I Confess: New Fletch Is a Big Improvement

I thoroughly enjoyed the Fletch reboot. You might agree, or you might disagree, or likely you hadn't heard there is a Fletch reboot. Well, there is. September. Confess, Fletch skipped wide release and headed almost straight for streaming services, propelled by a Miramax marketing campaign so stealth it would've shamed a ninja.

Fine by me--in the short run. I last darkened a movie theater door sometime before the pandemic. I'm happy in my basement cave, the big screen primed and a glass of wine ready for crime comedy.

Jon Hamm takes up the Fletch mantle. Fletch, if you've never seen the 1980s films or read the novels, is an ex-investigative reporter turned odd combo of art writer and impromptu sleuth, with special stress on impromptu. Movie-version Fletch is forever under-thinking investigation aliases and winging his way through trouble, usually of the upper crust sort. Fletch isn't a bumbler, though. He's a glider, and given the chance, Jon Hamm glides like few can.

The film offers plenty of glide path. The set-up: An Italian count hires Fletch to help recover a stolen art collection. Fletch's contacts say one stolen piece was sold in Boston. Fletch gets wrapped up first with the client's daughter and next with Boston Homicide detectives. Fletch discovers a young woman murdered in the Beacon Street condo that his new Italian flame rented. Then the Count vanishes, presumed murdered. The more Fletch investigates, the more the crimes are connected back his girlfriend. There's an actual mystery here.

They make too few movies like this anymore. Paced but not hurried, snappy dialogue without banter, constant humor without stooping to sophomoric, a bit of style but not style-obsessed. Much too rare these days. That's my long-term worry over Confess, Fletch landing bang in my basement cave, zero marketing beyond rolling the dice on a social media buzz-let.

If Miramax thought a smart crime comedy would break the box office, Miramax would've tried that route. I get it. Jon Hamm is great, but he's a television guy, and Mad Men was a while ago. Box office leads aren't also doing Progressive commercials. Nobody casted in Confess, Fletch is pre-hyped to younger thrill-ride seekers actually buying tickets. This film franchise has been dormant for three decades. The Fletch demographic is home decompressing via binge watch.

Maybe no one wants to make movies like this anymore.

Honestly, Hollywood didn't even make the original Fletch movies like this. Fletch (1985) exists to let Chevy Chase shtick his shtick. Seriously, there have been interviews about the lack of a traditional script. The plan was Chevy. The shtick works, but it doesn't hit hard. It can't when Chevy riffs through scenes played as skits, some legit hilarious, few with conflict even decent comedies need. Shtick without story wears thin. Witness the sequel, Fletch Lives (1989). Its contribution to entertainment was that actors and crew banked a paycheck.

Confess, Fletch takes the road more scripted. Good thing, because director and writer Greg Mottola asks the cast to act their comic roles. Much of that script sticks to the source material, Gregory McDonald's Edgar-winning novel (1977). Updated for a double-generational leap, of course. The best tension onscreen isn't between Hamm and his girlfriend or any of the suspects. It's the inter-generational joust between Hamm and Ayden Mayeri's Junior Detective Griz. Mayeri is gloriously Millennial in speaking her value while learning to keep up with Fletch.

Confess, Fletch can be nitpicked. The suspects could've used character depth. More danger would've sharpened the humor. The forensics and evidentiary exposition creeps toward a high-budget episode of Castle. But smart comedy doesn't have to be inventive genius. It has to be good, and Confess, Fletch is pretty good.

Please, someone keep making films like this.

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Side note only discovered while researching this: In the 1980s, Gregory McDonald relocated to Pulaski, Tennessee, sixty miles from my basement cave. McDonald got involved in local anti-Klan efforts, which makes him especially cool.

The Curious Case of Mr. Poe & Mrs Hale

The centerpiece on our dining room table this month was inspired by three recent books my wife did on the subject of Thanksgiving. One figure is our old pal, Edgar Allan Poe. The limited edition Bobblehead depicts Sarah Josepha Hale.

Together, they and the turkey add up to an interesting tale with a connection to the mystery genre. In the 19^th Century no editor was more powerful than Sarah Josepha Hale. For fifty years she edited the most-read periodicals in the nation, Godey’s Lady’s Book, published out of Philadelphia.

For $1 to $3 a year, Hale’s readers received monthly magazines that brought the world to the farflung homes of a growing nation, delivered by stagecoaches, steamboats, and pony express riders. In each issue, readers found sheet music, clothing patterns, blueprints for Victorian home designs, recipes, news, editorials, literary reviews, and works of fiction.

When Hale spoke, readers listened. When she suggested young ladies wear white dresses when they married, they did. When she described the curious European custom of erecting a Christmas tree in one’s home, Americans followed suit. Fifty percent of the nation blushed when she shared this exciting French word with her readers: lingerie. Hale drew the line at bloomers; she did not weigh in on that controversial bit of clothing until someone had invented a free-flowing garment women could wear when taking outdoor exercise.

Hale was a consummate crusader, but not in the way we think. She never warmed to the notion of giving women the vote. But every issue celebrated the idea of women’s education and important causes to which she urged her readers to contribute a few cents here and there. Micro-funding, in other words, as a way of making a big difference.

She ushered in the novel practice of paying professional writers for original work, instead of simply stealing copy from other publications.

Godey’s welcomed writers we would all recognize today: Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Stowe. Hale’s review section sang the praises of the young Louisa May Alcott. And then, one month in 1830, Godey’s celebrated the work of another young writer no one had ever heard of:

“It is very difficult to speak of these poems as they deserve. A part are exceedingly boyish, feeble, and altogether deficient in the common characteristics of poetry; but then we have parts too of considerable length, which remind us of no less a poet than Shelly [sic]. The author, who appears very young, is evidently a fine genius; but he wants judgment, experience, tact.”

The poetry collection was Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, the second volume of work ever published by—yes, you saw this coming—Edgar Allan Poe.

Scholars find it strange that Hale asked one of her regular contributors to cast a glance at one of Poe’s more forgettable works, and that the review appeared so quickly after publication. In order for the review to appear in this volume, she (or her reviewer John Neal) would have had to have received galleys months before the book came out. How did a 21-year-old self-published author with little clout or pocket money pull that off? We find something of a clue in a letter Hale received from her son, David E. Hale, Jr., a few years later:

“I have communicated what you wrote to Mr. Poe, of whom perhaps you would like to know something. He ran away from his adopted father in Virginia who was very rich, has been in S. America, England, and has graduated at one of the Colleges there. He returned to America again and enlisted as a private soldier but feeling, perhaps a soldier’s pride, he obtained a cadet’s appointment and entered this Academy last June. He is thought a fellow of talent here but he is too mad a poet to like Mathematics.”

