The Mystery at the Heart of “Masquerade”

My notes and case dossier from 41 years ago.

Buried treasures, anagrams, and complex puzzles are all tropes found in mystery fiction. They’re also elements of a delightful children’s book that spawned a sub-genre in kidlit in the 1980s.

It all started with a 1979 picture book called Masquerade, written and illustrated by a British artist and “wizard” named Kit Williams. (The book was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK, by Schocken Books in the U.S., and by publishers elsewhere around the globe. The plot of the book is simple. A sprightly hare is charged with transporting a precious amulet, a gift from Lady Moon to the aloof Sun-God. Jack Hare travels the length and breadth of England to deliver the prize, but loses the amulet along the way. Readers are encouraged to use the clues hidden in the book’s 15 hyperrealistic illustrations to find a very real sculpture, which Williams crafted from gemstones, faience, and 18k gold, and buried somewhere in that blessed plot, England.

Like some kind of latter-day Willy Wonka, Williams promised to send an airplane ticket anywhere in the world to the person who wrote him and convincingly demonstrated that they had cracked the code. He further promised to travel with the winner to the secret site and assist in the dig.

Thus ensued a colorful couple of years that saw (mostly) adult readers of the book going nuts digging up gardens, soccer fields, and other public and private lands all over the nation, in search of Williams’ jewel-encrusted rabbit. One long-suffering woman told British media that people kept digging up her rabbit-shaped topiary in search of the treasure. As the book’s fame spread, its New York publisher proudly bragged to the media that no less an entity than the FBI bought copies for their trainees to test their mettle cracking the code. They couldn’t, but with all the publicity the book sold at least 2 million copies worldwide.

While I never cashed in my childhood savings bonds and booked my ticket to England, I too became obsessed with the book, which arrived in U.S. bookstores about the time I was entering high school. I paged through the book countless times, and even “taught” the book for a time when I was tutoring kids in math and reading at a local elementary school. I was counting on the genius of little kids to help me unravel the case, because I was hopelessly stumped.

Like any good mystery, the book piled red herrings on top of red herrings. The visual clues included atomic numbers, magic squares, and so on, all designed to lead you astray. Williams actually painted a herring gull—a type of seabird—into one image. In another, he painted a goldfish whose scales appeared red where they overlapped with an underlying image of a hare. Each image featured a riddle painted in its borders. Some of the letters were red, others had barbed serifs. The barbed or red-letter clues, once decoded, amounted to a handful of innocuous and often unhelpful anagrams.

While Williams insisted in the book flap copy that no knowledge of British geography was necessary to solve the mystery, the book nevertheless touched on history, mathematics, literary references, British train schedules, astronomy, physics, botany, and the animal kingdom. For example, one clue found in the border of the very first image reads: “One of Six of Eight”—a reference to Catherine of Aragon, the first of six wives of Henry VIII.

In 1982, newspapers around the world revealed that the rabbit amulet had been found by a gentleman who sent what he believed to be the solution to Williams. Williams later published a smaller paperback in which he spelled out the solution in excruciating detail. Obsessive that I was (and still am), I rushed out to get that new version of the book and was astonished by the diabolical complexity of the puzzle.

To summarize this quickly, the key to the puzzle was drawing a line from the eyes of the living figures—humans and animals—in each of the paintings through their fingers (or paws/claws/fins) until those lines crossed and touched letters in the border. But you had to get the hierarchy of beings—men, women, children, hares, and lesser animals—in the proper order if you ever hoped to assemble the letters in the right sequence. One clue to this arrangement is found on the title page: “To find the hidden riddle, you must use your eyes, / And find the hare in every picture that may point you to the prize.” (Italics mine.)

If you do this, the marginalia spelled out the following:

CATHERINE’S
LONG FINGER
OVER
SHADOWS
EARTH
BURIED
YELLOW
AMULET
MIDDAY
POINTS
THE
HOUR
IN
LIGHT OF EQUINOX
LOOK YOU

From here, it becomes a matter of locating a monument in England dedicated to Catherine of Aragon, and waiting for the sun on the day of the vernal equinox to cast a shadow pointing to the location of the treasure. Where was the monument, you ask? An acrostic formed by the bolded letters above reads: Close by Ampthill. That’s Ampthill, Bedfordshire, where Catherine was exiled following the annulment of her sad marriage.

The two most important images in the book was one featuring Sir Isaac Newton and another depicting a woman known as the Penny-Pockets Lady. These two spell out the color-coded hierarchy of beings that solvers were intended to follow. 

In the Isaac Newton image, the barbed letters (circled in blue) spell SIR, and
the red letters (circled in red) spell ISAAC—both of which have nothing to do with
solving the final mystery. However, if you draw lines from the eyes of certain figures
through their hands, toes, paws, fins, etc, the resulting lines point to letters
that spell the secret word HOUR in the above acrostic.
Please do not ask me how to draw the lines;
I knew how when I was 16 years old, but not today.

By now I think we can agree that an American high school kid, aided only by his love of mysteries and a gaggle of second graders as his Baker Street Irregulars, had little hope of cracking the case.

Many years after the treasure’s discovery, The Sunday Times of London alleged that the finder had not played fairly. Instead of decoding the clues properly, he learned of the hare’s approximate location from an ex-girlfriend of Williams, and started digging holes until he struck pay dirt. The prize should have gone to two physics teachers from Manchester who cracked the code exactly as its creator intended, but whose letter reached Williams too late.

