believable, but also provides Gunther incentive to take down a couple of nasty customers he is investigating at the time: a full year after Inge's disappearance.

Fair Play delayed for the sake of literary realism, and eventually achieved in a completely realistic way.

Further proof supporting my long-held belief that to read the likes of Philip Kerr is to take a master class in plotting, conflict and character development.

And how's that for being "Perfectly Imperfect"?

And yes, this IS my example of a "callback."

All of the above of course begs the question: "Loose ends; bad or good?"

In the day and age of the unreliable narrator (a trope of which I personally am not a fan), do loose ends left unexplained help or hinder the narrative? If so, how many are too many?

I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments.

See you in two weeks!

The Beat Goes On

 Mea culpa... I forgot to mention in this article that James Lincoln Warren also critiqued the current novella for me, for which I was very grateful...

Back in 2011 my friend James Lincoln Warren asked me to critique a piece he was submitting for the Black Orchid Novella Award competition.  I did and naturally "Inner Fire" won.  (Oh, all right.  It would have won even without my two cents worth.)

But that got me thinking.  Maybe I could come up with a BONA-worthy entry of my own.  The contest is co-sponsored by Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and the Wolfe Pack, which is the Rex Stout fan club.  It celebrates the Novella form in which Stout wrote more than thirty adventures of Nero Wolfe.

While the contest does not require it, most of the winners have followed the classic Stout formula of having a younger narrator who assists an older detective.  Warren's did.

Design by James Lincoln Warren

So what I came up with was this: Thomas Gray, fresh out of business school in Iowa in 1958, moves to Greenwich Village to take over the coffeehouse founded by his late uncle.  There he meets Delgardo, he of the ever-shifting first name, a beat poet who supplements his shaky literary income by solving crimes.  The resulting story "The Red Envelope," won the BONA in 2012.

It was always my plan to write a sequel, and hopefully a series.  I set two rules for myself: 1) each title would be one word away from a Stout title (for example, he wrote The Red Box), and 2) each story would move ahead one month through time.

The first novella took place in October so I used my librarian superpowers to see if anything interesting happened in New York in November, 1958.  And I hit the jackpot: that was the moment when the great quiz show scandal hit the fan.

So I knew that my story would have Delgardo trying to help a friend who had been a big winner on a game show and  was now afraid of getting caught up in the scandal.

Next I needed a name for the game show, which could also serve as my story's title.  I realized Stout's penultimate novel gave me the perfect one-off name.  And so "Please Pass the Loot" was born.  You will find it in the March/April issue of AHMM.

As usual R.T. Lawton critiqued it for me and so did James  but I also owe a thanks to Steve Steinbock, mystery writer and critic.  I needed a particular kind of clue for the story and I knew Steve would be able to provide it.  He hasn't read it it and I hope he likes it when he does.

I hope you do too.

One added note: I haven't seen the issue yet but if I am reading the AHMM webpage correctly my piece is the last one in the magazine.  This gives me a warm and fuzzy nostalgic feeling.  Back in the late  1960s when I started reading AHMM the last story was always the one and only novella.  Makes me feel a connection to Fletcher Flora, Clark Howard, Bill Pronzini, Pauline C. Smith, George C. Chesbro,  and so many other greats...

Continuum of Editors

I am currently reviewing and preparing some of my published short stories for a potential trio of collections, and I’ve realized that there are three types of editors. One type stands alone and the other two represent opposite ends of a continuum upon which most editors can be placed.

The first is the Compiler. The Compiler does no actual editing, publishing work exactly as received. Though this type of editor is often found at the bottom end of the publishing heap, I have worked with a few well-known editors who may be compilers. I wish I could say that my work is perfect and needs no editing—well, I could say it, but no one would believe me—but when editors provide no feedback beyond an acceptance letter and/or contract and I later discover mistakes (typos, for example) in the published work that match errors in my manuscript, I suspect that editor is a compiler.

The two ends of the continuum are represented by the Writer is God editor and the Editor is God editor.

The Writer is God editor has the writer confirm every change and correction, no matter how insignificant. A manuscript may pass back and forth several times before it is put into production, and then the Writer is God editor has the writer review and sign off on page proofs—no one produces actual galleys these days—before approving the finished product for printing.

The Editor is God editor never shows changes and corrections to the writer, and never shares page proofs. The writer only knows what’s happened once contributor copies arrive, if they arrive because the Editor is God editor sometimes doesn’t even bother to send contributor copies.

THE GOD CONTINUUM

Most editors exist somewhere on the continuum, and I’ve worked with editors at or near both ends. Even so, I have probably been published by more Editor is God editors than Writer is God editors.

Regardless of where an editor may be on the continuum, a good editor will improve a writer’s work, regardless whether the writer’s input is sought. I’ve been lucky. I’ve only once had a published story harmed by editing—and that one did not have my byline on it.

Early in my career, I always compared my original manuscripts to my published work in an effort to learn from the editing. Many years ago I stopped doing that, though I do still read the published versions of most of my stories, sometimes surprising myself at how good they are.

Apparently, I should have continued comparing my published work to my original manuscripts. While preparing stories for the potential collections, I’ve discovered that several stories have substantial changes, and the ones that do were all edited by the same person. He published a few of them in a magazine and, after he left that position, published several more in a series of anthologies.

I grumbled when I first discovered all the changes he’d made to one of my stories, and then I grumbled even more when I realized how much he’d changed all the stories he published. I stopped grumbling when I realized how the changes had improved each of the stories, and I wonder how much I could have learned a decade or so ago if I had taken the time to do then what I’m doing now.

WRITER IS GOD

As a writer, I love working with Writer is God editors, but as an editor I understand why so few exist on that end of the spectrum.

