Dancing The Jig

We are headed deep in the lexicographic woods today.  If that's not your jam you have my blessing to move on.

As I mentioned previously, at Bouchercon I was on a panel about librarians and we prepared a webpage of resources for our audience.  I wanted to included Google Ngram Viewer, which allows you to trace the use of a word or phrase over centuries.  

Here is what I wrote:

Google Ngram Viewer.  Search millions of books and journals for words and phrases. Great for writing historicals. When did the phrase “the jig is up” start appearing in print?  When did it become popular?

I picked that phrase as the first crime-fiction-related term that popped into my head.  But after the conference I decided to take a closer look at what Ngram came up with.  And the result surprised me.

So, do me a favor and think for a moment. What does the phrase "the jig is up" mean?  In what context do you expect to find it?  If you are ready we will proceed...

The earliest example Ngram could find was from The Clockmaker, or the Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick. This was a comic novel written by the Canadian author Thomas Chandler Haliburton in the 1830s.  Oddly enough I have read the book and it isn't a struggle to get through.  

I became aware of the book when I was writing an essay about a different word: "slinky."

 But here is Mr. Haliburton on our phrase for the day:

The jig is up with Halifax and it's all their fault. If a man sits at his door and sees stray cattle in his field, a eatin up his crop...why I should say it sarves him right.

Fair enough.  But does that match the meaning  I asked you to fix in your head?

The next hit I found was a Dictionary of Americanisms from 1860.  That book says the phrase means "The game is up. It is all over for me." And that seems like a good fit with our Canadian friend.

But it isn't what the phrase means to me.  Here is what  a modern dictionary says about it: the scheme or deception is revealed or foiled. "the jig is up; you've had your last chance."

Exactly!  You might say that the modern meaning is a subset of the older one.  The phrase  used to mean something was over. Now it means something dishonest is over.  My example would have been something like:  "The jig is up, Bugsy.  We've called the cops."

So when did the change happened?  I suspected that, like so much criminal slang, we owe it to Prohibition. (For example, Donald E. Westlake  pointed out that "hardboiled dick" is a combination of World War I military slang with French-Canadian Prohibition jargon.)

Let's get on the trail and see what we can find out.

In 1877 in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote about people despairing and saying "The jig is up." Definitely the old meaning.

In 1881 Sheridan Mack quoted a man talking about a woman who left him:  "The jig is up and I ain't the fella to squeal on her. Matilda is as gay as a peach and I ain't gonna get all spoony."

In "The Flag Paramount," written by O. Henry in 1902, a character uses the term to say a Latin American revolution is over.  Still the old meaning.

But eleven years later in "The Badge of Policeman O'Roon" the same author has a policeman use that phrase to lament that he is too drunk to go on duty. Has Henry shifted to  the modern meaning in that decade or is it a coincidence?

Next Ngram pulled up an article from The Moving Picture World (1916).  Describing the movie The Defective Detective the writer said that when  a policeman enters the room "the jig is up." Now we're getting it!

Next comes a 1923 article from a magazine with the unlikely name of The Lather.  1923. It turns out to be the publication of the Wood, Wire, and Metal Lathers Union. This is part five of "A Confession" by an "Ex-Under-cover Man" about his infiltration of factories. 

It reads like  the author had been reading (or writing for?) Black Mask.  When he spots a competitor spying on him he tells his assistants: "Shadow the boarding house until you see him leaving, then catch up with him and tell him the jig is up and you are next to him.  Scare him red-headed if you want to, but don't harm him in anyway."

It's clear that by now we have the modern meaning, but I can't resist one more source.  In 1929 Joseph K. London wrote an article for The Jeweler's Circular on new methods to foil a hold-up man.  One involved taking the fiend's photograph. When he sees the flash he knows "the jig is up.'"

What none of these examples does is help explain why the phrase exists at all.  Why isn't it "the jig is down?" Or, for that matter, "the hornpipe is rotund?"

As I said when I was discussing the word "slinky," etymology is a wonderful time-sucker.

Collateral Damage II

     In 1992, the McAllen police arrested Linda in a prostitution sting. By that time, she'd been living on the streets for four years. Linda went to court, took her conviction, and slowly began to clean up her life. She moved to a halfway house. Then Linda started taking classes to learn a trade. She received financial assistance from the Texas government to help finance her education. In 1996, Linda became a registered massage therapist. She worked in the field for the next quarter century, renewing her license every two years. 

    Then, in 2020, Texas took her license away.    

    Several weeks back, I began a conversation about the collateral consequences of crime. Citizens routinely think and hear about the effects of an offense on the crime victims. The earlier blog focused on the person convicted of a criminal offense. The topic seemed like something crime fiction writers might consider. Most collateral consequences are often not discussed as part of plea bargain negotiations. A defendant may not be aware. They accept a plea deal, serve the sentence, and, in their mind, pay the debt to society. Later, like Linda, unforeseen after-effects arise. Suppose, as a writer, that your goal is to craft a villain with sympathetic motivations. If you want a character whose outrage feels justified, the collateral consequences of crime might be a place to look. I hope to continue that conversation today. 

    (As in the earlier column, I focus almost exclusively on Texas law. That's my sandbox. The specifics of your jurisdiction may vary.)