Scandalized, Williams apologized to the world at large. By then he had moved on to writing other puzzle books, painting more gorgeous images, and designing fanciful public clocks. As one who struggles constantly to conceive of even one or two clues to embed in my stories, I can only marvel at someone who possessed the creativity to layer such a dizzying array of clues for a book spanning a mere 32 pages. In my eyes, Kit Williams is some kind of a genius.

Masquerade is no longer in print, but you can still find reasonably priced copies online. If you’re buying for a child, you will want the 9-by-11-inch hardcover. If you want to learn how to decipher the code in the author’s own words, look for the 6-by-7.5-inch paperback version of the book “with the answer explained.”

See you in three weeks!

Joe
josephdagnese.com

An Exile in the Realm of Morpheus

"A tired mind become a shape-shifter."

— Rush, "Vital Signs" from the 1981 album Moving Pictures

Morpheus, the troublesome god of sleep

I am in awe of people who can write the opposite of their experiences. Women who convincingly write male Point-of-View characters. Men who do the opposite. People without disabilities writing characters with them. Stephen King inhabiting the character of an axe-wielding maniac snowed in at a Colorado resort hotel. Hillary Mantel bringing Renaissance English politician and royal fixer Thomas Cromwell not only to life, but convincingly and sympathetically so.

Now, I believe it is the obligation of the fiction writer to do right by their characters, and I'm hardly saying that I have spent my writing career writing only those experiences I have had myself, but the more extreme stuff I have hesitated to capture in the written word. Extrapolating my own experiences out into others where a bit of research and a fair amount of imagination can bridge the gap? Sure. And I'm always looking to challenge myself, so there's that, too.

But every once in a while life steps up and hands you a new experience, one so alien to your regular way of being that it can stand in stark contrast to your usual day-to-day existence. For my money, to go through something this unique and memorable and not to put it to use in my fiction? That would be nuts.

And my first step toward incorporating something new into my fiction is usually to write about it in my writing journal. I'm going to make use of my notes from this experience in laying out what it was like to be an out-and-out insomniac for two weeks.

The short answer?

Hell.

Let me start at the beginning.

And it begins in Las Vegas. 

With Sting.

Recently my wonderful wife took me on a vacation culminating with a celebration of my birthday by going to see Sting in concert at Caesar's Palace during the final week of his residency. My parents and brother also went. Great trip. Great time. We were scheduled for an early Sunday flight out on the morning after the concert.

The Sting in Yellow (GREAT concert!)

We got up and out that morning, only to arrive at McCarran Airport and discover that mechanical difficulties had delayed our flight. As it was we waited seven hours hovering around the gate, waiting to board.

And when we made the mad dash to board, I somehow left behind one of my carry-on bags. The one with my CPAP machine. For those of you not aware of the significance of this, let me put it this way: I have severe sleep apnea. Without a CPAP I snore very loudly and have trouble getting into REM sleep (to say nothing of driving to distraction anyone unlucky enough to be caught within earshot while I'm trying to sleep). I have used a CPAP for the better part of a decade. I had an idea how reliant I had become on my CPAP since adopting it (MUCH better and deeper sleep for me as a result), but I was about to find out just exactly how much.

I only realized I'd misplaced my CPAP once we'd landed, gotten home and begun to unpack. Once I realized I'd lost it, I got my original CPAP machine out of storage. I tried using it that first night.

It did not go well.

I kept drifting off and then jerking awake once I began to snore. This must have happened fifty or sixty
times that night. The older CPAP didn't work as well as my current state-of-the-art one, and halfway through the night I gave up even trying to use it.

And my poor wife eventually gave up and spent the wee hours of the night/morning in the guest room.

That next morning and all of the following day I was a zombie. Falling asleep in mid-conversation with my wife (both working from home that day), losing track of what I was I thinking/talking about in mid-sentence. A below the surface widespread itchiness across the breadth of my skin and behind my eyes and in the center of my head. And as long-time readers of this blog (BOTH of you! *rimshot*) will recall, I have tinnitus in my left ear. The lack of REM sleep that first morning turned that ringing up into something very like a roar.

Me getting out of bed in the morning. Would you believe I'm usually a morning person?

All that first day – a Monday – I spent trying to track down the bag which contained my CPAP. I called the airline. I called the airport. McCarran airport in Las Vegas is world renowned for its terrific customer service. It did not disappoint this time either.

The airline was a total bust. At the airport came through and found my CPAP and sent it to me. It would only take three days to get to me which meant by the time they had tracked it down, on Tuesday, I would receive it by Friday. So in the meantime, I was in the position of needing to find a way to compensate for my CPAP. 

My old CPAP was out of the question. It just didn’t push air at a high enough rate to keep me from snoring. That left supplements.

As almost anyone in their 50s, will tell you, to turn 50 it’s to say goodbye, or if you prefer good night, to a straight eight hours of sleep. I do better than most, I’m up, maybe once a night. And I sleep very well.

But as with everyone else my age, I have felt the need to supplement in order to try to get to sleep sometimes. This supplementation has usually taken the form of use of Melatonin.

So… not THESE types of Pink Floyd dreams

But I don’t really like melatonin, in part, because when I take it, I am usually guaranteed to have dreams the likes of which drove Syd Barrett out of Pink Floyd. And they are frequently obstacles to getting a good nights sleep.

However, I was desperate, feeling off after my first day of not really sleeping, so I tried some melatonin.

It did not help.

Imagine the same dreams, the same, psychedelic quality to them, undergirded, and intensified by a whole new color, palette, most of which I would be hard-pressed to describe during my waking hours. On top of that because I didn’t have my CPAP I would drift in and out of sleep, and a sort of Wakeful sleep? Or a sleepy wakefulness? Tomato, tomato I suppose. 