Writers submit sloppy manuscripts, filled with weird formatting, extra spaces, improper quotation marks, backwards apostrophes, and the like, and a fair bit of time gets spent just cleaning things up. It’s a waste of time to ask writers to approve corrections of things they should not have screwed up in the first place.

Additionally, many writers do not follow—and may not even know—a publication’s house style. Is it Associated Press, Chicago Manual of Style, or something the publisher created specifically for its own use? And what about things like British spelling vs. US spelling or word selections such as “OK” and “okay”?

It takes time to convert everything in a manuscript to house style and, again, it’s a waste of time to ask a writer to approve the conversion to house style. Publishers establish and use a house style to ensure consistency of their products, and writers are not often given the opportunity to express an opinion about whether they like it or not.

EDITOR IS GOD

The Editor is God editor is not an inherently evil entity. Deadlines, budgets, and corporate policies create situations where it just isn’t practical to touch base with writers every time there’s a change to a manuscript.

Despite the shock of seeing one’s words changed without one’s knowledge, professional editors often improve, and rarely harm, the material presented to them. Rather than being offended by what an Editor is God editor has done to a manuscript between submission and publication, it might be best to learn from it.

For example, many years ago I wrote short stories for a group of women’s magazines. I soon discovered that each time I used a brand name in one of my manuscripts, the brand name had been changed to a generic term in the published version. So, McDonald’s became “a fast-food restaurant,” a Quarter Pounder became “a hamburger,” and a Coke became “a cola.” This was not stated anywhere in the publisher’s guidelines, but as soon as I realized what the editor was doing, I stopped using brand names in my submissions.

WRITER IS MINOR DIETY

I edit several projects—a consumer magazine, a mystery magazine, various anthologies, and miscellaneous other things—and each requires a different approach.

For the consumer magazine, which only publishes non-fiction, the approach is Editor is God. The magazine has three editors, each of whom takes a pass at every article. The only time writers may be involved in editing is during fact checking. For example, if a writer quotes “Steven Smith” and we believe the man’s name is “Stephen Smith,” we check with the writer to determine which is correct.

When editing fiction, I lean toward Writer is God, but do not fully embrace the concept. My approach is more like Writer is Minor Deity. After I’ve fixed all the wacky formatting and made the work conform to house style, I involve writers in more substantive changes. Usually, it’s a single pass: I return manuscripts with the changes indicated using Microsoft Word’s track changes function, and writers have the opportunity to accept the changes and/or to work with me on changes with which they disagree.

With Black Cat Mystery Magazine, the next thing writers see are page proofs, and I may or may not make additional minor corrections/changes to their work between the time I receive the edited manuscripts back from them and the time I deliver the files to production for typesetting and page layout.

With anthologies, there’s often an additional editing step. After I’ve delivered the fully-edited manuscript to the publisher, the publisher’s copyeditor takes a run through it, correcting errors the contributors and I missed and suggesting improvements (better word choices, sentence restructuring, and the like). I review all these changes, accepting the obvious corrections and some of the suggestions, before letting the writers review the copyeditor’s work. Sometimes this is the last thing the writers see; other times they also see page proofs.

LESSONS

Compilers aren’t really editors. So, because you never know if you’re submitting to a compiler or an actual editor, always strive to present your manuscripts as error-free as possible. You don’t want to be called to task by a reader blaming you for mistakes you thought your editor would catch and correct.

On the other hand, if you’re working with editors whose approaches can be placed somewhere on the God continuum, remember that their goal is to publish the best work possible. If they are Writer as God editors, appreciate their efforts to include you in the editing process. If they are Editor as God editors, learn from your final published pieces so that future submissions to those editors require little or no editorial intervention between your submission and the final publication.

---

My story “The Fishmonger’s Wife,” which first appeared in Pulp Literature, was reprinted in Black Cat Weekly #22.

Love and Carnage

 by Steve Liskow

Valentines' Day. Flowers, candy, champagne, diamond rings and bended knees. Murder.

Love and Death are the two most important themes in art because once they happen, you can't take anything back. That goes double for mystery writers, both for the crime (motive) and context. A series romance is hard to pull off. Robert Parker had trouble keep Susan meaningfully occupied, and Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, Don Winslow and other writers have ended relationships sadly. If both members don't have a stake in the case, someone has nothing to do.

Dennis Lehane may have done it better than anyone else. Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro knew each other before they became investigators in A Drink Before the War, so their adventures have a deeper contet and the relationship enriches both characters as they make terrible mistakes before they get it more or less right. I wish I'd learned from the instead of painting myself into a corner.

Between 1994 and 1999, Patrick and Angie loved and lost their way through five novels. Patrick is the son of a South Boston fireman who abused the family, and it left lasting scars on the boy. Patrick is a working-class smartass with a chip on his shoulder and a resentment for the rich. He understands that, though, which makes us like him and gives him insight into the people around him. He's very loyal and cagey, lessons he learned by living to grow up.

Angie's grandfather is a ranking member of the Boston Mafia, and she looks at that as little as possible. She's lovely, clever, tough, and lost her virginity to Patrick in high school--after which he dumped her. Since then, they've made every mistake you can imagine. Angie married an abusive husband. Patrick married Angie's sister. Angie divorced her husband, who died. When she and Patrick tried to get back together, she was shot and nearly died, too. During that same book, Darkness, Take My Hand, Patrick faced the demons of his childhood abuse. When Angie's external wounds healed, she went to Europe to figure things out.

Sacred, the third novel, puts the duo in a case involving dysfunctional families that make their own youth resemble Sesame Street. They become lovers again, the case shreds their psyches one more time. Psyche makes context. Patrick and Angie don't live in a vacuum, they interact with people and places, some of them even worse off than they are themselves. Even while you watch them screw up again, you have to give them extra points for effort. 

