My Five Favourite Comedies of All Time – A Christmas Week List!

Many people know I got my start writing stand-up, which morphed into a syndicated humour column, which morphed into the kind of fiction I write now (generally off-the-wall capers, progressing to slightly more respectable loopy mysteries.)

John Floyd's column on sequels in movies had me thinking and rethinking my 'desert isle' list.  That is, if I could only take 5 movies with me to a desert isle, what would they be?

And of course, they would be comedies.  Christmas week is always the time I re-watch my favourite comedies.

(Aside:  I have 'desert isle' lists for almost everything - crime books, literary books, classical music, rock music, cocktails, beer, desserts - yes, of course you need desserts on a desert isle, darling. This is my desert isle, and I can design it the way I want.) 

But back to comedy movies.  I'm looking here for movies with sustained comedy, as opposed to popular rom-coms that have a scene or two that are memorable.  

Here is my list of the best of the best, from someone who has made their career in comedy.  Note that many of these are British.  I am not (I'm Canadian) but my dad was.  This possibly explains my own style of writing (which seems perfectly normal to me, but apparently others consider wacky.)

With that in mind, I hope some of these are new to you. I envy you if you haven't seen these before!  You are in for a treat.

1.  The Wrong Box

How can you go wrong with a cast like this?  Dudley Moore, John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Peter Cook, Peter Sellers...  Add in the best hearse chase scene ever imagined (with horse-drawn hearses).  I don't want to give it away, but when a box containing money gets mixed up with a box containing a statue, which gets mixed up with a box containing the dead body of the Bournemouth strangler... The Salvation Army women are just a scream.  I could quote lines, but you'd have to see it to appreciate it.  Let me just say... "This is Julia Finsbury...soon to become...Julia Finsbury!"  (final scene - an absolute hoot.)

This is my favourite movie of all time.

 

2. The Pink Panther

This was the first adult comedy I saw as a kid, and I love it even today.  It may have inspired my own reverse-robberies in The Goddaughter's Revenge.  How can you not giggle at the fancy dress ball, the apes, the crazy car chase, the marvelous thwarted seduction scene with the champagne exploding under the covers...

And Peter Sellers with Capucine. Sellers at his very best, and with her serene classiness, Capucine was made for the part. 

 

3.  A Shot in the Dark

The sequel to The Pink Panther, and many (like my friend John) would say the better movie.  I adore both.

Mike (husband) says I am unusual in that I like guy humour.  Well, if this is guy humour, he's dead on, because the scene of Peter Sellers holding the 'strategic' guitar at the nudist camp always has me giggling. 

 

4.  The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming

Can you tell this movie had a Canadian in the pilot seat?  I can't imagine how subversive this movie must have seemed at the time, in the midst of the cold war.  Alan Arkin is magic as the Russian submarine lieutenant charged with leading a small group of Russian sailors on a rescue mission through hick town USA. Again, I point to the dialogue.  Pure gold.

Tommy (accusing his dad):  "Yer a trader!"

Mom:  "That's traitor, Tommy, traitor."

 

5.   Here we have a dilemma.

I lean towards giving the no. 5 spot to Some Like It Hot, with strong honorable mentions to The Producers, We're No Angels, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Support your local Gunfighter, and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Okay, I may need a bigger island.

What are your favourites?  I'd like to hear.  Are any of these new to you?  Let me know if you watch them and appreciate them (or like me, love them to death.)

---

Melodie Campbell is the author of 18 novels, 60 short stories and over 200 humour columns. She spent a lot of time in the corner at school, as a kid.  Soon to come...

A Connecticut Yankee In Jim's TBR Stack

 I spent 15 years going through Stephen King's canon, skipping a few screenplays and Faithful, as I am not invested enough in the two baseball teams I grew up on, let alone the Red Sox. Why so long? For starters, life. I got divorced twice during this process, I changed jobs three times in that period of my life. My current wife had a catastrophic health crisis a few years ago. And, dude, I write. I may not sell much, but I write. Also, King writes. A lot. Sixty-five novels and novellas, plus two hundred short stories. And he's still writing. 

But now that we're down to a leisurely 1-3 books a year by Maine's most celebrated writer, whose canon am I going through now?

That would be one Samuel Langhorne Clemens from Hannibal, MO, and later of Hartford, CT. AKA Mark Twain. One of my first buys on Kindle was a collection of all his novels, short stories, and essays. I focused on the books. I also began reading in earnest when I read his massive and deliberately chaotic autobiography. I just now finished the books. I still have the short stories and essays to go through and bought three print books: Letters from Hawaii (compiled by his request after his death by Albert Bigelow, his editor and responsible for the earliest and shortest iteration of his autobiography), The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, and Short Stories and Tall Tales. These last three I will read in the new year. 

So how was reading Twain different from King? Well, for starters, horror isn't Twain's bag. He can write a scary story, but that's not what he's about. Also, King seems embarrassed to do non-fiction. Twain shines at it. I find his travelogues much more interesting than his novels. Yes, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are brilliant and the classics they deserve to be. But Recollections of Joan of Arc is actually better. And the later novels, a pair of Tom Sawyer sequels clearly written for a quick buck and A Horse's Tale, aren't quite as good. Twain, like any writer, is at his best when he wants to. That's probably why the three volume brick stack that is his autobiography is so readable. It's disjointed, so you can pretty much pick up anywhere, and it's your favorite uncle spinning stories. And even when Huck narrates, which he does in dialect, there's no character voice. It's Twain telling the story. 

But the essays, many of which are in early form in the autobiography, are Twain's bread and butter. Twain left home and became a reporter. If he were around today, he'd have a travel blog (and no doubt a YouTube channel: Sammy C Travels the World.) It's what makes Old Times of the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator so engaging. 

The shorts, of course, play right into this. I tried to read Mark Twain's Library of Humor, which featured many humorists of his time. I wasn't laughing. One can say it was the product of the times, but that doesn't obligate me to like what the others wrote. I also find Boston-area puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards unreadable, and I was forced to study him in high school. (Hawthorne pretty much made a career out of skewering that culture.) It was the times he wrote.