Turns out, Hale’s son attended West Point, where he made the acquaintance of Poe. Did Poe cozy up to David, knowing David’s mother was the nation’s most influential editor? Who knows. We do know that nearly everything in David’s letter about his friend is a lie, but that’s how Poe rolled.

Poe later became a regular in Godey’s pages, contributing 22 pieces from 1834 to 1849—a mix of short stories, poems, essays, and literary gossip. The latter attracted the most notice. His column, “The Literati of New York City,” skewered his contemporaries to such a degree that New York writers complained, and Louis Godey—the magazine’s publisher—insisted on inserting a disclaimer that the opinions expressed in these articles were those of Mr. Poe’s, not Godey or Hale’s.

It’s hard to tell what Hale actually thought of Poe. One of Hale’s biographers suggests that she grew fond of Poe’s small, impoverished household, when they were living in the same city, Philadelphia, and may have helped the family with groceries and other necessities. While the magazine lavished praise on his later work, continuing to celebrate his “genius,” she’s on the record as having paid him pitifully for his work—50¢ a page for a story that appeared in her Christmas annual. (In this case, he would have pocketed $5 for a 10-page story.) That is not terribly bad, if that was all her budget allowed, but at the same time, Nathaniel Hawthorne demanded (and got) $25 a story from Godey’s. Hawthorne famously argued that if he held out for better pay, he’d be able to support his family writing only 12 stories a year. Can’t really blame him.

I have to wonder what Godey’s genteel readers made of the most famous story of Poe’s to appear in the magazine, the one in which a wealthy nobleman entombs his enemy alive in a basement crypt. A modern Hale biographer suggests that “The Cask of Amontillado” fit neatly within Hale’s worldview. She saw the world of men as hopelessly corrupt, goes the theory; women were the only hope for decency in such a world. (That particular issue goes for astronomical prices online.)

Cute story. But why is this unlikely pair decorating our Thanksgiving table in 2022? Because besides giving America white wedding dresses, Christmas trees, and the outlet for one of our most macabre authors, Hale also became the Mother of Thanksgiving. She was obsessed with the holiday her entire life and lobbied five US presidents to make Thanksgiving a national holiday that occurred on the same day every year. At that time in history, the holiday was declared by governors and lesser officials for whatever day they thought reasonable. George Washington had proclaimed a Thanksgiving for the last Thursday in November, 1799. John Adams did so too, but Jefferson maintained that the separation of church and state prevented a president from declaring a religious holiday. Later presidents whom Hale approached trotted out similar objections.

So it went until the depths of the Civil War, when Hale’s letter landed on the desk of Abraham Lincoln. His proclamation for the last Thursday in November 1863 was mocked by Confederate-leaning newspapers, but nevertheless observed by the Union. The holiday didn’t become official until an act of Congress in 1941.

I for one remain eternally grateful that Mrs. Hale lobbied presidents on behalf of this holiday. I shudder to think what we’d all be consuming at our bountiful holiday tables if Mr. Poe had been the one with the holiday obsession. I don’t think I could stomach carving the Thanksgiving raven.

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I learned about this story and other connections from my wife's nonfiction books:

We Gather Together: A Nation Divided, A President in Turmoil, and a Historic Campaign to Embrace Gratitude and Grace, by Denise Kiernan (Dutton, 2020).

Giving Thanks: How Thanksgiving Became a National Holiday, by Denise Kiernan. (Philomel, 2022.)

Veterans Day

 Dear SleuthSayer faithful–it's that time of year again, with Veterans Day falling on a Friday, and just days after a mid-term election whose high voter turn-out (both red AND blue voters) warmed the cockles of my heart. Yep, you heard me: I don't care WHO you voted for, as much as that you actually DID vote. Because democracy is best when it's PARTICIPATORY.

In 2015 a former student reached out to me and asked that I serve as that year's featured speaker for her high school's Veteran's Day assembly. I have posted below the speech I gave on that day. I hope you will join me in thanking all of our veterans, living and dead, for their service to our country, and to the world.

I know I promised you a conclusion to the story of the Queen's Poisoner begun last go-round in the rotation, but with me being a veteran and an historian, and tomorrow being Veterans' Day–one of the most historical of American holidays–I'm going to beg your indulgence and repost the speech below, given at a local high school several years. I feel the sentiments expressed below if anything, more strongly than I did when I originally gave this speech.

I love this country. I am honored and humbled to have served her. I wish you all the best on this, a day of remembrance.

***************

Hello, and thank you for that warm welcome. While I’m at it, I’d like to thank Dr. _______, the staff, and the student body here at __________ High School for inviting me to speak to you today, on this occasion where we take time to honor our country’s veterans. My name is Brian Thornton, and I am a veteran. It has been my privilege to teach Ancient & Medieval World History at _______ Middle School, here in the ______ School District, for the past ________ years.

But before I began my career as a teacher, before my time in college training to be a teacher, before I moved to the Seattle area, before I got married and started a family, I lived a very different life, in very different locales, doing a very different job.

But more on that in a moment.

Now, I’m an historian, so I’d like to start off with a few words about the date on which we celebrate Veterans’ Day. It was only after my time in the military that I understood the significance of November 11th as the date we choose to honor our veterans. Far from being some random date on the calendar, November 11th was chosen for a very specific reason. Originally called “Armistice Day,” it marks the anniversary of the signing of the cease-fire agreement that effectively ended the First World War. Dubbed by turns “The Great War,” and “The War to End All Wars,”- this conflict resulted in the deaths of over 16 million people- only 9 million of them combatants- during its four years (1914-1918).

The First World War redrew national boundaries, toppled empires, wrecked a continent, and wiped an entire generation from the earth as surely as the swipe of an eraser removes ink from a whiteboard. By 1918 society had been so thoroughly rocked by the havoc this conflict wrought, that many people began to believe that they were witnessing the death throes of society itself- that civilization would literally cease to exist.

So the men who negotiated and signed this armistice (and they were all men. Human beings had yet to awaken to the importance of having the wisdom and experience of women at the table during negotiations like these), believed that with their actions, they were literally saving human civilization from eventual collapse and humanity itself from likely extinction.

And so they arranged for the cease-fire to go into effect on a symbolic date: literally at 11 o’clock in the morning, on the 11th day of the 11th month of the year- hence the phrase “at the 11th hour”- a phrase that we use to this very day, in describing disaster being averted at the “last minute.”

