The Greatest Historical Mystery of all Time

A while back I read, among other things, a review of Roberto Calasso's La Folie Baudelaire(1): 

"Calasso's book can be seen as a series of spirited improvisations on the theme expressed in Walter Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire: that the poet, though he remained resolutely in the Romantic tradition, was the first to express the dark new reality of what Benjamin called 'the permanent catastrophe of life after the Industrial Revolution.'"

To which my response was: "Maybe, but Genesis is the first work to express the dark new reality of 'permanent catastrophe' of life after the Agricultural Revolution."  

I've suspected for a long time that most of the very ancient myths, including Genesis 2-3 and Gilgamesh, are all really about the the Agricultural Revolution. It actually is one of the great historical mysteries, if not the greatest:  how humanity went from wandering the earth to settling down, from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Because there was nothing inevitable - or even logical - about it. Humans were hunter-gatherers for 90% of human history. Agriculture is only a blip of time, and the urbanized world we live in - with only 1.3% of the US population actually working in agriculture, and only 26.7% world-wide - is barely 100 years old.  

So how did it happen?

MY NOTE:  That's what myths are for, to explain mysteries that no one can explain.  How we got here.  Why we're doing the things we're doing here and now - because we have no idea what the hell happened.  Especially when you realize that you're stuck.  You can't go back.  

So, here's the thing:  Paleolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherer societies were complex, advanced societies.  They had fire, dogs, tools, woven containers, clothing, religion, art, music, dance, and stories.  They invented rafts, nets, and skis (the oldest skis still in existence date back to 6,000 BC from Russia).  They buried their dead. They had some concept of religious ritual.  They built sanctuaries and raised monoliths, megaliths, astronomical calendars, and passage tombs in abundance.  Look up Gobekli Tepe, Warren Field, Newgrange, etc.  

They had phenomenal memories.  (As I always told my students, oral cultures aren't and weren't stupid.)  Whole genealogies, records of journeys, oral maps, oral encyclopedias of where the plants and animals were, what herbs you used for medicine, what parts of trees and animals were best for what function and endless  - they had it all in their heads, and passed it all down, generation to generation, to [almost] the present day.  

They lived well.  They ate just as many plants as animals, and in some cases and definitely in some seasons, more more.  They returned again and again to sites where specific plants (roots, tubers, nuts, berries, and even grains) grew.  And they often either made sure to leave a certain number of those plants intact (roots in the ground, seeds above ground) and even replanted some things. (Ginseng hunters in China were known to do the same thing.)

It was a fairly egalitarian society: there was a leader, and/or a master of the hunt, but when the hunting and gathering was done, all the food was shared out equally among the tribe. Enlightened self-interest was and is the norm for pre-industrial societies. Radical hospitality was and is mandatory - if a stranger shows up, take him in, feed him, treat him well, because some day it will be your turn.  

It was also a fairly non-materialistic society, in terms of stockpiling stuff.  It had to be, because you can't carry a lot of stuff with you as a hunter-gatherer. 

It was also a surprisingly leisured society.  Hunter/gatherers only spent about 4-6 hours a day hunting for food, and the rest of their time cooking, eating, making tools, decorating themselves, sleeping, talking, etc.(2)   

The main drawbacks were high infant mortality, as well as the occasional death from accident, injury, and murder (yes, people killed each other then as now - see my 2015 blog post, Death Comes at the Beginning).  And, of course, they were extremely vulnerable to natural disasters.  All that kept the population very low. At one point there might have been only 125,000 humans on the planet.  

And then came agriculture and animal husbandry, and everything changed.

By the time of this ancient Egyptian painting, world population is estimated to have increased to 5-10 million people.  The Neolithic Revolution fed a lot more people than hunter-gathering, increasing the population in ways hunter-gathering couldn't.  But it had its downsides as well: 

Disease: hunter-gatherers had much lower disease rates (lice, worms) vs. farmers (measles is rinderpest in cattle; TB and smallpox come from cattle; an excellent source of tetanus is horse manure; rabies, obviously; flu from birds or pigs).  There's also overcrowding; a hunter-gatherer tribe was close, but there weren't 300-3,000 of them packed into stacked dwellings in a small walled town.  

Insecurity:  If your crops fail - well, folks are going to starve to death.  There are too many people to go back to hunting and gathering.  (Especially today.  I hear people say, well, I'm going to go off the grid, up in the wilderness - to which my response is, what wilderness?  Also, just because you've watched Alaska The Last Frontier doesn't mean you know how to survive.)  