Gone, Baby, Gone deals with  abused and neglected children, something they know too well, and ampified because by now they are talking about having a baby themselves. Lehane gives us some of the most insidious characters you can imagine. Nobody is "bad," but they're self-centered, stupid, or worst of all, ineffectually well-meaning. The book's ending may be the most emotionally wrenching moment I remember since I walked home from the Court Street Theater after watching Tommy Kirk shoot Old Yeller. 

Prayers for Rain brings the pair together again for the first time in over 18 months. They're older and miserable, finally deciding that being together is better than being alone. Patrick has a hit put on him and Angie does something she's never done before: she asks her Mafia grandfather for a favor. By story's end, Patrick is in the hospital after being shot again. 

At that point, Lehane says that Patrick stopped talking to him (Can you blame him?). He left the couple behind and wrote Mystic River and The Given Day, maybe his two best novels, and let the couple slowly recover. 

Moonlight Mile appeared in 2010. Patrick and Angie are the same people, but the wounds are catching up and they're slowing down. After ten years, it's almost like meeting them at the high school reunion. That context is still there, and many characters from Gone, Baby, Gone come back. Some of them wiser, but most have merely perfected their own ways of screwing up. Patrick and Angie are married and have a daughter. Patrick thinks of joining a larger firm. The first few chapters are as good as anything Lehane wrote before, but the pace and craziness gradually resolve into something like closure, or maybe what Kubler-Ross would consider acceptance. 

Lehane always said that he was afraid that he would kill one of the two--maybe even both--before he got to the end, but they deserved better, and he found a way to give it to them.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Ottawa Protest: It's not what it seems.

Canada’s capital, Ottawa, finds itself in the midst of a protest and, like Alice in Wonderland, in a situation that gets curiouser and curiouser.


During my decades of living in Ottawa, protests have come and gone. Never has any protest disrupted the city and terrorized its occupants. There is something very different about this. 

There are presently about 400+ trucks in Ottawa and a group of people that varies from hundreds to a few thousand who claim they are protesting vaccine mandates for truckers who cross the border.

For perspective, Canada has 38 million citizens, and at least 85% have had one dose of their COVID-19 vaccine and over 80% are fully vaccinated. In Ottawa, 91% of residents have their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and 88% are fully vaccinated. Further, I can walk into any grocery store or pharmacy in Ottawa and find everyone masked and happily shopping. As one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, Canada has also enjoyed one the most peaceful acceptance of mask mandates in world. 

So, what has changed? Is it just the rebellious 9-15% taking a stand against vaccine mandates for truckers? Maybe. But it’s doubtful. In fact they may not even be truckers, “90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated and the Canadian Trucking Alliance, which represents the industry in the country and does not support the convoy, has said most of the people in and around the protests “do not have a connection to the trucking industry.” 

It’s also important to note that the United States has its own mandate about vaccination - so getting rid of Canada’s mandates wouldn’t allow these truckers to cross the border anyway, but I digress. 

To understand what’s going on in Ottawa - a situation that has inflamed the world and resulted in copycat protests - you need to dissect it, look on the ground and look at how it evolved. 

When these protesters first came into Ottawa, it looked like any other protest. People with an opinion that differed from the federal government. They appeared to have a lot of support online and financially - this was to be proven incorrect. 

Our first sense of real trouble came from reports from Centretown - the area in close proximity to this protest, where 50,000 residents live. The protesters swarmed in on our largest mall, defying the mask mandates for indoor spaces, with large groups of them shouting at minimum wage store clerks to take off their masks and be ‘free’. What a store-clerk removing her or his mask has to do with vaccine mandates for truckers to cross the border is perplexing, but here we were. The mall shut down and remained closed to protect their employees. 

These protesters, angry about being shut out of restaurants with mask mandates, went to our most vulnerable and demanded food from soup kitchens. The frightened volunteers, unequipped to refuse, fed them. 

Reports started to flood in about gangs of protesters yelling at residents to remove they masks and join the protests. People started to hide in their homes rather than venture out. Many complained about the inability to sleep because of the incessant honking all night and those with pets told us about their animals cowering under beds, shaking from the noise. 

This is when Ottawa - a friendly and calm city - became angry. 

Soon reports came in from investigative journalists that the immense 10 million in financial support from Gofundme was not Canadian support, but largely foreign, “Donations from abroad are quite a common part of any large crowdfunding campaign,” Ciaran O’Connor, an expert on online extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Politico. “But the scale of this one is unprecedented.” 

The Gofundme money was stopped - refunded I believe - and yet we saw the protesters go from stealing food from soup kitchens to setting up barbecues for everyone, beside bouncy castles for the children to enjoy. Yes, children, “Almost 25 per cent of the 418 trucks have children living in them — children who could be at risk during a police operation,” 

As well, the apparent online support was largely from troll farms: “groups that weaponize social media to spread misinformation, promote division and influence public opinion.”

As the normally sanguine city of Ottawa got angry, Twitter became full of many who denounced all COVID-19 mandates and others who decried the Ottawa protesters.

As a physician, I’m puzzled what a world without any COVID-19 mandates would look like. Do we have unvaccinated, unmasked healthcare workers looking after children with cancer? 

Even those who are against the protesters goals are at times worrisome - they are generating attacks on our mayor, our police and various levels of government for not being strong enough. It’s a distrust of the very institutions of our democracy at a level that’s new. 

Canada, being a robust democracy, does not allow politicians to direct the police. Thank goodness because this could be abused. So, what about the police? Again, in a democracy, the police have limited powers (again, thank goodness) and are constrained by the budgets elected officials give them, limiting their numbers. 