    The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) is the state agency primarily responsible for overseeing businesses, trades, and occupations regulated by the state. Some jobs, such as plumbers, lawyers, police officers, EMS, doctors, pharmacists, and veterinarians, have separate regulating agencies. For many of the rest, the TDLR is the umbrella organization responsible for licensing within their occupations. 

    Some of the licensed trades in this state include air conditioning repair, auctioneers, barbers, electricians, massage therapists, mold remediators, notary publics, pawn shop employees, and tow truck operators. One state comptroller's report identified 774 occupation-related licenses overseen by 47 state agencies. 

    In Texas, a license holder's license shall be revoked if the conviction results in felony incarceration. It may be withdrawn, or a person may be denied the opportunity to obtain a license if the offense is directly related to the duties and responsibilities of the occupation or if the offense falls within the category of crimes that Texas has deemed especially bad. There is a list of these bad offenses in the Code of Criminal Procedure, Sec. 42A.054. Most practitioners call them the 3(g) offenses. (Section 3(g) was where one used to be able to find the list before the legislature renumbered everything, and 3(g) is easier to say than 42A.054. 

    The 3(g) list includes most of the crimes you'd think are bad, like murder and sexual assault. A few, like aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, are fact-specific.) 

    As with other states, Texas has different types of probation. Some were initially intended to enable the defendant to avoid the consequences of a criminal conviction upon successfully completing the supervision. Over time, many of those benefits have eroded. The TDLR may revoke, deny, or refuse to renew a license if the "non-conviction" activity renders the person unfit for the license. 

    In determining whether the conviction directly relates to an occupation, the statute lists four factors:

    1. The nature and seriousness of the crime.

    2. The relationship of the crime to the purposes for requiring a license. 

    3. The extent to which a license might offer an opportunity to engage in further        criminal activity. 

    4. The relationship of the crime to the ability or fitness to perform the duties of the     licensed occupation. 

    While items 2-4 draw some connection between the crime and the license, #1 is a giant loophole providing unfettered discretion to the overseeing agency. 

    Some licensing rules allow for the consideration of mitigating factors. Others in this state do not. We could discuss whether there should be zero tolerance for sex crimes in the legitimate massage business. As a society, we have become more attuned to issues of human trafficking and exploitation. We might debate whether we should consider the defendant's circumstances before denying a license. But those are topics for another day and a different blog. 

    Linda and others received their licenses because of an oversight by the regulatory agency. Then, at age 62, her income stream was pulled out from under her. The agency, alerted to the conviction, had no discretion. Bureaucracy may have crushed common sense. How might this defendant respond? It is easy for foresee anger and desperation. 

    Another reader might dismiss the concerns for Linda's livelihood. The saying goes, "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." Linda, they might argue, should be grateful that she evaded the consequences for so long. 

    And in that debate, you may have created a complex villain. 

    (I would like to recognize Eric Dexheimer and his reporting in the Houston Chronicle for the specifics in this blog.)

    Until next time. 

    

How do I kill thee? Let me count the ways

• Do you know how to pierce the heart when you stab someone from behind?
• Know three commonplace items you can substitute for a silencer?
• Have a list of slow-acting poisons you can buy without a prescription?
• Have you ever discussed such things with friends over dinner at a restaurant?

You must be a mystery writer.

Mystery writers run neck and neck with murderers themselves in preoccupation with ways to kill. Unlike actual assassins, for whom discretion is both a tool of the trade and essential to staying alive, writers love to discuss these matters with their peers. Before the pandemic, when convivial dinners were the high point of monthly meetings of my local Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime chapters and I went to mystery cons all over the country, I looked forward to such discussions and participated with great relish. If they took place in public places, so much the better. It was great fun to imagine the party at the next table wondering what you were plotting, a real-life crime or just a story. I admit to a tad of vestigial adolescent exhibitionism, what I call a Look, Ma! element in keeping eavesdroppers guessing.

One of the most beloved figures in the mystery community is Texas pharmacist and toxicologist Luci Zahray, universally known as the Poison Lady. When I sat down to write this, I found a note in my files, Poison Lady—arsenic (Walmart story). I probably jotted it down as she spoke at a Malice Domestic a decade before. I remembered the gist of it but wanted to get it right, so I emailed her. The Poison Lady’s own words reflect how not only writers but mystery lovers in general think.

The year arsenic became illegal to sell in stores, I was walking through Walmart and they had a grocery cart full marked down to 50 cents a box. I naturally, as one does, started pushing the cart to checkout. Then I realized I didn't actually need that much arsenic or even have a good place to put it. So I picked out several, quite a few, boxes and bought them. I still don't need that much arsenic and don't have a good place to put it, but I sometimes regret not buying the whole cart full.

We’re equally interested in likely settings for murder and places to bury the body. For example, what's buried in the garden? My son recently told me that the sale of his in-laws’ house in New Jersey was held up because they discovered an oil burner buried in the backyard. I was charmed. An oil burner is dull, but what if there were a body in an oil burner? Even better—hold the oil burner.