Possession / Greed / hoarding.  I grew this, so it's mine:  this is my land, my house, my crops, my animals, my family, etc.  Lock the door, bar the windows.  Apparently, the first use of writing was to record my land, my house, my crops, my animals.  Count 'em up and keep track of what's whose.

Kings, priests, armies, bureaucracy, and war all come with agriculture. Which leads back to the great puzzle of how they learned how to do all of this.  

And we have no records.  All the written records we have come after kings, priests, scribes, armies, bureaucracy, and agriculture are already in place - and practically irreversible.  

So, what happened?

Well, to figure that out, you have to take old myths seriously, but not necessarily how time has made people take them seriously.  Most myths have been transformed over time into what we call fairy-tales, folk-tales, religious texts, or epics.  This makes analyzing them hard.  Some people will even call it blasphemous, if you're analyzing their religious text. But there are certain universals.  There's a blind king in almost every ancient culture, from Oedipus to the Mahabharata.  There's a Cinderella story in Europe, the Middle East, and China.  And battling brothers is the basis of so many epics, so many founding fathers, so many wars - of course, that could simply be human nature.  And the Flood shows up everywhere.  So.  I firmly believe that there was, somewhere, some time, way back in time, a blind king, a Cinderella, and a terrifying flood, all so memorable that each story got carried from place to place and passed on down the ages.  

Which brings me back to Genesis 2-3.  A garden, in which every tree and plant is provided that's good for food.  And a great river flowing through it, with every beast and bird living on its banks.  And human(s) naming those beasts and birds.  There's a sense of infinite nostalgia, for a time when humans were one with their environment, where humans walked on the earth, knowing every tree, bush, plant, and flower, every animal, fish, and bird, and what each and every one of them was for. 

And then comes the serpent, “more subtil than any beast of the field” – and starts talking to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”  “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Now there's been a lot of water under that bridge, as to what kind of fruit, and what the real sin was - most theologians agree that it was a combination of pride and greed, basically disobedience to God. The Epic of Gilgamesh calls it a betrayal of nature (3).  And I agree. Because what really happened during the Neolithic Revolution was a turning away from a life that was based entirely on the existing seasons and habits of nature. Trusting, every morning, that nature would indeed provide food. All humans had to do was go and look for it. 

But discontent came, and the hissing voice - whether of a serpent or in someone's own head (4) - saying, "Aren't you tired of wandering all over the place and never knowing what you'll find? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to eat berries whenever you want, to store up enough food so that you don't have to be out in bad weather?  When winter comes, you'll be sitting tight in a nice warm place with all the food and more that you need? You can provide for yourselves. You can control nature, instead of it controlling you. You will be safe."

And they fell for it. Ever since, it's been a lot of hard work and (until very modern times) extremely little leisure.

NOTE:  There's a hint that God didn't appreciate it:  Genesis also has Cain and Abel, offering their produce to God - Cain gave vegetables, Abel gave a lamb, and God preferred the meat.  So Cain got jealous and killed Abel.

Another reason why I think this interpretation of Genesis might be the right one is that it came from one of the oldest known civilizations on the planet: Sumer. Remember, Abraham was Sumerian, he came from Ur, and he brought his folk-lore with him. And many of the stories in early Genesis are also from Sumer (the Flood, for one thing). Sumer, "the cradle of civilization" "the fertile crescent", one of the places where agriculture began the earliest, so that by the time of Abraham, there would have already been a couple of thousand years of farming.  That makes Sumer a very logical place for farmers to remember, longingly, of a time without kings, bureaucrats, armies, or war. A time when food was everywhere for the taking, and all humans had to do was wander through the earth like a giant garden. And wonder what had happened, why they had been cursed: and what a specific curse! 

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

The life of a pre-industrial farmer, and that's a curse, not a blessing.

(1) Primarily because he's the author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and Ka, two very interesting works on mythology, among other things.

(2) See Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.  BTW, I love central air/heating, antibiotics, anesthetics, gas stoves and screened windows. But I can wax nostalgic like anyone else...