A democracy has certain tools and one of them is declaring a state of emergency. This allows the police more powers (not to be taken lightly) and also an increase in their numbers by drawing from other police forces. This is one thing that should have been done much earlier since the Ottawa police chief has been clear: he doesn’t have enough police to enforce even the laws he has at his disposal. We have never seen this large a group of protesters and Ottawa simply doesn't have the police numbers to manage to remove them. Rather than distrust the police, we should be giving them the help they have asked for repeatedly. 

Luckily, we now have a declared state of emergency in our city and province, to give the police more powers. And hopefully Ottawa will get more policing help. 

Michael Kempa - a professor of criminology at University of Ottawa - has helped to make a very curious situation much more understandable. 

He identifies two distinct groups involved in the Ottawa protest. The first group are the ones we have been seeing on the news, alternating between yelling at the citizens and the media, to grilling burgers and setting up bouncy castles. They are the public face of this protest. A diverse group - only a few actually concerned about vaccine mandates for truckers at the border, some concerned with any mandates from vaccines to masks, some bringing their own issues like the need to fly a Nazi flag. 

The group that worries Michael Kempa more are the ones we don’t see in the command centres of the protest. They are hard-core, long time anti-democratic organizers who fund, fuel and strategize for the protest in Ottawa and elsewhere. They don’t care about vaccines and mandates because they have been planning this trucker convoy since before COVID-19. Their goal is to damage our democracy by damaging our citizens trust in its institutions and to replace it with a far right, more authoritarian system.

With the new powers given to police under the declaration of a state of emergency both in Ottawa and in the province, Kempa is heartened that “Canada is starting to demonstrate that the institutions of democracy are strong, and capable of dealing the with the radicalized political threat…we cannot give the organizers the image that Canada’s institutions are too weak to handle their challenge of misinformation and mobilizing people to fight their battles for them at the front line of protest.” 

This explains why a protest about truckers and vaccines has gone so out of control and why it has spread so quickly. For the organizers this was never about vaccine mandates and they have been planning this attack on our democracy for a long time.

To regain trust in our institutions, police need new powers but they also need larger numbers. After years of police cuts, it’s time to put enough police in play to protect against this new threat and fulfil the promise of the Canadian Constitution: Peace, order and good government. 

What a Decade of Story Writing Does to You

You should write something.

Probably every writer heard that whisper in their head. Come on. Do it. Write something. After all, how hard can it be?

I'd heard that butt-in-chair siren song. In 2010, I answered finally the call. I wrote something. It stank. I wrote something else. It also stank. The stinking continued a while, but I am a dedicated learner. 2012 brought my first story acceptance, from an obscure Canadian lit journal that folded soon after. A good journal, though, and I felt a million miles tall.

10 candles, y'all

Some ways I've changed since that first acceptance:

#1: I've met the best people.

Most folks probably have friends or family trying their hands at fiction writing. I didn't, back when. Not one. I didn't personally know another living soul who was writing fiction. Non-fiction authors, yes, and everyone's English professor has a chapbook or like that. I've even lived next door to incredibly successful songwriters. But I didn't travel in fiction circles.

So--once my introvert side relented--I started showing up places: meet-up groups, local events, writing conferences, Sisters in Crime. Like everybody who sticks with it, I've since come into dear friends from all walks of life and with a wide variety of publishing goals. I'm happier about that than any publications.

And a special shout-out to crime authors. You would think that people intent on plotting murders and heists would be trouble. You would be wrong. I've never moved in a community more top-to-bottom generous than crime writers. All that plotting must purge negative impulses. 

#2 -- Travel is a whole new world. 

Camargue, 2018 -- We ride after lunch

It's no accident I put my butt in the writing chair soon after I began traveling more adventurously. These days, travel can give me something or somewhere to write about. And to write about a place honestly, I have to travel better. Immerse myself deeper into a place's vibe and culture, into what they eat and drink, the hours they keep.

A quick count shows 12 of my 38 accepted stories emerged from an overseas experience. Museum exhibits (first AHMM sale!), rainforest hikes, wine cave tours. Once, I walked myself to mush in Montparnasse. Had to. I needed to understand the neighborhood feel and how a stranger would take it in if I was pulling off a story idea. Much of that walkathon detail was cut from the accepted version, but that vibe and character perception survived.

Side note: I also kissed the Blarney Stone in 2010. The story ideas began improving soon after. I; not saying coincidence is causality, but I'm not not saying it, either.

#3 -- I have become a Tottenham Hotspur fan.

It's true. A main character in my great shelf novel was British and a devout football supporter. He needed an English team to support. Now, I was an okay soccer player until everyone else got a bunch larger and faster. As a fan and semi-informed person myself, I went through the various big clubs and decided Tottenham Hotspur was the most fun to say. Go on. Say "Tottenham Hotspur." You just had fun, didn't you? Unless you're an Arsenal supporter.

A character can't just claim to back Spurs. He had to rattle off club history, past great players, the few high years and their lowest lows. I researched it. I watched their games. And kept watching. That manuscript is many years abandoned, but I'm still watching Tottenham's few highs and sudden lows.

 #4 -- Reading is harder. Except when it isn't.

Early on, experienced writers warned that I might never read fiction the same way again. Truer words. Once I understood the base mechanics of fiction--and that fiction must have those mechanics--my reading turned over-focused on a given author's tactical choices. Dialogue tag spacing, word patterns, sentence construction. Nothing kills joy like analysis. 

So I stopped analyzing. I learned to turn off critical thinking and be a reader who digs reading. 

But informed analysis is also a new life skill. Life's too short to read stuff you can't drop into or, better still, wallow next-level in extraordinary work. Last year, I (finally) read Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. I marveled as Vonnegut alternately nailed and broke conventions and at how he made the sum of those breezy-seeming choices into a beautiful gut punch. It wouldn't have resonated unless I had developed that sort of eye.

#5 -- New York City will never be the same. In a good way.

