Make Them Suffer--If You Can

Authors in the mystery community are generally known for being nice folks. Helpful, welcoming, even pleasant. But when it comes to their work, successful writers are mean. They have to be.
An author who likes her characters too much might be inclined to make things easy for them. The sleuth quickly finds the killer. She's never in any real danger. In fact, there's no murder at all in the story or book. Just an attempted murder, but the sleuth's best friend pulls through just fine.

These scenarios may be all well and good in Happily Ever After Land. But in Crime Land, they result in a book without tension that's probably going to be way too short. That's why editors often tell mystery authors to make their characters suffer.

Yet that can be easier said than done. If you're basing a character on someone you don't like, then you might have a grand time writing every punch, broken bone, and funeral. But not every character can be based on an enemy. And sometimes characters seem to plead from the page, "Don't do that to me."

It's happened to me. I started writing a certain story a few weeks ago. I had a great first page, and then I got stuck. No matter how I tried to write the next several sentences, they didn't work right. I walked away from the computer. Sometimes I find a break can help a writing logjam. But not this time. In the end, I found I simply couldn't write the story I'd planned because, you see, that plan had included the death of a cat. And I just couldn't do it.

Don't do it!

The publication I was aiming the story for would have been fine with a story that included a dead animal. But I wasn't fine with it. And I knew my regular readers wouldn't like it either. Sure animals die in real life, and sometimes they die in fiction too. But those deaths should be key to the story. The Yearling wouldn't work if the deer didn't die. And Old Yeller needed the dog to die too.

I'm going to refer back to these very points if and when another story I've written involving animal jeopardy gets published. Sometimes that jeopardy is necessary for the story. And that's the key question: is it necessary? In the story I was writing about the cat it wasn't, and I knew it in my gut, even if I didn't know it in my head at first. That's why I couldn't bring myself to write the story as planned. Instead, with the help of a friend, I found another way to make the story work, one without any harm to animals.

It's not the first time something like that has happened to me. About six years ago I wrote a story called "Suffer the Little Children" (published in my collection, Don't Get Mad, Get Even). This is the first story of mine involving a female sheriff name Ellen Wescott. She's smart and honest and way different than I'd planned. Originally she was supposed to be a corrupt man. But as I was thinking through the plot during my planning stage, I heard that male sheriff say in my head, "Don't make me do that. I don't want to do that." Spooky, right?

Sometimes characters
just have to be nice

While part of me immediately responded, "too bad,"--he had to suffer--another part of me knew that when characters talk back like that, it's because my subconscious knows what I'm planning isn't going to work. Either it won't work for the readers, as with the cat I couldn't kill. Or it won't work for the plot, as was the case with this sheriff story. So my corrupt male sheriff became an honorable female sheriff, and large parts of the plot changed. My female sheriff faced obstacles, but she was a good person. That was a compromise my gut could live with.

Readers, I'd love to hear about stories and books you've enjoyed that involved a plot event you didn't love, yet you accepted it because you knew it was important to the story. And writers, I'd love to hear about times you couldn't bring yourself to write something. What was it? And why?

Why Sara Writes

Sara Paretsky
© Steven Gross

Introducing Sara Paretsky…

In 1986, I read the first V I Warshawski private eye book, Indemnity Only. I also was writing a female P.I. novel when I learned women mystery writers at Bouchercon were meeting and forming a group called Sisters In Crime. One major objective of SinC was to raise publishing and public awareness of women mystery writers. This organization was the brainchild of V I Warshawski’s author, Sara Paretsky.

In 1988, I attended my first Edgars and Bouchercon. I quickly learned Sara was passionate about women writers getting a fair shake.

In 1990, my husband and I opened a mystery bookstore in Austin. Three years later, we hosted a mystery convention, Southwest Mystery Con. A small group of Austin mystery women formed a chapter we named Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime. Through that, Sara and I became friends. I’m proud our H•O•T chapter of SinC still meets monthly. I’m proud that Sara still fights for women mystery writers. And I’m honored to introduce Sara as today’s guest writer.

Sara Paretsky and her acclaimed P I, V I Warshawski, transformed the role of women in contemporary crime fiction, beginning with the publication of her first novel, Indemnity Only, in 1982. Sisters-in-Crime, the advocacy organization she founded in 1986, has helped a new generation of crime writers and fighters to thrive.

Among other awards, Paretsky holds the Cartier Diamond Dagger, MWA's Grand Master, and Ms. Magazine's Woman of the Year. Her PhD dissertation on 19th-Century US Intellectual History was recently published by the University of Chicago Press. Her most recent novel is Fallout, Harper-Collins 2017. Visit her at SaraParetsky.com

— Jan Grape

Why I Write
by Sara Paretsky

    Years ago, when I was in my twenties, I heard an interview with the composer Aaron Copland. The interviewer asked why it had been over a decade since Copland's last completed composition. I thought the question was insensitive but Copland's answer frightened me: "Songs stopped coming to me," he said.

I wasn't a published writer at the time, but I was a lifelong writer of stories and poems. These were a private exploration of an interior landscape. My earliest memories include the stories that came to me when I was a small child. The thought that these might stop ("as if someone turned off a faucet," Copland also said) seems as terrifying to me today as it did all fifty years back.

I write because stories come to me. I love language, I love playing with words and rewriting and reworking, trying to polish, trying to explore new narrative strategies, but I write stories, not words. Many times the stories I tell in my head aren't things I ever actually put onto a page. Instead, I'm rehearsing dramas that help me understand myself, why I act the way I do, whether it's even possible for me to do things differently. Where some people turn to abstract philosophy or religion to answer such questions, for me it's narrative, it's fiction, that helps sort out moral or personal issues.

At night, I often tell myself a bedtime story- not a good activity for a chronic insomniac, by the way: the emotions become too intense for rest. When I was a child and an adolescent, the bedtime stories were versions of my wishes. They usually depicted safe and magical places. I was never a hero in my adventures; I was someone escaping into safety.

As a young adult, I imagined myself as a published writer. For many years, the story I told myself was of becoming a writer. Over a period of eight years, that imagined scenario slowly made me strong enough to try to write for publication. After V I Warshawski came into my life, my private narratives changed again. I don't lie in bed thinking about V I; I'm imagining other kinds of drama, but these often form the subtext of the V I narratives.