Back in the Golden Age of mysteries, cleverness was valued more than it is today. John Dickson Carr was the king of the locked room puzzle, which depended on unexpected murder methods. Sherlock Holmes solved one case in which the lock was breached by a poisonous snake slithering through a pipe in the wall, if I remember correctly.

Roald Dahl’s short story, “A Lamb to the Slaughter” (1953), in which the murder weapon is a frozen leg of lamb, later cooked and served to the unwitting detective, is often cited as the best murder method in mystery fiction.

In Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1987)— the novel, on which the movie was based— Fannie Flagg rang a change on this. The murder was a simple skillet to the head. But the body disposal took place in the kitchen, and once again, the detective dined on the results.

Do we still relish ingenuity in the means of our fictional murders, or have we become so jaded that it doesn't matter any more?

To some extent, it varies according to subgenre. If it’s a cozy, the murder may be death by wedding cake or the victim stitched to death into a prize-winning quilt. If it’s Kellerman or Cornwell or their ilk, there’ll be a lot of gore, maybe torture described more lovingly than I want to read about. If it’s a technothriller, we’ll hear all about the gun and its accessories.

The best place to look for the far-out murder weapon these days is video. In shows like Midsomer Murders and Brokenwood, the giant cheese and unattended vat of wine are alive and well and killing people with enthusiasm. I get a kick out of watching and talking about these tricks. But in my own work, I like to knock the victim off quickly— bang on the head, push over the ramparts, car off the road— and get on with the story. For me, it’s not about the props. It’s always about the people.

October 7th

I listened to an interview with Rachel Maddow, host of the MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show on her research on the rise of antisemitism and she explained this:

When people tell you that a minority group are evil and they’re the reason things are bad, they are saying that some people among us are dangerous and these people shouldn’t be part of our democracy with rights to vote. We need someone to protect us from these people. So, its not just about telling us who to hate, it’s about undoing democracy and Maddow says we shouldn’t stand for it. It’s a powerful video.

This certainly fits with what we’ve seen with Anti-Asian hate and LGBTQ-hate – there are many narratives explaining why they’re ‘dangerous’ and shouldn’t have the same rights as everyone. Essentially, they shouldn’t be part of our democracy.

Now we’re seeing the rise of antisemitism and the same narrative holds. This topic is large, the events unfolding in the Middle East complicated and well beyond the scope of my small article. Further, I lack the expertise to talk about the history and lack the military expertise to talk about the war. I will write about only one thing: the October 7^th slaughter in Israel.

Over three thousand young people gathered to dance at the Supernova Sukkot in the desert, approximately 5 km from the Gaza Strip and near Kibbutz Re’im with a population of around 430.

The rave was billed as a celebration of "friends, love and infinite freedom” and attendees were prohibited from bringing weapons including guns and sharp objects. Sound like the kind of thing many young people we know, including our own children, would attend.

In the morning, Hamas came at the attendees from all directions, killing at least 260 people and abducting dozens as hostages. The massacre and hostage taking continued at nearby Kibbutz Re’im and in the end, over one thousand were slaughtered and hundreds taken hostage.

Hamas insurgents recorded their own deeds with GoPro cameras and that, combined with surveillance footage, has been aired to many including seasoned journalists who found the footage so gruesome that many had to leave.

"The worst part was the glee," Sabrina Maddeaux, a political columnist for the National Post, wrote in a piece published Monday, describing the apparent joy Hamas fighters took in their rampage across communities and at a music festival in southern Israel last month. Reporters described seeing images of burned babies and children, along with other indescribably graphic scenes.

There are still over 200 hostages in the hands of Hamas. We have seen a woman hostage naked and beaten on a truck paraded through Gaza. The terrorists have a baby who is 10 months old.

We have seen videos of people denying that these events happened and we’ve seen photos of the kidnapped torn down as ‘propaganda’. For those who wonder how people can deny the Holocaust, we’re seeing the denial in real time today.

There will also be people who may not deny these events but only want to talk about the ‘lead up’ to them and the war that followed them. There is no ‘lead up’ to justify this brutality, nor can you justify brutality by referring to any actions that followed it that were unknown at the time.

As Maddow said, this is identifying some minority as bad, dangerous and unfit to have democratic rights – human rights – whether it’s citizens of Israel or Jewish citizens of other countries.

On this Memorial Day 2023, when we honour those who fought for and preserved our democracy, I wanted to write a small article about the big events of October 7^th, 2023. In a democracy, all of us are equal, can vote and participate in the shaping our society and our world. If we exclude certain groups from these universal human rights whether it be those far away in Israel or Jewish citizens at home, we demolish the foundation of our democracy.

Don't Get All Twisted

Twist endings in short fiction aren’t mandatory. 

There. I said it. You hear the "gotta have a twist" advice now and again, and twists are wonderful when they’re pulled off. Repeat: when pulled off. This hype about twist endings probably doesn't serve us well as writers, particularly with folks getting started at short stories. If my starting principle mandates a twist as essential, then I risk forcing an awkward twist just to check that box. I'll bet that my editor friends here have turned down otherwise fine submissions because an attempted twist didn't hang straight. 

I should give my personal definition of twist. Two reasons. One, these things are subjective. You do you. And secondly, depending on your definition, the ending to my story in the November/December 2023 Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine may or may not pull a twist.

