Eating My Words

 

Not accepted as a form of payment anywhere in the world.

I have told this story in various ways over the years, and it always makes people chuckle. So here I go again.

When I was freelancing years ago for The New York Times, I calculated that they were paying me under 50 cents a word for the twice-monthly, 750-1,000-word columns I wrote for the Sunday New Jersey section. 

I know that short story writers are accustomed to payment rates under 10 cents a word, but in the realm of journalism you tend to get paid better. Not far better, mind you; just better. Most writers know that there’s not much money in freelancing for newspapers, especially ones like the Times. Still, every month I could count on $1,000 income from this gig alone. And it was fun. I wrote about “destinations,” places to go and things to do in ye Olde Garden State.

One day my editor called with a weird proposition. They were running short, under-300-word reviews of local restaurants, and he wondered if I could contribute a few. I asked about payment.

“We used to pay about $50 each,” he said, “but now we have these coupons for pie.”

I’ve had hearing issues my whole life, and wear hearing aids. So I often second-guess myself and ask people to restate what they just said. (Not a bad practice for a reporter.) My editor explained that a fancy bakery near the newspaper had given them these vouchers and that they were using them as a way to thank people. An extra bonus, so to speak, to make up for the low $50 payment.

Or that’s how I heard it.

Of course, I misheard. Actually, instead of paying $50, these coupons were the only form of payment I was to receive.

There’s so much wrong with this picture. For starters, to write a decent restaurant review—even a capsule review—you still have to eat at the place. Ideally, you would eat there more than once, with guests each time. That’s how the pros do it; you bring as many appetites as possible so you can try different dishes. But by their action, my editors were basically saying that since they were unable to reimburse reporters for these meals, they were offering them dessert instead.

Like any brainless freelancer, I said yes and started working these capsule reviews into my reporting/writing schedule. I’d eat at a place incognito, then phone later to speak to a chef, manager, or owner if I had any questions about ingredients, menu items, or the restaurant’s history. If anyone asked, I’d say I was writing a review for the Times. It was true. They didn’t need to know that it was for the New Jersey section of the paper, how short they were, or the absurd writer compensation.

I did a bunch of these reviews. And because I had misheard the editor, believing the pie thing to be a joke or perhaps an extra thank-you, I actually invoiced them $50, plus expenses, for each review. They always paid. But after each one, I’d get a coupon in the mail for a free pie at the fancy bakery.

I had a stack of these coupons and collected a few hundred dollars before accounting caught on and my poor editor called, embarrassed, to explain the situation. I forget how we remedied the overpayment. I’m guessing they recovered the article fees from my later assignments, but let me keep the expense money. (They were always generous on expenses, covering meals, phone calls, and mileage for other stories I wrote for them.)

I redeemed the pie coupons infrequently, I must say. The pie shop was in an inconvenient location in Midtown that I rarely visited. The one time I called to claim a bunch of pies for a party I was about to attend, the baker-in-chief told me that I could only get two free pies at any one time with those coupons. To make things worse, the pies were a little on the small side. Stereotypical Manhattan meal pricing. Delicious, but minuscule.

It remains one of the strangest ways I’ve ever been paid for my work. And for a little while, perhaps a summer or so, I liked to think of myself as being the hit of parties when I showed up with two boxes of free pie and a story of professional debasement and exploitation to boot.

Now let us pray at the Church of Uncle Harlan. Apologies in advance if his language offends you. If it does, how dare you call yourself a writer? Get to a bar this very minute and practice cussing between rounds. I know you have it in you!

To which I would add, the writer must be paid in currency, not pie.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Sincerest Form of Flattery? Part 2

Oh Marlowe,’ she patted my shoulder. ‘Women tell each other things we would never tell a man. You don’t know how it is. There’s just so much backstory to being a woman. Chadwick used to be a lot worse. He committed her mother to a sanatorium and they drugged her so heavily she drowned in a bath. It’s not as dramatic as it looks. Anneliese bruises easy and every time he beats her up she figures he’s bringing himself closer to death.‘

                    - Denise Mina, The Second Murderer

Great speech, right? It's Anne Riordan talking to fellow P.I. Phillip Marlowe in a scene written by Scottish writer Denise Mina. Can you imagine the girl reporter Anne Riordan of Farewell, My Lovely talking like that to Marlowe in the first place, and him just accepting it, in the second? That’s just one of the many differences between Raymond Chandler’s original take on these characters, and Denise Mina’s successful update of them in The Second Murderer, the first Marlowe novel commissioned by the Chandler estate, to be written by a woman.