The end result is that I am pretty sure I didn’t get more than two or three hours total sleep that night. And I also didn’t get into rem sleep at all.

The next morning, everything was gray. Color had leaked out of my world. My eyes ached. So did every muscle in my body. My hair follicles. My teeth. My fingers felt like 10 worms attached to my palms, which also ached.

And did I mention that everything was gray? Complete gray scale. I had very little idea what I was doing. I fell asleep multiple times, only to be awakened by my own snoring. 

Over.

And over.

And over.

By Thursday the panic attacks began to set in. I would go from a fugue state to a waking state to a dream state. I would try to catch up with naps during the day, only the jerk awake moments after falling asleep with my heart racing, and no idea where I was.

On the supplement side of things I graduated from melatonin to THC laced gummies. I live in Washington state and weed is legal here, but to be honest, it’s never really been my thing.

But I was desperately in need of an extended period of sleep, and I wasn’t yet ready to try Ambien. So THC gummies it was.

The end result? Now I was not only sleep deprived.

The opposite of "enjoyably high."

I was also stoned. 

I did not enjoy it.

Thankfully, my CPAP arrived on Friday. And yet even death, my regular sleep patterns did not immediately return to me. I still woke up several times a night, usually panicked, had a hard time getting comfortable in any bed, or on a couch the Sunday night after I got my CPAP back I slept in a chair.

That was the beginning of the return for me though. I slept a solid five hours straight that night. I have rarely had as much energy on a Monday as I did that Monday. Over the next several days, in conjunction with several daytime naps, I manage to put my regular sleep schedule back together.

The grayscale receded. I was no longer stoned because I took no more gummies. I skipped the melatonin (except for one night mid week. It help me sleep 10 hours.). The fugue state receded. The waking dream ended. I felt like Edgar, Allan Poe, coming out on the other end of a bender.

The color leeching back into my nights.

And now, on my regular sleep schedule again, I am ready to use this experience in my fiction. I have always had a rational understanding of the effectiveness of sleep deprivation as a torture method. But now I can attest to how devastating a too tired mind can truly be.

In fact, one of my favorite rock bands (Rush) put it best:  “A tired mind become a Shapeshifter.”

Truer words have really been spoken.

How about you? Have you had an experience with this kind of sleep deprivation? Had another experience that was so alien to your normal way of being that you felt the need to memorialize it in your fiction? Tell us all about your experiences in the comment section below.

And on that note:

See you in two weeks!

Candice Renoir

So, they cancel Doctor Blake, leaving a lot unresolved.  There may have been good reasons for it, in the real world, but given the interior reality of the show, it was hugely disappointing.  Craig McLachlan left under a cloud, and you can’t lose your lead actor, and then try to paper it over by pretending the character abandoned his life and livelihood, turning his back on everything we knew him to value.  It’s insulting.  Everybody who watched Bonanza knew Dan Blocker had died.  The writers didn’t have to conjure up a phony exit for him – Hoss fell down a well? – when the audience had already skipped ahead to the end.

The point about Blake is that they got caught on the back foot, as I understand it.  They tried cobbling something together, and it didn’t work, in spite of the best efforts of Nadine Garner, a marvelous actress put in an awkward situation.  I had much the same response when The Coroner wasn’t renewed after its second season; I was distressed when Island at War didn’t continue.  I had an investment in those characters. 

What’s a girl to do?  I’ve watched all the current episodes of Death in Paradise, and I’m biting my nails waiting for Bosch: Legacy to pick up where they left off – horrific cliffhanger this past season.  There’s a good New Zealand cop series called Brokenwood, and it turns out that both Unforgotten and Shetland are shooting new seasons, in spite of the leads leaving, but meanwhile.

To the rescue comes Candice Renoir, a French policier, streaming on Acorn.  (BritBox and Acorn are both available as add-ons with Amazon Prime.  Worth it.)  The premise is a working mom, four kids, back in harness running the small major crimes unit in a lesser Mediterranean port city, not so fashionable as Nice or as mobbed up as Marseille.  Her immediate superior, the commissaire, is a younger career woman, chilly and ambitious, her second-in-command is the guy who should have gotten the job, and resents her taking over.  Then there’s the good-looking neighbor, and the ex floating around, and the cute undercover cop in the next office, and so on.  I know.  It sounds like a truckload of clichés, or just too cute for school.  However.  What could be annoying and generic is actually charming and original.

The chief asset is the casting.  Cécile Bois, in the lead, sells it from the get-go.  I didn’t know her from a hole in a ground.  She was forty and a little when the show premiered, and she presents at first as slightly Barbie, but it’s protective coloration.  Close behind are the other cops on the team, and the kids who play her family.  The trick, of course, is to make this convincing in a few bold strokes, because it’s essentially a situation dramedy.  The kids are attitude, and a quick pose; so are the cops, for that matter.  The characterizations aren’t that deep – you have to take them on faith – but they get spikier, and more unexpected, as the relationships develop.

The crimes are a mixed bag, not always really ready for prime time, and the police work is sometimes perfunctory and not terribly authentic, quite honestly.  I don’t know that this is that much of a weakness.  The show is character-driven, but when the plotting is ingenious (and it is more often than not), that emphasizes the strength of the character dynamics. 

There is one technical fumble that’s odd.  The show is broadcast in French.  The subtitles lag slightly behind the audio, so an English speaker is always playing catch-up, and sometimes the dialogue is too fast and clever.  It helps to have a little half-remembered high school French, although the slang is well beyond what I remember from high school.  Quel bêtise.

It's Malice time!