(3) One last note:  The Sumerian epic Gilgamesh is even more obvious about one of the last meetings between the settler and the wanderer.  King Gilgamesh befriends the wild man Enkidu - "Abundantly hairy and primitive, he lives roaming with the herds and grazing and drinking from rivers with the beasts. One day a hunter watches Enkidu destroying the traps he has prepared for the animals. The hunter informs his father, who sends him to Uruk to ask Gilgamesh for help. The king sends Shamhat, a prostitute, who seduces Enkidu. After two weeks with her, he becomes human, intelligent and understanding words, however the beasts flee when they see him."  (Wikipedia)  Later, Enkidu helps Gilgamesh kill the giant Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, where the gods lived (and where they plan to cut the trees down). But before that happens, Humbaba accuses Enkidu of betraying the beasts of the wild and, by implication, all of nature by becoming "civilized".

(4)This is why one should always beware of listening too loudly to the voices in one's own head.

Real Time & POV

I tried to watch 1917, the new Sam Mendes picture, and gave up about halfway through.  It’s about trench warfare in WWI, and if you haven’t heard, its chief claim to fame is that it unrolls in real time – in fact, it gives every appearance of being a single, long tracking shot.  This is, of course, an effect, and an extraordinary one, due in large part to cinematographer Roger Deakins, editor Lee Smith, and director Sam Mendes.  Mendes says the shortest uninterrupted shot they used was 39 seconds, and the longest 8½ minutes.  I normally love this kind of technical sleight of hand, but this time around it left me cold.

 

The famous example of real-time is Hitchcock’s Rope.  The dead guy goes into the chest, and the two killers host a cocktail party.  Out beyond the windows, night settles on the city.  Inside, the noose tightens.  Hitch shot the picture in extended takes, from five to ten minutes apiece, ten minutes being the max a camera magazine could hold. 

 

The question is why.  Hitchcock later said it was a stunt.  But he was always one for showing off.  How not?  The opening titles of The Lady Vanishes, the snow-covered train tracks, the village, the cars, all clearly a model.  The square full of umbrellas in Foreign Correspondent, the windmill turning backwards, the plane crash at sea.  (Huge pipes, from an overhead tank, smashing through the rear projection and a windscreen made of spun sugar: in other words, real water.)  The astonishing crane shot in Indiscreet, when the camera swoops down from high above all the way down to the key in Bergman’s hand.

 

Hitchcock is no stranger to heightened effect.  The point being, how does it further the story?  I give you the Covent Garden sequence in Frenzy.  Anna Massey puts her trust in her boyfriend’s bestie.  We know Barry Foster is the Necktie Murderer.  They walk through the market.  He takes her up to his flat.  The camera pauses in the stairwell as they go inside, and then backs away, down the stairs again, out of the apartment, across the street and through the market, a tracking shot in real time.  We know   what’s happening upstairs, while everybody goes about their business.  A girl is being strangled. 

 

This is how real-time can be used to enormously sinister effect.  I was a big fan of 24, but let’s admit there were some pretty contrived narrative turns.  I also liked Birdman a lot, and it took me a little to catch on, but how did the convention of a single continuous shot contribute? 

 

What narrative purpose does it serve, or is it simply a trick?  I’m not convinced by Rope, any more than I am by 1917, to be honest.  How does this pull you in any further?  I think the technical tricks actually distance you.

 

There’s a self-consciousness in any narration.  We talk about the advantages or disadvantages of First Person vs. Third, for example.  Jay McInerney used Second, Plural, in Bright Lights, Big City, but he used it for distance.  It didn’t bring you closer.  It pushed you away.  A very different example is Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers.  He uses Second Person to draw you in, to make you complicit with an unsympathetic and even criminal narrator.

 

The question I’m asking, here, is how you create intimacy.  An uncomfortable intimacy, perhaps.  Which conventions work and which don’t? 

 

I thought Bright Lights was terrifically entertaining, but Second Person a novelty.  The way it’s used in Buffalo Soldiers is more intimate, and scary.  These tricks are useful.  I’ll take any arrow in the quiver, but overuse weakens the conventions.  Maybe there’s a picture that’s strengthened by constant forward motion, but 1917 isn’t it.

Not by this pretense. 

 

There’s a difference between invitation and lurking.  We all probably have predatory instincts, lions waiting at the water hole.  Who, though, is the prey?