Of course, Mina is hardly the first “successor writer” to take on Chandler’s iconic private eye at the behest of the late author’s heirs. There have in fact been several; some of them decent, all of them not really successful. In my last round on our blog carousel, I laid out the history of approved Chandler sequel novels, with brief commentary on how authors such as Robert B. Parker, Benjamin Black and Lawrence Osborne fared in their attempts to bring Marlowe and his world to life. If you’re interested, you can find that entry here.

I also laid down a marker that, in my opinion, Mina’s work surpassed them all. And I stand by that conclusion. Here’s why.

Mina’s Marlowe closely resembles Chandler’s original, but is hardly a carbon copy, and definitely not some sort of slavish homage. She gives us Marlowe’s familiar, abiding righteous anger at the injustice inherent in daily life in 1930s/40s Los Angeles. Also making frequent appearances are the wisecracks Marlowe so often deploys as part of his attempts to cope with the injustice he sees all around him. These are a mixed bag. Chandler’s humor rarely missed (“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake.”), and Mina’s wisecracks, when they land, stand up by comparison (“Chrissie Montgomery was easier to find than an optimist in a casino.” “He looked like a headache in a suit.” “The windows were small and many and a heavy roof hung over it all like a furrowed brow.”), but when they don’t land, they really don’t (“Her laugh had a tinny rattle now, sharp edged, like a comedian’s wife planning her divorce during a live show.”), mostly because it feels like there's an element of trying too hard about them.

As with Chandler's best work, the city of Los Angeles itself acts as another character, well-developed and deftly fleshed out:

A mid-September heatwave had descended on the city. Brittle heat rolled down from parched hills, lifting thin dust from roads and sidewalks, suspending it in the rising air and turning the sky yellow. Sounds became crisp and metallic. Everywhere people were gliding along through a gritty yellow fog, mean and squinting, spitting on sidewalks, waiting for the heat to break.

Avid Chandler fans will note how deftly the above passage calls to mind the famous opening paragraph for Chandler's short story "Red Wind," first published in Dime Detective in January, 1938, a little more than a year before Marlowe's full-length novel debut in 1939's The Big Sleep:

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

A comparison of the two passages strikes me how skillfully Mina evokes Chandler's descriptive prose without trying to closely duplicate it. It's the difference between an homage written by an author who has clearly been influenced by the original, and a true "pastiche," little more than a copy.

The similarities don't end there. As with The Big Sleep, there is a wealthy, aged, dying client. But where General Sternwood in The Big Sleep is a likeable old cuss,  The Second Murderer's Chadwick Montgomery is not. At all. Both rich old men have rebellious daughters, both families possess secrets they are loathe to have exposed to the light of day.

There are a plethora of other sly references to the original novels. My personal favorite among them is Mina's cleverly naming one of the city's seedy residential hotels the "Brody," an obvious reference to the Chandler character of Joe Brody, the "half-smart" blackmailer so dramatically gunned down halfway through the action of The Big Sleep. A close second was Mina's use of the famous Bradbury Building, renamed the "Belfont" by Chandler when he also made use of it as a setting for part of his third novel, The High Window.

But it's not just the similarities to the original material that make The Second Murderer so compelling. It's also the differences.

The original Marlowe comes across to modern readers as such an outright misogynist and downright homophobe that passages revealing him as such have become the stuff of cliché. As such an update to the character is not only called for–and I say this as a lifelong Chandler fan–but welcome.

Mina's Chandler isn't some "woke" construct. He simply reserves judgement, where Chandler himself always seemed unable to. He's still hardly the driver of the neighborhood Welcome Wago, as demonstrated in this scene where he and Riordan visit the home of an LAPD homicide detective with four annoying school-aged sons, all trying to block them from entering:

'Good morning, gentlemen,' said Riordan.

The oldest boy conceded the stick to the dog and stepped through a carefully tended flowerbed to get into her way.

'What do you want here?' he said. 'Father has been told not to bring his underlings to the door.'

She looked at him, 'We don't work for your father.'

He looked around at his rat-fink brothers. 'Are you from the school?' He wasn't going to let us pass him, not without answers.

'Son, we're here to see your daddy,' I explained carefully. 'So git. Because if you don't git I'll get angry and you'll be picking little tiny bits of your pug-ugly face out of that flowerbed over there.'

The boy did git, which was judicious of him. He was used to talking down to people who worked for his father but I like to think I extended his repertoire of engagement with underlings that day, perhaps in a way that was useful. We walked up to the door.

'Father of the year over here,' said Riordan. 'Is it snotty kids you hate or all kids?'

'I don't hate kids. I hate people.'

