The Marvelously Inventive Mr. Hicks

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the books of a children’s book author named Clifford B. Hicks. Among other books, he wrote a series of books about a kid named Alvin Fernald, who was sort of the MacGyver of the kid world. With a toothpick, a piece of string, and leftover jelly sandwich, Alvin could build a contraption to save the world.

Each book was constructed around a central mystery that took place in Alvin’s small town in the American midwest. Alvin tackled issues that seem grown-up in retrospect, but Hicks somehow managed to make them seem “safe” and accessible to kids: corruption in city hall, kidnapping and extortion, stolen industrial plans, and water pollution. Always, in the end, Alvin managed to save the day with the help of his pal Shoie, his kid sister Daphne (aka the Pest), and an arsenal of kooky inventions.

These books enchanted me. More than anything, they seemed to radiate a gentler, more affectionate tone than many of the other books I was reading at the time. The Alvin stories were longer and more sustained than the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries.

Alvin’s world of the ‘60s and ‘70s seemed more modern and realistic than the world of the Hardy Boys. Unlike the Hardy and Nancy Drew books, the Alvin series was written by a single, real-life author, not a committee of ghostwriters. Hicks seemed to care deeply about the little town of Riverton, Indiana, he’d created, and even cared about the quite serious issues he was writing about. The Wonderful World of Disney, the old Sunday night TV series, adapted one of the books and brought Alvin to a wider audience.

These were the first books I ever asked a local bookstore to special-order for me. After locating the first book in the series, The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald (1960), I set about creating my own inventions just the way Alvin did, using items from my carefully assembled “inventing box.” You’ll be relieved to know that nothing I created ever made it to the U.S. Patent Office. There’s a reason I’m a writer and not an engineer.

Once, in the mid-1970s, I wrote to the author in care of his publisher. “Can you send me the plans for a Sure-Shot Paper Slinger?” I inquired. I told him that my brothers and I had a newspaper route, just like Alvin, and that we would love to be able to shoot rolled-up newspapers from the rear of our bicycles onto a customer’s lawn.

“You’re crazy,” my father said when he heard about my note. “If you can shoot something, you might kill somebody!”

Yes, Dad, with a rolled-up newspaper.

To my delight, Hicks wrote back from his home outside Chicago:

“Gosh, Joe, I’m sorry I can’t tell you how to build one… When I was a kid, my friends and I made up almost all the other inventions, but I just dreamed up the Paper Slinger without ever building one. If Alvin is clever enough to build it, I’ll bet you are too, Joe! Let me know when you make it work. CBH”

I know it sounds like a carefully crafted brush-off, but I was over-the-moon-amazed to receive a response from Hicks. It was the first time I’d ever gotten a letter from an author. I have carefully preserved it all these years.

Years later, when I myself was working as an editor at Scholastic, I tried to locate fresh copies of the books and was surprised to find that they were out of print. That bowled me over. If kids were flipping over Harry Potter, why wouldn’t a publisher like my own employer reissue books that followed in a similar vein, about plucky kids with unusual talents who saved the day?

A little digging revealed that the Alvin series ended abruptly in the mid-eighties with the publication of Alvin Fernald, Master of a Thousand Disguises. Sales of used books proliferated on the Internet, with diehard fans rhapsodizing in reviews about how much they enjoyed them. Clearly, I was not alone in my affection. Here are some of the tributes I located online:

“I am 45 years old... my 44-year old-brother came over and talked about how this book changed his life. He read it as a kid and became an inventor of sorts himself... a perpetual tinkerer.”

“The Alvin books were my favorites as a kid. I checked them out from the library repeatedly and devoured them. As a 10 year old, I wanted to hang out with Alvin and Shoie. The books are full of laughs, adventure, and great storytelling. They take us back to small-town America, before kids had to deal with grownup problems. If you have a kid, buy this book for him. Buy it used, buy it on eBay, buy it at a used bookstore!”

“When I was about 11 years old, I read many of Alvin’s adventure stories. This book in particular inspired my imagination. I have vivid memories of trying to copy Alvin’s inventions! One summer while staying at my grandparents’ camp, I rigged a security device similar to the one in the book so that no one could enter my bedroom. I have been looking for this book for a very long time, as I seem to have lost my copy. It thrills me that these books are listed [online]. This book is without a doubt my favourite and I would love to share it with my daughter.”

Some years later, I read that two small publishers were beginning to bring out the old books. I found a website put up by the author’s son and discovered that Clifford Hicks, a former science journalist turned author, was not only alive and well—now in his late eighties—but living not far from where I’d had briefly lived in the mountains of North Carolina!

I wrote a second fan letter—thirty years after the first one. I told Hicks that I’d lived for a short time in his neck of the woods, but had moved away, and was now thinking of moving back. A few weeks later I received an email in my inbox. The voice was the same as I remembered from childhood: warm, avuncular, friendly.

Hi, Joe:

What a lift your letter gave me! I’m delighted, and proud, that you liked my Alvin books so much that you were inspired to become Alvin Fernald. 

When I was about 12 years old I became enamored of the Tarzan books, and quite definitely made up my mind to run away from home, go to Africa, and learn to swing from the trees. My three sons have known of this dream for years, and a few days ago one of them gave me a copy of Tarzan of the Apes that he located on the Internet. With some regret I turned the last page of that book this afternoon, just before writing this note to you. The book was just as exciting as it was the first time I read it. A magnificent story—but badly written!

...

In any case it’s incredible that you kept my letter all these years, dragged it to college with you, and still have it.

…

In a way, I’m flattered that you went into journalism, Joe. You can’t keep me hanging like this... Here we are, our paths crossing at least twice in our lives, yet separated by only 20 miles.

…

Come back to Hendersonville, Joe, so we can actually meet…I’ll never answer another reader’s letter without thinking of you!

I finally did move back. Hicks and I exchanged a few emails but kept postponing our meeting. He was ill for a little while, then entered rehab. He phoned one day to apologize for not being able to meet. And then, before I knew it, he passed away in September of 2010. I was deeply saddened to hear of his passing. He was 90 years old.

Clifford B. Hicks

I see that you can still link to his old website via the Wayback Machine. I bought a couple of the newly reissued books for one of my nephews, who loved them. The Alvin books marked a turning point in my life as a reader. They were among the last kids’ books I read before making the switch to predominantly books written for adults. In a sense they were the literary dividing line between the adult and the kid world. Hicks’s stories whetted my appetite for mysteries in general. And you could say that when I was through reading his books, I was well prepared for the larger world of adult mystery fiction.

But, as it turned out, I was not through with Alvin Fernald. The year before he left us, Hicks published a brand-new Alvin Fernald book, entitled Alvin Fernald’s Incredible Buried Treasure. That title rounded out the Fernald books to a perfect 10. I thought of it as a parting gift from the magical Mr. Hicks.

* * * 

Note: Frankly, the books are still a challenge to find. Amazon and other retailers carry four or five of the new reissues, but you need to dig for used copies to read the others.