I cannot help but find it fitting that we choose such a date to pause and take note of the contributions made to this country by our veterans. After all, it is the most American of traditions to take a painful memory and to substitute a hopeful one for it.

And to speak of the contributions, the sacrifices, of our veterans, is to speak of hope. Hope is an aspirational emotion, born of a desire for something greater, something better. People motivated by hope can achieve incredible things. America itself was founded on hope. Countless millions have flocked to this country from every corner of the planet, motivated by hope- hope for something bigger, greater, deeper. And they hope to find what they’re seeking in America, a place that the great poet Bruce Springsteen has dubbed “The Land of Hope and Dreams.”

And over the past two-plus centuries our citizen soldiers have answered their country’s call time and again out of a sense of dedication to that country, and to that hope. Such loyalty, such patriotism makes of mere countries the greatest of nations.

And as the service of veterans has helped to transform America, so, too has it had a transformational effect on those who served.

I served as a quartermaster in the United States Navy from 1985 to 1989. A quartermaster’s job is to serve as principal navigator onboard ship, and as an expert cartographer (a “map maker”) on land.

During my time in the navy I visited every continent on the planet, with the exception of Antarctica. I lived and worked with thousands of different people, from a wide variety of ethnic, economic, and geographic backgrounds. I experienced places and cultures and sights and smells and tastes that I never knew existed. It was a far cry from my childhood growing up in Eastern Washington.

I cannot overstate the effect that serving my country during those four years had on me. My worldview was radically changed as a result of that experience, and while it was not an easy journey, I cannot stress enough how important my military service has been to me in the years since my discharge in 1989.

The military taught me so much. Patience, mostly. And more patience. And then….still more. Those of you with a veteran in your family, ask them about the phrase “Hurry up, and wait.” See what reaction you get.

In the navy I learned to get along with people with whom I had nothing in common, other than the shared experience of serving our country. The navy brought me into close contact with people I might never otherwise have gotten to know. One of the life skills I value most is the ability to work well with people you may not like very much. Another is the ability to get past initial differences and find things to admire in others, things you might not have noticed on first acquaintance. The navy taught me how to do both of these things, and so much more.

None of this should have come as much of a surprise to me. You see, when it came to the military, I had a reservoir of previously acquired knowledge to rely upon at home while I was growing up. My father flew Huey gunships in Vietnam. Two uncles served in the navy. One retired from the Coast Guard. My grandfather was a tail-gunner in both B-17s and B-29s, flying bombing sorties over both Germany and Japan during World War II. Much of my childhood was spent listening to stories, not only of battle, but of boredom, “unintelligent” leadership, pranks played, and fast friendships formed.

Once I had served my own hitch, I had my own stories to tell. Tales of bad food, long work days, freezing cold watches stood on piers in faraway places with hard-to-pronounce names. And the exploits of “my buddies,” guys I served with. Guys I’ll never forget, like them, love them, or hate them. My younger brother did his own hitch in the army, serving as crew chief onboard Chinook helicopters. And he in turn brought home his own stories.

I have a lot of veterans in my family, including ones like my cousin, Ronald Quigley, who never lived to tell their stories. You see, my cousin Ronnie died while serving as an artilleryman in Vietnam. You can find his name inscribed with those of the other honored dead from that war on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

I was three years old when he died. All I have left of him are some jumbled memories from his going-away party when he left for Vietnam.

And yet, my cousin, and those others whose lights were snuffed out too early, who never lived to tell their stories, the ones who, in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, gave “the last, full measure of devotion” to this country, they deserve to be remembered. To be celebrated. To be honored.

And we, as a nation, have an obligation to keep their memory alive, to keep them from becoming just another name on just another war memorial. To help the citizens of this great nation remember the terrible cost incurred every time young people answer their country’s call to arms. To serve with honor, and to be transformed utterly by the experience.

And that leads me to the crux of this speech. Because, once you’ve lived it, once you’ve taken the oath, once you’ve stood the watches, and fought to stay awake, and been afraid, and laughed, and argued, and sweated, and ached, and bled, and loved and cried, all in the service of your country, like it or not, you’ve become a part of something larger than yourself. 

A fraternity. 

A family.

A group of women and men who have sworn to protect this nation. Who have made its continued existence their personal responsibility.

And it doesn’t change much once your hitch is up. Once you’ve done your bit, you’re a member for life. And for ever afterward.

That’s what being a veteran is.

***************

Coming in two weeks: the conclusion of the tale begun with an eccentric Swedish queen and her court poisoner. See you then!

He Ran All the Way

 

John Garfield.  He was the immediate precursor to Brando and Monty Clift and James Dean, pretty much the first Method actor in Hollywood pictures – or at least the first star.  His movie career only lasted thirteen years, and a recent New Yorker profile calls him “half-forgotten,” but I don’t buy it. 

Garfield was nominated for an Oscar in his first picture, Four Daughters, and then again for Body and Soul.  It’s fair to say, though, that the second half of his output is more interesting than the first.  Not that he’s ever less than compelling – Air Force, for example, is a pretty lame effort for a Howard Hawks, even if Garfield is good – but the later pictures are more invested.  The same year as Air Force, he made The Fallen Sparrow.  Based on the Dorothy Hughes novel (Hughes wrote In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse), Fallen Sparrow sets up the compromised hero Garfield fully embodies in Force of Evil and The Breaking Point.  Postman is of course about a guy who only thinks with his dick, but a more conflicted and ambiguous Garfield shows his colors in the final five years.

Body and Soul and Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947, Force of Evil in 1948, We Were Strangers in 1949, The Breaking Point in 1950.  Garfield hits his stride.

He’s muscular and assured, but transparent.  His emotions wash across his face like water, even when he’s ostensibly playing a mug or a tough Joe: you can read him.  He has the quality to appear natural, as if his character is only now inventing himself.  Force of Evil is masterfully written and fluidly shot, but it’s an actor’s movie, Garfield, Thomas Gomez, and the incomparable Marie Windsor, a B-movie queen in an A-list part.  Garfield plays a mob lawyer, and as the iron hand of his own doom closes on him, he rises to something like redemption, and makes it seem inevitable.

We Were Strangers is a political thriller, set in 1930’s Cuba, written (in part) and directed by John Huston.  The picture got tarred with a Red brush, which is of more than passing interest.  Garfield was about to get caught up in the Red Scare.  In the meantime, the movie tanked at the box office.  It was probably too subtle, and psychological, and it rationalized freelance assassination. 