I'm always running three or four storylines: the private ones, and the ones I'm trying to turn into novels. I need both kinds going side by side to keep me writing.

Storylines are suggested by many things- people I meet, books I'm reading, news stories I'm following- but the stories themselves come from a place whose location I don't really know. I imagine it as an aquifer, some inky underground reservoir that feeds writers and painters and musicians and anyone else doing creative work. It's a lake so deep that no one who drinks from it, not even Shakespeare, not Mozart or Archimedes, ever gets to the bottom.

There have been times when, in Copland's phrase, the faucet's been turned off; my entry to the aquifer has been shut down. No stories arrive and I panic, wondering if this is it, the last story I'll ever get, as Copland found himself with the last song. If that ever happens permanently, I don't know what I'll do.

So far, each time, the spigot has miraculously been turned on again; the stories come back, I start writing once more. Each time it happens, though, I return to work with an awareness that I've been given a gift that can vanish like a lake in a drought.

YTD

  Just the facts… believe it or not  

• Americans own more firearms than all nations’ armies combined.
• The US is ranked 1^st in crime rates among nations.
• The US is 14^th among the most dangerous nations in the world.
• America locks up more of its own citizens than any other nation.
• America experiences nearly one multiple/mass shooting per day.
• Americans kill a thousand of their own countrymen every month.
• Gun owners commit suicide at the rate of two thousand a month.
• NRA claims $1-million per day from its 5 million members.
• The NRA-owned Congress says it’s not time to discuss it… ever.

Year-to-Date 2018’s 49 Days the price of conscience 49 ⇧ YTD days since 01 January 2018 18 ⇧ YTD school shootings 8 ⇧ YTD school shootings ending in death 26 ⇧ YTD school shooting fatalities ~1643 ⇧ YTD shooting deaths nationwide ~2862 ⇧ YTD suicide by firearm ~4966 ⇧ YTD shooting deaths + injuries ~$1,677,000 YTD gun lobbying expenditures ~$700,000 YTD NRA lobbying expenditures ~$7,056,537 YTD NRA industry contributions ~$49,000,000 YTD NRA membership dues, fees 327,217,871 US population: people 252,284,978 US population: adults 359,939,658 US population: firearms 200,000,000 military-owned arms worldwide ~27,000,000 police-owned arms worldwide 2 firearms owned by author 135 legislative efforts to weaken gun laws ¹ including legalize silencers and ² allowing mentally ill gun ownership 0 bills to restrict firearms 15,137 registered Washington lobbyists ~75,000 unregistered Washington lobbyists 50 state governors 435 congressmen 100 senators 1 vice president 1 president ? strikes 0 balls

Draftsmanship

Offhand, I can't think of many words that have more different meanings than "draft" does. Drafts can refer to breezes, horses, beer, checks, athletics, military service, depth of water, and--yes--preliminary versions of a piece of writing. In other words, you can feel them, harness them, drink them, sign them, get caught by them . . . or write them.

I write a lot of drafts. Mine are usually short, since I write mostly short stories, and the first is often longer than the second, the second longer than the third, and so forth. (I tend to overwrite a bit.) I should mention, too, that my first draft is usually terrible. That doesn't bother me--nobody but me is going to see it anyway--and I think it's better to get as much as possible down on paper than to leave something important out.

I also like to write a first draft all the way through, without stopping to do a lot of analysis on the way. I've never been one of those people who "edit as they go." I don't even pay much attention to punctuation or spelling or grammar in those first drafts. They truly are rough.

A writer friend of mine insists that she doesn't have to deal with drafts--and not because she keeps the windows closed. She just makes every page as perfect as it can possibly be before going on to the next. Her reason for doing that is simple, she says: when she's written the final page of her book or story, she's finished; no corrections or subsequent drafts are needed. The reason I don't do that is simple, too: I might later decide to change something in the plot, or add another character, or take one out, or change the POV. If that happens, and if I've already tried to polish the first scenes and pages to a high gloss, that means I'll have to go back and re-edit what I've already edited. I'm not super-efficient and I'm sure not smart, but I'm smart enough not to want to do the same job twice. Besides, getting the whole thing down on paper, start to finish, gives me a warm and comfortable feeling about the project. It makes it something I know I can handle.

Writing a first draft all the way to the end in one swoop isn't as hard as it sounds, because I'm one of those writers who likes to map the story out mentally before I ever start putting words on paper. I think about the plot for a long time beforehand. Again, that doesn't keep me from later making changes, but it does allow me to have a blueprint to follow when I start writing, and having that structure in mind gives me--as I said--a sense of security. You might not do that or need that, but I do. Different strokes. (By the way, if you outline on paper and if your outline is long enough, sometimes that IS your first draft.)

I occasionally don't even have names finalized when I do a first draft. My hero/heroine might be H, my villain might be V, the hero's best friend might be BF. These are just place-holders, so I can come back later and fill in the names. Same thing goes for locations or situations that will require detailed research, or scenes that need a lot of description--I don't spend the time to do that in first drafts. I'm more concerned about plot points and the flow of the story. (Not that it matters, but I've found it's fairly easy for me to write beginnings and endings. It's the middles that are hard. Maybe that's why I write shorts instead of novels.)

Anne Lamott said, in her book Bird by Bird, ". . . The first draft is the down draft--you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft--you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed or even, God help us, healthy." She also said, "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts."

Readers have often asked me how many drafts I write, of a short story, The answer is, it varies. It also depends on how you define "draft." If you go through a work-in-progress and change only one sentence, is that new version another draft? As for me, I don't usually do many extensive re-writes, but I do go back through the manuscript a few times after a third- or fourth-draft polishing and see if there's anything more that needs correcting or fine-tuning. But, as all writers know, you don't want to go over it too much. When you can read through what you've done several times and not find anything glaring, you're probably finished. If you persist too long, you'll get to the point where changes might make things worse instead of better.

How about you? Are you a draft-dodger, and just edit everything as you go? Or do you rehearse and shoot several takes before you print the film? If so, how many drafts does that usually involve? How do you decide how many drafts is too many? How detailed is your first draft? Do you ever outline beforehand, either mentally or on paper? Do you ever write the ending first?

I once heard that a novelist has to be a good storyteller and a short-story writer has to be a good craftsman. Maybe both have to be good draftsmen.

Now, I wonder if I need to do more editing on this column . . .

First Stories

by O'Neil De Noux

Michael Bracken's earlier post about his first published story inspired me to go back to my first stories.