For me, a twist is a closing turn that surfaces from the narrative and inverts the expected path. Another operative word: surfaces. A twist that wasn't set up is no twist at all. It's new and probably intrusive facts. Take the classic Peanuts gag, Snoopy's "dark and stormy night" novel with sudden pirate ships and screaming maids. Attention-getting, but hardly organic. For a twist to work, the inversion path has been there since the opening passages, brewing, hiding in plain sight maybe, but definitely emerging from the story world and themes that have unfolded. 

By “inverts,” things wind up opposite from the characters’ goal, maybe ironically so. This is, of course, O. Henry territory.  In “The Gift of the Magi,” the husband sets aside his watch fetish and sells it to buy a brush for his wife’s glorious hair. Meanwhile, the wife is secretly selling those splendid locks to buy him a watch chain. It’s all very awkward on Christmas morn. His "The Last Leaf" does the trick much better, with a sacrificial--and sneakily set-up--turn that saves a depressed woman.

As another example, and one I’ve used here before, consider “The Cask of Amontillado.” Everyone knows what's on the line with Fortunato. The narrator, Montresor, has blathered about revenge and snuffing Fortunato since the first paragraph. How the murder attempt will go down, that’s Poe's dramatic question. So it’s no twist when Fortunato gets walled up and left to die. I'll argue his fate is parallelism. Montresor has also been locked in darkness of his own making. 

Poe’s twist is Montresor’s reaction when the deed is done. His fever breaks, if briefly, and he experiences lucid regret. Far from gleeful revenge, Montresor is trapped forever by guilt and self-loathing. It's a perfect ending because it comes from the story threads and ties them together, leaving no doubt as to Poe's meaning. 

It's easy to analyze. Twists are way harder to execute on the page. You know, surprise without being random or obvious. There are a million ways this can go horribly wrong. Confused story meanings, poor signaling, sudden pirate ships on the horizon.

It’s why I don’t fret over twist endings. My energy is better directed nailing down a big honking ending, a serious pay-off, something satisfying for the arc, something revelatory, and yes, a little unexpected. If that becomes an O. Henry-style twist, awesome. 

Inevitability as an ending is underrated. Inevitability is all around us: the rise of the sun, the change of the seasons, the span of our lives. Inevitability fits right at home in good fiction. Noir is stepped in the inevitable, that life is terrible and not getting any better. You do what you have to. Shutter Island jumps out, for my definition anyhow, not as a twist but as the inevitable reckoning of repressed personas. 

Many a great story plays with inevitability. We know how Frankenstein is going to end. We know Romeo and Juliet will commit suicide. Those stories are unravelings--and with masterful pay-offs that don't lapse into predictability. And is Montresor's guilt really a twist or the inevitable toll murder takes on the psyche? 

Often, I'm thinking more about caper rules. Under strict caper rules, the crew can't get away with the heist. They might have token loot, but mostly their win is to have navigated their foolishness and live to heist another day. Caper rules call for a spectacular fail at the very cusp of success, a surprising fail but seeded sleight-of-hand along the way. I use this construction a good bit--but I don't consider those turns as twists. Those are inevitabilities, what's bound to happen when people get in over their heads.  

“Know Thyself” is my twelfth story for AHMM. The piece does a few things well (I hope!), including an ending scene that stayed with me. I need such things to run a piece through my rewrite gauntlet. In "Know Thyself," my amateur sleuth has been obsessing over a Plexiglas horse statue theft pulled under her nose. Finally, after a one-woman crusade, she gets a lesson in what matters more, rules or justice, and also in what matters most: belonging and knowing your home. It's a low-key moment in a comic mystery, but it brought the story together.

That ending might be a twist. It might not. The point is, I'm not worried about it. Stories don't need a twist. Stories need a pay-off, a sparkling revelatory note that readers can carry with them.  

Scaling Mount TBR

CC 2.0 2007 Evan Bench

Last year, I read 104 books, including audio and advanced review copies. I could make that number more impressive with the number of manuscripts I've edited. That job, by the way, is usually great fun as I get to see something before everyone else. But I don't count that. After all, it's work. It's why I don't review anymore. And while editing can be a chore at times, it's not cramming in a book to write three paragraphs.

But I read 104 books in 2022. I did it while writing under two pen names, working a fulltime job, and taking care of an ailing wife. For 2023, it's likely, but not guaranteed, I'll make 105. It's unlikely I'll read nearly as much in 2024. Why?

One of the reasons I used the lockdown to learn speed reading was to get more books in. I always believed a writer should read widely and much. Every so often, I'll come up with a list I want to get through, and those often take years. One list in particular drove this year's reading: Stephen King.

Yes, I've read Holly, unexpectedly added Storm of the Century (a screenplay, but it should have been a novel), yet skipped Faithful. (If it's not the Reds or the Indians/Guardians, I'm really not interested in baseball books.)