Warners released The Breaking Point the following year, in spite of Garfield’s supposed political sympathies and the studio’s hard line against Communist influence, and the picture got good reviews.  [I wrote about it in a previous post, August 2019.]  But the handwriting was on the wall.  Garfield testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, denied he was a Communist, denied he knew any fellow travelers in the movie industry, and refused to name names.  It got him blacklisted.  He was disowned by Hollywood. 

He went back to New York, and opened in a revival of Golden Boy.  He died in May, 1952, of heart failure.  He was 39. 

Knowing this, his death foretold, Garfield might seem a haunted presence, but in life, not.  He was a kinetic force, his energy not so much performance, as inhabited, from the inside out.  Whatever suit of clothes he might put on, you can imagine no one else wearing them.

The Criterion Channel is hosting a Garfield festival.  

Extra! Extra! Why I'm Tuning in for Alaska Daily

About twenty years ago, a new TV show aired with a big-name star (whose name, ironically, I can't recall) about a newspaper reporter. I was a former newspaper reporter—I'd loved being a reporter (mostly)—and had been eager to see the show. But I ended up watching only a couple of episodes because the show was ridiculously over-the-top. I remember complaining about it to a friend (another former reporter). Why, I said, can't there ever be TV shows about journalists that are realistic? And he said, "You want to watch a TV show about taking notes in meetings or interviewing people on the phone?" He had a point (and he hadn't even mentioned the third prong in the triumvirate of fascinating things reporters do: type up their articles). While the articles reporters write may be interesting, the news-gathering process? Not so much.

Yet the new show Alaska Daily is proving my old friend and me wrong. Airing at 10 p.m. ET Thursdays on ABC, and available for streaming on Hulu, Alaska Daily is my favorite new show of the season. I've read reviews complaining about the show, but I'm going to focus on what I like about it: it puts a spotlight on the importance of local journalism at a time when so many newspapers are going under, leaving many communities without a watchdog of their powers that be.

The show has what I'm assuming will be a season-long arc, in which series star Hilary Swank, playing a big-deal NY reporter who's pushed out of her job, moves to Anchorage, Alaska, to work at the city newspaper (the fictional Daily Alaskan) to investigate the crisis of missing Indigenous women. Swank's character is teamed up with an Indigenous reporter, played by Grace Dove, and in each episode they make some (sometimes significant) progress. This is an important story line based, sadly, on real life. 

Each episode also has a stand-alone story line. These have included:

• A state official who misappropriated public funds
• A radicalized local man who is stockpiling bomb-making materials. (The story stemmed from a reporter interviewing the winner of the largest cabbage at the state fair, and you can't get more local journalism than that.)
• A beloved Anchorage restaurant owner selling out to a chain

Do I have issues with the show? Sure. For instance, the episode about the restaurant ended with the reporter writing a first-person article about the restaurant and why it was important to her and her family and why the owner had sold it. It was heart-stirring, but it blurred the line between news articles and opinion pieces—something that's already too blurry in too many people's minds. Nonetheless, I liked the episode. I've liked all the episodes, in fact, because they show reporters doing what reporters actually do: interviewing people, gathering facts, and making a difference in their community. (Wanting to make a difference, that's why everyone I knew who was a reporter went into the industry; it certainly wasn't for the money or for glamour.)

I like the reporters at the Daily Alaskan, even Swank's bristly character, who I assume will be toned down as the season progresses as she learns from her experiences and grows. I like the paper's newsroom, set in a strip mall because of financial issues (which is why they have a tiny staff, like so many real newspapers today that are struggling to survive). I like the paper's commitment to doing journalism right. 

So often these days, people see reporters as the bad guys. Alaska Daily puts its reporters in a positive light, and that's why I'm tuning in each week. I hope you'll check it out too.

***

While I have your attention, I'll be appearing this Saturday, Nov. 12th, at a Mystery Author Extravaganza at the Miller Library in Ellicott City, Maryland, along with fourteen other authors from the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime. We'll be talking about our new books and stories published this year. Books will be available for sale. Click on either link in the next paragraph to get the full list of participating authors.

The event is free and open to the public (no matter where you live). It starts at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. You also can watch over Zoom if you can't attend in person. To register to attend, click here for in-person or here for Zoom. (Walk-ins to the in-person event are welcome if you decide at the last minute to attend.) The library's address: 9421 Frederick Road, Ellicott City, MD 21042.

Creativity. Damned it you do, damned if you don't.

Creative work often presents itself as pure invention, when in fact, it’s merely a reconstitution of existing forms.  These are successful forms, which is why writers, editors and publishers produce this work by the trainload.  One only needs to see a lot of blockbuster movies, listen to commercial radio and read thick airline-oriented thrillers to know this is true.  There is tremendous comfort in diving into the familiar.  Like that cardboard container of MacDonalds French fries, you know what you’re going to get, and you can’t wait to get at it.

I’m totally down with this.  I read Sue Grafton, Robert B. Parker and Rex Stout because they’re a known commodity.  Important for me, they’re also really good at it.  They know how to maintain a familiar rhythm and context, while introducing just enough surprise and variety to keep the stories interesting.  Also true with some of my favorite TV shows, recently Shetland and Longmire. 

The hang up is that without genuine creativity – offering ideas, themes and plot structures that have never been tried before – the whole art form will eventually die of arterial sclerosis.  It becomes boring, dulling the senses and deflating like a tired old balloon. 

Here enters risk vs. reward.  Most fresh ideas fail.  It’s the cruel reality of biological evolution, that it takes thousands of beings to produce that one mutation that will improve the life prospects of a particular species.  Contrary to common wisdom, publishers are always looking for that one big idea that will transform the industry, and their financial well-being, but in the process kill more nascent innovations than a blue whale scooping up krill. 

Most artists succeed, in the sense of wide recognition and good pay days, because they remind us of what we already know.  But occasionally, someone rips up orthodoxy and shows us something so wonderfully different that we can’t resist assimilating the fresh mutation.  As to TV shows, I’m thinking The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.  Philip K. Dick was so unceasingly creative that his work inspired some of the finest sci-fi movies ever made.  Dashiell Hammett virtually invented the modern detective story.  James Joyce invited readers into the consciousness of his characters in a way that permanently altered the literary arts.   

This is why we need what Steve Jobs called the crazy ones (Philip K. Dick and Vincent Van Gogh were certifiably mentally ill, but that’s not exactly what he meant.)  Business folklore is full of risktakers, iconoclasts, scruffy revolutionaries working out of their parents’ garage.  The ones we know about were not only prolific idea machines, they were also inured against the effects of failure, or had the persistence to fail forward, to keep screwing up until something finally clicked. 