My first crime story acceptance was to the MWA Cold War anthology, Ice Cold (accepted 2013, published 2014). MWA does anthologies right, with name authors as editor--Jeffrey Deaver and Raymond Benson for this one--and as headliner contributors. The launch party was set for Mysterious Books, and I would've sold a kidney to get there. As it was, I'd had to negotiate a new job offer to include immediate time off for a New York City trip. Smash cut: I made NYC with best wishes and two kidneys, and I sat at the signing table with far more seasoned authors and wondered how the hell I'd made it there. That will always be my first NYC memory. 

#6 -- I had an empathy switcheroo.

Personality assessments over the years said I abound with empathy. I guess so. True, I can step outside myself and sense how others feel about what's going on around us. That's limited by my own experience, but I am not without experience. We're all three-dimensional folks, neither entirely angelic nor irredeemably bad in all things. We all have our own cocktail of ambitions, fears, disappointments, hidden injuries. My sympathy tank is drier than it was ten years ago, but good old empathy is hanging around. 

Writers need a high dose of empathy. It's part and parcel with building characters and forging reader connections. What's happened, though, is the act of writing has become a two-way pipeline. That hard work of empathizing for the page channels understanding back my way. Now my psyche expects the exchange--and I'm disjointed when it doesn't happen. I'm more easily frustrated. Staying in a writing routine gives me more sunshine. Can't explain it, but there it is.  

You should write something. 

Well, I did. If the first decade taught anything, answering that call brings one heck of a journey worth taking.

A Greatness of Their Own

Aaron Burden via Unsplash

Anyone who writes knows—or thinks they know—what readers are expecting when it comes to characters. The Big Why.

Why is this make-believe person the way they are? What made them this way? And we writers have two tricks up our sleeve for giving readers what they want. (At least, I think there are two. Feel free to debate.)

Method #1: We can dig our heels in and stubbornly refuse to give any backstory. We set down on the page a person who is a cipher, and we let the reader determine who they are on the basis of the character’s actions.

Remember that classic scene in The Silence of the Lambs—the book, not the movie—when young Clarice Starling goes to administer a questionnaire to Hannibal Lecter? The sadistic doctor toys with her, mocking the notion that a “blunt tool” can dissect the mysteries of his personality. “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.”

The sound you hear you is the cheering of writers up in the nosebleed section of the literary pantheon. Good for you, Thomas Harris! Way to create evil on the page. Don’t tell us anything! No back story. No exposition. Yay!

And what did poor Harris do? The more popular his Lecter became, the more he yielded to popular demand. His 1999 novel, Hannibal, hinted at Lecter’s childhood in war-torn Lithuania. His 2006 novel, Hannibal Rising, is all prequel. Critics have said that the last two books are the weakest in the series, perhaps because they fill in the blanks on Lecter’s past.

Don’t blame Harris. He did exactly what writers are expected to do when wielding Method #2: something in our character’s childhood shaped them into the person they become. Usually it’s some sort of trauma. I don’t want to get into Lecter’s. Suffice to say it’s, um, delicious?

The point is: Bad thing in past equals character.

I suppose you could play with this paradigm and change it up. Good thing in past equals character. Bad thing in one’s recent adult past—a divorce, a call to God, beating alcoholism—equals character.

The paradigm is strictly cause and effect. Because this happened, I happened, to quote Dr. Lecter.

Ages ago I read an interesting book that has had me questioning the nature of literary character ever since. Is it possible that we writers have absorbed lessons about character that derive from schools of thought outside the realm of literature? Is our view of character distinctly American?

We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse consists of a series of conversations and essays between the arts journalist Michael Ventura and the Jungian psychologist James Hillman. The book is 256 pages long, and filled with provocative concepts, but I always think of the idea that is expressed on one page of the text.

HILLMAN: The principal content of American psychology is developmental psychology: what happened to you earlier is the cause of what happened to you later. That’s the basic theory: our history is our causality. We don’t even separate history as a story from history as cause. So you have to go back to childhood to get at why you are the way you are. And so when people are out of their minds or disturbed or f*cked up or whatever, in our culture, in our psychotherapeutic world, we go back to our mothers and our fathers and our childhoods. No other culture would do that. If you’re out of your mind in another culture or quite disturbed or impotent or anorexic, you look at what you’ve been eating, who’s been casting spells on you, what taboo you’ve crossed, what you haven’t done right, when you last missed reverence to the Gods or didn’t take part in the dance, broke some tribal custom. Whatever. It could be thousands of other things—the plants, the water, the curses, the demons, the Gods, being out of touch with the Great Spirit. It would never, never be what happened to you with your mother and your father forty years ago. Only our culture uses that model, that myth. 

VENTURA (appalled and confused): Well, why wouldn’t that be true?
… 

HILLMAN: Because that’s the myth you believe.

Kristina Gadeikyte via Unsplash

Hillman gives a couple of examples. Winston Churchill stuttered as kid, and struggled with language. The great bullfighter Manolete was once a frightened boy who clung to his mother.

If you were creating a fictional character named Churchill or Manolete, you’d spin that person’s story using Method #2: Because he was weak speaker as a child, Churchill applied himself—and lo and behold, he became a great orator! The frightened mama’s boy overcompensated and fought bulls in manhood! Ta-da! Character tied up in a bow, fully and thoroughly explained.

Bull dinkies, says Hillman. No freaking way. 

When a puny acorn falls from a tree, it’s coded to become a mighty oak. Likewise, each of these men came into the world with a soul that knew from Day 1 what its purpose was. Of course the soul called Churchill had trouble speaking. It knew that its destiny was to save the western World through the power of speech. 

The soul called Manolete clung to its mother because its future terrified it; it knew from Day 1 that it was destined to step into a ring to fight massive angry creatures with horns.