I like to think of myself an an organized person, but sometimes life just kicks my butt. Normally I would write this post tomorrow (Monday) so it can appear at 12:00 a.m. Tuesday, but I forgot--until a minute ago--that they are doing internet upgrades in my neighborhood tomorrow and I'll be without service for a good chunk of the day (and that's if they keep their word to finish on time). So I need to write this now, but I don't have time to write a full-fledged column now so ... I'm taking the easy way out.

The Malice Domestic convention starts on Friday. Malice, as it's affectionately known, is a fan convention that celebrates the traditionally mystery, though the authors and fans who attend typically read across the crime-fiction spectrum. I am honored to be this year's toastmaster. Our other honorees this year are: Hank Phillippi Ryan, guest of honor; Vaseem Khan and Abir Mukherjee, international guests of honor; Ann Cleeves, lifetime achievement honoree; Tanya Spratt-Williams, fan guest of honor; Luci Zahray (better known as the Poison Lady), Amelia honoree; and Elizabeth Peters, our Malice Remembers honoree.

I'm also honored to have a short story nominated for this year's Agatha Award. My fellow finalists are Cynthia Kuhn, Lisa Q. Matthews, Richie Narvaez, and Art Taylor. You can access the five nominated stories through Malice Domestic's website. Just click here and scroll down to the names of the short stories. Each one is a link. Happy reading!

If you're going to Malice, yay! I'm looking forward to seeing you.

And I'll see you all here in three weeks.

Things writers can do when they discover they’re old.

Stay up all night.  Not because you’re dancing in the moonlight or pounding tequila, but because you’ve forgotten to go to bed.  You get engrossed in something, like binge watching David Attenborough, and suddenly dawn is breaking and the birds are singing. 

Objectively determine that falling off a roof is a bad idea.  Experience shows that a roof’s greatest utility is keeping rain out of the house and slowing down broken tree limbs.  There’s absolutely no need to crawl out there to look at the stars or contemplate ending it all just because your first short story was rejected by The New Yorker.

Be done with expectations.  What’s done is done and anything good that happens next is a happy surprise. 

Finally understanding your pets.  Sleeping most of the day now makes perfect sense.  The dog also teaches that snap judgements about people have merit (wag your tail or bite an ankle?),

while cats demonstrate that a sense of superiority need not have any basis in prior accomplishments or public recognition.

Admire physical beauty as something more than an incentive to propagate.  That he or she has a well-turned ankle, or nice blue eyes, can be observed more as an art historian than a randy fool.  And written accordingly.  

Forgetting.  Though there’s inconvenience in constantly searching for your wallet, iPhone and favorite pen, this comes in handy when avoiding regret and recrimination.  It also nurtures false optimism, which allows you to produce day-after-day with little chance of reward. 

Smelling the roses.  It’s amazing how much detail is apparent when arthritis sets the pace of movement through the world.  Recordable in various obsessive writings, fact and fiction.   

Harboring grudges.  Most fade over time, but a few have a lasting quality, best savored when you realize those feelings were entirely justified.  Useful in passages focusing on revenge. 

Assembling sentences with confidence.  At this point, good writers, or not so good, know their voice, and accept the product as their own.  As to good, or not so good, the relief is in not caring very much what other people think.   

Embracing the routine.  When life is no longer driven by external forces, daily rhythms are naturally re-occurring.  Not so much planned or plotted out, simply arising from celestial habits, like the tides and phases of the moon.

Knowing what books you like, and not like.  The days of forcing yourself to read a book you don’t like to the end are long gone.  Peer pressure has vanished, as have many of your peers, so there’s no incentive to prove you’re part of the cognoscenti.  Time is running out, so no need to waste it with unhappy consumption.  The same goes for movies, TV shows, kale and popular vacation destinations.

Sleeping in.  Since sleeping itself is not always achievable, this is a blessed event.  As a side benefit, writing time becomes whenever you’re awake, which could be any time day or night. 

Honesty.  Younger people feel compelled to present themselves as appropriate to their cultural and social cohort.  Ignoring all that baloney is the ultimate liberation. 

Experience unconditional love.  After a certain amount of time sets in, you tend to accept that you love those you love, no matter what.  Regardless of imperfections in the beloved, it’s something integral, indivisible, abiding and everlasting.   One compelling reason to keep tapping on the keyboard.

 

The Digital Detective, Banco and Bunco, Part 2

Resuming from last week…

Money Laundering

Checks (‘cheques’ in other English-speaking countries) are becoming less common in our digital society, but they still have their uses: Investors often receive dividend checks, some companies send refund checks, and many of us write checks to our lawn guy and housekeeper. Check handling still holds a place in our economy and so does a scheme called ‘check washing’.

Crime segments on programs like Dateline and 20/20 have warned us against the practice of bad guys plucking checks out of mailboxes and ‘washing’ them in a ‘household chemical’ bath. Then with a blank check in hand with the original signature, they fill in a new payee and amount. The scheme can work with bonds, wills, and other instruments, anything with a dye-based ink written with ordinary pens. Very old inks comprised of iron compounds remain unaffected.

Wait. Are you going to share with us?

What is the household chemical? Enquiring crime writers want to know.

The answer is ink-dependent and I’m aware of two compounds. Women baddies may have an advantage: The primary go-to chemical, acetone, is the principle ingredient in fingernail polish remover. Other dye-based inks may better respond when treated with ordinary bleach.

Here’s a how-to video by Dr Uniball… (Shh. I know, I know, the poor man. I’m afraid Dr Uniball suffered an unfortunate lab accident.) That aside, here is one of his experiments:

Note: Although not mentioned in the video, fraudsters can preserve the signature by covering it with transparent tape. Ink not so protected washes away.