And then there's the character of Anne Riordan herself. As shown above, this Anne Riordan is still a "nice girl," but is also a business owner (started her own detective agency when Marlowe earlier rebuffed her request to apprentice with him), and more than equal to the task of fencing/flirting with Marlowe himself. As such she is a welcome update to the original.

It's hardly all positive, though. Nobody is perfect, and novels, being human-made constructs (at least for the time being), are also not perfect. The single aspect of Mina's approach to the character and world of Marlowe that consistently pulled me out of the story is something I can't recall Chandler ever employing in his work (and something of which, as both a reader and a writer, I am most definitely not a fan), a very particular type of foreshadowing, as with this final sentence of one of the novel's early chapters:

The next time we looked each other in the eye it would be over the body of a dead man.

It's not something Mina does more than a handful of times, but it occurred enough for me to make note of it. Hence my mentioning it here. But even mentioning it, I didn't find it jarring enough to make me give up on the book.

When I first heard the premise for The Second Murderer, I wondered whether it would be the sort of bait and switch that the latest season of the Disney Plus series The Mandalorian has been (the title character is barely a factor in this season. It's clearly all about reintroducing the character of Bo Katan...Uhhh anyway, I digress). You know, it's ostensibly a Phillip Marlowe novel, but in reality it's an Anne Riordan novel, with Marlowe doing enough and showing up enough to serve as literary window dressing.

It definitely wasn't. This is a Marlowe novel. And it's a damned good one. Well worth your time. I enjoyed it start to end.

And now I'm wondering what enticement it would take for Denise Mina to once again agree to take us to 1940s Los Angeles. This time in a story featuring Anne Riordan as the main character, perhaps.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below. And for me, I would definitely read that book!

And that's it for me this time around. See you in two weeks!

The Reckoning

I don’t want to jump feet-first into the savage quicksand of Israel and her adversaries, but I have some observations about the Hamas attack, absent politics. 

First, the intelligence failure.  It’s astonishing that the Israeli security services missed the signals; Hamas may have kept planning for the offensive under wraps, but the best you can say is that the Israeli intelligence community was asleep at the wheel, complacent if not derelict.  They pride themselves on active countermeasures – and the U.S. shares satellite coverage and electronic intercept – so how did Hamas hit them so hard, and so suddenly?

The word “surprise” is being over-used, in this context.  Netanyahu’s current governing coalition includes some rabid right-wing fundamentalists, who not only reject the two-state solution, but reject basic human rights for the Palestinians in general.  (It should be pointed out that Fatah, the political wing of the PLO, accepts in principle Israel’s right to exist; Hamas is dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and Jewish genocide.)  If you listen to the inflammatory rhetoric of the present administrator of the West Bank, once investigated by Shin Bet for suspected sedition, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking he represents an existential threat to Palestinians as a people.  This isn’t to make excuses, or to suggest any kind of moral equivalency with Hamas, only to say that the terror attacks shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Another thing is that Israel is obliged to respond – has already responded – with brute force.  Civilian casualties are only going to mount.  This is a cruel consequence of the years of war.  You can argue the rights and wrongs of occupation, of resistance and intifada, but the intractable reality is unyielding grievance, and more innocents die. 

Then there’s the presence of other actors, in the wings.  The confrontation states have never given a rat’s ass about the Palestinians; the cause is just a stick to beat Israel over the head with.  Syria has been meddling in Lebanon for fifty years, and hope is lost.  Hezbollah and Hamas, once Syrian clients, are now supported by Iran.  The mullahs have of course disavowed the Hamas terror strike, saying they support Hamas in their struggle, but had nothing to do with this specific attack.  I call horse feathers.  Hamas stockpiled tens of thousands of missiles in preparation for this.  The obvious suspicion falls on Tehran.  Talk on the street says officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard met with Hamas in Beirut to plan the ground game. 

Israel won’t sit on its hands if the Iranians are even remotely implicated.  A strand of DNA, a single nose hair recovered from the crime scene, and Iran’s balls will go on the block.  It will not be pretty. 

---

On a more political front, the disarray in Congress can only sidetrack an effective American response.  The lack of a Speaker means the House can’t take up military aid to Israel, or Ukraine, or Taiwan.  (Has everybody forgotten about the Chinese and their Pacific ambitions?)  We’ve just sent a carrier battle group to the eastern Mediterranean.  But as it happens, the Navy doesn’t currently have a Chief of Naval Operations, because Tommy Tuberville, Republican senator from Bumwad, has put a hold on flag rank promotions - in response to a Defense Department policy on abortion. 

This is insane. 

Stop throwing shade on "write what you know"

If there's writerly advice that's ever received a bad rap, it is "write what you know."