 

Writer’s Block of Ice

Today is Saturday, February 20, 2021. I have not written anything more complex than a trio of Facebook posts and a few brief emails since last Sunday. At approximately 6:30 a.m., Monday, February 15, the power went out in the midst of what has become known as the Texas Snowpocalypse, and it did not return until Thursday morning. Temple and I live in an all-electric house in Hewitt, a suburb of Waco, about halfway between Austin to the south and the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex to the north.

Look at the pretty snow.
It’s trying to kill you.

We live in an area with unstable electric power, where power flickers off and on year-round. For that reason, two of our computers are plugged into uninterruptable power supplies, which shield the computers from surges and can keep them running for up to an hour during a power failure, allowing for safe and systematic shutdowns. As soon as we realized the power might not be returning anytime soon, I charged my phone and Temple’s Kindle using one the UPSes. We should have also charged her phone.

As day stretched into night and day and night and day and night, the house grew increasingly colder (ultimately reaching a low of 48 degrees), we learned many things:

Multiple layers of clothing works. I added a new layer each day. By the end, I wore a sweatshirt over a T-shirt, jeans over sweatpants over underwear, slippers (when inside) or boots (when outside) over two pairs of socks. Over all of this I wore a thick Land’s End robe (when inside) or a winter coat (when outside). Accessories included gloves and a scarf.

We come from families of quilters. We have a few store-bought quilts and many quilts made by our mothers and other family members. I’m uncertain how many quilts we actually own because we did not have to dig them all out, but by the end we slept beneath five quilts—without taking off any of the layers of clothing we already wore.

We could not open the garage door more than one-third of the way. The emergency pull that should have disengaged the door from the electric door opening system’s chain did not function properly and we could not fully open the door. Even if we could have opened the door, there was no place we could have gone because everyone around us, all our family and friends, were in the same situation we were. Unable to get the cars out of the garage, we were not able to safely use them to warm ourselves or charge our phones.

Let’s have a cookout.
Chili and tea on the grill.

It is possible to cook a nutritious meal over charcoal briquettes. We often use our grill during the summer for traditional things such as steak and burgers. I used it to cook chili and heat the kettle for tea. We had enough briquettes that I could have prepared a second hot meal if I had needed to.

When the house is almost as cold as the inside of the refrigerator, there’s no real danger in opening the fridge door and rummaging through the contents. Milk remained cold and drinkable, and other fridge items remained edible throughout.

A cat will learn to appreciate covers. Kiwi often sleeps in our laps when we’re seated in the living room and he often sleeps atop me at night. The first night, despite our efforts to cover him, he resisted. As the house grew colder and he began to shiver, we wrapped him up and held him so he couldn’t escape. By the end, he insisted on being wrapped in a quilt.

A GLIMMER OF HOPE

The power flickered off and on for about an hour and a half on Tuesday afternoon, allowing the HVAC system to warm the house by a few paltry degrees.

Wednesday morning, power was restored to Temple’s father’s home. He lives about seven blocks from us. When it appeared that his power was stable, I made a renewed effort to open the garage door. I am not mechanically inclined, but after scouring the internet, I learned how to completely detach the door from the automatic system and opened the door. Temple escaped to her father’s home.

A few hours later, I took Kiwi to his house and returned home. Mid-evening, with no change in our situation likely, I joined them, and we had a warm dinner (leftover chili!), spent the night in a warm house, and had a warm breakfast.

Let there be light!

I returned home Thursday morning to find that power had been restored and the house was slowly warming. Mid-afternoon Temple and Kiwi returned home, I reassembled the garage door, and I showered for the first time since Sunday morning.

We spent Friday listening to transformers explode throughout our neighborhood. Each time, the power would flicker off and then return.

Friday, our community was placed under mandatory water conservation restrictions. So, while we’ve never been without water, we are avoiding showers, have not washed clothes, nor have we run the dishwasher.

Today, with the midmorning temperature above freezing and the roads reasonably clear, we ventured out. We had bills to pay, medications to pick up, and groceries to buy.

I tried to fill my car’s gas tank, but could not find a service station with working pumps.

The crowded grocery store had limited supplies. But we found milk, cheese, and potatoes as well as some canned items that would supplement the food we already had at home.

Many of our fellow Texans have suffered far more than we have—and some even escaped to Cancun—so I’m not about to complain about our experience. Still, I certainly don’t want to ever repeat it.

It will take a long time to recover from what’s happened. In fact, we may have PTSD—Post Texas Storm Disorder.