So how can you shield yourself against lawnmower man bleaching your check or your nifty cleaning lady rewriting the palty cheap-ass amount after an acetone bath? You can purchase speciality India ink pens costing in the hundreds of dollars. Or, as I recently learned, you can buy a less than two dollar Uniball at your local Dollar Store. This pigment-based pen is made by Mitsubishi Pencil Company, yes, a sister company of the car manufacturer. Look for Uniball 207, pictured here:

But wait. If you’re a fraudster and your victim banks with Chase or certain other banks, you don't have to bother erasing and filling in checks. Crooks have discovered Chase’s sloppy remote banking by smartphone looks only at the numeric dollar amount and routing number. Bad guys can add in an extra digit to the dollar amount, changing it from hundreds to thousands. Chase doesn’t trouble themselves to validate the written amount or check the written payee matches the conman’s name on the account. They even allow the same check to be deposited more than once.

Signs of Fraud from Bank of America

A casual survey suggests Chase Banks may figure in more frauds than all other banking institutions combined.Worse yet, Chase battles customer victims who try to get their money back. Lily, our Chase target in a previous article did everything right, trying to get an oblivious and lackadaisical Chase to take action. And they die– they blamed her.

No place in the world is safe from fraud, but if YouTube is to believed, Arizona suffers an outsized number of attacks. And naturally, Chase customer service isn't there when needed.

From A to Z, ATM to Zelle

Zelle is German for jail, literally, a prison cell. I’m frankly surprised it doesn’t mean Sucker!

I can’t trust Zelle. If accounts of a money app can’t be viewed and studied on the web, the customer/victim is at a disadvantage when attempting to reconcile transactions. Unfortunately banks and society at large push us in that direction.

Former business partners owed me money and had been steadily paying me through Sun Bank. Abruptly payments stopped. I notified them. It turned out Sun wanted to cease sending direct, electronic payments to my bank (and others) and insisted its ‘partners’ use Zelle. The problem was that Sun submitted payments into the black hole of Zelle, but my bank didn’t see them.

“Not our problem,” said Sun. “Call Zelle.”
“Not our problem,” said my bank. “Call Zelle.”
“Not our problem,” said Zelle. “Call your bank.”

This occurred after repeated and futile attempts to get a phone number for Zelle, who declined to help because they were ‘too far removed from the situation’, claiming they were outside the transfer rather than being the conduit. It took four months of repeated complaints to resolve the issue.

☚☛

As you might imagine, Zelle is a convenient tool for fraud. In one particular scam, you receive an SMS text that your bank account has been put on hold, pending unusual activity. You phone the conveniently provided phone number, and a polite professional asks how she can help you.

She ‘checks’ your account, saying it appears nefarious forces are attempting to penetrate your security. The solution is to safely move your money into a bank-approved Zelle account. If you’ve not heard of Zelle, she provides you a web link showing your bank works with Zelle, and she’ll help you set up a new free account, which will make bill paying so much easier.

Ten minutes later, your new Zelle account is all set up and your money moved into it. “Thank you, thank you,” you say before hanging up, upon which the scammer sets to work. You receive another text message, this time from your real bank. Your accounts have been emptied.

“Not our problem,” says Zelle. “Call your bank.”
“Not our problem,” says your bank. “Call Zelle.”

Can you love the art and loathe the artist?

For years, I've told my writing students that to be a successful novelist, you must be the writer, AND the author.  The Writer does the writing:  alone in a room, butt in chair, hands on keyboard for hundreds of hours.  The Author is the personality out in public and on social media.  The halcyon days of novelists being able to hide behind a word processor were over in the 90s.  Readers and publishers expect you to be out in public, promoting your books.

Here's the thing that has always puzzled me.  I don't understand why readers want to meet the author.  For many years, my favourite author has been the Sicilian, Andrea Cammilleri.  I adore Inspector Montalbano, star of his sharply funny books.  In fact, I so adore Cammilleri, that I have no real interest in meeting his creator.  Why?  Because Montalbano *is* Cammilleri to me.  Seeing him in person would take away the magic.  What if he looks entirely different?  What if Cammilleri is 80 while Montalbano is 50?

(Sadly, I knew that to be the truth.  Cammilleri died recently, at the age of 93.  With him, dies Montalbano who was just into his 60s.  No more books, and that's a tragedy for me.)

But I digress.

The point of this post:  I am always a bit surprised when readers are enthusiastic about meeting me.  I wonder that they too might find seeing me in person could corrupt the image they have of my protagonist/s.

But beyond appearance, and possibly worse, does my own character do justice to my protagonist?

Do we have to like the artist to love the art?

Put another way: if the artist falls from grace, does it affect how we perceive their art?

A few names come to mind.  Woody Allen.  Michael Jackson.  Can I still watch a Woody Allen movie without feeling slightly queasy?  Can I listen to Thriller or Beat It, and enjoy them, without thinking of disturbing sexual misconduct? 

And then there is Dilbert.  Can we still laugh at the comic strip, yet deplore the opinions of its creator? 

The jury is out for me on this one.  I really do go back and forth about equating the art with the character of the artist.  I am sure that if we looked into artists of the past (I'm going way back here - the Romans, Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment, 19th century) we would find people who held views that we find abhorrent now.  People who conducted themselves in amoral or cruel ways, but produced wondrous art.

How far does one go in this?  Should we be refusing to value the art of men who denied women the vote until the last century?  Should one idolize and cheer for Tiger Woods on the PGA tour when he treats women so dishonorably?