I read Twain in parallel with King before I focused on finishing his canon. Unlike King, there have been no new Twain stories or works since Volume III of his autobiography debuted in 2015. So while King has work in the pipeline (and probably will not slow down should he die soon), Twain is pretty much complete.

So, who's replacing Twain as the author whose canon I'm working through? I'm about halfway through William Shakespeare. So once I've read the short stories, I'll be averaging a play a month. However, as someone recently commented in my post about The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare is meant to be watched, not read. (The sonnets notwithstanding.) So, in 2025, I plan to watch one Shakespeare play a week, which will take less than a year.

Welcome to the Dirty 30s

Recent statement cropping up on a lot of social media about the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare Insurance over some other social media posts lionizing Luigi Mangione:

"A healthy society doesn't lionize vigilante killers. 

But we don't live in a healthy society."

My response:  Really?  We don't lionize?  Kyle Rittenhouse leaps to mind.  I remember members of a certain party saying, "I want him to be my Senator", and urging him to run for office, even though he took a semiautomatic rifle (a Smith & Wesson M&P 15) out of state (from Illinois to Wisconsin) to a BLM riot. Seventeen year olds don't do that unless they're looking to shoot someone and he did. Daniel Penny, just acquitted for using excessive force in killing a homeless mentally ill man who was yelling at people on a subway, was taken to the Army & Navy game where he sat with President Elect Trump, VP Elect Vance, and Elon Musk.  Seems a little like lionizing to me...  Not to mention the long, tragic, on-going tradition of lynching.  

Here in America, it's all about who gets vigilanteed. And it's assumed that some people are untouchable. And we all know that.

BUT – The simple truth is that there comes a point where the "common man" has had enough of being ripped off and used, and... crap happens. Let's use the Way-Back Machine and go to the Great Depression (1929-1939), when the most common folk heroes were bank robbers. 

A little history first:  The banks in the Roaring Twenties had invested a tremendous amount of money - too much money, most of their customers' money - in the roaring stock market.  So when the stock market crashed, they closed, a polite term for went bust, collapsed, went bankrupt.  And as those banks failed, people tried to withdraw all their money from both the collapsing and surviving banks, which only made things worse.  Banks liquidated loans and other assets.  800 banks in 1930, 2100 in 1931, 9000 by 1933.  

And there was no FDIC - which was created by FDR and which federally insures our deposits to this day - so if a bank failed, people who had any money in those banks lost it all, with no hope of getting it back.

MY NOTE:  Certain people in the post-January 20, 2025 world want to abolish the FDIC because...  reasons...  No history, but "reasons"...

Meanwhile, there were a lot of small rural banks which were unregulated. (Again, times have changed.) They'd grown up after WW1, when the world needed a lot of corn and cotton.  As farmers bought more land, real estate went up.  As real estate went up, farmers took out more loans. As the economy tanked, these banks called in their loans, but farmers didn't have the money.  And the Dust Bowl hit - the "Dirty Thirties", which was a severe drought (up to 8 years in some areas) exacerbated by "deep plowing" which led to soil erosion. Crops failed. No money. Result?  Foreclosures, foreclosures, and more foreclosures.  The banks took the farms, booted out the farmers, and then sold the land at a nice profit to someone else - anyone else.  

The result was that about 3.5 million people left the Great Plains - 86,000 moved to California the first year - trying to find a place and a way to live.  They weren't welcomed with open arms. They were called "Okies" and "Arkies" and treated as subhuman. (Is any of this sounding familiar?)  

Anyway, all of these people - and more - blamed the banks for taking their land.  They hated the banks.  And so when various armed gangsters started robbing banks, they became folk heroes. It didn't matter that they often killed people during their robberies. Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd (who allegedly destroyed mortgage documents when he robbed a bank), and many more were heroes, because they were fighting back against the filthy banks that had taken everything the common people had. They even (sometimes) gave (some) money away, just often enough to make them Robin Hoods in the public eye.

And these modern day Robin Hoods / folk heroes showed up, in legends and ballads like Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, which included "Tom Joad", "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues". 

They also showed up in the serious literature of the day:  John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (published in 1939) Ma Joad told her son Tom Joad about Pretty Boy Floyd: 

"I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks. He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be…He done a bad thing an' they hurt 'im, caught 'im an' hurt him so he was mad, an' the nex' bad thing he done was mad, an' they hurt 'im again. An' purty soon he was mean-mad. They shot at him like a varmint an' he shot back, an' then they run him like a coyote, an' him a-snappin' an' a-snarlin’, mean as a lobo. An' he was mad. He wasn’t a boy or a man no more, he was just a walkin' chunk of mean-mad. But the folks that knowed him didn' hurt 'im. He wasn' mad at them. Finally then run him down and killed 'im. No matter what they say it in the paper how he was bad – that’s how it was."

When it came out, The Grapes of Wrath became a bestseller that was banned and burned in many states, but also read voraciously.  And it won the Pulitzer Prize.  

Bonnie & Clyde, of course, got the full movie treatment, more than once - 1967's Bonnie & Clyde (directed by Sam Peckinpah) is the most famous. And there are a lot of songs written about them:  

Merle Haggard's "Bonnie & Clyde" (Link)

And here's one, in French, sung by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot.

And you can read Bonnie Parker's own account of their career in "The Trail's End" Here.

Meanwhile, John Dillinger probably has the most movies made about him.  Lot of people have sung about him, written about him (William Burroughs loved him and hoped he was still alive), and played him in the movies...  