Stephane Yaich via Unsplash

Hillman suggested that therapists learn to “read a person’s life backwards.”

“Suppose we look at the kids who are odd or stuttering or afraid, and instead of seeing these as developmental problems we see them as having some great thing inside them, some destiny that they’re not yet able to handle. It’s bigger than they are and their psyche knows that.”

In the course of the book, Hillman expounds on his theory, going as far as saying that every person has a daimon, “guiding ghost,” angel, or genius that leads them on their path.

I love this concept, but I admit that I have trouble knowing how to apply it to characters I’m creating. Yes, readers have come to expect the Big Why as childhood backstory. But wouldn’t it be fun sometimes to work with a convention that breaks the mold? 

Hillman, who died in 2011 at age 85, is no longer around to help writers bring this concept to fruition in their work. But I think a writer can perform a mental exercise inspired by Hillman as they are creating a character. Do the links in the chain of the character’s life make sense in both directions?

Not every character is destined for greatness. But every character has the right to a greatness that is uniquely their own.


* * *


I first shared the work of Michael Ventura in my New Year’s Eve 2021 post.

You can read more in We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse, by James Hillman and Michael Ventura (HarperCollins, 1992).

Best of luck on this most palindromic of Februaries!

See you in three weeks!


Joe


josephdagnese.com

The Human Condition

I watched a segment on CBS Morning News where they talked to David Magee about his new memoir Dear William, about losing his son to an accidental drug overdose. I agree that it was tragic, that the family dynamics played a role in everything, that the combination of teen depression and availability of drugs to freaking everyone played a role - However, one thing that struck me was that everyone agreed that "this generation is different", because they're facing so many crises, and there are so many drugs, and etc.  Really?  

Welcome back to the 1960s. 

In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis increased the number of active nuclear defense drills - "drop and cover" - against a nuclear annihilation that seemed ever more imminent. 

1962 - Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, beginning the long battle to save the planet - and ourselves - from ourselves. 

1963 - John F. Kennedy's assassination.

1961-1975 - The Vietnam War: endless deaths, endless napalm; Buddhist priests setting themselves on fire; watching as prisoners were shot in the head; My Lai massacre; naked girls running screaming down the road; "We had to destroy the village in order to save it"; all broadcast nightly while we ate our dinners and pretended everything was going great. 

the 1960s - the Civil Rights movement; watching dogs, hoses, bats, set on groups of non-violent protesters, live on TV. 

1965 - the Watts Riots. Makes everything since pale in comparison. 

1966 - Richard Speck AND Charles Whitman the same damn year. The Boston Strangler throughout the 1960s. And many, many more. 

BTW, the first death of a person my own age was when a 14 year old fellow student died of an illegal Mexican abortion. (We all knew she'd been knocked up by someone in the family.)

The first non-relative's dead body I ever saw was another fellow student who died of a heroin overdose. Before fentanyl.

1968 - The assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I was 14, and both - along with the death of the girl mentioned above - gutted me. And the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention was enough to make our Founding Fathers throw up in their graves.

We've forgotten the level of acceptable violence towards women and children in the 1960s, 1970s, even early 1980s. It was quite common to see black eyes, swollen jaws, bruised arms, etc. in the grocery store. Everyone ignored it. Children were whipped to bruises and cuts - just discipline, that's all. 

Speaking of what you could do to women and children, as I've said before, in 1961 my neighbors' college-aged son tried to molest me when I was six years old. No repercussions, other than my father built a fence between our houses and they never spoke to the neighbors again. God only knows what that frat boy got up to in later life. 

And catty-corner across the street was a family which took in foster kids. All of us kids knew that the dad was molesting the girls, but we also knew that if we said anything, we were going to be in trouble, because we weren't supposed to even know such things could happen. 

Also across the street were Annie, Mabel, and Frank, two silent movie actresses and their live-in boyfriend (not sure if he was he or she) who were doing just fine, thanks to royalties, cigarettes, and wine. Perhaps the most normal people in the neighborhood. 

Oh, and there was the overwhelming legal use of liquor in public. Public drunkenness was taken for granted. Take a look at the characters in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and in The Best Years of Our Lives.  ("the sixth martini" in The Thin Man...)  Suburban housewives like my mother drank because they were bored, lonely, not allowed to get a job or a degree, and perhaps came from a long line of violent alcoholics, and there was nothing else to do. Drunk driving was no big deal - depending on who you were, the most that would happen is you'd get stopped and they'd drive you home. MADD wasn't even founded until 1980. 

And you combine that alcohol with prescription drugs - well, we may not have had oxy, but there was Darvon, Valium, Seconal and Miltown for the anxious, amphetamines (Benzedrine, Dexadrine, etc.) for the tired housewife and long-haul trucker. All the over the counter diet meds were straight up dexy. There were a lot of accidental overdoses then, too, including Judy Garland's.  And a few deliberate ones.  And all the kids knew where the liquor and the drugs were, and helped themselves... 

Different? I don't think so. 

"Our ignorance of history makes us malign our own times:  People have always been like this." - Gustave Flaubert

***

Meanwhile, Florida man is back!  

NO TITLE COULD EXPLAIN THIS CASE, BUT THE DETAILS WILL… WELL, IT’S BEST TO JUST READ ON:  TRAIN vs VEHICLE vs HOUSE

38-year old Bradford Weitzel, of Port St. Lucie, told Martin County Sheriff’s Detectives that he couldn’t find his car after leaving a Martin County bar early this morning, so he stole one in a good faith effort to locate his own. He said he somehow ended up on the train tracks along Indian River Drive. That’s when Weitzel claims the vehicle he stole suddenly stopped dead on the tracks as a train was coming. So he said he got out and ran, leaving the car on the tracks. Within seconds, the train hit the car, catapulting it into a nearby home where the homeowners were sound asleep. Fortunately, they were not physically injured, although the explosive sound of a driverless car smashing into the side of their home was clearly jolting. Meanwhile, Weitzel continued on to a nearby fruit stand, where he vandalized the business then tried to steal a forklift. In the end, Weitzel said he thought it was best to flag down the responding deputies to let them know he was still looking for his car.  Bradford Weitzel was arrested and charged with Grand Theft, and Criminal Mischief. Additional charges are expected.  We told you a title was not possible."  