Bibliography

Wired magazine: The Geekly Reader: Danny Dunn and Alvin Fernald

Mystery Scene: The Magnificent Brain of Alvin Fernald, Clifford B. Hicks' Charming Kid Crime-Solver

An Era Ends…

I sent this a couple of weeks ago to everyone I work for/with at the pen, and also some friends, so I thought I would update my SleuthSayers family as well:

"Dear Friends,

"This is a difficult letter to write. Due to my increasing arthritis* and the physical therapy that requires, as well as Allan’s multiple health issues, I’ve decided that I can no longer perform my volunteer activities at the penitentiary. My last date with the Lifers’ Group will be Saturday, November 5th.

"Barring a miracle of recovery, I will no longer be doing AVP. Nor can I continue with the Lifers’ Group. Both of these have been fantastic, nurturing, vital experiences for me for 12 years, and I will miss them. I will continue to be on the AVP Board and, given better health come warm weather, would be interested in helping to expand AVP into the community."

*I'm having a major flare-up in my neck which is, of course, influencing the rest of my spine. Damn it.  But let's hear it for acupuncture, cortisone shots, physical therapy, and massage!

What I didn't mention in the email is that there have been a host of significant changes to what volunteers can and can't do at the prison, and more are coming. We can no longer visit inmates at an inmate's workplace, to either drop something off, or tell him something important. No more. Not allowed. It used to be fairly normal to stop by the cell hall, especially if an inmate had been sick or returned from hospital, and visit with them. No more. Not allowed. Not even for pastors. And that's just the surface.

Basically, all volunteers are questioning what the changes in policies and rules – which are by no means complete - will mean to their ability to actually do what they're volunteering to do. Or if they'll be able to come in at all.

So, now what?

Well, I had to retire from teaching 12 years ago because of a major arthritis flare-up. It was my first, truly hideous and painful, and I was in fear that I would be incapacitated for life. Since then, I've learned the hard way that physical therapy really does work if you actually do the exercises, along with patience, hope, perseverance, and a significant amount of pain-killers. (Still waiting on that medical marijuana that's legal in this state to actually get out to the masses…) So, with this new major arthritis flare-up, I'm getting on with my physical therapy and trying out all sorts of new ways to do things from sleep position to typing these words. I'm good at grim determination once I've been convinced that whatever I'm grimly determined about has a chance of working.

I've also learned, give yourself time to mourn. When something you loved with all your heart is gone, you're going to miss it. I missed teaching, and the students. Never missed the administration - especially the bean counters - for one minute. I already know it will be the same with the pen. I'll miss the inmates very much.

I've also learned to not go looking for the next project, job, whatever. Every time I've ever done that - and I did it a lot back in 2009-2010 - it didn't work. The real deal will find you, as long as you stay open to what comes. That's how I ended up at the pen in the first place. Allan and I were doing Quaker meditation once a week, and one of the leaders asked me if I'd like to do an Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) in prison one weekend. So I said "Sure," not having any idea that it would lead to 12 years of volunteering in prison.

The main thing is to always remember that what you're doing today may not be what you will be doing or be able to do tomorrow. The mind changes (hopefully), the body certainly changes, and God knows life changes. (Heads up, everyone who back in 2019 had a world-wide pandemic on their next year's probability card! Yeah, me neither.) 

Meanwhile, we could all do worse than loll like a seal for a while: 

Shamelessly stolen from Heather Cox Richardson's blogpost © 2022

And then get writing. I've got a lot of stories to tell. 

Also, BSP:

Happy to say my story, "The Closing of the Lodge" is in this issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine! Along with fellow SleuthSayers, Janice Law, O'Neil De Noux, Leigh Lundin,  and Mark Thielman, whose stories are in it, too. Can't wait to get my copy and read them all!

Stepping Up to the Plate

 You might say our adventure begins with A.C. Gunter visiting San Francisco in the summer of 1888.  You have probably never heard of Gunter, which would surprise the people of his time for he was one of America's most successful novelists.  Today he has only one, very tangential, claim to literary fame.

On June 8 he picked up a copy of the San Francisco Examiner and read a poem.  He enjoyed it so much that he tore it  out and took it with him when he returned to New York.  There, he handed it to his friend John A. McCaull, a theatrical producer.  McCaull was impressed enough that he gave the poem to his chief comedian, DeWolf Hopper, and told him to memorize it and recite it that night in the middle of a play which, interestingly enough, had nothing to do with the subject of the poem.  Theatre was more casual in those days.

Hopper did so and thus began a new career.  For the next forty years he recited that poem countless times on stage, on records, and even in new-fangled talkie cinema.  In old age he commented dryly that when summoned out of his grave at the resurrection he would probably, automatically, announce "The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day."

As you have probably figured out the poem Gunter rescued from obscurity was "Casey at the Bat."  It was published anonymously but the author was Ernest L. Thayer, a recent Harvard graduate, who had taken a job at the Examiner.  (Inevitably, other people claimed to have written it, but there is no reasonable doubt.)  Thayer, like Gunter, left no other memorable work behind.  But his little masterpiece shows no sign of fading away.

I learned all this in an entertaining little book by John Evangelist Walsh called The Night Casey Was Born.  Because of the way my brain works, reading the book made me wonder: Can I get a crime story out of this?

And I did.  The October issue of Mystery Magazine features "Murder in Mudville," in which that town's unfortunate chief of police is trying to solve the murder (by baseball bat) of the very pitcher who struck out the hometown hero.  

It was great fun to write.  

But here's the thing that haunts me: Think about Gunter stumbling on that poem.  How many little masterpieces are rotting away, undiscovered, in old papers and magazines?

 

I'm in the mood for stories that open with the weather

Elmore Leonard had ten famous rules for writing. The first one: "Never open a book with the weather." I've long agreed with this advice, with an exception: If the weather is pertinent to what's happening at the start--if it's part of the plot--use it. Still, even with that caveat, the times you'll need to use the weather at the start of a book or story are probably few.

If you're sitting there thinking, Barb, you've written about using the weather in stories, even starting with the weather, before. Come up with something new. Yeah, yeah. The column you're thinking about ran in 2016. I just reread it, and I think my advice is solid. You can read that post here: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2016/06/warning-theres-storm-coming.html.

Today, I'm going to come at this topic from a different angle. I belong to a Facebook group whose members post each Monday the first lines of books and stories they read the prior week. The intent is to showcase good or great first lines. Sometimes people share more than the first sentence of a story. Sometimes they share the first paragraph. (I've been guilty of this myself.) I enjoy reading more than a sentence because the additional words can help me to get a much better feel for the work at hand. And reading first lines and first paragraphs that don't grab me is also helpful. It helps me understand what works and what doesn't and why.

Here's where the weather comes in. To my surprise, the openings that catch my attention the most each week, the ones that make me eager to read a book or story, use the weather. I find this is especially true if I have the opportunity to read a first paragraph rather than just a first sentence. Those extra words can enable an author to truly set the scene--or more to the point, to set the mood. Mood, more than anything, is what pulls me into a story, and few things can truly set mood better than the weather.

Raymond Chandler famously made this point about weather and mood in the opening to his story "Red Wind":

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

Maybe you'd want to read Chandler's story because of his exquisite way with words. Maybe he could have been talking about dog grooming and still draw you in. But he was talking about the weather--in this case, the wind--and how it affects people. And that's the point: the weather can affect people. Characters are people, but so are readers.