The only folk hero (so far) who beats him is Jesse James.  I think Jesse James is proof that bank robbers have never been that unpopular among the "common man".  When I was a little girl, my grandmother would sing "Jesse James" to me as a treat.  I'll never forget her wavering voice singing the refrain, "The dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave."  You could tell where her sympathies lay.  Here it is, sung by Johnny Cash:  

BTW, in case you're thinking that this is a grim message for the day after Christmas, you need to read more Dickens.  First of all, Ebenezer Scrooge would be an obvious target for a folk hero's bullet - and was threatened with an ignominious death by the deceased Jacob Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Future.  And then there's Dickens' The Chimes, so bleak it makes Cormac McCarthy look cheerful. Yes, Dickens does supply the mandatory happy ending, but until then... it's a treatise on the ultimate result of Victorian economic theory and practice (pay the poor the absolute minimum and step on any of them who objects), and a legal system designed to eliminate the poor the hard way (lock them up if they don't starve first). This fun read for the holidays is available for free here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/653/653-h/653-h.htm

Or you could just take a walk down some of the poorer streets of your city... Talk to some of the elderly who are working at hardscrabble jobs to make ends meet, because their Social Security isn't enough. To some of the working class parents, both of them working two jobs to pay for everything, and always falling behind. To that woman, living in her car because she lost her job, the bank foreclosed, and she still can't figure out how it all happened so fast. To the elderly man who divorced his wife, not because he doesn't love her, but because she's in a dementia ward, and the only way to keep her there is to let the nursing home take all the money, while he lives in a little apartment on his Social Security and works one of those hardscrabble jobs to keep himself alive. To the family of the teenager who got meningitis/encephalitis and was in the hospital for almost a year and got smacked with $1 million in debt...  And that was AFTER a chunk of it was forgiven by the hospital...  

The #1 reason for bankruptcy in this country (66.5%) is medical debt.  

Sooner or later, something's gonna give.  

Jesse Walters, "United Health"

Deadly Tropics

The search goes on, for something watchable.  Ghosts, on CBS, streaming on Prime, is terrifically charming (and very light), and I’m not the only one to think so.  A wide circle of my friends, a group with widely divergent tastes, are smitten with it.  I’m also much taken with The Musketeers, although I aired some of my grievances in a Substack column a couple of weeks ago.  But more narrowly, looking in the genre of criminal enterprise, I’ve been toggling back and forth between BritBox, Acorn, and MHz – I only allow myself one subscription at a time.

Shetland is back, Season 9.  Blue Lights kind of lost me, in the second season, I don’t quite know why.  Scott & Bailey ran five years, and I wish there were more: I could watch Amelia Bullmore in damn near anything.  Troppo left me cold, even with Thomas Jane.  I took a flyer on The Jetty, because Jenna Coleman, how could you not?  (I was a huge fan of Victoria, which is admittedly a royal soap, but I thought it was more engaging than The Crown.)  The Jetty collapses of its own weight, as it telegraphs every beat of its glaringly familiar reveals.  Sorry. 

I’m pleased, therefore, to give you Deadly Tropics.  (Not a great title, and the original, Tropiques Criminels, isn’t any better; you wonder why imagination failed.  They could have called it Martinique Heat – almost anything would be better, to draw an initial audience.)  What the series very definitely is not, is a French knock-off of Death in Paradise, to which it’s been compared.  Just for openers, Tropics is nowhere near as annoying.  Paradise, which I’ve continued to watch faithfully (even through the ghastly Kris Marshall years), depends on a repetitive trope, and let’s be honest, fatigue sets in.  Deadly Tropics is much more of a policier, and strains credulity a lot less.  I could do without the exasperated male superior, mopping his brow and fretting that les femmes will embarrass him, but nothing’s perfect.  Baseline.  New commanding officer sent to Martinique from Paris to take over the homicide squad.  (Her former husband’s a bent cop, and she shouldn’t be tarred with his brush, but she is.)  Resistance from her ranking junior officer, also a woman, with radically different approach to policing.  Blah-blah.  New girl actually born on the island, but left as a child; has lots of family there, but doesn’t speak Creole, doesn’t really know the culture, although she herself is black.  The local woman cop - who, as it happens, is white - is a lot less structured in her methods, as relate to work, and her personal life.  This is mostly window-dressing, because the team manages fine, after some early missteps.

In other words, the show starts with a concept, and then essentially discards it.  There’s a genuine chemistry between the leads, Sonia Rolland and Béatrice de la Boulaye, and the scripts are spry and tight.  The scenery is lush, the locations feel authentic, the politics and so on seem to fit.  I don’t know from sex tourism, or the music scene, say, but it all has a gloss of reality.  As with Candice Renoir, the police procedures may or may not be exact, but you get a strong sense of the Caribbean, just as Candice gives you the Mediterranean influence.

The mysteries themselves aren’t taxing, but they’re not formula.  About half the time, you can guess it’s the dad, or the ex, or the plastic surgeon.  The storylines play fair, and they aren’t gimmicked.  I’ll settle for plain old GBH, and a garden-variety blunt instrument.

Joyeux Noël!

Making Fictional Fodder from Emotional Wounds

What better thing to think about on the day after Festivus, in the hours before Hanukkah begins, and on Christmas Eve Day–all holidays that many people spend with family–than childhood emotional wounds. Often inflicted by family, of course. They can be terrible for kids and the adults they become. But for crime writers, they are gifts bundled in tissue paper and boxed with ribbons and bows, waiting to be unwrapped.

Do you enjoy reading or watching How The Grinch Stole Christmas?

There wouldn't be much to the story if the Grinch weren't a terrible being. He wouldn't sneak into the homes of the Whovians and steal their tinsel, toys, and trees if something hadn't happened to him to cause him to be so terrible. He wouldn't abuse his poor dog Max and tell little Cindy-Lou Who that he was Santa Claus if he didn't have an emotional wound driving him. Yes, yes, I know. Some have said that maybe he is so grinchy because his shoes are too tight or because his heart is two sizes too small. But how did his heart come to be so small?

I bet back in his childhood someone was mean to him. Maybe other kids. Maybe someone in his family. Maybe both. Bad for the Grinch and bad for the Whovians and bad for dear old Max, but for readers of the Dr. Seuss classic, the Grinch's emotional wound is pure gold. It drives the Grinch's actions and it gives him room to grow. A character arc in a half hour? Oh, yes, dear reader. The Grinch proves it can be done. Short story authors, take note.

Festivus pole

It isn't much,
but then again,
neither is Festivus.