My first story to see print was "The Sad Mermaid," a fantasy published in ELLIPSIS, student magazine of the University of New Orleans. Wasn't a sale. No payment. January, 1976. Another beginning writer had her first story printed in that issue of ELLIPSIS - fellow New Orleans mystery writer Tony Fennelly. In 1996, I made a little money on the story when it was published in TALE SPINNER Magazine, Issue 4.

Years of rejections of short stories followed. multi-genre failures. Decided to write a novel and finished GRIM REAPER (1988 Zebra Books). When it sold, I remember telling my father who asked, "They're paying you American money?"

Soon after, I met George Alec Effinger who was living quietly in the French Quarter. He took a look at my short stories and suggested I use the main character from my novel in stories.

First LaStanza story sold quickly -"The Desire Streetcar" Pulphouse Fiction Spotlight Magazine, Issue 2, July 1992. Other sales followed. "The Man with Moon Hands" to New Mystery Magazine, Issue 3, December 1992 and the BIG ONE - a sale to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Vol 101, #5, April 1993. Interesting note, this was a LaStanza story and like the novels, it had a profanity in dialogue. Editor Janet Hutchings missed it when she accepted the story and sent me a nice note asking if I could change one word in the story. Are you kidding? Hell, yes. I'm not a poet. I'm a writer. I'm not in love with words, they are only tools, so I switched to another tool. I'm proud of the story "Why" primarily because it dealt with a different kind of homicide we handled - suicide.

Which brings me to an important point. Listen to the editors of professional magazines, especially when they suggest a re-write. When editor Gardner Dozois at Asimov's suggested I re-work my story "Tyrannous and Strong," I resisted, then looked closely at his suggestions and rewrote the story, which appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 2, February 2000. The story has been published five times, including magazines in Greece and Portugal.

In the 42 years since "The Sad Mermaid" saw print, I've had over 400 short story sales and received several thousand rejections as well as a SHAMUS AWARD for Best Private Eye Short Story and a DERRINGER AWARD for Best Novelette and other awards.

A highlight came with the January 1995 Issue of AMERICAN WAY: IN-FLIGHT MAGAZINE OF AMERICAN AIRLINES. Two pieces of fiction in the magazine. One of my stories and a short story by one of my literary icons - Ray Bradbury. The stories ran back to back in the 138-page slick magazine given free to American Airlines passengers that month. Ray Bradbury and I together.

When I was fifteen and dreaming of becoming a writer as I read THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN, I never dreamed I'd have a story in the same magazine with this man.

Now - If we can only answer the ultimate noir movie question - Why did Dick Powell keep get knocked out in movies?




That's all I got today -
www.oneildenoux.com

Older Than You Think

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" - (Explanation later)

The New York Times ran a great article the other day called, "Many Animals Can Count, Some Better Than You".  I am sure that every one of us who has /had a pet can assure them of that.  (Try to gyp a dog out of the correct number of treats.)  Not only can they count - as a female frog literally counts the number of mating clucks of the male - but they can compare numbers.  (Read about the guppies and the sticklebacks.)

But where the article really got interesting was where they talked about that, despite math phobia, etc., humans have an innate "number sense." There is archaeological evidence suggesting that humans have been counting for at least 50,000 years.  Before writing ever came around, people were using other ways of tallying numbers, from carving notches (bones, wood, stones) to clay tokens that lie all over Sumerian sites and which often looked, for decades, to archaeologists like bits of clay trash.

But the ability to count and the desire to count and to keep track comes before tokens or notches, otherwise they'd never have bothered.  And language - blessed language - comes before all of that.  So get this:  they say that the number words for small quantities — less than five — are not only strikingly similar across virtually every language in the world, but also are older (and more similar) than the words for mother, father, and body parts.  Except certain words like... no, not that!  (Get your mind out of the gutter)  Except the words for the eye and the tongue. Make of that what you will...

Dr Mark Pagel, biologist at Reading University, said, “It’s not out of the question that you could have been wandering around 15,000 years ago and encountered a few of the last remaining Neanderthals, pointed to yourself and said, ‘one,’ and pointed to them and said, ‘three,’ and those words, in an odd, coarse way, would have been understood.”  That just gave me goosebumps when I read it.  

Development of Sumerian cunieform writing,
Td k at Wikipedia

I admit, I'm fascinated by the past. (That's why I became a historian...)  To me, history is time travel for pedestrians, a way to connect with our ancient ancestors.  So let's zip around a bit, starting with jokes (Reuters):

Sumerian man,
looking slightly upset...
(Wikipedia)

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” - Sumeria, ca 1900 BC

“How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” - Egypt, ca 1600 BC, supposedly about the randy Pharaoh Snofru

The earliest [written] "yo' mamma" joke, from an incomplete Babylonian fragment, ca 1500 BC:
"…your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. What/who is it?"
(Okay, so it doesn't translate that well, but we all know where it's heading.)

And this riddle from 10th century Britain (for more see here):
"I am a wondrous creature for women in expectation, a service for neighbors. I harm none of the citizens except my slayer alone. My stem is erect, I stand up in bed, hairy somewhere down below. A very comely peasant’s daughter, dares sometimes, proud maiden, that she grips at me, attacks me in my redness, plunders my head, confines me in a stronghold, feels my encounter directly, woman with braided hair. Wet be that eye."
(Answer at the end and no peeking!)

Plot lines go very, very far back as well.  

Ancient Egyptian leather 
sandals (Wikipedia)

The fairy tale with the oldest provenance is "The Smith and the Devil" which goes back at least 7,000 years, and has been mapped out over 35 Indo-European languages, and geographically from India to Scandinavia.  (Curiosity)  The bones of the story are that the Smith makes a deal with the Devil (or death) and cheats him.  Now there's been all sorts of variations on it. In a very old one, the smith gains the power to weld any materials, then uses this power to stick the devil to an immovable object, allowing the smith to renege on the bargain. Over time, the smith's been transformed to clever peasants, wise simpletons, and, of course, fiddlers ("The Devil Went Down to Georgia" is, whether Charlie Daniels knew it or not, a variation on this very, very old fairy tale), and the devil occasionally got transformed to death or even a rich mean relative.  Check out Grimm's "The Peasant and the Devil" and "Why the Sea is Salt".