READING AND WRITING

I did a lot of reading during daylight hours. (I completed two Peter Lovesey novels and am halfway through a third. I strongly recommend his work even if you’re not caught in a Snowpocalypse.)

What I didn’t do is write. I couldn’t. Survival took precedence.

I don’t believe in writer’s block, and I never have. This week, though, I experienced the ultimate writer’s block.

This week I was beaten by a writer’s block of ice.

On February 12, Down & Out Books released Bullets and Other Hurting Things: A Tribute to Bill Crider, edited by Rick Ollerman. The anthology includes my story “The Ladies of Wednesday Tea.”

My story “Family Films” was published by Close to the Bone on February 14.

The Great Filling Station Holdup: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Jimmy Buffet, edited by Josh Pachter and published by Down & Out Books, was released February 22. Included is my story “Tampico Trauma” and stories by fellow SleuthSayers John M. Floyd and Leigh Lundin.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

I may have mentioned, once or three hundred times, that until I retired I was a government information librarian. One of my hobbies back then was collecting interesting government titles.  Now you get to benefit from my dedicated time-killing.

All of these are real and I include links to prove it. Some of these titles no doubt made sense when they were published. Some make sense now if you look them from the right point of view. Some – like the terrorism one  – are just a garbled mess. And some are artifacts of one of the most tragic impulses that can occur to a government author – the desire to be clever or “hip.”

Dullness is your friend, Mr. Bureaucrat. Embrace it. If you are putting an exclamation point in a government title, you are on the wrong track.

• AARUGHA!
• Combatting Terrorism of the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs 
• Cooking up solutions: cleaning up with lasagna
• Delivery of Caffeine Through an Inhalation Route
• Developing a Jail Industry
• The Divining Rod: A History of Water Witching
• Do you know oatmeal?
• Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Exploration Program.
• Easing the Thumbprints of Society
• Everything you always wanted to know about shipping high-level nuclear wastes
• Exploring the U.S. Role in Consolidating Peace and Democracy in the Great Lakes Region
• Fertilizers in a national emergency
• Getting a job on the moon
• The golden age of bathing
• How large is China’s economy? Does it matter?
• Index of Blank Forms
• Let’s Use TV!
• Magic Bean Wishes
• Manual for Medical Examination of Aliens
• Method of Swinging on a Swing
• Mud & Guts
• Options for Making Concurrency More Multimodal
• Plane Clothes: Lack of Anonymity at the Federal Air Marshal Service Compromises Aviation and National Security.
• Proposed Idea Regulations
• Public Dance Halls: Their Regulation and Place in the Recreation of Adolescents
• Request for Assistance in.. Preventing the Injury of Workers by Robots
• Sprocketman
• State-of-the-art dummy selection
• Step into action! A guidebook for the above-knee amputee.
• Wake Up America! A National Sleep Alert.
• What color is your green card?
• Whether the attempted implementation of the Reid-Kennedy Immigration Bill will result in an administrative and national security nightmare
• A winning combination: wild horses and prison inmates

A Buffett Buffet

Why get stoned when there’s rock? Stone crabs and rock shrimp, of course, boiling in sea water seasoned with Old Bay, served outside a rusted beach shack. Delicious.

Unless you’ve been living under a conch shell, you probably heard Margaritaville has a new criminal element in town. Disreputable word-slingers have been spotted skulking amongst the happy drunks at beachside bars, gathered around a piratey privateer, Josh Pachter. This disreputable lot call themselves anthologists. Book 'em, I say, in fact, it’s already booked: The Great Filling Station Holdup.

Let’s face it. Jimmy Buffett is a damn good lyricist. If he’d migrated from Nashville to Tin Pan Alley, he’d reside among the best of Broadway songwriters.

While Buffett is known for lighthearted, cheerful tunes, scratch many a surface and you’ll reveal more serious strata. Take as example the lyrics of Margaritaville:

But there’s booze in the blender
And soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.

Wasted away again in Margaritaville,
Searching for my lost shaker of salt.
Some people claim that there's a woman to blame,
And I know it's my own damn fault.

A reviewer at AZLyrics.com opines:

The song is about a man spending an entire season at a beach resort, enjoying carefree Caribbean lifestyle with margarita cocktails. There is some lyric confusion about words ‘Wasted away’ in the chorus of the song.