But to get King's canon finished this year - Fifteen years is long enough - I had to read twenty-five pages at a sitting. Hard to do during the day. Back when working at the office was a regular thing, I had to deal with interruptions: The coworker who took an open book as, "Oh, cool, you're not doing anything" and the needy manager who already sent me a Teams message and an email. (Pro tip: IT guys probably get it after the first email. Use Teams to follow up. Even a gregarious one such as me doesn't want to people much while working.) You sometimes have to steal time outside of breaks. And my wife thinks 5 PM is a hard deadline to stop work.

But I read Holly in sips. And while I devoured Rick Rubin's The Creative Act (like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, it's now an annual reread.), I'm going through Don Winslow's City of Dreams slowly. At 311 pages, I'd normally have this done in three or four days. I started it on Monday. The library already bugged me once I would need to return it or renew it.

So 2024 will probably see me read half as many books. But just as there are benefits to reading much and widely, there's a bonus to reading less and more slowly.

On some books, it cost me. I read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I loved. However, I also had the impression if I'd only read 10-15 pages in a sitting, maybe with fewer sittings, I'd have understood why that book made Harold Bloom's list from How to Read. (My problem with Bloom was how vocal he was about what he didn't like. It's like Star Wars fandom, only with classics and literary fiction. And I am so over Star Wars for that reason alone.) But I also don't remember much about A Midsummer Night's Dream. I can't remember the last crime fiction book I read, and it was only a month ago. And with editing, sometimes the manuscript blurs a little with whatever's on my end table at the moment. (Winslow is blurring with my current author, which actually put a smile on my face yesterday while working on it.)

But I sipped Holly. I'm sipping City of Dreams. By the time this publishes, I'll probably be into another Twain novel.

One thing that hasn't changed is audio. Audio imposes its own pace. And these days, I prefer audio to music in my headphones and in my car. My musical odyssey began with the Beatles, detoured into Deep Purple, and landed on jazz in recent years. I revisit the Beatles often, but good God, Purple has become fingernails on chalkboard to me. How many times can you listen to "Highway Star" before realizing you're a middle-aged man in a boring sedan? Detroit doesn't even build sedans anymore! So I listen to audio books. And I am an addict.

Audio has its own rotation: Non-fiction, fiction, banned book, and what I call “not Harold Bloom”. 2023 had spiritual books in it, which doubled the amount of ancient texts. (Side note: Those of your putting the holiest of your beliefs or apocryphal texts on audio need to hire better narrators. Some of them would have been more interesting if the guy didn't sound like he slept through it. It’s not reverent; it's just dull.) Ancient epics were the most fun. Star Trek’s Dominic Keating and the great Ian McKellan read The Iliad and The Odyssey respectively, and I found myself disappointed when both stories ended. Same with Beowulf, which I finished the night before writing this. The narrator was one I was unfamiliar with, but he was Irish, like translator Seamus Heaney. So even Heaney’s voice in an afterword came through.

I wondered if I was a freak of nature reading this many books. 104? 105? Once, getting to 100 was a badge of honor. But when it gets to be a chore, and you find yourself padding the list with a lot of filler, is it really useful or relaxing?

Reading should be in service to writing. It should also be relaxing (probably why I love audio so much.) When it becomes an obligation with no purpose or a time suck, then what's the point?

A Veterans' Day Speech Reposted

  Dear SleuthSayer faithful–it's that time of year again, with Veterans Day falling on a Saturday this year, I'm re-posting the following because, as always, it continues to be both timely and relevant. I look forward to a day when it may not actually be "timely."

Also, thanks all over again, to all of my fellow veterans, everywhere, for your service. And here we go:

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

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

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

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

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

But more on that in a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fraternity. 

A family.

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

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

That’s what being a veteran is.

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

See you in two weeks!

TATORT ("Crime Scene")

In my ongoing quest for something watchable, meaning a bingeable series – and preferably crime – I stumbled across Dresden Detectives, streaming on PBS Masterpiece.

Police procedural, of course, and (yes) German.  Not that much like an American or Brit show, though, even if the basic lineaments are familiar.  (I suspect that a goodly number of UK productions are made with an eye to export, to the US, or to Commonwealth countries, Australia and New Zealand, which return the favor.) In the case of Dresden Detectives, a crime occurs, and the cops show up, but after that, the rhythms shuffle and change pitch.  Not that it seems distinctly German, to my less-than-Europeanized ear and eye, but neither do they seem to be homogenizing it, or repackaging it for a different market. 

I noticed the same thing with Dahad, the Hindi cop show, and I liked the fact that it was unapologetically Indian in concept and execution.  These cross-cultural currents are interesting in and of themselves – although it obviously makes all the difference when the storyline, like Dahad, is compelling, as well.

Dresden Detectives is a team of two women, mid-thirties, working for Kripo, the equivalent of CID, who catch serious crime: the Murder Squad, essentially.  You get some domestic, single-mom stuff, but it’s mostly shop – more Barney Miller than Candice Renoir.  They work under an older, male supervisor, who’s stuck somewhere in the later Stone Age, which allows for some labored workplace chauvinism, played for laughs but unhappily unfunny, a trope that does feel German, to me.  My apologies, but I never got German cabaret humor; it always seemed underdone and overbearing, mockery at the expense of a captive audience.  On the other hand, the dynamic between the two women cops is quite genuine, sympathetic but competitive, a real sense of a work relationship that isn’t static.