Enkidu, Gilgamesh's
best friend - his death
sends Gilgamesh in
search of eternal life.
(Urban at French
Wikipedia)

But Cinderella's pretty old, too, and just as universal.  Many people believe that the Eros/Psyche myth is the true original.  The Chinese version, Ye Xian, was written in 850 AD, and has everything including the slipper.  There's a Vietnamese version of ancient lineage, The Story of Tam and Cam.  And there are at least 3 variations of it in 1001 Nights.  (BTW, if you're gonna read 1001 Nights - and I recommend it highly - read the Mardrus and Mathers translation in 4 volumes.  Available in paperback or Kindle at Amazon.)

And, of course, many stock plots go at least as far back as Sumeria, including rival brothers (Cain and Abel), blood brothers (Gilgamesh and Enkidu), old men killing their rivals (Lamech, Genesis 4), the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood (complete with ark, dove, and rainbow), and the quest for eternal life (Gilgamesh).

BTW, most of the stories in Genesis come from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which makes perfect sense when you remember that Abraham is said to have come from Ur of the Chaldees, which was a Sumerian city.  

But back to words, which are, after all, our stock in trade as writers.  Remember above, where I quoted the NYT how you could communicate with Neanderthals by pointing and using number words?  And remember that sentence at the very beginning?  

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" 

According to researchers, if you went back 15,000 years and said that sentence, slowly, perhaps trying various accents, in almost any language, to almost any hunter-gatherer tribe, anywhere, they'd understand most of it.  You see, the words in that sentence are basic, almost integral to life, constantly used, constantly needed, for over 15,000 years, since the last Ice Age.  (It's only recently that we've lost our interest in black worms except in tequila and mescal.)

Due to the fact that we live on a planet with 7.6 billion humans and counting, it's hard to realize that, back around 15,000, there were at most 15,000,000 humans on the entire planet (and perhaps as few as 1,000,000).  They probably shared a language.  If nothing else, they would have shared a basic trading language so that when they ran into each other, they could communicate. Linguistics says that most words are replaced every few thousand years, with a maximum survival of roughly 9,000 years. But 4 British researchers say they've found 23 words - what they call "ultra-conserved" words - that date all the way back to 13,000 BC.

Speaking of 13,000 BC, here's a Lascaux Cave Painting.  Wikipedia

Now there's a list of 200 words - the Swadesh list(s) - which are the core vocabulary of all languages.  (Check them out here at Wikipedia.)  These 200 words are cognates, words that have the same meaning and a similar sound in different languages:

Father (English), padre (Italian), pere (French), pater (Latin) and pitar (Sanskrit).  

Now this makes sense, because English and Sanskrit are both part of the Indo-European language family.  But our 23 ultra-conserved words are "proto-words" that exist in 4 or more language families, including Inuit-Yupik.  (Thank you, Washington Post.  And, if you want to wade through linguistic science, here's the original paper over at the National Academy of Sciences.)

So, what are they?  What are these ultra-conserved words, 15,000 years old, and a window to a time of hunter-gatherers painting in Lascaux and trying to survive the end of the Younger Dryas (the next-to-the last mini-Ice Age; the last was in 1300-1850 AD)?  Here you go:

thou, I, not, that, we, to give, 

who, this, what, man/male, 

ye, old, mother, to hear, 

hand, fire, to pull, black, 

to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm

There's got to be a story there.  How about this?

"I give this fire to flow down the bark!  Who pulls the man from the mother?  Who pulls his hand from the fire?  Who / what / we?"

I was trying a couple of variations on these words, and then I realized that the ultimate has already been done:

"Who are you?" [said] the Worm.  

PS - the answer to the riddle is "onion".  

The Iron River

Mexico has long fascinated us gringos, I think as a place of the imagination as much as a physical destination. The idea of Mexico is at least as strong with the Mexicans themselves, but more as a promise never kept. These days, Mexico in the grip of the narcotraficantes is far darker. "So far from God, so close to the United States," Porfirio Diaz once said. Easy to forget that it's a mirror image.
The simplest and most troubling schematic is the pipeline, The Iron River, drugs and human traffic moving north, money and guns moving south. What we're talking about is market share, access, gangster capitalism. Mexico has all the characteristics of a failed state. No rescue, no refuge. A phenomenon like the Juarez feminicidio, the unsolved murders of hundreds of women (a low estimate), doesn't take place in a vacuum. It has a context. I don't pretend to know all the reasons for it, but the drug traffic, and gang terrorism, is a fair guess as a contributor. 

But for all its reptilian chill, we have to admit it makes marvelous theater. That's the contradiction. I look at the narcos, and I see predators, carrion-eaters, and maggots, the food chain as career path. Mara Salvatrucha? Looney Tunes. And the Zetas? Let's not even. On the other hand, you can't make these guys up. They're gonna crowd your peripheral. You want to take on the drug wars? This is the furniture. It's the threat environment. The picture's already been cast.

You set out to tell a cautionary tale, probably. Or almost certainly. It's the nature of things. T. Jefferson Parker, in the Charlie Hood novels. Iron River, The Border Lords, The Famous and the Dead, to name his most recent three. Two by Don Winslow. The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. And the stories I've written myself about the border war. Doc Hundsacker, the Texas Ranger working out of El Paso, and Doc's pal Fidelio Arenal, the Federale major across the river in Juarez. Pete Montoya, the state cop based in Santa Fe, and Albuquerque FBI agent Sandy Bevilacquia. They're real to me, their strengths and weaknesses, and the consequences of what they choose to do. Not my sense of duty, or my moral choices, but theirs.

I'm not beating a drum, or selling a cure for cancer, or telling you how to vote. I'm saying that if you decide you're telling a certain kind of story, you may very well have to choose up sides. In fact, the story will probably pick a side for you.  They do that, damn it. You wind up on the side of the angels, when you were ready to sell your soul to the Devil. Cheap at twice the price. 

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

This is going to be a rather morbid post, but it’s something that’s been on my mind for some time. It also might be a little bit unfocused as there’s so many things going round my head on this subject, but I think the main points will come across.

Lately, I’ve been noticing on Facebook a lot of people being sick to one degree or another and even some who’ve passed on. This has been happening since I joined FB but it seems like there’s more lately and that it’s happening more frequently. As I was thinking about this, I’ve also seen posts from other people who’ve noticed the same thing. Maybe it’s because we have more FB friends, maybe it’s because that’s just life or people are getting older? Either way, every time I see these messages—and even the ones about people’s pets—I get a pang of sadness. On the one hand, it’s part of life, still, on the other it hurts to see so many people going gently—or otherwise—into that good night.