© Matthew Keefe

The Seinfeld episode “The Strike” also shows how childhood emotional wounds can be wonderful entertainment fodder. This is the episode about Festivus. If young George Costanza had not been forced each December 23^rd to listen to his father detail his grievances, if George had not been raised in a home without a Christmas tree but with a tinsel-less aluminum pole–tinsel is distracting, you know–if George had not had to participate in the Feats of Strength each year, he might not have grown up to be a man who claims to make donations to a fake charity he created in order to get out of giving Christmas gifts.

Sure, you may be thinking, even without Festivus, George would have been doomed to become an extremely flawed adult because he grew up with Frank and Estelle as his parents. But that just shows the depth of his emotional wounds. Thanks to the suffering he experienced as a child–and yes, as an adult–TV viewers got to enjoy nine years of a complex, flawed character who drove many amusing storylines, even the ones that ultimately were about nothing. And viewers still can enjoy them, thanks to the wonders of syndication.

One of my stories that was published this year involves a man, Ethan, who suffered childhood emotional wounds at the hands of his father, and like with the Grinch and George Costanza, those wounds plague him to this day. Ethan can practically hear his father whispering in his ear whenever he doesn't measure up to some ingrained standard. Then he seeks refuge in his favorite comfort food. When that coping mechanism becomes unavailable, adult Ethan acts out. His childhood emotional wounds drive the man and thus the action in the story. Want to know more? You can read this story, “A Matter of Trust,” on my website by clicking here. It isn't funny like many of my stories, but I hope readers find it compelling.

Happy holidays and happy new year to you all. May you reach January without any new emotional wounds. The ones you writers have are likely more than enough.

Writing Advice from 1908, Part 2

Last Wednesday I offered you some words of wisdom from Writing the Short-Story by J. Berg Esenwein.  Published in 1908, it was one of the first creative writing manuals. Here are some more of his tips, useful or otherwise.

* "As a character the detective cannot be much more than a dummy.  That is, his individuality cannot be brought out in a single short-story, except by a few bold strokes of delineation; but when he figures in a series of stories, as does Sherlock Holmes, the reader at length comes to know him quite well."

* "The novel is expansive, the short-story intensive."

* Sir Walter Scott said that "in nature herself no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes, would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas -- whoever trusted to imagination, would soon find his own mind circumscribed, and contracted to a few favorite images."

* "Wise is that writer who patiently awaits the hour of full-coming before attempting to write."

* Esenwein says there are three main streams of fiction. He does not do a great job of explaining them or giving adequate examples but here you go: Realism (which "paints men as they are" and in which he suggests the author should not express a point of view), Romanticism (such as Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King,"), and Idealism (which expresses the world as the author wishes it was, such as "A Christmas Carol.")

*"Must I typewrite my story? You need not, but you ought to.." 

* There are  many ways to tell a story. "Another variation is that in which a minor character tells of the deeds of his enemy, who is nevertheless the central figure in the story." 

* "A hackneyed device is to tell the story in the first person after having introduced the speaker by a second person, who really thus reports the story 'as it is told to me.' You may be sure of two things in this connection: a story begun in this style must possess unusual merit to offset the triteness of its introduction; and, it is a hard task to convince the reader that you could not have plunged into the story in the first person direct, relying upon the opening sentences to set the scene.  Still, if you can do it exquisitely, go ahead.  No rule in art is so good but that it may well be broken by a master stroke." I point out that Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" was written a decade earlier.

* "All things must be looked at with an eye to their possible literary use."

* "Many an unwary author has slipped on the simple matter of forgetting that it takes time to travel here, there, and back again; that people normally get older with the lapse of years; and that events must be consistent with the procession of the seasons."

* "Wit deals with externals, humor seeks out the heart; wit consorts with contempt, scorn and hate; humor abides with friendship, benevolence and love; wit holds folly up to darting ridicule, humor looks with gentle sympathy upon weakness."

* "In the mystery story the author should begin early to set his wires so that with a single pull the whole house of bafflement may come tumbling down before our eyes, at a glance disclosing the secret. In the short-story the mystery must be less complex than the novel, hence the uncovering of the secret will require less time. But if I knew how to hold a breathless mystery up to the last moment and then disclose it all in a trice, I could not -- and perhaps would not if I could -- impart it to others.  This is the very incommunicable heart of the plotter's craft."

Some Previous Owners

* "The use of quotation marks does not convert a passage into dialogue." - Arlo Bates

* Could a story have two reasonable but different endings?  Robert  Louis Stevenson: "The whole tale is implied; I never use an effect when I can help ir, unless it prepare the effects that are to follow; that's what a story consists in. To make another end; that is to make the beginning all wrong... The body and end of a short-story is bone of the bone and blood of the bone of the beginning."

* Character's "speech must show not so much what they say as what they are." 

Near the end Esenwein lists "One hundred representative stories."  I had read eight of them (e.g. Bret Harte "The Outcasts of Poker Flat"), heard of 39 other authors, (e.g. Rudyard Kipling "The Man Who Was") and was completely unfamiliar with the rest. Such is fame, or my ignorance.

Thanks again to Mary Lou Condike for giving me much to think about.

Scrooge McGrinch and the Four Elves (a Christmas Puzzle)

E. Scrooge McGrinch

In the hour before the sun peeked around the mountain, a green, green figure clumped up the hill, dysphoria washing over him yet again. Scrooge McGrinch felt misunderstood. His shrink explained he suffered from hereditary hormonal imbalance, festiphobia (a fear of holidays) and affluenza (a love of money). As the 7^th generation following the historic marriage of Ebenezer Scrooge Jr and Ethylene Glycol MacGrinch, his skin still bore the same pigment as an eight-dollar bill.

[For our vast audience of molecular biologists, see DAT1, DRD2, and SOD1-/- in ‘Condition Green’, Morley et al, JAM, 2022.]

Then he heard a racket, a cacophony of four voices, and his spirits leaped in joy. Off the trail, caught in an avalanche of snow, were wedged his sworn nemeses, a quartet of bratty elves who made his pitiful life miserable.