(LINK)

***

BTW, Our South Dakota legislature passed, and our Governor Noem signed, a bill that bans transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams. (Link)  Meanwhile, the best transgender athlete in the State is a transgender boy who plays football on the boys' team and is really good. 

In February, after an hour of testimony during which lawmakers and parents aired their fears of letting trans students play sports on teams that conform with their identities, a few opponents of the bill were allowed to speak. In his confident voice, Kris beamed in over Zoom: “One of the many things I've learned in my life is that people do not say anything until you do.”

He detailed his experience, having had to switch schools to play football. He said no kid should fear playing sports because of their gender identity, their race, or anything else. “No child should ever have to go through that kind of hurt—being shunned because you did not fit the standards of their expectations…. All I want to do is be a kid and play what I love, which is football and sports in general.” (LINK)

So far, he's not included in the law, but... give it time. He's got a hard row to hoe, damn them. 

More later, from South Dakota, where we talk like Mayberry, act like Goodfellas, but hey, at least we're not stealing forklifts to find our missing car. Yet.

A Thousand Steps

  

T. Jefferson Parker’s Laguna Heat came out in 1985, and I gobbled it up.  Two years later, he released Little Saigon, which I thought was even better.  I skipped the next six books, for a reason so trivial as to invite scorn, and with apologies, here it is.

Laguna Heat was adapted into a made-for-TV movie.  It’s got a good script, it’s well-directed, it has two-thirds of a solid lead cast.  Unhappily, the other third is Harry Hamlin, who conveys the hero’s moral conflict with furrowed brow and a general air of unplumbed gastric distress.

Now, of course, we both know that the last person to be held responsible for this is the writer.  I don’t have to quote Bill Goldman.  Jeff Parker is innocent of the wrongs done his novel, but he was somehow guilty by association.  I think this was partly unconscious – if I’d thought about it at all, I would have seen how ridiculous it was, but the effect lingered. 

So, cut to Silent Joe.  Fifteen years later, if you can believe it.  I pick it up in a bookstore and flip it open, thinking, I remember reading this guy.  The book sucks me in, no hesitation, and I’m like, where have I been?  And then, to my chagrin, I remember the back story.  This leads me to catch up with many of the books I’ve missed.

Then, in 2009, the Edgar nominations for best short story include me, Jeff Parker, Laura Lippman, Sean Chercover, and Dominique Mainard - and Linda Landrigan, my editor at Hitchcock, invites me to their table at the awards dinner.  Had a great time.  Didn’t win the Edgar.  Parker did.  “The fix was in,” Laura Lippman mutters to me.  But here’s the thing, which she and I would both readily admit.  It’s disappointing not to win, for sure, but it’s better to lose to somebody you like and admire, not just some chump.

Kept right on reading the guy.  All six Charlie Hood novels, which stack up with Don Winslow’s border trilogy. 

I have to say I’ve written about this neck of the woods as well, and about what Parker has called the Iron River, money and guns going south, drugs and human traffic coming north.  We three would probably agree that the War on Drugs is a failure, but nothing we’ve written is prescriptive.

Which brings us to A Thousand Steps. 

Jeff Parker is a California boy, and his books have a local specificity, particular to a place and time.  A Thousand Steps takes us back to Laguna, but the Laguna of 1968, the summer of a thousand Zig-Zags.  The book is, yes, a mystery thriller, but I’m inclined to think of it as a quest story first and foremost.  The departure here is that the hero is sixteen, and Parker inhabits the kid’s voice with absolute authority.  It doesn’t feel made-up or inauthentic in any way.  Parker was that age, in Laguna at the time, and he’s said in interviews that he didn’t have to conjure up much – that it was a matter of reimagination.  I believe it.

The thousand steps of the title are metaphorical, but they refer to a beach just off the Pacific Coast Highway, on the south end of Laguna.  I have another tangential connection here, which is that my pal David Price, himself a native Southern California boy, is the architect who designed the public restrooms for Laguna’s beaches.  (Both the restrooms and the flights of steps are being rehabilitated.)

A Thousand Steps, the book, is immersive.  It’s both a journey inward, and an embrace of the larger world, at high velocity.  I didn’t hesitate.  Neither should you.

Addressing Social Issues in Fiction

One of the greatest benefits of reading is it allows you to be an armchair traveler. You can visit distant lands without leaving your couch. You also can get an inside look at the lives of people (real and fictional) who are far different from you. Both types of travel are important because they can help readers have a fuller view of the world and all the people in it. With such knowledge can come understanding and empathy, and humanity can always use more of both things.

With my short stories, I often focus on the second type of travel. I find a good way to bring readers into a character's world is to focus on details, showing how the character lives or things that happen to him or her, and showing how experiences affect the character emotionally. Including the emotional effect is vital because it's something readers will remember.

My newest story, "Five Days to Fitness," allows me to illustrate my point. The main character, Bree, is an attorney. She's heard that if she doesn't slim down, her chances of advancement at work will be negatively affected. Bree is good at fighting for other people, but a lifetime of putdowns has left her hesitant to stand up for herself. Instead, she attends a fitness retreat. While there, she meets several other people who also carry a lot of emotional baggage with them—often weight-related. Their experiences are revealed as the whodunit unfolds. 