It gives me pause. Maybe because my world is so much bigger, in some ways, thanks to FB. Therefore, I see more of this than I would in pre-FB days. I’ve had friends and relatives die since I was a little kid, of course. Some well before their time, either because of “natural” causes or war or in the case of my birth father, from being hit by a drunk driver. Somehow he made it through World War II, but not the mean streets of L.A.

So I wanted to talk a little about writers and recognition, both in our lifetimes and beyond: mortality and immortality. It’s an uncomfortable subject, maybe one of those that we don’t like to talk about in “polite” company, but maybe one that we think about on occasion.

We write for various reasons. To get our point of view out there, to entertain, to get fame and recognition, maybe even a little money...very little money 😉. And it might seem vain, but I think we also write because many of us would like that little chunk of immortality that leaving behind our words gives us. We want to think that in a hundred years or a thousand someone searching some “dusty” silicon chips (or whatever the current medium is) for a bit of nostalgia or a glimpse of how the world used to be might stumble upon our words. And just for that little moment in time we might live again. Of course, we also want to be recognized while we’re here—wouldn’t that be nice?

Some people say that writing in itself is its own reward—maybe, or to an extent. But, speaking for myself, while I enjoy the writing, creating stories, characters, settings, plots and putting it all together like a jigsaw puzzle, if no one else read it it would be like the sound of that famous tree falling in the forest—with no one there to hear it. So, aren’t we really writing for others—whether today or for posterity? Otherwise why share our work with anyone else? Writing for yourself is like eating a pizza by yourself (or watching a movie, playing cards or a game), it’s definitely enjoyable, but it’s often more fun to do with someone else. And if we’re writing for others our work can live on even if we can’t.

In Sonnet 18, Shakespeare, whoever he was in reality, said…

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

…referring to his poem living on, making him immortal.

Does everyone think or hope they’ll be the next Jane Austen or Charles Dickens—or even Dan Brown? Did any of these people think they’d be remembered a hundred or more years later—maybe, or maybe not. They, probably like a lot of writers, just felt compelled to write—but maybe with one eye toward some type of immortality. For some of us, writing is like breathing. But are we really writing for a tiny audience of our wives, husbands and mothers? I don’t think so.

Jane Austen

Most people want to leave a mark—hopefully for something good or at worst neutral, though some prefer being known for their evil deeds (which gives us fodder to write about). Nobody wants to be ignored or forgotten. To some that means leaving children to carry on the family legacy and name, to others curing cancer, and yet to others leaving a piece of writing that will endure. But after a generation or two even our great grandchildren don’t really know us either, but our readers do.

If we don’t care about these things, both being known in our lifetimes and beyond, why do we get upset when our work is rejected, when we can’t get agents, etc.? Sure, part of it is ego, no one likes being rejected. But maybe part of it is also losing another shot at a little piece of immortality.

At some points in our lives, particularly when we’re younger, I think we don’t see the possibility of not being here anymore. We know it happens intellectually, but we don’t like to think about it. Which brings to mind these lines from Flowers Never Bend in the Rainfall, by Paul Simon:

So I'll continue to continue to pretend
My life will never end,
And flowers never bend with the rainfall.

And that also brings me to one of my favorite songs about mortality:

There's no place in this world where I'll belong when I'm gone
And I won't know the right from the wrong when I'm gone
And you won't find me singin' on this song when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

So, do it while you’re here, do it now and don’t put it off ’cause you never know what will happen. And hopefully it will last. And, like Dylan Thomas said, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

***

And now for a little BSP that will hopefully help me on the road to immortality: Mind Blowing News: My story “Windward” from Coast to Coast: Privates Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea (edited by Andrew McAleer and Me, published by Down & Out Books) has been selected for the 2018 Best American Mystery Stories edited by Louise Penny & Otto Penzler. It will be out in the fall. To say I’m blown away is an understatement. Also selected for Best American Mysteries from this collection is John Floyd’s “Gun Work,” and Art Taylor’s “A Necessary Ingredient” has been nominated for an Agatha. Not a bad batting average for one book 😁.

And a shoutout to SleuthSayers Michael Bracken and David Edgerly Gates, who also have stories in the Best American Mysteries, and Barb Goffman on her Agatha Nom. SleuthSayers is cleaning up!

https://www.mysteriousbookshop.com/blogs/news/best-american-mystery-stories-2018 


Also, my Shamus-winning novel, White Heat, is being reissued in May by Down and Out Books. It’s available for pre-order on Amazon. Here is the new cover reveal:

Also, there’s a fun and interesting article on Alfred Hitchcock in the Washington Post (and other places) from Associated Press writer Hillel Italie: Alfred Hitchcock Remains an Influence on Crime Writers. It includes quotes from Linda Landrigan of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Mike Mallory, SJ Rozan, A.J. Finn, Otto Penzler.......and even me! Enjoy!

###

Is That All There Is?

by Steve Liskow

Why did over 100 million people watch the Super Bowl last week? Certainly, many of them were rooting for the Eagles or the Patriots, but many of them just wanted to watch the last football game of the season, featuring two good teams, to see who won.

That's it, isn't it? The final score. As writers and readers, that's what we care about, too. How the story ends.

How often have you heard someone say, "Well, the story was pretty good, but I hated the ending." Mickey Spillane said the first chapter sells the book and the last chapter sells the next book. It's hard to argue with that. If you don't like a book by an author, how likely are you to pick up another one?

The punchline of a joke should make us laugh. If we don't laugh, it's not a good punchline or ending. Simple, huh?

Obviously, if you go to a production of King Lear or Romeo and Juliet expecting lots of pretty girls doing a kick line at the end, you're going to be disappointed, but most people have a clear idea of what to expect. You set up the expectations, so you should meet them.

There are only a few kinds of bad endings.

The first is the Letdown, which I see more often in short stories than novels. The story, usually quasi-literary, doesn't really go anywhere, and it finally stops completely as though the writer has reached the word count he was aiming for. Sometimes, the ending is ambiguous, bit it's usually more indecisive than anything else. "The Lady or The Tiger"

fails because you can support (or NOT support) either choice equally badly. When my students tried this nonsense and I called them out on it, they always told me, "I left it this way because I wanted to make the reader think." I always asked, "What do you want him to think ABOUT, and what do you want him to think ABOUT IT?"