Here's another great example from Julia Spencer-Fleming, from her first book, In the Bleak Midwinter. (I also think this is one of the best first sentences ever.):

"It was one hell of a night to throw away a baby. The cold pinched at Russ Van Alstyne's nose and made him jam his hands deep into his coat pockets, grateful that the Washington County hospital had a police parking spot just a few years from the ER doors."

Spencer-Fleming is another author who knows how to lure the reader in. Is it a coincidence that she used the weather to do it in her first book, which won a string of awards? I don't think so.

So, maybe Leonard's advice about openings and weather deserves a second caveat: 

Never open a book with the weather--except (1) if the weather is pertinent to the plot in that opening scene or (2) if you want to use the weather to set the mood. If either exception applies, shine that opening until it glistens like a desert highway on a brutal summer day and you're praying the sea of melted tar you're approaching is but a mirage.

A Room of One's Own

City desk

Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, declared that, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” We all know that this is an ideal. That’s why writers’ retreats exist. We’ve all heard and told anecdotes about successes and failures keeping the family at bay while we write.

The ultimate room of one’s own belonged to Woolf’s friend and sometime lover, novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West, who with her husband, author and diplomat Harold Nicholson (oh, that Bloomsbury Group!), created the most beautiful gardens in England at their home — a castle, what else? — at Sissinghurst in Kent. Nestled among flowers in Sissinghurst Gardens is not a room of Vita’s own, but a whole house.

South Cottage is a fairytale cottage and a dream house for a writer. And yes, Virginia, you would need lots of money to own such a perfect refuge. I first saw Sissinghurst in 1969. I was visiting friends who lived right down the road in a 16th century half-timbered farmhouse, memorable for the roses climbing all over the outside and the low oak beams within, on which visitors invariably bumped their heads when passing from room to room. But that cottage and that garden — the cottage garden, as the English term a small garden stuffed with flowers in a riot of colors, embracing South Cottage, not the whole breathtaking expanse of Sissinghurst Castle Gardens — became my vision of the perfect garden and the perfect writer’s room of her own.

Country desk

I am a lucky woman and a lucky writer. My writing, unlike Shakespeare’s, won’t be remembered four hundred years after my death, but neither will I die unsung and, more important, unheard, and “buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle,” the fate Virginia Woolf envisions for her imaginary Judith, Shakespeare’s equally gifted sister.

In the city, I have a workspace that is mine in an apartment that’s all mine when my husband is at his full time job. When he’s home, he hangs out in other rooms. He may pass through, occasionally addressing a remark to me. His remarks range from what happened in Ukraine that day to what Maria Theresa said to Frederick the Great to “Do we need milk?” He also frequently talks to himself. Even more annoying, he breathes. But I have only to bark, “Writing!” and he moves on. It’s not ideal, but Jane Austen wrote under far worse conditions.

In the country, where I have a very small house, I have a modest version of my ideal. I spend the summer there on my own.

Yes, my husband has to work. But the real key to my precious solitude is that he hates the country. Sirens are music to his ears, but the chirping of birds is the howling of the hounds of hell to him. And the beach! Yes, he inspired the character in Death Will Extend Your Vacation who turns as red as a lobster in about the same time it takes the lobster. So all summer I have my little house to myself. And my cottage garden, a riot of flowers, sits on the deck in pots right outside the door. It’s heaven.

Vita's

Do I write better when I’m uninterrupted 24/7, or as we used to say, around the clock? Absolutely. My train of thought was never interrupted, not even by a breath.

If my characters started talking in my head or a line of narrative bubbled up as I lay in bed, I got up and went to the keyboard, whether it was time to get up or two in the morning. I wrote and wrote until what Jo March (and presumably Louisa May Alcott) called “the vortex” passed. I wrote four short stories in a little more than four weeks, including revisions, and they were good.

Mine

Yes, Virginia, a room of my own is writer’s paradise. To write surrounded by flowers is lagniappe.

---

The Top Fifteen Crime Films of the 1940’s.

by William Burton McCormick

As I said in my listing of my favorite crime films of the 1930’s, lists are silly.  Making lists, however, can be a useful exercise for authors studying a genre. At best, it forces serious analysis on what works and what doesn’t, allowing an author better perspective on the elements of a successful thriller or mystery. At worst, it is a wonderful excuse for watching and re-watching countless old films, re-appreciating classics and unearthing obscure gems. 

So, here I am again with a new decade to discuss, the era of the Second World War, film noir’s first Golden Age, when authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett held sway and English director Alfred Hitchcock burst onto the American scene (his previous films, including my 30’s top film The 39 Steps (1935) were made in England. Now Hitch had Hollywood budgets and stars at his disposal. Look out!).  Warning! Spoilers are ahead.

The number of outstanding crime films in this decade was exponentially greater than the preceding one and reducing it to fifteen was a painful affair. A list of honorable mentions reads like a collection of classics and near-classics: The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), Key Largo (1948), Song of the Thin Man (1947), Mildred Pierce (1945), This Gun for Hire (1942), The Blue Dahlia (1946), Laura (1944), They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), The Naked City (1948), High Sierra (1941), Gaslight (1944), The Dark Corner (1946), I See A Dark Stranger (1946), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Out of the Past (1947), and The Postman Always Rings Twice(1944).

Several legendary directors had multiple films I was forced to omit: Fritz Lang (whose M (1931) nearly topped my earlier list) had the excellent pictures The Woman in the Window (1944), Hangman Also Die! (1946) and Scarlet Street (1945) left off. Akira Kurosawa wrote and directed two fantastic crime films Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949) but they were unseen outside of Japan, and I use this as the flimsiest excuse to omit them. (For a discussion on Kurosawa’s crime films go here.) 

Alfred Hitchcock, well-represented on this list, was productive enough to have several excellent films not make the cut: Saboteur (1942), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rebecca (1940, his only career Best Picture winner), and Suspicion (1941, often called his ‘flawed masterpiece’ as producer David O. Selznick forced Hitch to change the ending and make Cary Grant’s character innocent, much to Grant’s chagrin who wanted to play a villain). 

Carol Reed, who has a film high on this list, also produced two excellent thrillers I’d recommend: Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948). Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946) was probably the most painful cut from this list, while his The Lady from Shanghai (1947) has scenes of absolute genius tempered by Welles’s typical money problems and egregious studio interference. (And Welles insisted his wife and costar Rita Hayworth cut her luxurious hair and bleach it blonde, a sin against humanity that must be penalized).

Lastly, several great films with crime elements but ultimately residing in other genres are excluded: Casablanca (1942, a romance), Arsenic and Old Lace (1945, a farce), To Be or Not to Be (1942, a war comedy), His Girl Friday (1940, a screwball comedy), Rebecca (1940, a gothic romance), and The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948, a Western). 