As the series goes on, there’s thankfully less to the running joke that Schnabel, the senior cop, is a fool, or a Neanderthal.  The actor playing him was actually born in Dresden, in 1967, when it was still the DDR, East Germany.  The actresses who play the leads, in contrast, were both born in West Germany, but less than ten years before reunification.  Point being, that Schnabel, the character, would have spent his formative years – into his early twenties – under the East German regime of informers and toadies, and that’s when he would have joined the police.  This disconnect is a subtext to the show, any German viewer would realize it immediately and instinctively.

In other words, there’s a tension, here.  In spite of the lame office humor, and the more authentic shuck-and-jive going on between the two cops hitting the pavement, you can feel a kind of thickness in the air.  I don’t know how actually real the procedural stuff is.  I always thought German cops worked more hand-in-glove with prosecutors, and less independently, on the streets, but I could be wrong.  The cops also seem more diffident than I’d imagine they are in life, less sure of themselves.  Dramatic license?

Dresden Detectives is actually excerpted separate episodes from a larger, umbrella series called Tatort (or “Crime Scene,” in German), which has been running since 1970, if you can believe it.  This gives it longer legs by far than Law & Order, or even Gunsmoke, in this country.  Midsomer Murders, in the UK, has only been running since 1997, which makes it still in short pants. 

The overall conceit of Tatort is cop shows done on location in different German cities, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, West Berlin, Munich, and so on, produced by locals.  Everybody gets one, a dozen or more, and the locations themselves become a character in each story.  Austria and the German-language arm of Swiss TV got in on it, and it was a big enough hit that East Germany cloned it.  Now, since reunification, cities from the former East are part of the package, Dresden, Leipzig, and others.  At last count, there are some 1200 episodes of the show, and with a 90-minute runtime, they’re basically made-for-TV movies.

Dresden Detectives is running thirteen episodes on PBS Masterpiece, one of the Amazon Prime channels.  Tatort, the whole series, is available on MHz Choice, with Prime. 

Road Trip!

I insert myself into Hico.

I have a story due to an anthology editor by December 31. For the past several months, I have been writing and researching what I thought was a great story. Unfortunately, the more I wrote, the more the story read like a term paper with dialog; the more I researched, the more I realized the two ideas I was trying to merge mixed as well as oil and water.

This morning, Sunday, November 5, I threw in the towel. I needed a new concept, a new set of characters, a new setting, and a new plot. And that meant:

Road trip!

Several years ago, Temple and I discovered we could generate stories—sometimes just general concepts but more often rough plots with characters and important background details—while I drive and she takes notes. Sometimes the resulting story is primarily mine, sometimes it is primarily hers, but most often it is a healthy mix of both our ideas. When we return home, I enter her handwritten notes into a Word document and write the story.

Backroad driving is better for story generating than driving on interstate highways, and we live in a part of Texas where there are several interesting small towns within a one- to two-hour backroad drive.

(Our previous road trip generated two story ideas—one, our first official collaboration, for an anthology, and another that has no specific market in mind.)

But our road trips are for more than story generation. They allow us to unplug from the world around us, to avoid having household chores demand our attention, to escape the siren song of other distractions, and to stay connected to each other.

For this morning’s trip, we selected Hico, where we lunched at The Chop House in the Midland Hotel, walked around the shopping district, and then stopped for handmade chocolates at Wiseman House.

The result was an enjoyable day spent together, a story that should meet the anthology requirements while utilizing much of the research I’ve already done, and, as a bonus, this SleuthSayers post.

I call that a win.

My story “Spilt Milk” appears in the November/December issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

Later this week, I’m attending Crime Bake. If you see me there, please introduce yourself.

---

Life in the Fast Lane

You can’t exactly call a car an inanimate object, since you can use it to drive to San Francisco, or to the 7-Eleven, so clearly animated.  Though it’s not alive, not in the fashion of a German Shepard, goldfish or your Uncle Lou. 

I grew up in a car family, imbedded in a surrounding car culture, in the 1950s and 60s.  My father worked hard at his job, maintained our house, and worked on cars, to the exclusion of everything else.  To us, cars were no less creatures who lived with us than our various dogs and cats, and to a lesser degree, the children.  Our cars had names and the tradition was honored by my friends as well, so I spent satisfying time in Alice Blue, the Blue Max (no relation), Vinnie the Volkswagen, Dudley the Dodge, The Silver Goose, the Silver Queen (also no relation), Mr. B (my car) and Tootles, my mother’s name for her 1947 Plymouth which she drove fast enough to frighten Mario Andretti. 

    We all fixed our own cars in those days.  You only consulted a mechanic in the direst of straights.  And they needed a lot of fixing.  I had to change the spark plugs and distributor points on Mr. B on a regular basis, replace brake shoes and pads, and attend to the constant disintegration of exhaust systems, batteries, carburetors, starter motors, solenoids, and rocker panels, which I patched with sheet metal salvaged from an old refrigerator.

Safety was never a consideration.  Seat belts had yet to be required, and occasionally slamming your head into the dashboard was considered encouragement to improve your driving skills. 

I don’t remember learning to drive, since my brother and I had hurled whatever junkers were cast about the house through the trails and fields of our neighborhood from the time we were tall enough to look out the windshield. 