Yep, as predicted—I see 'em—the pitchforks are coming out. Mention "write what you know" and many people will roll their eyes at such a stupid suggestion, wishing you and your bad advice would crawl back under a rock. But I'm here today to make a spirited defense of this misunderstood advice. 

Let's think about why this advice is often given. There could be other reasons, but I imagine these two are foremost in the minds of WWYK (let's use the acronym or we could be here all day) advocates:

Reason 1: Newer writers may feel intimidated, wanting to write but not sure what to write about, so teachers try to make them feel comfortable and encourage them to write about something they know about, something they've experienced. Ask me to write a short story involving a rocket engineer who's going about his workday, and I certainly wouldn't begin typing eagerly, because I don't know anything about how rocket engineers spend their day. But ask me to write a story about a newspaper reporter working in the 1990s and I could put my fingers to my keyboard immediately. That's what I did for a living back then.

Reason 2: Readers like to be able to sink into a story when they're reading, to lose themselves, not even realizing they're turning the pages. One thing that will interfere with this—that will throw readers out of a story, if not make them want to throw the book out of a window—is if the story has incorrect details. How many times have you, dear reader, stopped reading to mutter, "That's not right. That's not how it works!"? Things like that take the enjoyment out of reading. When you write about things you don't know about, you're likely to get details wrong. But if you WWYK, this is less likely.

I can hear some of you grumbling that fiction involves making things up, so WWYK shouldn't apply. I disagree. Your story should come from your imagination, but your details should be true to life unless you've made clear that you are writing about an alternate reality. Want to write a historical novel set in 1800 that refers back to our first president, John Adams? Even if you have the most rocking story, readers likely will skewer you for not knowing the first US president was George Washington—unless you've made clear that your story involves alternate history. Like it or not, details matter.

But—and here comes the important part—this doesn't mean that you should only write about things you've experienced. It doesn't mean you can't write stories set before you were born or involving things you haven't done. It means if you want to write about such things, you should do enough research so you get your details right (see Reason 2). (I don't doubt that some people have said writers should only write about things they've experienced firsthand, but I think such advice is misguided and hopefully a rarity.)

So, want to write about a character who's a rocket engineer but you're not? Then do your research so you'll get the details about her workday correct. Want to write about a big-city environmental attorney but you're not sure what such a person does or even what the inside of a large law firm looks like? Once again: do your research. 

Once you've done your research, you'll know the ins and outs of whatever it is you want to write about. You'll be more comfortable starting to type, and your readers will be in better hands when you finish.

That's the real beauty of WWYK. Once you've done your research, you'll be able to get your details right because you'll KNOW them. Then you can write about anything.

From paw to page.

After twenty plus years of thwarted efforts to publish a novel, I scaled back my ambitions to conform to the somewhat circumscribed audience still available to me: 

Me.

When my agent, the late Mary Jack Wald (a paragon of hope, persistence and faith in lost causes) encouraged me to rewrite one of my many failed forays, the first thing I did was add a key character to the action.

A dog.

The sole reason for this was my wife and I had finally, after many years of longing on her part, acquired a dog. My habit was to write on the front porch of our house on Long Island, and since the new dog was a constant companion in this setting – and as all writers know we seek stimulation from our immediate surroundings – it was nearly impossible to concoct a scene in which no dog was present.

A published book followed.  You do the math.   

I was immensely fortunate that our dog, Samuel Beckett (a soft-coated Wheaten Terrier named after a lesser-known Irish existentialist), who passed away about fourteen years ago, was in possession of an outsized personality.  Dog owners know that some dogs are dogs, other dogs are strange people who live with you.  So it was with our dog Sam (coincidentally the name of my protagonist – I can’t explain it) who was a thoroughly reliable source of literary subsistence in both form and content.

His fictional counterpart is an eccentric named Eddie Van Halen.  While Eddie’s received his share of fan mail, most of the recognition has come from reviewers, who write things like, “...and his lovable mutt, Eddie”, and “…the anti-Marley, Eddie Van Halen”. 

One of the best reasons to include dogs in your fiction is they give your protagonist someone to talk to, and hang around with.  The dogs don’t have to talk back, they just have to be themselves, which is enough in my case, since most of my dogs are bottomless fonts of reliable inspiration.

Our dog Sam shared with his alter ego Eddie Van Halen a characteristic dominant in all exceptional canines – unpredictability.  Experts on animal behavior will tell you that dogs are highly programmable routine freaks.  Nothing makes them happier than the noon walk, the six o’clock meal, the seven thirty am tummy rub. 