All these films I watched or re-watched before composing this list. So, enough about what’s not here. On to our main event:

15. Gilda (1946)
American gambler Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) is hired by Ballin Mundson (George Maceady) to run his Buenos Aires casino and watch over Mundson’s rebellious wife Gilda (Rita Hayworth), who often cavorts with other very dangerous men. When two German mobsters seek control of the casino, Mundson fakes his own death leaving Johnny and Gilda to contend with each other and the mob. Hayworth’s Gilda is the very visual definition of a femme fatale. Her entrance in the film is legendary, as is her singing “Put the Blame on Mame” in a hormone-popping strapless black dress designed by Jean Louis, a performance still bewitching seventy-six years later.  An Esquire photograph of Hayworth in that dress with “Gilda” stenciled above decorated the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tested in July, 1946. The 23-kiloton bomb was the most powerful exploded up to that point and the decoration meant to honor Hayworth “as the world’s ultimate bombshell.” When Hayworth found out she was highly offended. 

14. The Glass Key (1942)
The second of four films pairing Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, The Glass Key edges out This Gun for Hire from the same year and The Blue Dahlia (1946) as the finest picture to feature both stars.  Based on the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name, The Glass Key tells the story of Ed Beaumont (Ladd), the “problem solver” for corrupt political boss Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy).  Madvig has fallen in love with Janet Henry (Lake), and is determined to get Janet’s father, Ralph Henry (Moroni Olsen), elected governor despite the objections of mob kingpin Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia). A tale of temptation in many forms, Ladd’s Beaumont stays loyal to Madvig despite sexual advances from Janet and bribes, threats and torture from Varna. As election day approaches the bodies pile up, including Ralph’s son Taylor (Richard Denning). Despite Ladd being third-billed, Beaumont is the film’s central character. The Glass Key was rushed through production to capitalize on the chemistry between Ladd and Lake in This Gun for Hire and Hammett’s name after The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the successful Thin Man series. The timing was right, and it paid off handsomely at the box office.

 
13. Rope (1948)
Inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murders, director Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope tells the story of two roommates Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) who kill a friend (Dick Hogan) for the sheer intellectual thrill of it. They then host a party using an unlocked chest housing the body as a serving table. Among the guests are the victim’s father (Cedrick Hardwicke), fiancée (Joan Chandler) and their old prep school professor Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), whose gallows humor and promotion of Nietzschean superman theories greatly affected the killers in their youth. By the end of the night, Phillip is coming apart, Brandon is making threats and Rupert regrets his irresponsible teachings.  

A modern BBC review called Rope “technically and socially bold.” This is certainly true. The characters of Brandon and Phillip are a homosexual couple which the film hints at often. In reality, Dall was gay, Farley bisexual, and Hitchcock hired openly gay writer Arthur Laurents to craft a screenplay with appropriate subtext (Laurents and Farley would begin an 18-month relationship soon after production). The character of Rupert was also supposed to be gay, though the hints more subtle. (There is no evidence Stewart knew he was playing a gay man.)  A film in 1948 with three homosexual characters, two villains and the hero, was daring even if the Hays Code prevented mentioning homosexuality explicitly.  

Technically, Hitchcock was also pushing the envelope. In his first color picture, he shot long, continuous scenes only limited by the amount of film that could be placed in camera. Hitch disguises the ends of these eleven-minute “long takes” by panning or tracking into objects and then starting again from the same position. Some of these seams are clumsy (especially when you know the trick) but it allowed the film to appear to play out in real time. This was influential on director Fred Zinnemann and producer Stanley Kramer, who would use the illusion of a real time story to great effect in High Noon (1952). Except for one exterior establishing shot, the entire movie takes place in Brandon’s and Phillip’s Manhattan apartment. Hitchcock’s experiments on how to tell a gripping thriller in static limited space in Rope and the equally confined Lifeboat (1944) would pave the way for a masterpiece of the form in 1954’s Rear Window.

12. Shadow of the Thin Man (1941)
The fourth Thin Man film keeps the winning streak alive. In San Francisco, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) head to the races only to find a jockey who has thrown a race was murdered. (“My, they’re strict at this track,” says Nora.) With the day at the races ruined, they head to a wrestling match where Paul Clarke (Barry Nelson) is framed for killing a reporter and Clarke’s girlfriend Molly (Donna Reed) pleads for help. Are the two murders connected? The trail leads to Claire Porter (Stella Adler, future founder of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting) who, failing to seduce Nick, tries to outsmart him and steal evidence. Twists, turns and much laughter ensue. 

The best scenes include a brawl in a restaurant and a recurring joke where Nick’s underworld contacts mock Nora’s hat. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot Ava Gardner as an uncredited extra in one scene, her debut in film. (We’ll see more of Ava on this list soon.) The first Thin Man film not based on a Dashiell Hammett story or treatment and without a screenplay from the husband-wife team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich (who claimed they had exhausted every witticism they knew in the first three films) new writers Harry Kurnitz and Irving Brecher stepped in without missing a beat. It is also the first film after canine actor Skippy was retired and the role of Asta given to a descendent. More changes were ahead. Pearl Harbor was attacked two weeks after the film’s release and Loy would forgo acting to serve in the Red Cross as Director of Military and Naval Welfare, while Powell would be devastated by the death of his ex-wife Carol Lombard in a plane crash two months later. But never mind those grim future troubles. Put on your best screwy hat, order the seabass, and enjoy because “Baby, you’ve arrived.”
 

11. Green for Danger (1946)
Based on the Christianna Brand novel of the same name, Green for Danger is a classic “closed environment” mystery set in an English countryside war hospital during the German bombings of 1944. In the first scene, we are witness to an operation performed by a staff of six people: surgeon Eden (Leo Genn), anesthetist Barnes (Trevor Howard), Sister Bates (Judy Campbell) and nurses Linley (Sally Gray), Woods (Megs Jenkins), and Sanson (Rosamund John).  A voiceover tells us within five days “two of these people will be dead and one of them a murderer.” What follows is a tense mystery where duties and bombings force suspects together and ratchet up the anxiety to deliciously tortuous levels. This tension is nicely counter-balanced by humorous-but-clever Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim), who arrives to catch the murderer. Great fun.

10. Foreign Correspondent (1940)
After leaving London for Hollywood in 1939, director Alfred Hitchcock burst onto the American cinema scene with two films released in 1940 that would receive Academy Award Best Picture nominations: Rebecca (the winner) and Foreign Correspondent. 

 The latter is a cracking good thriller of Europe teetering towards war.  American journalist John Jones (Joel McCrea) is sent to Europe to interview a Dutch diplomat (Albert Basserman) only to witness his assassination. Or was it faked? And if so, for what purposes? Adventure, international intrigue and a surprising amount of comedy follow. 

This film has a plethora of memorable Hitchcockian visuals: the chase in the rain through an umbrella-packed square, the mysterious windmill that turns opposite direction of others, the assassination on the steps mimicked by Francis Ford Coppola in the Godfather and Hitch’s first great set piece for American audiences, a plane shot down in the stormy Atlantic where the survivors cling to the wings as the waves wash over them. 

After filming was complete, Hitch visited England and found the German blitz was soon to come. Back in Hollywood, he hired Ben Hecht to write a new closing scene where McCrea’s reporter broadcasts a warning to the world. It impressed even the enemy. German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels called Foreign Correspondent "A masterpiece of propaganda, a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries". Hitch was fighting Nazi propaganda fire with a fire of his own. Rebecca may have taken home the Oscar, but for my money Foreign Correspondent is the better film. It’s certainly more reflective of what was on Hitchcock’s mind in 1940.