Four Awful Elves

Boozy, Doozy, Floozy, and Woozy had awakened at 4:30, giggling and chuckling. The lads chortled at the notion of joyriding the village’s most recent resident, Bolderdash, understudy for the nine celebrity reindeer. In the dark of the mudroom, they pulled on boots, mittens, and stocking caps. Emboldened by a generous slug of wintergreen schnapps, they headed toward the barns.

Bolderdash was not thrilled to be shaken and awakened when a bridle slipped over his nose. The brightly lit factory and rail yard swarmed with activity at that early hour, so the jackanapes led their captive reindeer into the dark before climbing aboard.

They cantered down the tracks of the Polar Express and galloped into the night. At the edge of the plateau near Kringle International Airport, a landing FedEx cargo plane zoomed overhead, startling Bolderdash. He balked. He had had enough. In a fit of pique, he bucked and skidded to a halt at the edge of a precipice.

Four little figures flew over a cliff and landed up to their chins in deep snow, fortunate they didn’t set off an avalanche. They found themselves trapped in cold white stuff, unable to move. Meantime, Bolderdash sulkily stalked back to the barns, hoping for a little more sleep before roll call.

The Problem and the Proposal

A half hour passed until Scrooge McGrinch stumbled upon the naughty elves. He said, “You… You in the red hat. What are you miscreants doing?”

The elves appeared confused. Two wore red hats and two wore green hats. “In the dark, O Verdant One, we grabbed toques without noticing the colors. None of us can see what we’re wearing.”

“You brats wear colorful hats, but you don’t know the hue, do you?” said McGrinch. “Let’s play a little game.”

Scrooge McGrinch wasn’t a mean man… Well, okay, he was mean in multiple senses of the word, but he wasn’t entirely heartless. Following a modicum of smug enjoyment, he said, “If anyone can figure out the color cap you’re wearing, I’ll rush to Ski Patrol to dig you out, else I’ll call your parents and they won’t be happy.”

The elves shivered. “We’ll give it a try, Your Viridescence.”

McGrinch grimaced. “Fine. Here are the rules.”

The Puzzle

1. Four elves in a row are immovably buried up to their chins in snow.
2. Their names and positions are Boozy₁, Doozy₂, Floozy₃, and Woozy₄.
3. Two wear red hats, two wear green, but no elf knows what color he wears.
4. Each elf can see only the elf or elves directly ahead.
5. Woozy is separated by an impenetrable snowdrift.
6. None can glimpse their own hat, nor do colors reflect off the snow.
7. Elves are not permitted to discuss what they see.

Solution after the break.

And so Scrooge McGrinch promised to rescue them if any elf correctly identified the color hat he was wearing, otherwise they faced the humiliation of begging the Big Elf’s help. Which elf might deduce his hat?

Here It Comes, Ready or Not

 

I have often been asked, over the years, for advice on how to submit short stories to publications--mostly magazines. I don't know how helpful that's been, but I've always tried to deliver honest guidance, and the only reason I feel qualified to advise at all is that I've submitted a lot of stories and I've done some of it the wrong way.

The truth is, in the old days it was much harder to submit stories to editors and much easier to make a submission mistake. I can recall forgetting to sign my name on cover letters, leaving pages out of manuscripts, not putting enough postage on envelopes, binding the pages the wrong way, using the wrong kinds of envelopes, forgetting to enclose cover letters, and forgetting to enclose SASEs (remember those?). I once put together a neat submission, packed it all into one of those 9 x 12 envelopes, and then forgot to mail it. My wife found it under some papers in the back seat a month later.

But even in our modern, electronic world, you (I should say I) can still make submission mistakes. One of the worst, of course, is an error in the story itself. Some of those are minor (misspellings, typos, punctuation errors, etc.) and some are major (plot holes, factual mistakes, unintended POV switches, etc.). All are embarrassing, and are a good reason to try harder in the future to proofread, proofread, proofread before sending a story off into the hard and competitive world.

It's something that's especially important to me because one of my so-called rules for the submission process is to not read a story again after I've sent it off to the publication. After I hit SEND to dispatch my emailed submission to an editor, I try to forget that story, and I mean completely forget it, until I receive a response. If the eventual response is a rejection, fine--I then re-read the story, make any changes that I think are needed, and submit it elsewhere. If the response is an acceptance, I usually also re-read the story. But--I'll say it again--I don't re-read the story while it's out for consideration. I erase it from my mind and start working on another one.

Now, consider this. What if ignore that advice, and decide to take another look at your story after submitting it? Hopefully you won't find any mistakes, but . . . what if you do?

If the error is really minor, I would let it go. Everybody makes mistakes now and then. Make a note of it to yourself if you want to, but do nothing more. Don't contact the editor. Go back mentally to the point when you emailed the submission and think no more about the story until you receive a response. 

But what if it's a major mistake, like one of those I mentioned earlier? What if you re-read the story while it's in transit or under consideration and find that action B cannot logically follow action A in your plot? What if the geography's wrong, or the timeline is wrong, or the hero knows things he couldn't possibly know, or the device your character used in your historical mystery hasn't been invented yet? Or maybe Janet Bradley on page 2 has changed to Janice Brady on pages 4 through 10. After you slap your forehead and spew a few words that shock both your family and your dog, what do you do?

That's happened to me. (Well, except for the dog.) In my case, it was an error in a fact that I just hadn't researched as well as I should've. It not only made my plot look stupid, it made me look stupid. I still remember thinking Did I actually write that? But I did. And I submitted it to a magazine, only a few days earlier.

What happened then was, I reluctantly send a followup email to the editor, one I thankfully knew, and I told her I'd screwed up a story I'd sent and would like to resubmit a corrected version of that manuscript. She was kind enough to allow me to do that (she probably hadn't read the botched submission yet)--but even so, I suspect my request annoyed her. And annoying editors doesn't top anyone's list of smart things to do.  

But what if I had found the mistake and hadn't sent the followup note? One of three things might've happened, and they're the same things that might've happened if I hadn't found the mistake: (1) the story could've been (deservedly) rejected; (2) the story could've been (undeservedly) accepted, after which the editor would probably have corrected the mistake or asked me to correct it; or (3) the story could've been accepted and published with the mistake intact. And believe me, that can happen as well.