Sam liked his routines, Lord knows. But he also loved to mix things up, in a way far more reminiscent of a practical joker than a habituated, monotony-loving house pet.  I heard him howl exactly twice, both times on a corner in Southampton as a fire truck passed by. He stuck his head out the window of a moving car exactly once, for reasons neither of us ever figured out.  A dog who showed nothing but disdain for conventional chew toys would suddenly become enamored with a polyester squirrel and spend the greater part of Christmas morning eviscerating the poor thing. 

 Sometimes, very infrequently, he’d walk up to me, look me in the eye, and issue one loud, imperious bark.  I’d say, “What.”  He’d bark again, and then walk away, disgusted.  I know these exchanges meant something to him, but I’ll be damned if I know what it was. 

Since Sam, I’ve had other, equally productive characters living in my home.  The most recent, as mercurial and unpredictable as their predecessor. 

However, I’m way ahead on the deal.  I get to have characters I can write into my books whenever my imaginative powers flag, with little need for invention.  All I give in return is a concentrated ear scratching, a walk around the block (or whatever direction their moods dictate) and an occasional cigar. 

 Cuban.

   

On Our Streets

We have a rise in hate crimes in Ottawa which, while being the capital city of Canada, has always felt like a quiet place.

With a 23.5 per cent increase in hate incidents in 2023, Ottawa Police Chief Eric Stubbs said, “Across North America and really the world, we’ve seen this trend of hate crimes on the rise.” One of the targeted groups was the LGBTQ community.

This gave me pause because many of us have been talking amongst ourselves about the shocking changes we are seeing. Canada has had a history of supporting LGBTQ rights by decriminalizing being gay as early as 1969, legalizing same sex adoption in 1995, legalizing same sex marriage in 2005 and making LGBTQ discrimination illegal in 2017.

Recently, however, in Canada we’ve had marches called, “Leave our kids alone”. Under the guise of protecting children against learning too much about sex, they actually want them to learn nothing good about the LGBTQ community. So, in reality, we had anti-LGBTQ marches on our streets. Some of the hateful things said left many of us reeling. 

What is also worrisome was the fact that they went to great lengths to look like a bunch of concerned parents, organizing organically at the local level. However, in reality they were supported by a big tent of far-right groups aligned with groups holding these “Leave our kids alone” marches in the United States.

In typical Canadian fashion, many people came to show strong support for the LGBTQ community as well. What was heartwarming about the support was most of it was from neighbours, friends and family of people who happen to be LGBTQ simply saying to them: we know you, respect you, care for you and will stand up for you. 

But make no mistake, this has shaken us. Canada has always been a tolerant country, largely insulated from the far right hateful shouting elsewhere. To have these same slogans – at times screamed out by children – was horrifyingly unCanadian. Many I spoke with were tearful at the thought of LGBTQ children hearing this vileness in a country where many had worked so hard to make them feel respected. For LGBTQ adults who had seen grimmer days of intolerance recede and lived in hope one day it would be gone, this rise of hate is disheartening. 

Ottawa Police Chief Eric Stubbs talked about the hate seeping in from our southern neighbours, but some is homegrown or brought in from people who now call Canada home, but were raised in a hateful environment elsewhere.  It was a warning to us that we are not immune. It is literally on the street where we live. 

What is uniquely Canadian is a history of calm and civility. Americans sometimes make fun of the ‘nice’ Canadian, suggesting we are prone to naiveté and cluelessness. They misunderstand. It’s actually a steely determination not to get caught up in anger and drama but to choose, instead, to chat with people as we meet them. It’s not soft. Nothing is stronger, more adult, than refusing to engage in childish shouting, drama and anger -  this is the fodder for extremism and hate. These are the things we have tried to have a steely resolve to avoid. That’s the backbone of who we are and I hope, the civility will once again win. We have always had intolerance within our borders and knocking on the doors of our borders. We conquered it with civility.

My parents came to Canada when brown-skinned people were few and far between, particularly in small town Waterloo. Many, who had never met anyone who looked like my parents, chose to chat as they met in the neighbourhood and, more often than not, extend an invitation for coffee. At school, children hung out on the playground, invited me to their homes and some became lifelong friends. This is why civility is highly underrated. It allows everyone to meet and talk.

What we saw on these marches was the antithesis of civility. 

The far right extremism may seem big, well-funded and so loud that they will drown us. We must fight them in big ways - online, through enforcing hate laws, increasing rules in workplaces - but one way to drown them out is to chat. Quietly. In a friendly way. Being the quintessential nice Canadian, with a spine of steel, who is civil to anyone we meet on our streets. 