A breakthrough requires two distinct capabilities.  One to come up with the idea, the other to introduce it to the world.  As a practical matter, I think the latter takes the greater risk.  When I was in advertising, I’d remind my fellow creatives that if our campaign fails, we might lose an account, but our partners who worked inside the client companies could lose their jobs.  Creative people tend to dismiss the sensibilities of the money people, but when a half million books get remaindered, they aren’t the ones typing up their resumes. 

Humans are biologically programmed to avoid risk, otherwise, we wouldn’t have made it out of the Pleistocene.  This is why a truly fresh idea is often met with skepticism, if not outright fear.  We also learned in advertising how to somewhat overcome this natural reaction, but at the end of the day, it simply took a lot of guts and faith in the power of originality. 

I once wrote a line for a stock photo company that wanted to encourage their clients to take greater risks by supporting more pioneering photography.  I think it equally applies to the writers, editors and publishers of mystery fiction.

“There is nothing so difficult to create, so delightful to render, or so dangerous to defend, as a new idea.

Skabengas!

What the Bad Guys Wear this Season © South African Paramount Marauder

An Unexpected Heroine

Seldom do we encounter a housekeeper who singlehandedly defeats a criminal terrorist cell. On television, such a heroine would have a CIA backstory, keep a 10mm in her spatula drawer, and be trained in seventeen different ways to kill a bad guy with a broken pair of nail scissors. But no, Nellie appears so extra ordinary, she becomes extraordinary. Our calm and self-possessed iqhawekazi unpacks her most formidable weapon, her wits.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine arrived mere minutes ago, seven hours before today’s publication deadline. It contains stories by my betters, Eve, Janice, Mark, and O’Neil, and  a rare chance to see one of my stories in print. I’ll discuss the genesis of the story another time, but let’s discuss language… or in this case, languages.

South Africa has thirty-five languages, eleven of them official. My story, ‘The Precatory Pea’, is sprinkled with expressions from several. The Netflix television show Blood & Water illustrates how South Africans speak, sometimes coloring sentences with two, three, or four languages.

We do the same thing without realizing. We North Americans mix in Spanish, French, and Latin, plus numerous American Indian place names. We’re the richer for it.

The Name of The Name

“The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’”
“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.
“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’”
“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called?’” Alice corrected herself.
“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’, but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”
“Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting On A Gate’, and the tune’s my own invention.”

The table below contains unusual mixed-case words like siSwati, isiXhosa, and isiZulu. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might note, Zulu is a Nguni language but isiZulu is the name of the language… or something like that. The particulars fomented a searing war within Wikipedia. British Wikipedian’s were outraged, claiming the names were at best stolen loan-words or worse, made-up slang. South African editors responding by quoting the Oxford Dictionary, South African Edition, which Wikipedian’s initially didn’t believe existed. So, if you aspire to be ultra-obsessively, compulsively correct (and Good Lord who doesn’t?), Zulu is the people, isiZulu is the language.

Complicating the issue is what computer people call ‘camel case’, mixed capitals and lower case, but this is not unusual in South Africa spelling. For example, the name of the province where I lived is KwaZulu-Natal… birthplace of the Zulus.

I’m admiring and grateful Alfred Hitchcock’s chief editor Linda Landrigan took in stride these issues of languages on the other side of the planet. How terrific is that!

The Fame of The Name

“Must a name mean something?” asked Alice in Wonderland.

Well, yes. Meanings of names used to be important in Western civilization. They often denoted something about the child or birth (Tuesday, Ginger), or religion (Mary, Josh), an occupational name (Carter, Fisher), a place name (D’Arcy, DuPont), or pretty much anything at all (Pearl, Rose). Society has let these lapse from shared memory, but meanings of names remain important in other cultures. An African family naming their little girl Treasure or Precious softens the hardest heart.

I’m not the only one, but I have a habit of relating names to the character of people in my stories. Sometimes I use sounds; sometimes I go by popularity. In the telling of ‘The Precatory Pea’, I took into account ethnicity and name meanings of characters, e.g, Sipho– gift.

Pronunciation

To my ear, South African English combines the sounds of British English with American Deep South vowels. “I like to ride my bike,” sounds like, “Ah lahk to rahd mah bahk.”

I enjoy the sound of several isiZulu terms. It happens to be a click language, so once in a while a *click* pops out. Many words use onomatopoeia. Anyone who’s been around aged farm machinery knows the sound of a tractor, ganda-ganda. A rattletrap vehicle is a skedonk. A bad guy is a skabenga– you can hear the word spit out in disgust.

I suspect Dutch Afrikaans has influenced some pronunciation. For example, ‘th’ sounds are pronounced with a hard T. The talented actress Charlize Theron is exceptionally tolerant of Americans mispronouncing her name, but in her home country, it’s spoken as Teron.

Johannisburg, Johannisberg, Johannesburg… I never know which spelling to use, never mind tasting the riesling. I learned it pronounced with a ‘Y’ as in “Yohannisburg.” So what happens? My hostess corrects me… “Johannesburg.” And then her Afrikaner friend corrects me back, “Yohannesburg.” I get verbal whiplash… or toungelash. At least all agree on Jo-burg pronounced as Joe-burg).

Salade Lyonnaise (salad of Lyon, France)

Salade lyonnaise is delicious, perhaps not often made with African spinach. Its distinguishing feature is warm vinegar and oil dressing with bacon scraps, heated but not so hot to wilt romaine, endive, or whatever lettuce you have at hand. Finish with chopped egg on the greens and dribble savory dressing over it. Try it!