Anyhow, it has become my practice to submit a story and then leave it alone until I get a response. Call me irresponsible, call me unreliable, but that's my policy. I make sure my submission is written as well as I can write it, I send it off, and I forget it. My reason is, if you re-read it and don't find any mistakes, you've wasted your time. And if you re-read it and do find a mistake, you either alert the editor or you don't. If you don't, you'll probably still worry about it for the next few weeks or months, and if you do alert the editor, you run the risk of irritating her and could be wasting your time anyway, because the acceptance/rejection outcome might be the same. Bottom line: I'm not convinced that finding an error once the bird has flown does anyone any good.

One more thing. I think my decision to not look at a story again after it's submitted has made me a more careful writer. It's forced me to look a lot harder at the story beforehand. 

So here's the question. What's your policy? Do you forget your stories after they've been submitted for consideration? Do you re-read them after submission but before you've received a response? Have you ever found a gastric-distressable error at that point? If so, what did you do about it, besides Maalox? Did you contact the editor, and if so, how'd that go? Was the story accepted or rejected anyway? Have you ever made story mistakes, small or large, that somehow got past all the guards and found their way undetected into print? (I wish I hadn't--they don't stay undetected long.) Come on, be honest. Confession's good for the soul.

Meanwhile, keep writing the best stories you can, check them carefully, and send 'em in. Some of them will surprise you, and actually make something of themselves in the world.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

Alimentary, My Dear Watson!

I blame Dickens for my household’s attempt to cook a Christmas goose some years ago. My wife and I had always been charmed by the Cratchit family’s dinner of goose and Christmas pudding depicted in the 1999 TV version of A Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart. We followed Julia Child’s instructions to the letter, but did not have the “tight-fitting lid” for our roasting pan that is so critical for properly rendering the bird prior to roasting. For weeks after, I felt as if everything I touched in the house—my eyeglasses, my computer keyboard—was coated with a fine film of goose fat. It’s not a fowl I desire to ever eat again. The Cratchit bird fed eight, and I get it. One slice of that rich meat is all anyone needs to survive winter.

I’ve since come to respect geese. The living specimens are fierce protectors of their turf who figure prominently in ancient art. In Rome people told us that if you didn’t have a dog, you could rely on a goose to keep your yard safe from intruders. No one wants to be bitten in the butt by an angry honker.

Alas, when the fowl shows up in literature, it’s usually on someone’s plate. The “unimpeachable” goose who is the star of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” starts out alive, then ends up dead and the centerpiece of a mystery. Interestingly, as we shall see, that goose kept coughing up mysteries well into the 20th century.

The 8,000-word story is the only Christmas tale in the Sherlock Holmes Canon. It first appeared in the January 1892 edition of The Strand magazine. (You’ll find it in the first book of collected stories, The Adventures.) If you know your Holmes, it’s the story that starts with the great man deducing the heck out of a bowler hat that has lost its owner, and later confronting a nervous amateur jewel thief who has stolen a precious gem—a blue carbuncle—from the belongings of a countess lodged at a London hotel. To keep the jewel safe until he can consult with his fence, the thief thrusts the gem down the throat of a living goose in his sister’s backyard. The goose gets switched on him, is sent to market, and zaniness ensues.

I reread the story recently to see what sort of Christmasy details Conan Doyle folded into his prose. They’re sparse; mostly Watson describing cold weather, warm fires, a cast of chilly characters, and ice crystals forming in windows. There are no Christmas trees or presents. Since the story is nearly 133 years old, I don’t think I’m spoiling anyone’s enjoyment by revealing that in the end, Holmes lets the repentant thief off scot-free. Because, he argues, “it’s the season of forgiveness.”

I enjoyed the story immensely this time around, and then foolishly read all the notes about it in my copy of Leslie S. Klinger’s The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. That’s how I learned that serious Sherlockians have long quibbled with fine points of the tale.

Some examples should suffice. A carbuncle is a garnet, which are typically red. Though they have been found in other colors, there’s no such thing as a blue carbuncle. No garnets have ever been found in the Chinese river Holmes mentions as the origin of this stone. The detective botches a discussion of the jewel’s weight, presumed value, and chemical composition. The law enforcement official in the story conducts a hardness test on the stone that does not prove what he thinks it does. Moreover, of the eleven or so deductions Holmes makes about the bowler, Sherlockians dismiss at least four as highly illogical.

But hey, if our author couldn’t get the number of Watson’s wives straight, or the location of the shrapnel the good doctor brought back from Afghanistan, why do we expect him to get such details right? Conan Doyle wrote to make glad the heart of geekhood. He was a little like the Hungarian-American director Michael Curtiz, who when someone pointed out all the implausibilities in the script for Casablanca, replied, “Don’t worry. I make it go so fast nobody notices.”

Sometime after WWII, however, a clever female reader proved just how much the largely male membership of Holmes societies knew about geese. Throughout the story, we are told repeatedly that the stolen gem was found in the goose’s crop. That word is mentioned five times in the story. Since many birds do not have teeth, they pre-digest their food by funneling items into a separate anatomical pouch, which is sort of a pre-stomach.

I remembered seeing such a thing as a child, watching my mother butcher a backyard chicken. The bird’s crop was filled with tiny pebbles, which chickens instinctively swallow in their pecking. That grit is later used by the gizzard, the muscular end of the stomach, to grind bugs and vegetation so they can more easily be digested.

In a sidebar in Klinger’s Annotated Holmes, our editor tells us that the “Blue Carbuncle” was referenced during Christmas season 1946 by Chicago Tribune columnist Charles Collins, who was a friend of Vincent Starrett’s and a founding member of the Chicago chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars. A longtime journalist, Collins wrote a popular column called A Line o’ Type or Two for the newspaper. Some days later, astute reader Mildred Sammons fired off a note, taking issue with his six-paragraph summary. Her brief note appeared in the newspaper the day after Christmas that year. 

Regarding the Sherlock Holmes Christmas story, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” discussed in the Line o’ Type column on Dec. 17: It contains a statement that the missing jewel was found in the crop of a goose. Let me remind you that a goose has no crop.