Those of you who have read some of my previous articles know that I strongly champion empathy in all its forms.  To the shouty and the angry, to the political and crass, I may seem like a naive fluffy person. In response to that caricature, I would like to tout my credentials - after much more than a quarter of a century of studying and clinically practicing in the area of mental health as a physican -  what allows for normalcy, decreases violence and prevents mental illness is my lane. I can say with utter certainty that empathy is crucial for a highly functioning person and a highly functional society. 

We need to get back to empathy and civility. On our streets. 

September Stories

  

Here in the south, autumn is finally in the air--well, almost--and I have a few fall stories to report on, at least those from the month of September. Some are seasonally-themed stories; the rest just happened to be published at this time of year. And every one of them is far different from the others. (That's part of the fun of all this, isn't it?)

Anyway, here are six of my recent efforts--two in magazines and four in anthologies:

"Plymouth West," Killin' Time in San Diego (Down & Out Books). Editor: Holly West. (I'm actually cheating a bit by calling this a September publication, but only by a few hours--it's the Bouchercon 2023 anthology, officially "launched" at a signing on the evening of August 31 at the annual conference.) My story is a modern-day revenge tale about a restaurant owner, her budding romance with a mysterious chef, and a traditional but deadly Thanksgiving dinner. It was originally written with a pandemic setting and then changed at the last minute to a regular story--whether that was a smart move I'm not sure, but I was thankful the editor liked it. It's a "framed story" of about 2700 words and takes the form of a narrative by the protagonist to a close friend, shortly after everything happened. It's my sixth appearance in a Bouchercon anthology and its setting is of course the city that hosted the conference.

"Della's Cellar," Ordinary Miracles, September 6, 2023. Editor: Dorothy Day. When I was asked to supply a teaser/logline for this story, here's what I sent the editor: "After a dare goes wrong, young Billy Kendrix finds himself battling with his own conscience." That of course isn't all he battles with, but you find that out later. The story runs about 2300 words, it's set in the rural south (which is where I was raised), and was told from the viewpoint of a twelve-year-old who's involved in a prank that goes terribly off the rails but ends up changing three lives for the better. The only breaking of the law in this story is an incident of trespassing, so it's not a crime tale, but it does include mortal danger, so I suppose it'd be called suspense instead of mystery.

"Silverlake," Monster Fight at the O.K. Corral, Vol. 2 (Tule Fog Press), September 10, 2023. Editor: Lyn Perry. This is about as far from the previous story as it could possibly be. It's certainly the weirdest story I've written in a long time, and for an anthology with the weirdest title. The genre is Western but it's horror/fantasy also (how could I resist that?), and the plot features a weary cowpoke on his way home from a trail drive who stops for the night at a little town called Silverlake and finds a lot more there than he was looking for (think Cowboys & Aliens). This was one of those stories that I wrote to match a theme, which is something I've found myself doing more and more often lately, and I managed to work in a few old frontier legends as well as some scary otherworldly elements. Its wordcount is about 3200, and it's told through the eyes of the traveling cowhand.

"Free as a Bird," Woman's World, September 18, 2023, issue. Editor: Alexandra Pollock. For anyone who's interested in this kind of thing, the story was submitted on 7/10/23, accepted on 7/15/23, and published on 9/7/23 (little-known fact: the on-sale date for WW is always eleven days before the issue date). This story's yet another installment in a series I've written for them for years now, featuring a pleasant but dimwitted southern sheriff and a grouchy retired lady who is (1) his former fifth-grade teacher and (2) a constant pain in his ass. But she's smart--really smart--and consistently helps him solve difficult cases, which works out well for both the sheriff and me. The mystery here involves a prison break and sort of a word-game puzzle that leads to the solution. As usual, the story is only a little over 500 words, and this one's told from the POV of the schoolteacher.

"Liz and Drew and Betty Lou," Strand Magazine, Issue #70, September 2023. Editor: Andrew Gulli. This story isn't exactly a sequel, but it's a followup to an idea I used in a story I wrote for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine several years ago. It involves two high-school students, one of whom's father owns a fancy self-driving sports car. The two teenagers decide one day to play hooky from school, "borrow" the car, and spend a few hours chasing their financial dreams at a local casino--a venture that predictably goes astray. In this case the mishap is that they meet a crook looking for some quick cash. It's a half-serious, half-funny story of about 5900 words, and was--like the EQMM story that preceded it--a ton of fun to write. Strangely enough, the dates on which this story was submitted, accepted, and published were almost exactly the same as the submit/accept/pub dates for the earlier-mentioned Woman's World story (neither the Strand nor WW wait very long to get accepted stories into print). Not that it matters, but I received my author copy of the issue in the mail last week and read it last night.