Glossary

Many words have both formal and informal variants. Informal forms and plurals are in parentheses.

term	definition, description		language
Arch Desmond	Archbishop Desmond Tutu		Setswana
bakkie	pickup truck		Afrikaans
bandile	increased	isiNdébélé, isiXhosa
bok, buck	any horned, antelope-like ruminant	Afrikaans, English
buhle	handsome	isiNdébélé, isiXhosa
deurmekaar	confused		Afrikaans
dof	daft, dumb, stupid		Afrikaans
dwaal	dazed		Afrikaans
en	and		Afrikaans
hawu	expression: wow, whoa, pfft	isiXhosa, isiZulu
impi	war, warriors		isiZulu
induna	foreman, overseer		isiZulu
injakazi	slut, bitch		isiXhosa
inyanga	(plural izinyanga) healer		isiZulu
isangoma	medicine man, witch doctor, diviner, spirit talker, seer		isiZulu
isigebengu	(skabenga, plural izigebengu) bad guy, criminal, villain		isiZulu
isipho	(sipho) gift	isiNdébélé, isiXhosa
isiXhosa	language of the Xhosa	isiXhosa, English
isiZulu	language of the Zulus	isiZulu, English
kokayi	summoner, caller of the people together		Shona
mach schnell	hurry (verb), quickly, now		German
Madiba	Nelson Mandela (clan name)		isiXhosa
magondo	hyena		Shona
mampara	idiot, cretin		Afrikaans
marogo	African spinach	isiZulu, isiXhosa
moegoe	cretin, stupid person		Afrikaans
nelisiwe	satisfied		isiZulu
nkosana	prince		isiXhosa
rooibos	South African red tea		Afrikaans
salade lyonnaise	salad of Lyon: egg, heated vinegar, oil, bacon		French
schalk	varlet, knave, servant		German
Selous Scouts	controversial Rhodesian multi-race guerrilla special forces		English
skedonk	jalopy, beater, dilapidated car, junker		isiZulu
svitsi	hyena		Shona
uDokotela	physician, doctor		isiZulu
umlungu	(mlungu) white person		isiZulu
umndeni	(mndeni) family		isiZulu
umthakathi	(tagati) sorcerer, witch		isiZulu
umuthi	(muti) medicine; any liquid of useful purpose		isiZulu
voortrekker	pioneer		Afrikaans
xiang si dou	aphrodisiac love beads		Chinese
	(parentheses imply informal variants or plurals)

Appreciation

I owe thanks to Simon for describing Selous Scouts and approving the finished story. I extend appreciation to ABA for helping me get the wrongs right and the rights better. Thanks to RT Lawton for reading and advising. And I thank the real Nelisiwe, a gentle soul, an open heart, and a lovely person. She’ll be shocked to learn she’s known a world away. Nellie, I miss our shared lunches.

Three Hitchcock Stories

  

I'll begin on a happy note: I received word a few weeks ago from Jackie Sherbow at Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine that one of my short stories, "Going the Distance," will be included in their Jan/Feb 2023 issue, coming out next month. More about that in a later post.

On that subject, I've been fortunate enough to have three other stories featured in AHMM already this year--the first time I've had three in one year at AH since, I think, 1999. And the strange thing is, these three stories are different in almost every way. (I think that kind of variety is one of the things that makes this magazine fun for readers and writers as well. It's like a box of chocolate mysteries: you never know what you're gonna get.)

The first of my three stories was "Mayhem at the Mini-Mart" (Jan/Feb 2022 issue). At 2300 words, it's the shortest story of mine that AHMM has published in a long time. It's not a whodunit, or even a real mystery--it's more of a straight crime story, about a violent and unforeseen event in the lives of two brothers on a fishing trip. The first half of the story takes place inside a vehicle and is almost entirely dialogue, and the last half is about an incident at a quick-stop gas station that's tied to something the two guys heard earlier on their truck's radio. It's a standalone story set in the rural South, it's told via the POV of one of the brothers, and it's different from most of my stories in that there are no female characters. (Well, there's one, a sister who's a partner in their small business, but she's only mentioned in passing.) One of the things that made this story so much fun to write is that movies and the love of movies play a vital part in the storyline, and the thing that saves the main characters' lives involves a well-known Hitchcock plot device called a MacGuffin (which probably made AHMM more receptive to the story). The original title was even "MacGuffins," but editor Linda Landrigan suggested a different title to make it easier to use in a cover illustration.

My second story at AHMM this year was "The Dollhouse" (May/June 2022), one of those whose title has a double meaning. This one is a whodunit, in fact it's two whodunits because it contains two separate mystery plots that are seemingly unconnected at first: one is a murder mystery and the other is an incident at a local high school. It's a bit more typical of my other recent stories in AHMM because it's the sixth installment of a series featuring southern sheriff Ray Douglas, his ex-lawyer girlfriend Jennifer Parker, and his deputy Cheryl Grubbs. (My upcoming story in the Jan/Feb 2023 issue is the seventh installment, and the eighth has been accepted at AHMM but so far has no publication date.) "The Dollhouse," which runs about 5200 words, is about the same length as most of my latest AH stories. It's told from the sheriff's POV and again contains a great deal of dialogue, mostly between him and his two crimesolving partners.

My third story, "The Donovan Gang" (Sep/Oct 2022) is different in a lot of ways. First and foremost, it's not present-day. It's sort of a whodunit Western set in 1907, in the Arizona Territory. Second, it mentions several real people from that time period, and actively involves another real person as a part of the plot. Third, almost the whole story happens inside a confined space: the interior of a stagecoach--which again gave me an opportunity for lots of talking between the characters. The six passengers are a preacher, an actress, a journalist, a lawman, a saloon girl, and a dentist--and there are another half-dozen minor players, some of them offscreen-only. The story is a standalone and is told from the young journalist's POV. Also, it's a fairly typical length, around 4100 words. The fact that it's set in the Old West isn't unusual for me--I love to write Westerns--but it is unusual for AHMM. Twist Phelan and I have agreed to call those "historicals with horses." 

One thing these three stories do have in common is that they're all told in first-person, which has always been the case in the series I mentioned but not in most of my standalones, which are usually third-person. These three are also all written in past tense, but those are the only kinds of stories I write. I don't mind reading present-tense stores, but I don't like to write them. (I'm actually not crazy about reading them either, but I've accepted it.)

As for upcoming stories at AHMM, I have three that have been accepted but not yet published. Two of them, as I said, are more installments of my Ray Douglas series and one is, believe it or not, a standalone science-fiction story. So yes, I can say from experience that Linda will certainly consider stories other than mysteries, so long as a crime is present in the plot, and in fact AH is one of only two respected mystery magazines (that I'm aware of) that are receptive to stories with paranormal elements. The other is Mystery Magazine. Remember that EQMM has been known to publish the occasional otherworldly tale but usually doesn't, and both Strand Magazine and Black Cat Mystery Magazine prefer undiluted crime stories.

For those of you who are writers, what's been your experience, with the kinds of stories you've had accepted and published at AHMM? Are they shorter? Longer? Series stories? Standalones? Do any of you stick to traditional mysteries? Has anyone had success with other genres there? And what kinds of stories have you most enjoyed reading at AHMM? How about the kinds of stories you submit to other markets? Is there any subject matter, like Covid, that you try to avoid completely? Inquiring (nosy) minds want to know. 

Meanwhile, thank you as always for stopping in at SleuthSayers. Keep writing and reading--and have a good November.