I don't know.  I'm anxiously ambivalent about this one.  In fact, I'm losing sleep at night.  It's 5:20 AM right now as I'm writing this sentence.  I've been up for two hours, stewing on this.  

Which all goes to show... I've found another fabulous way to procrastinate on writing my next novel. 

Melodie Campbell writes wryly funny crime books, from the shores of Lake Ontario.  The Merry Widow Murders will finally hit the shelves in May.

How It's Done and Over Mastication

Inspired by recent posts from Michael Bracken and John Floyd, I wrote the following.

In his SleuthSayer's posting of 4/11/23, Michael Bracken said, "I don't often write about the genesis of my stories because I often don't know or don't remember much about how they came to be. My stories don't exist, and then they do."

Yep. Looking back – that's how I feel about most of my stories. How the hell did I come to write that story? I do remember the inspiration for some of my stories, but not a lot of them and now that I think about it, remembering the inspiration isn't important. Only the story matters.

I do remember being asked by an editor what inspired me to write a story which won an award and I could not remember the inspiration. Since I'm a fiction writer, I made up an inspiration. Faked it.

In John Floyd's SleuthSayer posting of 4/15/23, he wrote about writers ruining their books in the rewriting process, editing a book over and over, making it worse rather than better.

I can echo that. A writer friend once asked me to read his new novel. I did and liked it a lot. His agent, however, recommended changes and so did his editor. The writer made the changes after complaining to me about it. The book was published and when I read it, I saw how the editing, the over masticating of scenes, had taken all the spontaneous enthusiasm out of the book. It was flat and what was original was gone. It had become the agent and editor's idea of the book.

When my agent at the time recommend changes in my next book, I changed agents. The recommended changes were massive. Another reason I'm an independent (indie) writer. It's my art.

Having said all that – I've experienced this type of destructive meddling only a few times. Nearly all of the editors I've worked with have helped my writing.

Lots of lessons out there for writers. Beginning writers should follow SleuthSayers. I've been writing since the 1980s and I learn something new here all the time.

(I hope this is the correct logo)

That's all for now.

www.oneildenoux.com

The Legend of Jack Ruby

 by Eve Fisher

Actually, this story is primarily by Gary Cartwright, and was published Texas Monthly in November, 1975.  I think it's an appropriate column for the week, give or take a month, that he was born back in 1911.  

Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin, who in turn, assassinated John F. Kennedy, was born Jacob Leon Rubenstein on or around March 25 and April 25, 1911, in Chicago. From then on... it's legendary, mythic, and damned uncertain what happened and why. But one thing is certain, he played his part:

"If there is a tear left, shed it for Jack Ruby. He didn’t make history; he only stepped in front of it. When he emerged from obscurity into that inextricable freeze-frame that joins all of our minds to Dallas, Jack Ruby, a bald-headed little man who wanted above all else to make it big, had his back to the camera.

I can tell you about Jack Ruby, and about Dallas, and if necessary remind you that human life is sweetly fragile and the holy litany of ambition and success takes as many people to hell as it does to heaven. But someone else will have to tell you about Oswald, and what he was doing in Dallas that November, when Jack Ruby took the play away from Oswald, and from all of us.

Dallas, Oswald, Ruby, Watts, Whitman, Manson, Ray, Sirhan, Bremer, Viet Nam, Nixon, Watergate, FBI, CIA, Squeaky Fromme, Sara Moore—the list goes on and on. Who the hell wrote this script, and where will it end? A dozen years of violence, shock, treachery, and paranoia, and I date it all back to that insane weekend in Dallas and Jack Ruby—the one essential link in the chain, the man who changed an isolated act into a trend."

Personal note:  I still remember watching this on the news, and even at 9 years old, I knew there was something fishy about it: I turned to my parents and said, "But they stood back and let him shoot him!"  

...

"Twelve years ago, when the first announcement that the President had been shot was broadcast over the PA system at Richardson Junior High School, Gertrude Hutter, an eighth-grade teacher, began crying. Bob Dudney, who is now a reporter for the Times Herald, recalled the moment. She turned her back long enough to compose herself, then addressed her class with these prophetic words:

“Children, we are entering into an age of violence. There is nothing we can do about it, but all of us must stay calm, and above all, civilized.”"

Read it all here:  Texas Monthly

Gertrude Hutter was a prophet.  But I doubt even she could have foreseen the seemingly endless death and destruction we have unleashed upon ourselves.  

1963 seems quaintly peaceful:  one assassination, and a nation horror-struck, but pulling together in mourning.  

Even 1975 - Watergate, the last year of the Vietnam War, Squeaky Fromme, a bomb at LaGuardia killing 11 people,  - seems like an era of safety for most, if not all.

But today...  

A Fine Trip to the Dump

 Do you know Thomas Perry?  He writes mostly  thrillers, and one critic described his work as "competence porn," meaning that we follow in great detail as a single man or woman outsmarts and when necessary outfights a whole regiment of villains.

I'm currently reading his newest title Murder Book and I want to discuss one scene.  It consists of a bad guy on the phone with his boss, the even worse guy.

Bad Guy fills Boss in on what's been going on and in the course of doing so he explains part of the conspiracy in which they are engaged.  Boss Man gets irritated.

 "We know." the man said. "Remember the reason you're good at the details.  You're a realtor, not a gangster.  To hear you use slang like you were a Mafia boss  from yesteryear I only feel weary despair."

My reaction to that was: Ooh.  Nice expository dump.

The expository dump, alias info dump, is a problem that most fiction writers face sooner or later.  In short, you need to explain some piece of backstory or plot to the readers without boring them to death.  