    What does all this have to do with writing, the mission of this blog?  When I created Sam Acquillo, my first and most enduring protagonist, I gave him a 1967 Pontiac Grand Prix, an impossibly oversized and stupidly over-powered hunk of Detroit iron, because that was the type of car I was raised on.  It was an obvious thing to do.  I made his father a mechanic (like mine, though my dad was an Ivy League graduate and corporate executive, which did nothing to dilute his thuggish devotion to internal combustion, in his cars and himself.) 

I’m sure you can be a male American mystery writer and never include a dumb car in the narrative, but not if you’re from my world.  It’s as essential as a divorced spouse  or an everyday bartender. 

Cars today are serenely smooth, quiet and efficient.  They are computers with engines attached, and I don’t know the first thing about fixing them.  The average minivan could probably smoke a souped up ’67 Mustang off the line, but there’s something missing.  I’ve had a string of Audis, and some have sparkled with personality, including the two aging versions my wife and I still cling to.  The Subaru that’s now my everyday ride is even more refined, and I love it, but it’s too good.  There’s no rattle and roll, no coughing start, no deafening wind noise, errant squeaks or intermittent, mysterious surges of power.  There’s a big digital screen filled with functionality I’ve barely scratched, ways to drive without holding the steering wheel, a four-cylinder turbo-charged engine (four-cylinder?!) that leaps from green lights, and constant reminders to behave in a more responsible and socially conscious manner.

In other words, entirely tamed.  And taming.  We’re better off for it, but I’m grateful that I got to live in the Wild West of unfettered, lethal and exhilarating car-crazy abandon, when I was too young to know how lethal, and too lucky to suffer any permanent harm. 

Prohibition Peepers part 3 — How to create closed captions

0085 00:03:48.800 --> 00:03:51.200
  Leigh, let’s wrap our slideshow how-to
  discussion talking about closed captions.

  Leigh, let’s wrap our slideshow how-to  
discussion talking about closed captions. 

0086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225
  Sure, why not?

 Sure, why not? 

Closed Captioning

We return with the final how-to tutorial of creating a slideshow for Michael Bracken’s Prohibition Peepers. I doubted any of the tens of trailer viewers would rely upon subtitles, but I wished to expand my skills working within a non-critical environment I could share with you. This is largely technical, so feel free to read more interesting essays by my colleagues.

Subtitles include a multiplicity of flavors and formats. They presently have no one standard, nor even a mere two or three.  The most common kind is .srt, which stands for SubRip. I chose to work with its close cousin, Web Video Text Track. The .vtt format is newer, more featured, and natively supported by the HTML5 standard. It also uses the decimal point standard found in most English-speaking countries.

Subtitles can be married to videos in three different ways: physically separate files, embedding, and burning. YouTube and smart television programs can work with multiple files, usually bearing the same name but different suffixes:

ThePrisoner.mp4

ThePrisoner.srt

ThePrisoner.vtt

You might also see files for languages and variants, say, British and American English, French and Canadian français, Cuban and Mexican español. File names may be labeled like this:

ThePrisoner.en-UK.vtt	ThePrisoner.fr-FR.vtt	ThePrisoner.es-CU.vtt
ThePrisoner.en-US.vtt	ThePrisoner.fr-CA.vtt	ThePrisoner.es-MX.vtt

Burning Questions

Once you’ve created a closed caption file, then what? Depending upon your target platform, you may have three choices.

1. Associating Files

If you use a computer to peek closely at a movie DVD or a downloaded smart television movie, you’ll find numerous files. These include the movie itself in one or many segments, perhaps a preview, sound tracks in one or more languages, and closed caption files also in one or more languages. Separate files permit the viewer to adjust synchronization of sight and sound. YouTube also works with multi-file uploads, so I separately uploaded the slide show video and CC files, which YouTube accepted without complaint.

2. Embedding

Still curious, still expanding, I went beyond uploading multiple files to YouTube. I used an embed technique to create standalone videos, i.e, combined video and captions in a single .mp4 file. Videographers can embed subtitles with iMovie, independent apps like Shutter Encoder, or a web site that combines closed caption files with movie files. This results in a nice and convenient single file for viewers.

3. Burning

You may also see mention of ‘burning’, not to be confused with making DVDs. This method permanently overlays video images with text; that is, subtitles become an unalterable part of the picture. Only two advantages come to mind, (a) aiming for older platforms that don’t support closed captions, or (b) control over how subtitles look independent of the player.

Excelling

Throughout the audio/video process, I relied on spreadsheets in several ways. I used Excel for odds and ends like building an authors list, preparing scenes and maintaining the script, but spreadsheets turned out to be a key tool for closed captions.

Although the .srt format is older and therefore more common, the .vtt format has a distinct advantage for North Americans, Britons, Swiss, Asians, and Oceanians. We use a dot ‘.’ as a decimal point and a comma ‘,’ to visually group digits. Most of Europe, Africa, and South America do the opposite.

This quirk arises in subtitle files. A primary difference is .srt uses decimal commas and .vtt uses decimal points. More significantly, the English version of Excel understands the decimal dot, which means it works nicely with .vtt files.