Random Thoughts

The next book or story I'm going to write will not be in the first person or second person or third person. I'm going to write it in the fifth person where each sentence begins with –

I heard from this guy who told someone ...

That's a joke from stand-up comic/actor Demetri Martin so he gets credit for it. I do think it would be cool and a helluva challenge. Demetri Martin is the same guy who wants to go to a beach frequented by guys with metal detectors. He'll go early in the morning and bury objects with the inscription, "Get a life."

What happened to Frank Yerby's literary estate?

When I was a kid, my father read a lot of Frank Yerby paperbacks – The Foxes of Harrow, The Vixens, The Golden Hawk, Benton's Bow, The Saracen Blade, Jarrett's Jade and others. By the time I was out of college and reading what I wanted to read, instead of what was assigned, I didn't get around to Yerby. I should have. His books are out of print today. Amazon and EBay sells old hardbacks and paperbacks but there are no eBooks or audiobooks and no new editions of his works. My public library (an excellent library) does not carry any Yerby books. The Foxes of Harrow may be obtained via interlibrary loan.

Frank Yerby left the U.S. in 1952, in protest against racial discrimination, living in France then Spain. His ancestry was African, Native American and White. He died in 1991.

Frank Yerby

That's all for now.

www.oneildenoux.com 

A Blast from the Past

by Eve Fisher

For your consideration:  I recently excavated this from a file drawer. It's the opening of the first (and only memoir, if you don't count journals) I ever wrote, back in my early 20s.  I was trying to write down some of the stories from street life in L.A. while they were still fresh, and I centered them around Hollywood's infinitely less famous & undoubtedly seedier equivalent of the Chelsea Hotel:  The Blackburn.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Blackburn Chronicles, Part 1:

The Blackburn Hotel sat two blocks from Hollywood Boulevard and one up from the coffee shop and that was all the directions you needed to get there.  It was like most downtown hotels, run to seed and winos, covered in cockroaches and losing another window every day.  Maybe Hedy Lamarr had slept there:  she'd probably gotten crabs and spread more than the word.  The linoleum in the lobby was curled and buckled and the carpet on the stairs was a health hazard.  The walls sucked in any new paint and the ancient cracks in them smiled like the toothless old men on the fifth floor.

This haven of rest - and it could be a haven and even heaven on a wine-filled afternoon when it was raining outside or the Santa Ana had hit - cost $60 a month for one room, $100 for two and a bathroom and kitchen all to yourself.  The Management was strict about the rent, too, most of the renters being the sort who found 3 AM to be the best time to move out.  This caused a certain culling of clientele - not so much of poverty but of personality.  The obvious solution was to have three, four, five, a dozen people to a room, at which point the rent, if nothing else, was manageable.  Very few flunked the test of communal living.  As long as you didn't hack everyone to pieces or steal too many drugs you were in.  Those who did flunk ended up in the flophouses, the missions, or at the Free Church where they let drunks snore on the carpet in front of the altar and spent a lot of time cleaning puke off the pews.

Sex, which was always rearing its pointed head, culled the herd in a different way.  The heterosexuals were fairly used to performing in semi-public (5 people in a room did not make for a lot of privacy) if not necessarily en masse, but only among other heterosexuals.  The transvestites, transsexuals, homosexuals, and the heavy bondage crew stuck, for the most part, to the third and fourth floors.  If they were young and beautiful, they moved to the Shangri-La Hotel, where they could join Julius Caesar X in his daily berobed, bejeweled, and bedrugged frolics in the central pool.  (He had serious money. And even more serious connections.)

The Shangri-La Hotel:  still there, tarted up, very pricey.  Wikipedia

The second and third floors, right above the lobby, had the most transient and "normal" inhabitants.  All the freaks who hadn't quite descended to total addiction or risen to a part-time job shuffled through them.  There was a lot of experimental trust.  We called ourselves families, and each other brother and sister.  The doors would stay open all day and half the night, unless someone was horny or busy hiding their drugs.  The noise level was unbelievable - radios blaring, guitars jangling, people playing drums on the walls with their feet; laughter and talk and yelling and toilets backing up; friendly screaming and an occasional crash of furniture or tinkle of glass.  Both floors reeked of wine, vomit, dust, urine, sweat, incense, and - on one miraculous occasion that would live on in legend - of a half-pound of cocaine that Popsicle  Joe spilled in front of a fan.  White dust floated everywhere, settled on everything, and for two weeks at least it wasn't considered weird to be seen licking the walls.  

The lobby was no man's land, where anyone could sneak in and hide and crash at night.  Most mornings would find number of homeless sprawled out like dressed hamburger, and if Mad Dog bottles had been returnable, we'd all have been rich.  Sometimes they'd start a fight, or someone would die, or someone would light a fire.  Of the three, the management got most upset about fires.  The Blackburn was a firetrap and would have burned to the ground in an hour, tops, and the fire department would have just sniggered into the phone and kept watching TV, and the police would probably have given a reward to the arsonist.  

The police figured it was all too weird for them and stayed away, except for the yearly pre-election cleanup when they arrested everything in sight.  Even then, they went no higher than the sixth floor.  The Blackburn went higher than that, but no one knew for sure who, or more importantly what, lived on those top floors, and everyone had tacitly agreed that in this case ignorance was bliss. 

The management - a surly 400-pound ex-professional wrestler with a permanent hernia - couldn't get any insurance and couldn't sell, so any hints of fire led to large buckets of water and a few extra bruises for any poor bastard with a pack of matches.  Nonetheless, the homeless kept on lighting fires.  It gave them light and warmth, and God knows the lobby was a gloomy, damp, hard, evil place at night.  It was large enough to hold the Oscars in, and seemed bigger since there was nothing in it but huddled people and trash.  The management figured the rent didn't include cleaning of anything, so anything that fell on the floor stayed there except for dead people, and the police would cart them away.  Anything to save the hernia.

It was a bad hernia, and it was a good thing that so many painkillers were floating around the building.  The management didn't care what kind - reds,  yellows, librium, darvon, pentathol, THC, grass, hash, cocaine, thorazine, methadone, smack, or just cheap wine - if you didn't have money, he'd take drugs instead.  He'd snarl and ripple a lot, but he'd take them.  There were rumors that he'd take sex, too, and considering his 400 pounds everyone was sure he would, but at 400 pounds no one would take him on, or at least, no one would admit to it.  And he didn't care who lived there or who paid the rent as long as it was paid. You could answer the door, a total stranger he'd never seen before, stark naked, a needle in one arm and a bloody hatchet in hand, and all he'd want to know was "Where's the rent?" 