Several excellent writers end their books with something left unsaid, but they give enough information so we can figure out what happens offstage or after the curtain falls. My recent novel Before You Accuse Me ends with Woody Guthrie and Megan Traine discussing the consequences of the crime they've solved. We don't know exactly where the fallout will land, but we can make several solid guesses, none of which involve those pretty girls and kick lines.

Another bad ending involves a deus ex machina, the information that comes out of nowhere at the very end to tie things together (Thomas Hardy and Nathaniel Hawthorne got away with this constantly--or maybe not: we don't know about the after-life yet). In mysteries, this may be the missing piece of information we didn't even know was missing. One Ellery Queen novel has a solution built on our not knowing that the murder victim wasn't really a twin: he was a triplet. That's cheating. If you can't even give the reader a hint, look more carefully at your plotting.

Does anyone remember the TV show Burke's Law? One episode ran long, so they cut another minute to fit in the last commercial...and accidentally deleted the clue Gene Barry cited in the final solution. I understand the TV network's switchboard lit up like a nuclear blast that night.

Another ending is the one built on inductive reasoning instead of deductive reasoning. The detective (Rex Stout used to do this with Nero Wolfe all the time) starts by positing that a particular person is guilty, then looks for information to confirm that theory. It's too much like the police deciding person A did it and overlooking exculpating evidence. At Crime Conn several years ago, a detective who worked cold cases told us, "A cold case always happens because someone made a mistake." More often than not, some piece of evidence was overlooked or misinterpreted. Call it art imitating life if you want, but I disagree.

The opposite, which I see less often is the Perfect ending. The writer gives us intricate subplots and tons of detail, and none of it is extraneous. Every single miniscule thing fits together to create the main denouement. It's impressive and very difficult, and at some point I see the author's hand turning the characters into puzzle pieces instead of people and the thread suspending my disbelief starts to unravel. If it fits together more tightly than a Wagnerian crescendo, it's too much.

OK, so what does an ending need? That's pretty simple.

Your opening should make the reader ask questions about the plot and characters. Your ending answers those questions. It resolves the issues, just like a song should end on the beat and on the tonic chord. It will feel complete.

Remember "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" from the Beatles LP Abbey Road? It repeats the last melodic figure over and over and over, but instead of fading out, it ends suddenly...NOT on the beat or the tonic note or chord. It's a jarring musical joke. You're not the Beatles, though, so you can't get away with it.

If you're writing a mystery, you need a logical solution. If you're writing a romance, the two protagoni should be together at the end, or you need a clear reason why they aren't.

Death works, or jail. Time travel might work, too, but that gets into sci-fi, and that's a different union.

If you write comedy, the reader should laugh. Especially at the end.

Even if you write a series and you're planning the next book, this one should have a definite end to the current issue. Some issues can continue, but win this battle and carry on the war next time. Don't make me buy the next book to figure out how this one ended. I'll be ticked enough not to buy it.

Or maybe by the time that next book comes out, I won't even remember that I cared. That's one of the perks of getting old.

A Voice for the Dead

“I don't believe it, and none of us believe it.”^[1]

That was the response to the police assessment of murder-suicide from one friend of billionaires Honey and Barry Sherman. This was followed by a chorus of agreement from many prominent Canadians, and subsequently by an expensive independent investigation which resulted in a revised new assessment of double murder.

Leigh Lundin asked me to look at this now high-profile Canadian crime being played out, blow by blow, in the news. So here I am looking at it. But with Canadian eyes.

Honey and Barry Sherman

My question isn't about what happened in this particular crime. I feel confident that it will play out in the investigation, and that the truth will emerge. My question is this: What would happen if a family disagreed, but did not have powerful friends or the money to conduct their own investigation? What if the family were poor, but still vehemently in disagreement? What if a murderer was on the cusp of getting away with it? Who would stop them? 


I brought this up with Dr. Coroner – not his real name but it would be a good one, because he is indeed a coroner. He is called in if a death occurs outside a hospital, and occasionally in it. His job is essentially to assess the manner and cause of death. Is this death natural, an accident, a suicide or a homicide?

The body can be photographed but cannot be touched until he is finished his assessment and releases the body. He looks at the story, told by the body, of the manner and timing of death. There is also the story told by the place of death, and the question for him is whether it is consistent with the story the body tells.

My question: If the family disagreed with a murder-suicide verdict, but were neither educated or moneyed – what would he do? What if the family was unable to articulate a story as well as the friends and family of the Shermans? What if they were angry and threatening, or in general made themselves unsympathetic?

He said often his job is to help reconcile the disbelief with the reality. Some counselling is often part of what he does with families.

Also, he argues that marriage – by the nature of the long term relationship – can lead people to kill each other, even if they look to others like they are happy. Marriage itself can be the reason for murder.

Those caveats aside, Dr. C. said there was enough from the story of the “murder-suicide” of the Shermans to make him suspicious, largely because the story is wrong. Domestic murder is often more violent, angry. Hanging is not what he would expect as a means of murder or suicide in this case. Hanging is more often seen in cases of mental illness or extreme distress. Further, why would a man who has copious drugs available to him choose this manner of death for himself and his wife?

If the stories of the body, manner of death and family assessment make Dr. C. suspicious in any way, he has many options to augment the evidence he gathers.

• The authority of the coroner overrides privacy of information, so he can seize records from sources such as the family doctor, psychiatrists, and psychologists. This could provide a more fulsome picture.
• He can seize all radiological and dental records, to see if there is evidence of previous abuse.
• He can order a post mortem, or a forensic autopsy and refuse to complete the death certificate or even provide the funeral home with a warrant to bury, until he is fully satisfied.

Ultimately, the story must hang together. Regardless of the ability of the family to articulate their concerns, or their resources to investigate on their own, Dr. C. relies on having a coherent story told by the manner of death, the body, the family and the records seized. If there are inconsistencies – then a further investigation is warranted.

If a family were unable to mount the same vigorous objection and investigation as the Shermans have, it could be the coroner who stands between the constructed truth of the murderer and the actual truth of the victim.