9.  White Heat (1949)
Possibly James Cagney’s greatest film, each act of White Heat explores a different crime subgenre – gangster, prison, heist.  Cagney plays mobster Cody Jarrett, a psychotic Mama’s boy worthy of the later Bruno Antony or ;[;[Norman Bates. After killing four men in a train robbery, Jarrett confesses to a lesser crime committed elsewhere to give him a false alibi for the murders.  While serving a year in prison, members of his gang plot against him and the group is infiltrated by an undercover agent (Edmund O’Brian). After Jarrett’s release, they undertake a payroll robbery at a chemical plant unaware of the traitors and lawman in their midst.  A perennial entry on all-time great films lists, White Heat is one of the darkest masterpieces to come out of the ‘40’s.  And that ending. Wow! Say it all together: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”  Boom!

8. The Thin Man Goes Home (1945)
Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy, as if you didn’t know by now) leave Nicky Jr behind and visit Nick’s parents (Harry Davenport and Lucile Watson) in rural New England.  Word quickly circulates that the famous detective is on a case, rumors fanned by Nora to impress Nick’s father, who thinks little of sleuthing and wanted his son to be a doctor like he is. Then a man is shot dead on the Charles’ doorstep and the fictious case becomes real. One of the best in the series, the cast of colorful small-town suspects makes it the most engaging mystery since the 1934 original. 

The fifth film, it was the first entry without series director W.S. Van Dyke who died in 1943. With Loy off supporting the war effort, MGM announced in pre-production that Irene Dunne would be cast as Nora. Horrified fans started a mail campaign demanding Loy. As Powell said: “The fans wanted Myrna, and they didn't want anyone else...And I wanted Myrna, too…I've never seen a girl so popular with so many people.” When Loy did return (her only film of the war years) she donated her salary to the war effort.  The Thin Man Goes Home would be followed by a final sequel in Song of the Thin Man (1947) a darker, noirish picture which could have made this list too. Is there any mystery series (or comedy or romance series) that is this good, this long? If you can think of one put it in the comments below. 

7. The Killers (1946)
Expanded from an Ernest Hemingway short story of the same name The Killers starts out in tense and riveting fashion. Two hitmen (Charles McGraw and William Conrad) arrive in Brentwood, New Jersey and murder a gas station attendant nicknamed “the Swede” (Burt Lancaster).  Insurance investigator Jim Reardon (Edmund O’Brien) looking for a motive for the killings, delves into the Swede’s past, unearthing a rogue’s galleries of suspects including gangster-gone-straight “Big Jim” Colfax (Albert Dekker) and old flame Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner).  

As Reardon moves closer to the truth, the Swede’s story is told in Citizen Kane-style flashbacks. Lancaster, terrific in his film debut, and Gardner, given a chance to shine after years of bit parts, both deservedly became stars. The music written to accompany the hitmen at every appearance would later become the Dragnet theme. 

With a screenplay by Anthony Veiller (and an uncredited rewrite by John Huston), The Killers would go on to beat out such other classics as Notorious and The Big Sleep for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Picture.  But the truest praise came from Hemingway himself who called The Killers “The only good picture ever made of a story of mine.”
 

6. The Big Sleep (1945)
“Ah ha!” you say, you’ve caught an error. Every cinephile knows The Big Sleep (based on the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel, with a screenplay by William Faulkner and starring Humphrey Bogart as detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as widow Vivian Rutledge) came out in 1946, not 1945. Well, have faith true believers, this requires an explanation. When director Howard Hawks filmed The Big Sleep, World War II was coming to a close. Warner Bros. Pictures had a backlog of war films the studio wanted to release before the fighting ceased. So, with the film in the can, The Big Sleep’s theater distribution was pushed back. Warner Bros. did, however, play it to Allied servicemen fighting in the South Pacific in early 1945. 

Then a funny thing happened. Thanks To Have and Have Not, Bogie and Bacall became Hollywood’s hottest couple on and off screen. Bacall’s agent asked if Hawks and the studio would be willing to film new scenes to capitalize on their chemistry and increase the role for Bacall’s character. Twenty minutes of new footage were shot, mostly featuring the couple exchanging sexually charged banter. Scenes were re-ordered, others removed, and two key characters dropped to accommodate the new footage. 

This version, released in 1946, was the classic we’ve all come to know. A terrific film, but even its most fanatic admirers will admit the plot is confusing. (When Jack Warner cabled Chandler asking if a character was murdered or had killed himself, the author replied “Dammit, I don’t know either!”).  

In the 1990’s, a copy of the original 1945 cut was found in the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Hugh Hefner, a fan of Chandler’s work, paid for a restoration and theater distribution of the 1945 print. Since then, the debate has raged: ’45 or ’46?  Roger Ebert preferred ’46, caring more for “feel” than story. The Washington Post thought them both masterpieces but very different films. Me? I watched both versions again for this article. I’ll side with Hef and the servicemen. There is enough interplay between Bogie and Bacall in the ‘45 cut for my taste and with the scenes in proper order and those two other characters present, the plot makes much more sense. Have you seen both versions? If so, which do you prefer? Please tell me in the comments.

5. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
One of Hitchcock’s finest films of any decade, Shadow of a Doubt is the story of Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Teresa Wright) and her visiting uncle Charles “Charlie” Oakley (Joseph Cotten). The two Charlies share a special bond, one that is tested by the terrible secrets Uncle Charlie brings with him when he arrives at the family home in Santa Rosa, California.  

Wright’s Charlie is easily my favorite Hitchcock heroine, and the actress is a joy to watch in the role. No icy blonde bound for humiliation, the character is a plucky, warm, and highly intelligent brunette who follows the clues to discover what her uncle really has been up to on the East Coast with all those “merry widows” who seem to be dying off. When the secrets are revealed, she matches wits with her uncle and ultimately defeats him while sheltering her family from the horrible truth. 

That family is excellently portrayed and I’m particularly fond of Henry Travers as her father, a bored banker and mystery fan who plots murderous scenarios with family friend Herbie (Hume Cronyn) over the dinner table. Their humorously imagined killings are a perfect balance to the real threat Uncle Charlie has brought into their home. Cotten is flawless in the role, charming enough to fool everyone, but his niece, and chillingly sinister when cornered.  Hitchcock would say for the rest of his life this was his favorite of all his films. Who can argue with the Master? Well, maybe I’d dare to argue (a little) as I have another Hitchcock film at number four.  

4. Notorious (1946)    
Poor Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman). She loves American agent T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) but he wants her to sleep with and ultimately marry another man, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), so she can spy on Sebastian and his circle of German conspirators in Rio de Janeiro.  

Alicia obeys partially because she is a patriot and wants to stop the Nazis from restarting the German war machine, partly because her German-American father was a spy and traitor and she wants to atone for his actions, but mostly because she loves Devlin and he asks her to do this. Devlin, while directing her actions, resents her obeying his carnal orders and treats her in a jealous and passive aggressive manner. How dark and twisted is that? But it’s for national security, right? 

Sebastian, despite being implicitly a Nazi (the word is never used), is portrayed as a sympathetic character for a villain. He truly loves Alicia, and she is using that love to destroy him. What it amounts to his one of the blackest and most suspenseful love triangles ever put to screen.  