And we paid up.

More later. Maybe.  Let me know what you think.

Meanwhile, some BSP:

My latest story, "The Closing of the Lodge" is in the latest AHMM:  

BTW, congrats, O'Neil, for getting the coveted cover!

My story, "Cool Papa Bell" (set in prison, BTW), is in Josh Pachter's Paranoia Blues;

https://downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-paranoia-blues/ 

And on Amazon HERE

Two Novels, Two Cities, Two Sleeps

 I don't usually review books here (which is what I say every time I do) but I recently read two strange and excellent novels I want to tell you about.  Are they mysteries?  Well, let's say that the authors use the tropes of our genre for their own purposes.

China Mieville.  The City & the City. (2009) I heard about this book at Chicon, the World Science Fiction Convention, at a panel about great SF mysteries. 

We all know that two things cannot exist in the same time and space.  Don't try telling that to Inspector Tyador Borlú who is a police officer in the  East European city-state of Besźel.  It occupies the same territory as  Ul Qoma. From an early age the residents of both places are taught to "unsee" the people, vehicles, and even buildings of the "foreign" city they share space with.

In every other way the world of this book resembles our own.

Borlú's troubles begin when a young woman is found murdered on a Besź street.  She turns out to be a Canadian archaeology student who has been working on a dig in Ul Qoma and has no business being in his city, alive or dead.

The investigation into her death reveals shocking facts and even more mysteries.  Inevitably Borlú must travel to the "foreign" city that occupies the same land as his...

The  thing I like best about this book is a single word.  The hypothetical prehistoric event that caused the two cities to co-exist is called the "cleaving."  Of course, "to cleave" is to split. It is also to stick together.  If I was Mieville after I dreamed that up I would have stopped for a glass of champagne.

Robert Harris.  The Second Sleep.  (2019)  In England the year is 1468.  Christopher Fairfax is a young priest on his first assignment: to say the funeral rites for a rural clergyman.  But arriving in the tiny village Father Fairfax makes two shocking discoveries: the older priest may have been a heretic, and he may not have died of natural causes.

Ho ho, I hear you say.  A medieval mystery.  Got it.

To which I must reply: You don't got nothin'. Harris is working in much different materials here.

If I were  a real reviewer I would have to decide now what type of spoilers to include, but I'm not one so all I will say is this: Harris has thought long and hard about his subject and anyone who reads this book will likely do the same.

I recommend them both to the adventurous reader.  

Barnyard Justice

    Beastly behavior might end up in court.

    Beginning in the Middle Ages and extending through the 18^th century, many European nations believed that animals could commit crimes. I’m not talking about soiling the rug or barking after midnight. Pigs, dogs, rats, and other creatures might be accused of penal law violations. There were several sources for the belief in animal culpability. Chiefly, the Hebrew Bible supported the idea. In Exodus 21:28, it is written that "[w]hen an ox gores a man or a woman to death the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh not eaten." Additionally, medieval cosmology established a great chain of being. Society was hierarchical. Atop the ladder sat God, followed on the lower rungs by heavenly hosts. Below them, God’s representatives in church and state—the priests and king rested. Nobles, freemen, and serfs usually complete our view of the ladder. The hierarchy, however, did not stop there. Primates, quadrupeds, lower animals, and vermin were followed by plants in the great chain of being. Unique among the earthly species, humans were made in the image of God. They alone had the opportunity to join the divinity in the next world. Because each occupant of a rung had the same essence, to a greater or lesser degree, moral agency extended down the ladder.

            Both secular and religious authorities agreed on the need to prosecute certain animals in courtrooms and, as appropriate, to punish them for offenses. The reasoning behind these prosecutions varied. Some saw animals as sentient beings who had conscious thoughts. They could scheme and behave like humans. (Although from a different time, we might remember Aesop. He famously crafted a bundle of tales about anthropomorphic beasts of farm and forest.) Other thinkers supported animal trials out of retribution and a need to extract society's measured response to wrongdoing. The absence of legal intent did not necessarily free the animal from criminal liability or consequence. Still others saw a threat to social order by not acting. A goring ox was not executed because it was morally guilty. These thinkers recognized that oxen do what oxen do. As a lower animal, however, it had killed a higher animal. The ox threatened to upset the divinely ordered hierarchy of God’s creation. Finally, some, like Thomas Aquinas, reasoned that the lower animals are God’s creatures. He uses them for his purposes. To punish or curse them for their actions would be blasphemy. Offending animals, he argued, therefore, must be agents of Satan. It was widely understood that the Devil frequently used irrational and simple creatures to the detriment of humans. The disposition of the cases then must not be seen as punishing the animals but as hurling them at Satan. Think of the demon-inhabited pigs in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 8. They ran off a cliff into the sea and drowned. The agent of evil needed to be destroyed not for the criminal act but rather to resist the Great Tempter.

            Whether criminally culpable or demon-possessed, animals deemed guilty/cursed were destroyed. The meat could not be salvaged. Neither the beast nor the owner fared well under the system. Far better, I suppose, when a non-domesticated animal stood accused. Nobody loses when a mosquito gets its due.

            Courts, both secular and ecclesiastical, developed procedures for the trials of animals. A distinction was drawn between the capital trials by secular courts of offending domestic animals (Thierstrafen) and judicial proceedings undertaken in ecclesiastical courts against vermin for damage (Thierprocesse). Although the cases had non-traditional defendants, the courts took the proceedings very seriously.

            As often happens, while looking for something else, I stumbled into a 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E.P. Evans. He documents the medieval belief in the appropriateness of the criminal prosecution of animals. Evans, in particular, notes the work of Bartholomé Chassenée, a 16^th-century French jurist. Chassenée wrote a treatise describing his efforts to defend accused beasts. Evans' collection of animal trials is a fascinating world to visit. 

        The November/December issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine includes my story, “A Rat Tale,” the second story about the animal avocat, Bernard de Vallenchin. The tale is based loosely on a Chassenée trial. Both Valenchin and Chassenée work on behalf of the lowly rat. It was tempting to get lost in the weeds when telling the story. Who, after all, doesn't want the protagonist to drop a casual aside about the excommunication of moles in the Valley of Aosta, Italy, in the year 824. I tried to strike a balance. The goal was to offer a compelling courtroom drama. I also wanted to provide a few odd, historical details.  I hope that a reader finishes the tale entertained and interested in this jurisprudential footnote.

---

            If you don't like the story, punish my dog.

            (I'll be traveling on the day this posts. If you comment, I apologize for not getting back to you promptly.) 

            Until next time.