You could hear a feather drop in the great and glorious Kingdom of Holmesiana. By then the tale was 54 years old; in all that time none of the geniuses had spotted this error.

After consulting various waterfowl experts and butchers, the U.S. experts conceded: “[T]he lady is correct. Holmes made an alimentary error, which the Baker Street Irregulars should have noted long ago.” There was talk in the pages of The Baker Street Journal of granting Mildred Sammons some sort of award “in gratitude for her discovery.”

I don’t know if she ever collected, because of course it didn’t end there. Scholars on both sides of the pond kept interrogating poultry experts, further beating a dead goose. The problem went all the way to the UK’s office of the Minister of Agriculture and Fish. The Ministry’s Chief Poultry Adviser—who of course turned out to be a Holmes geek—weighed in, saying that the American experts were correct. “However,” he added, “as a Sherlock Holmes fan I am glad to say that this fact does not necessarily invalidate the theory in the story of the ‘The Blue Carbuncle.’”

The reasoning: Yes, chickens and turkeys have a separate organ or pouch called a crop. Waterfowl such as geese and ducks have no such pouch, but their gullet is just long and extendable enough to accommodate food—or the occasional precious gem—that will be stored and later digested. If the goose’s stomach is full, a swallowed item might well remain lodged in the gullet, awaiting its turn. (I beg your indulgence here. I am not an expert on poultry anatomy. I am relying on articles such as this, on the glories of the digestive tracts of waterfowl. Feel free to cry fowl if I've screwed anything up.)

Naturally, this engendered a flurry of further academic papers, the most hilarious of which was written by a Sherlockian who posited that the hullabaloo was all beside the point. Maybe, just maybe, quoth he, “the long debate is centred on a printer’s error, which substituted an o for Watson’s a.”

And on that note, I’ll wish you all the best of the season, however you celebrate and whatever graces your table.

* * * 

Please use the comments to share some of your favorite holiday stories. I could use a few suggestions.

I recommend Connie Willis’s 544-page A Lot Like Christmas, if you can stomach that much Christmas, much of it novella-length SFF. I also recommend Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Holiday Spectacular, which she describes as a virtual advent calendar that delivers one new story—a romance, mystery or fantasy by various authors—to your inbox every day from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day. All holidays are represented, not just Christmas.

See you all in the New Year!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

 

Vegas: Well-Spring of Story Ideas

 

A room with a view-photo by the author.

So as it turns out the Most Wonderful Woman in the World is both lucky at love and at cards. And the Luckiest Man in the World– that’s me by the way– got to do a ride-along when the aforementioned Most Wonderful Woman in the World went to Vegas for a couple of days last week.

We had one heck of a time. My lady love has mad skills in the casino, and I wrote a bunch. Plus the Bellagio’s atrium is currently decorated for Christmas. If you happen to find yourself in Vegas, it would be a shame to miss it.

Longtime readers of this blog (Both of you!) will no doubt remember that l lived and worked in Vegas for a couple of years back when the world was young. It was the beginning of my public school teaching career, and I could not have asked for a better baptism of fire than teaching in one of the Clark County School District’s schools.

Because I worked with some of the best teachers in the world. Because they were generous with their time and their advice, and they were overwhelmingly effective in their example. I learned tricks of the trade that I use every day to this day.

Stuff like learning a kid‘s name. Using it. Making sure to pronounce it correctly. Letting them see you do that. It’s a great way to show you care enough to say their name right, and that means that you care about them. You build a relationship with these kids– and this is true anywhere in the world– and your work gets monumentally easier. My heroes, the Vegas teachers, taught me that.

So anyway, it’s always nice to visit Vegas, and when I go, I try to get out to places that tend to be far away from the strip (like Red Rock Canyon. Not to be missed!), and the best thing about it, is I always return home with ideas for stories. Because Vegas is full of characters. Let me give you just one example.

The Calico Hills, Red Rock Canyon-author’s photo

More shots of Red Rock- all author’s photos.

Robyn and I were headed to the airport to catch our flight home. We had eaten at an Italian place I knew of away from the Strip, so rather than cab it, we called for a Lyft. And that was how we met Mark.

Mark’s SUV make & model

Nice guy. Early 60s, so a few years older than me. Drove a sweet Mercedes SUV. Spotlessly clean. Told us all about how he was working on getting his CDL, because the money was so much better than driving for either Lyft or Uber.

Not Mark-but definitely his fleece.

Now, this was a guy whose entire appearance practically screamed “MONEY.” Manicure. $200 haircut. Expensive base layer fleece that retails starting at firm $150. So I was somewhat surprised to hear him complaining (however mildly) about money.

Then came the segue. While talking about money, Mark made an oblique reference to the recent election (full disclosure: I think Mark would have been surprised to learn that in this election I backed the accomplished brown-skinned lady with the foreign-sounding first name.). He said, “Yeah, I was tired of seeing all of the money leave the country, instead of coming into it, and felt like we needed a change.”

Bear in mind that my origin story includes being born in, raised in, and taking frequent sojourns in what the chattering class have lazily begun to refer to as “Trump Country.” I call this “lazy,” because I am well aware that aside from campaign stops and photo ops, Donnie Dollhands wouldn’t be caught dead in places that bear such a moniker.

But I’m from there. I still have friends and family there, and I have learned how to either talk with the people I care about whose opinions differ from mine, or even more importantly, how NOT to talk to them about things like politics. It is definitely a skill.

I used that skill to evade being drawn into just such a discussion with Mark. But as it turns out, he wasn’t done trying.

When I mentioned I used to work in Vegas, he asked what line of work I was in. I told him I was a history teacher and a writer. 

He immediately seized on the “teacher” part. Asked about whether I had any exposure to students categorized as “ESL” (“English as a Second Language”- an outdated term outside of Vegas. Several years back the state changed the acronym to “ELL” - “English Language Learners”, and more recently to “MLE” - “Multilingual Education,” but I wasn’t about to tell him this.).

I replied that I did. In fact I worked very closely with kids in that program. 

And then he said it.

“I bet they’re a real drag on your resources, huh.?”

Well.

No.