The story also has a lot of humorous moments—I didn't want it to be a downer—and, as you can expect with a whodunit, justice is served in the end. But on the way to the end, the reader gets an inside look at the rude, thoughtless, and embarrassing comments overweight people can experience and how it affects their self-esteem. I hope the story sparks compassion and understanding in readers who don't have these experiences in their own lives.

You can read "Five Days to Fitness" in the anthology Murder in the Mountains, released last Tuesday. The anthology also includes stories by Gretchen Archer, Leslie Budewitz, Karen Cantwell, Eleanor Cawood Jones, Tina Kashian, Shari Randall, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Cathy Wiley. The stories (mostly whodunits) are set on mountains spanning three continents, during all four seasons of the year. And, if you like trivia, the anthology publisher is running a game with some fun prizes (including a $25 Amazon gift card) through Feb. 15th. Just click here.

Turning back to addressing social issues in fiction, here are some other of my stories through which I've tried to provide an inside look:

• "The Case of the Missing Pot Roast" portrays the emotional effect of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's disease. (Published in the 2017 Bouchercon anthology, Florida Happens.)
• "Ice Ice Baby" shows how powerless a victim of sexual harassment can feel. (Published in the September/October 2021 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.)
  
• "For Bailey" addresses how fireworks scare animals. (This story is scheduled to be published in May in the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote: Volume 3.)
• "A Tale of Two Sisters" touches on gender expectations. While the issue isn't the focus of the story, it is addressed. (This story appeared in the 2021 anthology Murder on the Beach. You also can read it on my website by clicking here.)
• "A Family Matter" delves into ... well, I'm not going to say what it delves into because that would be a spoiler. But you can find out for yourself. The story is posted on my website. Just click here. (The story was first published in the January/February 2021 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.)

Two important things to keep in mind when writing a story touching on a sensitive topic is you want to engage your readers and not preach to them. There's a fine line between showcasing a problem and standing on a soapbox and lecturing about it. While you can have characters talk or think about an issue, you don't want to go on too long about it. Give readers the inside look you desire, and they'll draw their own conclusions.

***

Before I go, a little BSP. I'm delighted that I had two stories nominated for this year's Agatha Award: "A Family Matter" and "A Tale of Two Sisters." You can find links to read both stories in the bullet list above. The Agathas will be handed out at the Malice Domestic mystery convention in April.

A New Cross-Genre Hero: Murderbot

After reading mysteries for sixty years and writing them for twenty, I've become an appallingly picky reader. I seldom discover a new-to-me author whose book I want to read all the way through, much less one on whose series I rush to binge. Yet that's exactly what happened when I heard about fantasy author Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries on DorothyL, the venerable e-list for mystery lovers. Someone said, "They do have 'murder' in the title, and they're wonderful!" Someone else said, "I love Murderbot!" Others chimed in enthusiastically, pointing out that crimes and at least one murder mystery could be found in the series. So I picked up the first novella, All Systems Red, and I was hooked. I literally bought and read straight through the whole series before going on to any other reading. And I was in good company. All Systems Red won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards for Best Novella.

Murderbot is not your typical antihero. If I said it's the most lovable android since R2D2, you'd get completely the wrong idea. First, you'd better not call it Murderbot. That's private. It's SecUnit to you. Second, don't touch it. Pats on the head, the shoulder, the back, or the arm are not welcome. Third, if you value your life, don't ask it how it feels. It has a thousand ways to kill you, and it doesn't give a damn that you meant well.

Murderbot is a rogue SecUnit who's hacked its governor module and is making a break for freedom. As the story arc unfolds, we begin to understand what being controlled by a governor module was like for a sentient being and why Murderbot is chronically grumpy and doesn't trust humans. Unlike the humanoid androids in most science fiction, the last thing it wants is to be human itself. Humans are stupid. They think slowly. They invariably do the wrong thing in a crisis. They constantly put themselves in danger, from which SecUnit is programmed to rescue them, even at the cost of its own life. Somehow, even without its governor module to punish it for failing, it can't help doing that.

In the course of its adventures, Murderbot gradually comes in contact with a few humans who treat it as a fellow being rather than as a piece of equipment. It doesn't want to care about any of them. Caring isn't in his programming. It tells itself this unfamiliar response must be a system glitch. But caring as well as curiosity keep leading it into new friendships (sorry, Murderbot, I didn't mean to use the F word) with both humans and other machine entities as it hitchhikes through space investigating the mysteries in its own past.

Because Wells is a highly experienced and imaginative writer who serves up a unique brew of world-building and character and humor and plotting that is superior to all the "gripping, compelling, if-you-like-Martha-Wells-you'll-love" imitators I'm sure will come along if they haven't already, she avoids easy solutions. For example, at the end of one of the novellas, the human SecUnit finds the least intolerably stupid, slow, disorganized, and irrational, one who's almost possible to work with in a crisis involving humans, offers it a home. Her world is free from the corrupt influence of Murderbot's former corporate owners and of bigotry toward bots. But our hero is not a bot. It's a SecUnit—a valuable piece of lethal equipment—and although its not-a-friend might call it her teammate or family member, whichever it prefers, she would have to be its legal owner to get it onto the planet. In other words, it would be a slave again. So Murderbot, who can't possibly be feeling a bit conscience-stricken, slips away to have more adventures. Since these include investigating murders as well as stopping various bad guys from preying on both humans and sentient machines, Murderbot fans can rejoice. By the way, don't tell Murderbot it has fans. It would be so embarrassed. If SecUnits could get embarrassed.

Artificial Condition, the second in the five novellas that make up The Murderbot Diaries, also won the Nebula and Locus Awards for Best Novella.

Network Effect, the Murderbot novel, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Best Novel and was a New York Times bestseller.

Rumor has it that Wells has signed a contract for several more Murderbot works.