Ultimately, all crime writing is social justice writing. And the poor have a voice – the coroner. The story of the body, uncovering the life lived, the manner of death, might be the key to catching a murderer. The background knowledge and tenacity of the coroner is what most of us rely on when our bank accounts are meagre.

Dr. C. said that the job of the coroner is to provide a voice for the dead, to listen carefully to the story they tell. This is the first step towards social justice for those without money and connections. They do this by asking the simple question:

Does the story of this death make sense?

Nasty Boys

by Libby Cudmore

Nasty, nasty boys, let me see your body groove. — Janet Jackson, “Nasty”

Lester Nygaard

There has to be a word for that moment when you’re watching a TV series, and you’re more than a few episodes in, and you suddenly realize that you are terribly, violently attracted to the absolute worst character on the show. It’s never a slow build; one minute, you’re just toodling along, watching Fargo on the couch with your husband and the next, like a hammer to the skull, you find yourself thinking, “I am ride-or-die for Lester Nygaard.”

There has to be a word for it. And if there isn’t, we should scour world’s languages over to invent one. Because it’s legit. I remember how I felt in the moment I fell for Shane Vendrell, sometime around season two of The Shield, and my heart just started pounding, and I thought, “He is so fine that I am going to literally die from how fine he is.” Then I discovered he was the cast member with the last name Goggins and thought “Well, Mrs. Elizabeth Goggins doesn’t sound that weird….” But through all of it—through the casual racism and the grenade throwing, the violence and the threats, Shane was my One True Love, right to the end. I was there for all of it.

And I thought maybe it was a one-off thing. Nope. A whole series of trash boys followed. Jimmy McGill on Better Call Saul. Lester Nygaard on Fargo. Boyd Crowder on Justified, and on and on and on. There’s one in every series.

I am not really like this. My husband is a well-regarded figure in our community. He is honest and handsome, a sweet man who buys me Donald Fagen records for Christmas. I have never once wanted to date a “bad boy;” in high school and college I happily dated a series of nerds, guys who listened to Billy Joel or watched anime or went to ren faires. I have always been attracted to nice boys. I am a feminist. I demand respect, Ms. Cudmore if you’re nasty.

Shane Vendrell

But I confessed this terrible feeling to my other girlfriends and, as it turns out, they all had their own trash boys. Caleb on Bates Motel. Gus Halper as Erik Menendez. Jax on Sons of Anarchy. They’re the first entry on a game of F•ck/Marry/Kill, but they are down for a good time. And so what if they impregnated their sister or murdered their parents or take sleezy career shortcuts? We love them just the same.

To men, these characters often play as a sort of justification for all their weak impulses. Who hasn’t felt like they’re misunderstood in their work or by their spouse, believed they deserved more, that they had earned what they’d stolen? It’s an outlet, a fantasy that they could get away with being something other than the common human we are all guilty of being.

But to women, they are someone in need of love, of fixing, of understanding, then maybe they wouldn’t do such terrible things. There’s a certain power, at least to me, in loving these sorts of characters. We could keep their secrets. We could help bury the bodies. We are bold and trustworthy broads, and no man would ever think of double-crossing us. We can hold our own in a gunfight or a car chase.

It’s dangerous thinking, in real life, to imagine that you are responsible for fixing someone. But in film and fiction, it’s an addictive thrill. And a good writer knows this. A good writer knows how to make a man desirable and repulsive all at the same time, give him something the audience recognizes as a nearly-palpable need and then twist that into something selfish, the push and pull with the audience. It is almost erotic when done right.

Crime fiction thrives on nasty boys. But a good writer can make even the worst of them somehow charming, to keep the reader turning the page, breathless and, just maybe, slightly in love.

And while you’re working on that, I’ll be trying to create a new word for that stupid-twisted-love feeling. I’ve got another season of Fargo to get through.

The Blank Page: Anxiety or Opportunity?

By Art Taylor

Three weeks ago, I helped lead a Fiction Intensive workshop with high school students at Broad Run High School in Ashburn, VA—young writers released from their regular schedules for the day to concentrate on creative writing. We worked through a number of exercises on building character, plot, and setting, stopping at several points for the students to share their exercises aloud. The work they were doing was imaginative and exciting, even in those quick timed exercises (which I'm never good at myself). Last Friday, I returned to Broad Run for a reading in front of a large assembly—me reading some of my work and several students volunteering to read too. In advance of that reading, I offered a critique of those students' drafts—and continued to be impressed by their work and then also by their readings in front of their peers too. Braver than I might have been at their age, I have to tell you!

But several things stood out to me along the way—things that... well, troubled is too strong a word, and puzzled too, I guess, but maybe intrigued?

A couple of things struck me, let's say that, and my thinking about them has continued to gain momentum over the past week.

The first observation: Out of the 30 or so students who volunteered for the workshop, only five were male. They all took a table together, no women with them, and one of the guys sat there throughout the exercises literally staring at the blank page in front of him, writing nothing that I could see, and looking a little pained about it.

The second: The freshmen in the group were overall far more likely to share their work—enthusiastically so—than the juniors and seniors, who kept more quiet. As the students worked on one of the exercises, I chatted with one of Broad Run's creative writing teachers , who pointed out several students who were particularly strong writers but who were very clearly guarding their work much more closely than others.

I'm interested in the first of these observations for personal reasons—as the father of a six-year-old boy who (at least now) very much loves reading and storytelling and the arts in general (more on that in a moment). I've heard too often stories from parents of other boys about how their sons used to love reading and then simply lost interest, usually around 10 years old from most accounts. Even a quick Google search on "boys and reading" calls up too many articles on the challenges they face, compared with girls, in terms of reading comprehension and even interest in reading at all. Check out this article from the New York Times in 2011 or this one from The Guardian in 2016  or this study from the Brookings Institution or....

But rather than focus on gender differences here, I want to talk more about age—and this interest is also personal, I'll admit, with more to say on my own six-year-old son, Dashiell.

I asked the teachers at Broad Run about the division between the enthusiasm and openness of those ninth graders and the relative reserve of the older students—because I'll admit, it surprised me. My own expectation might have been that older students would be a position of greater leadership, more comfortable in their place at the school, more confident and assured in their work. But the answer I got was that there was more at stake at that age—more self-consciousness about their work, even if the writing itself might have been more advanced in many ways than the work the younger students produced.