Far from it.

And I made a decision that I wasn’t going to avoid this conversation after all. I mean why not? I kinda liked the guy. And all he was really doing was the all-too human move of seeking confirmation/support for his biases. We’ve all been there.

So I told him no. I told him my hardest working group of students tended to contain high numbers of “ESL” kids. I further explained that I teach in one of the most diverse districts in the nation (we are situated cheek by jowl with a huge refugee resettlement center.) and something like 240 different languages are spoken in my district.

And that’s the thing: I explained. I didn’t lecture. I didn’t proselytize. I kept my tone light, breezy, conversational. My very first response to his question about “those kids“ being a “drag“ was to say: “On no, far from it. Some of the hardest-working kids I have are ‘newcomers.’ I teach in a very diverse district with a ton of different languages being spoken there. And I invite anybody to come on into my school. Come on into my classroom. Mark, if you ever find yourself anywhere near my patch, get in touch with me. Come visit. It will blow your mind.” 

To his credit, Mark listened. Or he at least seemed to. Our conversation stayed pleasant. And then we moved on to him telling Robyn and I a cool story about him watching a semi truck practically blow up during a training exercise gone horribly wrong (no one was hurt) on a part of the freeway one of his CDL classes was using for training. 

I told him I was going to use his description in this other story I’ve been thinking about. This is one I’ve told before about a former student of mine who teamed up with a friend to steal cinderblocks from a construction site and spend a lot of time trying to drop them on cars from the loca I-15 overpass back when I  still taught down there. 

I think I’m gonna put those two together and I think I just might have something. I’ll keep you guys posted.

And I already promised Mark I would use his name.

So yeah, Vegas well-spring of stories! And as it turns out, civilized political discourse.

Who knew?

(Same view as above, only at night, and a panorama shot. Video by the author’s better half.)

And on that note, my time here draws to a close with this, my final blog entry of the year. I wish you all the finest of holidays, and a blessed new year. See you in January 2025!

Writing Advice From 1908, Part 1

A few months ago John Floyd asked if I would be interested in a very old book about creative writing.  Mary Lou Condike had found it and offered it to him.  John didn't want it but thought I might.  I said sure, why not. Mary Lou very kindly mailed it to me and it has been part of my bedtime reading for a while.  

Writing the Short-Story by J. Berg Esenwein was published in 1908.  According to Wikipedia it is one of the first creative writing manuals.  When Esenwein wrote it he was the editor of Lippincott's Magazine.

So clearly the information was going to be a little dated.  But I thought it would be fun to see what, if anything, I could learn from this book.  Don't expect a review, just a summary of things I thought were interesting for one reason or another. Some still make sense. A few will astonish you.

* Let's start with something that appears near the end of the book which I am sure will move the hearts of all the writers out there. In discussing the processing of submitting stories to magazines Esenwein asks:  how long should you wait to hear from an editor? "If you do not get an answer in three weeks, it may be wise to drop a line courteously asking for a decision, but you had better wait the month out."  That sound you just heard was the rueful laughter of thousands of authors.  In today's modern age of mad speed and instant communication, well... I have fourteen stories out waiting for judgment by editors.  The wait is currently an average of 131 days, with the median being 95 days.  Considerably more than four weeks.  

* Esenwein tells us the oldest known story is in The Westcar Papyrus.  I had never heard of it but it turns out to be an Egyptian manuscript from roughly 1600 BCE, although the stories seem to be a millennium older.  The tales are about priests and magicians doing amazing things. If you have ever heard that cutting an animal in half and restoring it to life is "the oldest trick in the book," this papyrus is the book.

* "Men are often interested in fictional characters whom they would not care to know in life."

* Mystery writers "all introduce the detective, amateur or professional, for the purpose of unraveling the mystery before the reader's very eyes and yet concealing the key-thread until the last.  Sometimes the web  of entanglement is woven also in full sight -- with the author's sleeves rolled up as a guarantee of good faith; and the closer you watch the less you see."

Esenwein

* Character "names should be fitting. Phyllis ought not to weigh two hundred, nor ought Tommy to commit suicide. Luther must not be a burglar, Maud a washerwoman, nor John spout tepid romance.  The wrong surname will handicap a character as surely as the wrong pair of hands.  Hardscrabble does not fit the philanthropist any more than Tinker suggests the polished diplomat, or Darnaway the clergyman."

* "A man who has a stirring fact or a thrilling experience has not a story until he has used it in some proper way - has constructed it, has built it." - Walter Page 

* Esenwein gives us a list of things a short story is not: an episode, a scenario or synopsis, a biography, a mere sketch, or a tale.  In a tale "events take a simple course," but in a short-story "this course is interrupted by a complication."

* "Never write back sarcastic letters when your offerings are rejected. You may need that editor some day."

* "In the detective plot, the author seems to match his wits against the detective's, by striving to concoct a mystery which presents an apparently impossible situation. It adds to his problem that he must leave the real clue in full sight, yet so disguised that the reader cannot solve the mystery before some casual happening, or the ingenuity of the detective, shows it to the reader at the proper moment."* "To make a first-class short-story longer would be to spoil it."

* Some themes for stories may just "pop into your mind." "Sir, Madame, I am a Story. Write me up!" I wish that would happen more often.

*The advice on the left will make most modern writers, not to say editors, shudder in horror.

* Sir Arthur Phelps quotes an anonymous friend: "Whenever you write a sentence that particularly pleases you, CUT IT OUT." An early statement of "Kill your darlings."

* "Whatever may be the thing which one wishes to say, there is but one word for expressing it, only one verb to animate it, only one adjective to qualify it.  It is essential to search for this word, for this verb, for this adjective, until they are discovered, and to be satisfied with nothing else." - Flaubert

* "Write at white heat because you can think big thoughts only under stress of emotion; but revise in a cool mood."

* Esenwein criticizes writers who "debase their gifts by presenting distorted views of life, placing false values upon the things of experience, and picturing unclean situations -- all for the sake of gain." Thank heavens that never happens anymore.

This is getting long so I will give you the rest of Esenwein's wisdom next Monday.   See you then!