Notorious marks a major development in Hitchcock’s career. Midway through pre-production, he finally jettisoned producer David O. Selznick. From here on out, Hitch would produce his own films (as well as direct and develop the stories with his writers).  With this freedom, starting with Notorious his movies would become more psychological in focus, an aspect that has given his best work a true timeliness. There is always something uncomfortable going on underneath the surface now. 

Not that the magic is all subtext, visual storytelling remained a strength. For example, the legendary tracking shot from the top of a high staircase down to a key in Alicia’s hand far below. (A prop Bergman would keep as a memento).  Or one of the most famous MacGuffin’s in history, the uranium ore that Sebastian is storing in the wine cellar, implying his team is working on an atomic bomb. (Notorious was filmed shortly before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the American government was very leery about uranium references in the media.) Hitchcock claimed he and his screenwriter Ben Hecht were followed by the FBI during shooting.) 

How good is Hitchcock at pulling the strings in Notorious? Consider this. It has no gunfights, no chase scenes, no onscreen murders, not a punch thrown or shot fired, yet it undoubtedly a superb example of the thriller genre. How? It’s all psychology and suspense. The Master playing the audience like a violin.  Critic Roger Ebert regarded Notorious as Hitchcock’s best work and one of the ten best films of all time. 

3. Double Indemnity (1944)
I’m glad I doubled down on Double Indemnity. The first time I viewed Billy Wilder’s film, years ago, it would have not made this list.  Having grown up watching reruns of My Three Sons, and Disney live action fair like Follow Me Boys! and The Absent-Minded Professor, Fred MacMurray to me was a gentle, fatherly everyman not a murderous heel spouting risqué dialogue as he is here. This really threw me. 

And Barbara Stanwyck in a cheap wig was not as dangerously beguiling as femme fatale sirens like Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner or Ava Gardner. I didn’t understand why MacMurray’s insurance salesman would destroy his life for her. (Wilder would say that the phoniness of the wig was meant to hint at the phoniness of the character beneath it.) 

On a second viewing, those biases fell aside. This is one great film, rocketing up to its current position. The best of a noir sub-subgenre featuring evil women seducing weak men to gain help murdering husbands or sugar daddies, this trope is found in The Woman in the Window (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and countless other films to this day. (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine editor Janet Hutchings once told me this plotline is the most frequently submitted to her magazine. One wonders how many are influenced by Double Indemnity?)  

The difference is in the high quality of the performances by MacMurray and Stanwyck (once all biases and wigs are ignored), a fantastic screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (based on the James M. Cain novel of the same name), and perfect direction by Wilder, with suspenseful sequences that may equal anything Hitchcock did in the 1940’s. (Not an easy admission for a Hitchcock devotee like me.)  Among these are a sequence on a train where MacMurray cannot find privacy to fake a suicide, or the moment after dumping the body when Barbara’s car refuses to start, or when a character places a gun under a pillow that you know will be used later, or the extended tension when MacMurray’s friend and colleague, insurance investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson, never better), recruits him to help solve the murder MacMurray himself committed. I could go on forever. Even a conversation in a grocery store is fraught with danger and suspense. For many, this film is the apex of film noir’s Golden Age. I can see why.

The last two films, flipped back and forth for the top position a half-dozen times during the drafting of this list. Oh, the agony, we arbitrary list makers go through! But the piece has to be finished, so the positions must be set. He takes a breath.  So… 

2.  The Third Man (1949)
“The dead are happier dead,” remarks a character in The Third Man. The statement reflects not only the speaker’s sociopathic views, but the exhaustion of a war weary Europe in the late ;40s. Director Carol Reed made two excellent thrillers in the years preceding this film, Odd Man Out (1947, Roman Polanski’s favorite film), and Fallen Idol (1948), but The Third Man is his masterpiece.  

Written by the great Graham Greene (who drafted both screenplay and novella), The Third Man tells the story of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a naïve American Western author who arrives in post-WWII Vienna to work for his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to discover that Lime was killed by a passing car days before Holly’s arrival. 

Martins finds the accident suspicious and seeks to discuss it with two witnesses (Ernst Deutch and Siegfried Breuer) who carried Lime’s body away and a mysterious “third man” who was also at the scene. His search for this third man brings him into contact with Lime’s girlfriend, actress Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), a German-speaking Czech who lives in dread of being deported to the Soviet Zone, and British military police officer Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) who tells Martins that Lime was an unscrupulous raconteur operating in all zones of divided Vienna.  

In an era when most filming was done on sets and studio backlots, The Third Man was filmed primarily onsite in still-rebuilding Vienna, giving it greater realism and vibrancy than other pictures of the time. Indeed, the divided city has an authentic character as strong as any flesh and blood actor. It is a beautiful film for the eyes and ears with harsh lighting and Dutch angles from expressionist cinematographer Robert Krasker and a distinctive score by local zither player Anton Karas (whom Reed discovered playing one night in a Vienna wine-garden and invited him to score his film.)  

Despite rumors, Welles did not direct any of the second unit filming, though he did provide the famous “cuckoo clock” line. The actor performances are starling modern, and Greene’s dialogue is imbibed with depth, ironic humor and a real despair.  A speech by a villain looking down from the heights of the Wiener Riesenrad Ferris wheel, the people below resembling mere dots, is one of the most memorable and chilling ever given. “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax.” 

The rare thriller to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, The Third Man was voted by the British Film Institute as the greatest British film of all time (of any genre or era). They aren’t wrong. I love this film and can’t believe The Third Man is second to anything.

 But there is another film I love as much, and it defines crime cinema in the ‘40’s like no other.

1. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Ah, that black bird. The greatest MacGuffin of all. John Huston’s directorial debut was the third filming of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, but this is definitive. Those other films took liberties with the story and were of mixed success, so Huston decided “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” and writing the screenplay himself, followed the book scene-for-scene, dialogue-for-dialogue. 

It was an enormous hit launching Huston’s career as both director and screenwriter and turning B-list gangster actor Humphrey Bogart into a major star. (Coupled with Casablanca released the next year Bogart was on a fast track to becoming a Hollywood icon.) More than any other film, it ushered in the era of the film noir and Sam Spade (Bogart) became the archetype for a hardboiled detective. The Maltese Falcon tells, in essence, two interlocking stories: one is a mystery about who killed Spade’s detective partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan), the other is a game of wits with a quartet of crooks seeking a statue of a falcon which is supposedly encrusted with priceless jewels beneath its enameled skin. 

With one of history’s most sublime casts, each of those actors perfectly defines their crooked characters: the duplicitous femme fatale Miss Wonderly/Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), the over-dressed, treacherous fop Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), the gluttonous, talkative criminal leader Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) and the unhinged youthful gunman Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook, Jr.). 

To watch the five main characters, try to outmaneuver each other for the priceless bird, each spouting Hammett’s snappy dialogue, is one of the great joys of cinema. At the center of the storm is Spade juggling crooks, police and Miles' widow Iva (Gladys George) who is infatuated with Sam. He trusts nobody and plays it straight with no one except his secretary/side kick Effie Perrine (Lee Patrick).