The dump is sometimes known as the "As You Know, Bob" speech.  As in:

"As you know, Bob, as accountants you and I are legally required to blah blah blah..."

Why is our character telling Bob something he clearly already knows?  Because the reader doesn't know it.

But here's why I so admired Perry's way of dealing with the problem.  The Bad Guy is actually attempting to flimflam the Boss, avoiding admitting that things have gone badly (because of the actions of the competence porn star who is the book's protagonist).  He is using this extraneous information  as a smoke screen.

In other words, the info dump has become an important element of the drama.  Now, that's clever.

And by the way, the Boss's reply, quoted above, is an example of a different writerly technique: lampshade hanging.  That is: Perry is smoothing over the rough spot by (paradoxically) calling it to the reader's attention.

I had a bit of an info dump problem in  story I just sold to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.  My Delgardo tales are set in 1958 and I had found a really cool historic fact from that time I wanted to slip in.  

How do I include it without making it look like I'm showing off my research?  I turned it into a vital clue, which only my clever beat poet detective would recognize.  Seems to have worked.

By the way, I went to the ever-helpful website TV Tropes to see what they had to say about the info dump and they parsed it several different ways:

Infodump: A particularly long and wordy bit of exposition.

Mr. Exposition.  A character whose only purpose is to provide the info.

Exposition Fairy.  A recurring character whose job is always to, well, you know.

Exposition Already Covered.  "You must find the Sacred Kumquat.  If you fail--" "The world will end.  Yeah, I get it."  

Exposition Cut.  "Well, that's a long story..."  "Gosh," the newcomer said, after hours of discussion we won't bore you with.  "It certainly was."

So, how do you deal with trips to the dump?  And which ones bother you the most?

With Bias Toward None

    I'm sure I'm unique with this problem. While I searched for one thing, I got sidetracked. I distracted myself by reading about something else. 

    Some light research for a project led my browser to an article about ancient Greece. I clicked on it. There, the original work quickly became forgotten. I got pulled aside, musing about a question. The art of medicine has Hippocrates, their symbolic Greek forefather. But what about the practice of law?

    To think about ancient Greece is to think about the written and spoken word. The Greeks had lawgivers. No single toga-clad figure, however, stands over the legal profession like Hippocrates. Most of my fellow lawyers likely couldn't claim an ancient Greek to whom we are heir. Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement. Since there is no standard pre-law curriculum, many of my brothers and sisters in the bar were liberal arts majors. We all likely have a smattering of ancient Greeks at the ready. If pressed, most would likely glom onto Socrates. The Socratic method, after all, is the standard pedagogical tool for most law schools. 

    But he was a teacher and philosopher and not really our legal ancestor. 

    Demosthenes, famous for his persuasive oratory, might be the candidate. You might remember the stories of him reciting verses with pebbles in his mouth to enhance his enunciation. Or speaking on the seashore, forcing himself to be heard over the roar of the waves. 

    Another contender is Themis. Originally the organizer of the communal affairs of humans, her ability to foresee the future got her promoted to one of the oracles at Delphi. She became the ancient Greek goddess of divine justice. Themis was not portrayed as blindfolded. As a seer, covering her eyes was unnecessary. Neither did she carry a sword because she represented common consent and not coercion. She has, however, largely been pushed aside by Iustitia, or Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice. 

    Iustitica, by the way, was originally not blindfolded either. She usually carried a double-edged sword, and her scales may date back to the Egyptian god, Maat. 

    I nominate as our standard bearer, Bias of Priene. He was renowned in ancient times as the wisest of all the Seven Sages of Greece. A skilled advocate, he famously represented only righteous defendants. He did so, the legends report, without charging a fee. 

Vatican, Public Domain

   An advocate up to his final days, one story of Bias of Priene has him arguing a cause on behalf of his client. After he finished speaking, Bias sat, leaned back, and rested his head on the chest of his grandson. When the advocate on the other side had finished his argument, the judges hearing the case sided with Bias. It was then discovered that he had died during the opposing counsel's argument. 

    Lest we think him naive, his most famous saying to come into our time is the simple epigram, "All people are wicked." 

    A model of wisdom, Bias recognized the wrong but crusaded for the right. He fought on behalf of the just cause to his dying breath. Bias of Priene deserves to have a better place in the lineage of justice than he currently occupies. 

    Perhaps it's the name.

    Bias, the systematic deviation of results or inferences from truth, is a perceived enemy of justice.  

    Does the ancient Greek have anything to do with our modern word "bias," the term for a prejudice sewn into our contemporary legal codes and scientific journals? The rabbit hole I had started down just got deeper. But now I was engaged, so I plunged into it. 

    Does our current usage have anything to do with the ancient Greek? 

    Duncan Hunter, in the online British Medical Journal, repeats a story reported by Herodotus. Croesus, the ancient king of Lydia, planned warfare to expand his influence throughout Greece. He consulted with the wise Bias about the best way to deploy his warships against the Ionians. Bias, hoping to avoid the death and destruction of war, deliberately misled Croesus. He advised the king that the Ionians were preparing a land assault against Lydia. Croesus stopped building warships and instead turned his attention to developing his defenses. Bias later confessed that he had lied and honestly reported that the Ionians were also building warships. Croesus, instead of being angry, learned instead that the better course would be to make peace with the Ionians. Bias of Priene may have provided misinformation. Some may see an early example of a "Reporting Bias." 

    Etymonline, the online etymology dictionary, offers an alternative and more modern explanation. This one dates from the 16th Century. In the game of bowls, "bias" was, apparently, a technical term. It is related to balls made with a greater weight on one side. This caused them to roll not on a true line but instead to curve in one direction. The figurative use became the one-sided tendency of a mind to bend in a particular direction. 