Echoing some of this: Yesterday, a writer friend, Liz Mugavero, posted at the group blog Wicked Cozy writers about creative struggles, specifically struggles, as Liz described it, "with process, with procrastination, with plots. With taking myself seriously enough to expect more for myself and my writing life." You can (and should) read the whole post, "Writing with Spirit," here. At one point, Liz quoted Julia Cameron of The Artist's Way talking about "creative injuries," which Liz herself paraphrased as, in part, "something you learned as a child about creativity being shameful or unrealistic to pursue as your life’s work."

What we learn about creativity as children—that emphasis stood out. What parent or what friend might have dismissed the importance of artistic endeavor? Or what part of the educational system devalues the arts at the expense of other lessons, other skills? These are questions to ponder and  obstacles to overcome—those external influences—but in my response to Liz, I wondered as well whether creative injuries might be self-inflicted at times too. In what ways do we ourselves form some judgements about what's "valuable" work and what's... extraneous? superfluous? negligible?

I'm struggling to find words again, but I know that even I find myself too often putting my "real" work ahead of my writing—which isn't real? or isn't work?— and maybe it's not just the size of the paycheck at the end of that process that determines what work "counts."

To bring this even more back home—literally: On Wednesday of this week, we had (another) winter weather day, school delayed, then cancelled, and our six-year-old son needing activities and attention around the house while we tried to get something accomplished ourselves on what became a sudden work-from-home day for us too. A seemingly easy answer: craft projects! And so we gathered up paper and colored pencils and crayons and scissors for Dash—and set him out on a project of his own choosing, a drawing he was going to do for a friend.

As you might expect, things didn't go as planned—do they ever?

But the reasons those plans fell apart—that's what I wasn't expecting.

Dash is a fine artist—amazing both us and his teachers with his attention to detail, the precision with which he approaches his work, his comprehensiveness, his enthusiasm. In Oregon last year, we took a lunchtime riverboat cruise one day, and at a restaurant that night, waiting for our dinner, Dash decided to draw the boat from memory. I'm not sure what others might see below, but this proud parent thought his artwork was great—and told him so.

At times, my wife and I have laughed as Dash repeated some of the praise we've given him—him declaring at one point, "I really am a great artist!" as he dove into a new project. It's a confidence that might come across as cocky from someone older, but it seems charming now, as if he's somehow surprised himself.

....which is why on Wednesday, I myself was surprised to hear nothing but frustration coming from him as he tried to draw an airplane.

This doesn't look right. I messed this up. I did this wrong. I made a mistake. 

I wish I could find and link to an article I read recently about how kids right around Dash's age suddenly see their creative work with different eyes. Where younger kids more often draw or paint free from any self-consciousness, somewhere around six they begin to feel more self-critical—for two reasons. One is comparison with others: so-and-so draws better than me. The other is comparison with the real world: what I drew doesn't look like the thing I was trying to draw.

...or to shift media: So-and-so writes better, and then, what I was trying to write, what I saw in my mind, isn't what came out on the page. We've all been there, I'm sure.

It was a frustrating moment for him—and frustrating too for me as a parent, for bigger reasons. What he was drawing—that plane—it looked fine, and the "mistake" he'd made—a small slip of the pencil along one line, a tiny curve—seemed negligible. But it left him fretful, unsatisfied—and left me wondering bigger questions about how he would handle this new self-consciousness, self-criticism, not just in that moment but in many similar moments still to come, across a lifetime maybe.

Would tearing up the page and throwing it away be a step toward drawing (or writing) better the next time? Surely that can be a good thing—steps toward improving your craft, right?

Or would tearing up that page be just the first step toward walking away from all of it?  leaving all the blank pages behind?

"Remember Ish," I told him, a kids book about a boy struggling with self-consciousness about his own drawings. "Remember The Book of Mistakes," I said, another one that talks about turning mistakes into triumphs. (Good books, I should add, for all of us.) "We'll read those again tonight, OK? It's all going to work out." 

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, I have to admit. I felt like some answer might come to me as I was writing this post, but instead I just find myself thinking about my own frustrations with procrastination and process, those frustrations Liz wrote about, and then about the students at Broad Run High School who were writing fine stories but hesitant to share them, and then about the guy who just stared at the empty notebook and didn't seem to be writing anything at all.

In order not to end this post on a worrisome note, I want to go back further into Dash's childhood and to a couple of lessons that he's taught me about creativity and about getting where you want to go—lessons that I've brought up on panels and presentations myself.

The first is about determination. When Dash was first learning to walk, he was nearly single-minded in his resolution. If he fell after one step, he got up and did it again, until he could take two. And once he had two down, he went for three. It took him a long time to get where he wanted to go, but step by step he got there, and I remind myself of this each time I feel like I'm not making enough progress on my writing—page by page, sentence by sentences, word by work, as long as I'm moving forward, I'll get there.

The other lesson is about revision—and about Lego, something I've already talked about here before. When I'm working on revision, it's often painful to take apart something I've written and try to rework it or worse to scrap paragraphs or pages that simply aren't working. But when Dash is working with Lego, he doesn't mind at all dismantling things—there's a glee in it, in fact!—to follow through on some new idea, some new vision.

There's a courage there and a freedom that I wish I had when tearing down and rebuilding my own work. And it's a courage and a freedom that I was hoping Dash himself would have earlier this week with his own "mistakes."

The good news? He didn't throw the page away. He fretted, but he finished, and the end product looks great.

Those lessons I learned from Dash—I just hope he can continue to hang on to them himself.

BSP & SHOUT-OUTS

I'm thrilled that my story "A Necessary Ingredient" has been named a finalist for this year's Agatha Award, alongside my good friend and fellow SleuthSayers Barb Goffman for her story "Whose Wine Is It Anyway?" Hooray! You can read both stories at the Malice Domestic website, along with stories by the other three finalists too—all for free.

"A Necessary Ingredient" was published in the anthology Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea, co-edited by our fellow SleuthSayers Paul D. Marks and published by Down & Out Books, and in related news, two other stories from the collection have been selected by Louise Penny for this year's forthcoming Best American Mystery Stories anthology—both stories by fellow SleuthSayers as well: "Windward" by Paul D. Marks himself and "Gun Work" by John Floyd.

Two other SleuthSayers also got tapped for BAMS honors: Michael Bracken for his story "Smoked" in Noir at the Salad Bar and David Edgerley Gates for "Cabin Fever" from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

Not hardly a bad showing for our little group, yeah? Congrats to all!