 Bogart’s other great film detective, Philip Marlowe, may have gone down the “mean streets”, but Sam Spade is plenty mean himself. As in the book, Sam keeps his thoughts private from other characters and audience alike, and much of the tension comes from wondering if Spade will fall in with the crooks and become one of them. He is on the edge of being an antihero. It’s a corrupt world, but is our hero corrupt? 

At the denouncement, Spade steps back from the abyss at last revealing his cards and telling O'Shaughnessy: “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be. That sort of reputation might be good business, brining high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.” 

In a sentimental age, when the male and female leads were supposed to go off together hand-in-hand (even Notorious, as black as it is, ends with Grant and Bergman together), The Maltese Falcon throws a curve. When O'Shaughnessy admits to killing Miles, Spade tells his lover: “Yes, Angel, I’m gonna send you over. That means if you’re a good girl, you’ll be out in 20 years. I’ll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.”  It begins a speech many can recite from memory. Some film historians think Psycho (1960) is the great severing point between the Age of Sentimentality and the Age of Sensation in cinema. I’ll maintain that The Maltese Falcon did that nineteen year earlier.
Why is The Maltese Falcon number one? I’ll quote the film’s last line, one improvised by Huston from Shakespeare on the set.

“It’s the stuff dreams are made of.”

Any films I missed either on the list or Honorable Mentions? Give me your own favorites from the 40’s.

Now’s the time when the blog author normally plugs some work. I like to keep my shameless promotions relevant to the article. Fortunately, I had a thriller short story set in 1943 published this year. “Locked-In” was in the January/February 2022 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. If you liked this article, please revisit my story in a back issue or Magzter or wherever you read AHMM and tell me if it fits in with the era. You can read Rob Lopresti’s review of “Locked-In” here.

Second Chances

 

A common question for fiction writers is Do editors often ask you to revise and resubmit a short story?

The answer, in my case, is no. Most of the editors of the magazines and anthologies I submit to tend to either accept a story or reject it, period, with no reasons mentioned and no second chances. 

But not always. Occasionally I'll send a story in and get back a note from the editor saying the submission almost made it but not quite, and asking if I would consider changing such-and-such and resubmitting? In that case, my answer is usually yes. In fact I can't think of a time when it wasn't yes. I make whatever change(s) they want, whether it's deleting something controversial, adding something that relates more to their theme or their market, revising the ending, etc. I have two reasons for trying hard to do what they ask me to: (1) it always results in a sale--at least it has for me--and (2) if/when I later sell that story as a reprint or use it in a collection of my own, I can change it right back to the way it was at first. So, simply put, why not?

I know a lot of folks who don't agree with giving in that easily, who resist/decline most editorial suggestions to revise and resubmit. To them I would say Fine--do what you want. But--again--I like to sell what I write, and I want to please the editor if I can. I also try to be agreeable when editors ask for changes after acceptance. Chances are, I'll be sending more stories to that publication in the future, and I'd prefer to be labeled Easy to Work With.

All this is not to say I've never suggested some alternative ways of changing things. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. And to argue at all depends on how strongly I feel about the changes.

Most after-acceptance requests for revision are too minor to ever think twice about. An editor once asked me if I could change "He cut his eyes at me" to something else because she wasn't familiar with the concept of eye-cutting. I changed it to "He gave me a suspicious look," which in my opinion wasn't as effective but which I also didn't consider worth fussing about. Other requests (whether pre-acceptance or post-) have involved revising story endings to be more upbeat, less happy, more concise, etc. In every case I can remember, I have saluted and merrily made that kind of change. And, as I said earlier, sometimes changed it right back again after publication.

One editorial discussion I recall--and I think I've mentioned it before at this blog--happened when Strand Magazine editor Andrew Gulli phoned me after the first story I ever submitted to him, back in 1999. He said the story was under consideration but he had a question about a poison I used in the story to do away with a main character's wife. "None of us here have ever heard of that poison," Andrew said. "Where'd you find out about it?" As it turned out, there was a reason they hadn't heard of it: I made it up. So after a long and awkward silence, I answered, "I made it up." Another pause. Andrew said, "You made it up?" I said, "Yep. I made it up." Yet another long silence dragged by. Finally he said, "Okay." And that was it. The story was published with my imaginary poison, which I think was derived from the oscolio blossoms of East Africa or some such thing, and the story went on to be listed by Otto Penzler in Best American Mystery Stories as one of the top 50 mysteries of that year. I learned a valuable lesson from that exchange: if you need something to perform a particular task in fiction and there's nothing available in real life that fits the bill, sometimes it's okay to dream up something believable that does work, plug it in, and go happily on your way. But I still remember how scared I was as a fairly new writer, saying what I said to a real editor.

I have so far never been asked to make structural plot revisions or change things like POV or my choice of the viewpoint character. Those would, after all, be major requests--if those things were wrong I suppose the story would probably have been rejected outright. I have, however, been asked now and then (by one market in particular) to change a story's title. Again, I almost always agree to that. And--very honestly--my titles are sometimes changed at that market without their ever even asking my permission. When that happens it always makes me feel a bit like Rodney Dangerfield, but the resulting paycheck seems to help a lot in soothing that discomfort.

The funniest dispute I've heard about, between editor and author, was described to me awhile back by one of my oldest and most-admired writer friends. I won't use names here, but the editor asked the writer to change the way one of the characters in a story set in the middle ages addressed a local warlord. The character said "milord" and the editor preferred "Sir Knight." The writer said "Sir Knight" sounded clumsy, and preferred "milord." The editor also objected to the phrase "like shit through a goose." The writer replied that the speaker was a soldier and should sound like one. After a long pause (I can relate to those) the editor sighed and said, "Tell you what. I'll trade you the milords for the shits." And that's what they did.

Question: What are some your own experiences, with regard to editorial requests? Are you often asked to make changes to a submitted short-story manuscript, either before or after acceptance? If so, have you usually agreed, or resisted? Did you win or lose the argument? What's the oddest/funniest thing you've been asked to change?

As my friend said to me following the description of his above encounter with the editor, sometimes that kind of back-and-forth game can be fun. After all, how many things in life are negotiable anymore?

That's it for today. Keep writing, and keep negotiating.

Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude: the appearance of being true or real. The appearance.

It's what writers strive do in fiction. Harlan Ellison once said, "I want it to seem real ... to hold up the mirror of life and turn it slightly so you can see things from a new angle."

Create credible characters for readers to follow, to like, to hate, to worry about.

Give the reader fictional hyper-realism. Magic-realism. Hell, anything to show it, to elicit emotion in the reader. Fiction is liberating. It allows us to make up stuff, create people, create worlds, re-create our cities the way we want them to OR show the way they are through eyes with a different vision.

It's easy to screw this up by not paying attention to the details of life, by not showing those details, by taking the lazy way out – such as writing "it was sunny outside" instead of showing sunlight reflecting off a store's window. Pay attention. Observe life and take notes and give it back to the reader with the mirror tilted.

Crime fiction is realistic. The big problem I have, especially with movies, is characters acting illogically (better described as stupidly). I know people make mistakes and do screwy things, but leaving a machine gun on the ground and running off with a revolver with only two shots left in it isn't logical. Why didn't they take the bag of food? They haven't eaten in weeks. Why didn't they take a moment to fill up their canteen? Why don't they call the police right away?