    Bias of Priene should be more renowned as the law's Greek ancestor. He symbolizes both the good and the bad in the modern practice of law. He is forever associated with forceful advocacy exercised until the last breath. His name, however, also serves as a cautionary tale against the pull in an unjust direction. While he should be Hippocrates, he rests in relative obscurity, unknown to most. 

    Crime fiction writers might adopt him. The maxim, "All people are wicked," means that anyone might be a suspect. 

    Until next time. 

Crime Scene Comix Case 2023-04-021, Bearly There

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this episode, Shifty learns the importance of a mother’s love… bearly.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

The Digital Detective, Banco and Bunco, Part 1

One upon a time I was scammed, or rather American Express was. In my consulting days, a pair of cancelled flights kept me hostage at Chicago Airport for ten hours, which covered a couple of mealtimes. For one of those, I plunked down in their sit-down restaurant and partook. And was partaken without my knowledge.

The end-of-month credit card statement showed a charge that could have fed a family of twelve instead of not-so-little ol’ me. AmEx explained this was called a ‘waiter’s charge,’ literally so in my case. A waiter hands you a bill in a black leather folder. The diner casually tucks a credit card in the folder and the waiter carries it away. At this juncture, the fraud happens.

If the restaurant keeps a computerized tally, the waiter adds on an additional lobster and a hell of a tip. Without an ongoing account, a waiter simply adds in a dollar figure. In olden days, waiters might run two or three blank slips through the imprinter for later use. These days thanks to skimming devices, a waiter can mint a new card before you leave the premises.

Once a card is out-of-sight, waiters can do anything they wish.

As did a waitress in Minneapolis’ beloved Pannekoeken Huis. Two things had come together to draw my attention to a minor racket. Unlike my girlfriend whose sharp eye for cash register fiddles caught one in the middle of a famous theme park, I don’t have specialized training in these things. However, a conversation with a vice president of finance at the company I consulted for raised my awareness. After meals, he carefully perused the bill and credit card slip, commenting he’d find mistakes nearly half the time and went on to prove it.

Bad Taste

And so I found myself in the very restaurant where he’d enlightened me. Frankly, the waitress did little to avert attention to herself. In a Midwestern city where everyone is friendly, she was unusually hostile. Perhaps it was the result of a bad morning, but she acted distinctly sour. Thus when the check came and bearing in mind the VP’s admonition, I looked over the register’s paper tape and there it was… or in this case wasn’t. The line items didn’t match the inflated total.

Her scam took but a moment to unravel. The register tape provided the clue– the restaurant’s logo was missing at the top of the tape. She’d rung in a false item, rolled the register’s tape forward several inches and tore it off, and then rang in the real breakfast tab.

I brought it to the attention of the front-of-house manager. That trusting soul cheerfully waved off the discrepancy as a register glitch. Fine, not my problem, but the practiced moves of the waitress announced she’d done this many times. I did not encourage her by leaving a tip.

That wasn’t why he glanced at your derrière

Does your credit card have a tap ’n’ go icon? If so, it has a built-in bit of electronics called passive NFC… near field communications, a cousin of RFID. Your cell phone may have something similar, but is active NFC because it’s battery powered. They work on the same principal as store exit scanners that sense security tags still attached to the jacket you just bought.

Besides the likelihood of your butt mashing your phone, NFC is a major reason you shouldn’t carry your phone in your hip pocket. A passerby brushes her phone past your pocket and *snap* — she’s captured your information.

Sleight-of-Hand

Scams can happen other ways. You check out of your doctor’s office, or you pay at the window of that overpriced restaurant, or you’re enqueued at Wendy’s drive-thru window and your fuel gauge is running low as is the patience of the guy behind you who taps his horn for the third time but it’s not your fault because your salad isn’t ready and finally the server comes to the window and hands you a bag with a freckled girl’s face on it and says, “That will be $36.80,” and you realize for that kind of money you could have dined at Pannekoeken Huis with money left over but you dig through your purse and there’s your MasterCard that you hand over and a second later he hands it back followed by a receipt that you stuff in your purse and before the guy behind you can blast his horn again you pull forward and out of his way, yet when you get home you receive a text message that your credit card has hit its limit. What? How can that be? You should have at least fifty dollars to spare.

And there it is: Instead of $36.80, you were charged $96.80. Maybe the guy’s finger slipped ringing it up. But wait, there’s another $23 charge from the same place at the same time. That shouldn’t be possible. What happened?

When you handed over your card, you lost sight of it for an instant only. But it was enough time for the window guy to pass the card over a pocket skimmer or even a second NFC machine, a modern analogue of imprinting an extra credit card slip.

Universal Contactless Cards (NFC, RFID)

ATM : Access Thy Money

You may seen recent warnings about ATMs with inoperable card slots, glued shut according to articles. Nearby, a helpful guy who’s standing a respectable, unobtrusive distance behind you offers a suggestion. “You can tap your card.”

But of course you can. You thank the guy, boink the card over the symbol, stuff $200 in your purse, and nervously flee the scene to safety. Or so you think. The helpful guy, he moves in and empties your account.

When an ATM’s mechanical reader returns your card, it automatically logs you out of the system. Likewise in store transactions, once the clerk rings you out and you see the Thank You message on the screen, you’re once again disconnected from your account.

Surveys show at ATMs, tap ’n’ go customers often don’t manually log out of their accounts. Without a mechanism holding their card and releasing it as they sign out, clients fail to realize the connection to their account remains active and vulnerable. Please, log out.

Next Week: Money Laundering