In theory, we could work with a default time format, but a slight modification provides finer time codes. Select Custom from Excel’s number format window and use either of these format codes:

hh:mm:ss.000

or

hh:mm:ss.000;@

Thus, a one hour, twenty-three and three quarter minute time code might look like:

01:23:45.678

Nitty-Gritty

Closed caption files are plain text that can be opened in TextEdit, BBedit, WordPad, and so on. For the most part, white space consisting of blanks, tabs, and single lines of code are all treated the same. The following are equivalent:

86
0086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225
Sure, why not?

00086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225 Sure, why not?

Each of these is called a cue. Each cue is separated by a double-spaced blank line. Leading zeroes can be omitted, including the hour:

86 3:52.0 --> 3:53.23 Sure, why not?

Subtitles can be positioned on the screen, and they can be formatted with common HTML codes and CSS. I didn’t have a need for the latter, but I used HTML <i>italics</I> in a few places.

Down and Dirty

Some high-end programs and web sites offer audio-to-text timelines– usually for a fee– to build closed caption files. I wasn’t impressed and since my project was small, I stepped through the video and made notes the old-fashioned way– by hand.

In addition to the formatting above, the rules are straightforward. Obviously, the ending time of a cue must come later than the beginning. Likewise, each start time has to be greater or equal to the start time of the previous cue.

Although rarely used, the rules allow for cues to overlap or persist on-screen. That could be useful when off-screen action can be heard but not seen.

A number of closed caption apps can be found on-line, most still using the .srt format. If you happen to use one of these and want .vtt, you may be able to selectively scan-replace decimal commas with decimal points.

Try to save your captions as a .vtt file, but you may find it safer to save as a .txt file and rename it.

ThePrisoner.txt

➨

ThePrisoner.vtt

Adding closed captions is easier than it sounds. Consider it for your next video. And be sure to pick up a copy or two of Prohibition Peepers for Christmas.

More information follows.

Hitchcock and Sherlock

  

Like many of our readers here at SleuthSayers, I love short stories. I love reading them and writing them, and I've been doing both for a long time. Writing shorts, for me, started thirty years ago--I submitted my first stories in late 1993--and even then I leaned toward mystery/crime stories. I also wrote some westerns, science fiction, etc.--and still do--but I especially like mysteries. 

I won't get into a lot of things about markets and marketing, but I will mention that two of my stories have appeared in the past few weeks in two of my favorite mystery publications: Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. AHMM, as most of you know, has been around since the 1950s and publishes once every two months, and SHMM started out maybe a dozen years ago and publishes irregularly--but both have been good to me and both have editors I like and admire. 

My story in AHMM (Nov/Dec 2023 issue) is "The Zeller Files," and is different in a couple of ways from what I usually write. This story is a mix of two genres--crime and science fiction. It's about a guy named Eddie Zeller, who once survived an alien abduction and was told by his captors that they would return for him someday. When he and his wife Lisa discover that another couple supposedly kidnapped in the past by these same otherworldly beings have recently moved to the town where the Zellers live, Eddie fears that these alien forces might be gathering all the onetime abductees together so they can again be taken, in one swoop--and maybe this time for more than just observation and release. There is also a crime involved, and there's a fair amount of the chasing and zapping and paranoia that you usually find in an X-Files kind of story.

The second difference about this particular tale is that it's one of only a few stories I've sold that were set during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the characters wearing masks and avoiding crowds and dealing with a whole different kind of paranoia. I think both these oddities made the story more fun to write, and--who knows?--might've been what appealed to the editor. At any rate, I was grateful but surprised when AHMM bought it.

The other story is "The Three Little Biggs," in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine (Issue #32). Its a little different also, from my usual, but it's on the other end of the spectrum from the AHMM story. "The Zeller Files" is longish (5600 words), it's more SF than mystery, it's sort of intense, it's set in the (recent) past, it has only a few characters, and it's a standalone story. "Biggs" is short (900 words), it's a whodunit, it's lighthearted, it's present-day, it has a lot of characters, and it's a series story. In fact it's the umpteenth installment of what I long ago started calling my "Law and Daughter" mysteries, featuring small-town sheriff Lucy Valentine and her bossy mother Frances. 

In this story, Lucy and Fran investigate the strange death of wealthy rancher Elijah Biggs, whose three weird offspring have gathered at the ranch to celebrate his birthday and found his dead body instead. There's a lot of inheritance-squabbling between the siblings in this story (I told a friend last week that it's a bad-heir-day mystery), and if you read it I hope you'll find that the solution fits Aristotle's famous description of endings that are "both unexpected and inevitable."

Quick questions. Everyone reading this probably knows about AHMM, but are all of you familiar with Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine? (It's a publication of Wildside Press and the editor is Carla Coupe.) Have any of you submitted stories to them, or been published there? If so, have you found them easy to work with? Please let me know in the comments. I really like the magazine, I've had a number of stories published there over the years, and I hope it'll be around for many more.

How could anyone resist two magazines with those names in their titles?

Coming attraction: In two weeks my friend Josh Pachter will be here to tell you about his--and several of our--experiences with a new short-fiction market called Storia.

See you then.