"River Road," Prohibition Peepers: Private Eyes During the Noble Experiment (Down & Out Books), September 25, 2023. Editor: Michael Bracken. I love private-eye anthologies, and this one's set in one of the most interesting periods in American history. My story--it's around 6000 words--features a PI who's hired by a wealthy landowner to locate his missing wife, and who then finds that it's not an easy task. Much of the action takes place in the woods and swamps of southwest Mississippi, whose historical settings are familiar to me, but the plot also required a good deal of research into the making and selling and transporting of moonshine, so I wound up learning a lot. As for submission details, this story was accepted fairly quickly but was published more than a year and a half afterward--and well worth the wait. NOTE: One place that has a significant role in the story is an actual site about an hour away from my home, and was featured in the old movie Raintree County, with Liz Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Here's a clip from YouTube. 

NOTE: My story "The POD Squad" is in the Sep/Oct 2023 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but it came out in mid-August, so I didn't list it here. If you like reading "behind-the-scenes" accounts of stories, I covered that one (and another story, published the last week of August) in a SleuthSayers post last month.

What are some of your recent publications? Were they in anthologies or magazines, or both? Which do you most enjoy writing for? Any successes in new markets? Any publications that were different from the kinds of stories you usually write? Do you find that you need that kind of variety now and then, to keep from getting bored?

Anyhow, that's that. I wish everyone a great autumn. Keep writing--and reading--and I'll see you again on the 21st.

A Great Gift and a Great Loss

Couple months ago, I stumbled across a spy novel on my local library's website and checked out Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews. I love good spy novels good spy movies and this one grabbed me from the beginning and didn't let go.

It's the story of a premier Russian ballerina Dominika Egorova whose career is sabotaged by a jealous rival. Dominika sustains a career-ending injury to her leg and is forced into espionage training by her insidious uncle. She is sent to Sparrow School where she is trained to use her power of seduction to entrap targets. She has other talents, including the ability to see colors (halos) around people, revealing their true natures. She also becomes a lethal killer. She is unhappy with the work and unhappy with her life and is recruited by the CIA to spy for the Americans.

The details of spycraft is extraordinary and this is the best spy novel of the 21st Century I have read. The library had a sequel Palace of Treason and a third in the trilogy, The Kremlin's Candidate. Each is better than the one before and I raced through them and will have to go back and read them slowly to relish the scenes playing out before me.

Dominika rises through the ranks of the Russian espionage network – all the way up. Her interactions with her CIA handlers is fascinating and gripping. The end of the third novel packs a helluva punch, left my heart beating fast.

When a writer writes this well, it is such a gift to us readers. After finishing the third book, I searched for other books by Jason Matthews and found none and went online to learn these were the only books he wrote. He died at age 69 from a rare neurodegenerative disease of the brain.

His books are a great gift and his death a great loss.

Red Sparrow won the MWA Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author and the ITW Thriller Award for Best First Novel.

If you like spy novels or just good fiction, check out this trilogy. The detailed descriptions of contemporary spy work is fascinating. Jason Matthews was a CIA officer.

I'm so slow. Two days ago, I found the film Red Sparrow starring Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton. Pretty good adaptation but like most movies, not as good as the novel.

As my hero F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his final line of The Great Gatsby – "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past."

Thanks all for now.

  www.oneildenoux.com 

You Get What You Pay For

by Eve Fisher

A couple of weeks ago was, God help us, the anniversary of the 45th anniversary of the hit "reality" TV show, Survivor.  I've watched one episode of it, and it quickly became clear that it was about watching people in the minimum of clothing (sometimes not even that) compete for the right to stay on the island all the time making alliances and deals which they promptly broke without shame or qualms, because winning was all that counted.  I never watched another.  

But it was and still is a hit, and since then there have been so many "reality" TV shows like The Apprentice, starring a currently indicted former President as not himself, the Kardashians (never watched a single episode of that one) watching the rich and becoming famous marry the very rich and famous and have an never-ending series of 1% Problems, Duck Dynasty, watching the rich and becoming famous pretend to be "just us folks" and literally selling their religious beliefs along with more duck calls to millions while making even more millions from the show and spin-off books, Big Brother, with its titillating promise of watching pneumatic people have pneumatic sex or at least hearing it, Jersey Shore, ditto, etc., etc., etc.  

Granted, there are also shows like American Idol, which at least give the masses hope that they can become the next superstar if they please the masses and the judges, and one per season does.  Slim odds, but better than none.

NOTE:  I always put "reality" in quotes when it comes to TV shows because folks, they are heavily scripted, edited, and even rehearsed, just like professional wrestling, and if you want to have a fit about it, please call the Tooth Fairy and let her know.  