Good ficiton is no easy to write. A writer just needs to give the appearance.

I've quoted Harlan before but I love this one: "I'm a professional liar, folks. I write fiction for a living. I make up weird crap and people pay me for it."

Other tidbits:

Did you know Mike Nesmith of The Monkees wrote "Different Drum" (recorded by The Stone Poneys featuring Linda Ronstadt)?

Did you know Barry, Robin & Maurice Gibb (The Bee Gees) wrote "Islands in the Stream" (recorded by Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton)?

Did you know Sony Curtis of The Crickets (of Buddy Holly and the Crickets) wrote "I Fought The Law" (recorded by The Bobby Fuller Four)?

Pretty sure we all know Neil Diamond wrote The Monkees hits "I'm a Believer" and "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You."

That's all for now.

Indexes and Other Treasures

When I heard the title of Dennis Duncan's new book my reaction was basically to pedal my bike to the local independent bookstore and yell "Take my money!"

I am fond of popular histories of scholarship.  So I have decided to tell you a bit about some of my favorite books of this type, with random anecdotes from each.  It has nothing to do with mystery fiction, so feel free to ignore me if you wish.  I get that a lot.

Dennis Duncan. Index, A History of the. The index is one of those things we take for granted.  Haven't they always been there, hiding at the back of nonfiction books, making them more usable?  Of course, the answer is  a lot more complicated.

Duncan points out three key ingredients you need before you can have an index.  First, comes the ABCs.  I don't mean the alphabet (duh), but the concept of organizing words in alphabetical order, which is a different thing.  Then, you need the codex, which is what we think of as the structure of a book, (indexes don't work well with scrolls).  The third essential we can date specifically: page numbers were first used in books in 1472.

This book includes all kinds of oddities: Indexes so long they had their own indexes.  Indexes to novels.  A short story in the form of an index.  Indexes created by authors' political enemies to mock their books. A picture index of envelope fragment shapes (and that was in a book by a well-known author.)

Oh, and how about this fact: ancient librarians used to glue a scrap of parchment with author and title to the back of a scroll.  The Greek term for that device was sillybos, from which we get the word syllabus.  The Latin word was index.

Denis Boyles.  Everything Explained That is Explainable.  The eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910-1911) is considered one of the greatest reference books.  Its creation was part scholarship, part marketing scheme, and part con game.

The head publicist was Henry Haxton.  Earlier in his career, working as a reporter for William Randolph Hearst, he tested the lifeboat system of the Oakland ferryboats by "accidentally" falling into the Bay.  Fortunately the safety system turned out to be good enough.

The main editor for American entries was Franklin Hooper, who is drily described in the current edition of the Britannica as "undaunted by his own lack of scholarship."

The Americans who were running the encyclopedia project in coordination with the Times created something brand new: the Times Book Club.  They sold books much cheaper than had previously been legal, causing mob scenes known as "bookstore madness."

And speaking of the Times, the entire encyclopedia project almost fell through because of the obstinacy of a family whose mighty power came from their owning one-seventh of one-third of one-fifth of three-sixteenths of that newspaper.  This resulted in a lawsuit that was heard by Mr. Justice John Charles Darling, about whom, well…

Around the turn of the century barrister F.E. Smith was defending in capital case. After he gave a long and complex explanation of a point of law Justice Darling, complained: "Well, after all that, Mr. Smith, I am none the wiser."

Smith replied: "Perhaps none the wiser, m'lud, but certainly better informed." His client was executed.

Simon Garfield. Just My Type. Fifty years ago no one outside the publishing and design industries knew or cared much about printing fonts.  Then came personal computers and now everyone has an opinion.  I have seen college students argue furiously over serif vs san serif.

Garfield's book is a fascinating journey through the history of fonts. For example: in 1908 Thomas Cobden-Sanderson killed his classic Doves font by taking all the metal letters and throwing them into the Thames, so his partner could not profit from it.

In 1979 Japanese designer Eiichi Kono was selected to revise the iconic font used in London's subway system.  Rather dryly, he first demonstrated his work with the word underglound.

The first thing I did when I got this book was search the index (there's that word again) for The Prisoner, because that science fiction TV classic was the first place I ever really noticed a font.

Turned out the unusual lettering used in the surreal claustrophobic Big-Brotherish Village is Albertus, the same one used on street signs in the City, which is the financial district of London.  Hmm…

Garfield dedicates an entire chapter to the much despised  Comic Sans.  The title?  "We Don't Serve Your Type."

Simon Winchester.  The Professor and the Madman. When James Murray took on the task of creating the Oxford English Dictionary in 1857 he knew he would need help from hundreds of volunteers to track down unusual words and meanings in thousands of books.  He had no way of knowing that his most useful contributor would be Dr. W.C. Minor, an American Civil War veteran imprisoned for murdering a stranger during a bout of paranoia.  

This is the only book on my list which was made into a movie (starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn, no less).  The flick is worth watching although it does get Hollywoodish, even adding a love story to provide a motive for some of Minor's bizarre actions.  (Here's a better motive: the man was crazy.)

Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton. Cartographies of Time.  For hundreds of years people searched for a way to visualize the passage of time.  This books shows dozens of examples.

Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, cracked the problem in 1765 by inventing the timeline.  Since the timeline, like the book index, is so much a part of our lives it is hard to grasp that someone needed to dream it up. This made me wonder: Did it seem just as natural to the people of Priestley's time as to us, or are we just used to it?  

It turns out the former is true.  Other authors started using timelines immediately.  And it only took twenty years for William Playfair to add a y-axis and create the line graph.

 Violet Moller.  The Map of Knowledge. Moller says that when she was studying the history of science  she was taught something like this: "There were the Greeks, and then the Romans, and then there was the Renaissance."

Moller thought a piece or two had to be missing from that story.  Surely the Classical texts hadn't preserved themselves for a millennium.  As she demonstrates there were thousands of rulers, scientists, scholars, publishers, and librarians who cataloged, preserved, and used those texts.  Many of them spoke Arabic.  (Of course this relates to the Chicon panel I mentioned last month, where scholars complained that the Middle Ages received a bad reputation because of Renaissance propaganda.) 

You have probably heard of the great library of Alexandria, but you may not know of what we librarians would call their acquisitions policy: they wanted everything.  Each ship which landed in Alexandria was searched and all books confiscated.  When they borrowed texts from other libraries to copy they kept the original and sent back the duplicate.  Sneaky, sneaky, librarians.

In the tenth century the library in Cordoba, Spain, had 404 volumes.  That doesn't sound too impressive but I'm only talking about the  catalog of their collection.

In the eleventh century Salerno, Italy, was considered the center of modern medicine in all of Europe.  But a North African merchant who got sick there was so appalled by the ignorance of the doctors that he trained as a physician in his native Carthage and  returned to Italy with hundreds of up-to-date medical texts. 

In Venice, Italy, in 1502, a printer named Manutius started using a dolphin and anchor logo on his books, apparently the first "product brand."  It was such a recognized symbol of quality work that other publishers began counterfeiting it.

About half of the texts of ancient Greek we have were written by the physician Galen.  But since he was a doctor we can't read his handwriting.  (Rimshot! Sorry...)

And now I shall go read a mystery.