Now we are what we eat, and that doesn't just apply to our bodies.  What our minds feed on transforms our minds, too.  And our social culture.  All these shows are HITS.  And the result is that fictional TV is also wrapped up in nothing but competition, celebrity, looks, wealth, and the occasional loser from hell.

And what lessons do we learn from these shows? 

• That life is all about competition, and whatever it takes to win, do it and don't have any regrets.
• Wealth, power, celebrity, and looks are the only things that matter - what else would we want to see on TV but people who are seriously above us socially, economically, and physically?  After all, as John Steinbeck said, every American sees themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."  That could be us, next!  (Grow up, folks.)
• The only exception to the above is when we have a show that concentrates on schadenfreude or "there but for the grace of God".  Biggest Loser, Cops, and Hoarders all leap to mind.  

House of Cards.  Succession.  Yellowstone.  White Lotus.  Hell, even soap operas now are all set in the world of multi-millionaires who just swap CEO / COO jobs and companies around like they're chips and dip.  

Meanwhile, the Young Adult market is heavily into how to rebel (successfully, eventually) against dystopian societies in which all the resources are with the 1% and they use us for the Hunger Games, until they're finally overthrown.  (See also The Maze Runner, Divergent, Station Eleven, etc.) This could / should get very interesting...  

Anyway, we've been swimming in the ocean of mass media for a long time now - radio dramas began in the 1920s, television in the 1940s, although it wasn't until the 1955 that half the population had a TV set (black and white of course).  And now we have streaming services in every room, on every television, computer, and smart phone and almost nobody just "listens to the radio" anymore.  

What interests me is the trends in stories over history.  After all, what we watch is crafted for us by others, and it either becomes popular or not. So what's popular when?  

Well, in Greek and Roman times, it could be summed up (to paraphrase Hamlet) "the play's the thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience - or at least attention - of the crowd."  

Greek theater was all about comedies (often obscene by modern standards - big stuffed phalluses everywhere, including on the gods) making fun of men and gods and current events.  Aristophanes' The Clouds mocked Socrates, which proved, if nothing else, that Socrates had become a notable figure in ancient Athens.  It was also all about tragedies, ranging from Sophocles' relatively formal take on myth and legend (The Oedipus trilogy) to Euripides' more naturalistic approach, where gods appear seeming very human indeed (Dionysus in The Bacchae - one of my favorites) until they pull the god card out of their cloak and then anything can happen.  And there's always war.  

• What the Greek plays teach is that the gods rule all; AND
• "Lord of all gods is fate!"  (tag line from one of the Greek tragedies) A man (or woman) can't avoid his/her fate, no matter how grim it is, no matter how moral they are; all they can do is deal with it.
• Suicide is a noble statement of moral righteousness and a way of expiation; 
• and that family comes above all else, and you must avenge the dead.  

Oh, and Euripides hints, for the first time, in The Trojan Women and Medea, that women have an innate humanity, no matter that the men think of them as nothing but booty and slaves.

Rome came, stole most of the plays of ancient Greece, and added a few twists:  pantomime was hugely popular.  But the best fun of all was live violence and death.  From the gladiator contests to the killing of beasts in the arena, to tragedies where the deaths were live (The Death of Hercules, where a condemned criminal was burned alive at the end of the play), the Romans barely spent a day in which they didn't watch someone being killed live in front of them for entertainment.

Roman philosophers justified this for five major reasons:

• It taught that the bad would be punished:  the criminals were already condemned to death for serious crimes (murder, robbery, arson, sacrilege, mutiny) so sending them into the arena actually gave them a chance to live they didn't deserve, and 
• if they died horribly, their deaths were a deterrent to future crime and an example of what Romans should NOT do, and
• if they died well, their courage would be inspiring.
• It was good for the people to see blood and guts to accustom them to the needs of war. 
• Last but not least, it kept the poor occupied.  The emperor Trajan said that gladiator contests were necessary for the “contentment of the masses.”

In other words, competition was training for war, which was one of the major means of growing rich in Rome.  Conquer something, and plunder it.  

Think about all those westerns in the 1950s and 60s.

Think about all the detective, lawyer, and police shows that have been on for decades, getting more and more graphic about crime and punishment every year.  

The huge popularity of TV, movies, and books about serial killers.  Serial killer chic.  

And now...  rich people doing wicked things in high places, for money, for power, for celebrity, and because they can.  

And Squid Game, let's not forget that.  

Could it be that any of this has anything to do with our current social / political / media climate?  After all, you get what you pay for.