Whut? Seriously? Are we listening to the same song? You can’t hear the tone of forlorn desperation? Sir, put down the rum and step away from the bar.

While many of Buffett’s songs carry a serious secondary layer, a few like ‘Southern Cross’ will break your heart, and some of his early work is downright dark and dangerous. And I like it. But, when Josh Pachter invited me to sail the Buffett brigantine, I was immensely flattered and simultaneously panicked. What the hell could I possibly come up with? Then parts fell into place.

I find it difficult to write about myself. Talk about my work, okay, fine, but talk about me, not so easy. To deflect scrutiny, I hatched the notion of writing about my SleuthSayers colleagues and their stories appearing in Josh’s latest and greatest anthology. Good excuse. And why not include Pachter’s headlining story as well? Let’s begin.

	♪ Spending Money ♪ Beach House on the Moon [music • lyrics] John Floyd

John sent me his story first, so we’ll start there. Jimmy’s song, ‘Spending Money’, is a light-hearted, whistling ditty. Part of the chorus subtly hints at skullduggery,

A little spending money, money to burn.
Money that you did not necessarily earn.

John has molded his story into a morality play. Greek playwrights could recognize the plot. Russian authors might embrace such a protagonist.

In John’s story, a hint of a pending train wreck hovers in the air, a force that can’t be stopped. The main character has an issue with honesty, a shortcoming of which a rare friend, a waitress, tries to disabuse him of his wayward ways.

To tell you more would tell you too much. I’ve read many of John’s stories and haven’t encountered one like this. Enjoy it.

	♪ Tampico Trauma ♪ Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes [music • lyrics] Michael Bracken

I’ve read Michael Bracken over the years, but I hadn’t absorbed what a master of atmosphere he is. From the beginning, you feel like you’ve been dropped into Tamaulipas– no, not a Taco Bell menu item, the Mexican Gulf state. In Michael’s story, you can smell aromatic herbs seasoning the broth, you can hear a touristy guitar.

Buffett’s song is barely 150 words, fewer than twenty lines. In contrast, Michael has fleshed out a complete story, a simmering plot spiced by the kind and compelling Hernández hermanas. I can’t help but wonder if he didn’t borrow a refrain from another song:

First you learn the native custom,
Soon a word of Spanish or two.
You know that you cannot trust them,
Cause they know they can’t trust you.

Trust me, Bracken has smuggled a lot in a small packet.

	♪ The Great Filling Station Holdup ♪ A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean [music • lyrics] Josh Pachter

Josh Pachter shuttles us through the dimensions of space, time, and sound, back to a Jimmy country song. Both artists convey an old-fashioned tone, a feeling when informal policing could accomplish more than modern day school resource officers and zero-tolerance policies.

We got fifteen dollars and a can of STP,
A big ole jar of cashew nuts and a Japanese TV.
Feelin’ we’dd pulled the biggest heist of our career.
We're wanted men– we’ll strike again!
But first let’s have a beer.

Josh delivers a surprisingly gentle story. He pays considerable attention to characterization, so by the time the story wraps, you’re glad to witness a happy ending.

And for enquiring minds who want to know, he’s a damn fine editor. He’s also donating a third of the royalties to two Buffett charities, Singing for Change Charitable Foundation and Save the Manatee Club,

	♪ Truckstop Salvation ♪ Down to Earth [music • lyrics] Leigh Lundin

After Josh’s invitation, I sweated, coming up with zero ideas. As the acceptance deadline approached, I feared having to decline.

One evening, my scalpel-tongued brother Glen mentioned one of his ironic descriptors– dirty, furrin’ lovin’, commie, pinko, hippie, peace queers (considerably cleaned up for our refined audience). I tossed out, “Long-haired, greasy-looking ape,” and immediately wondered where that came from.

Googling found it in a song on Jimmy Buffett’s first album, Down to Earth. The lyrics of ‘Truckstop Salvation’ hinted at an off-camera not-so-pleasant ending.

A silly ditty floated in my brain to the tune of ‘Harper Valley PTA’ (written here in awkward pentameter):

I want to tell you about a valley in Eastern Tennessee.
Good folks and bad struggle in a place called Suwannachee.
No McDonalds, no mall, no factory, no future, no pay,
Then along comes a notice from the local valley TVA.

Those in Washington know you love your rustic neighborhood,
But Congress tells you to give it up for the greater good.
Though eminent domain puts your family in a jam,
Those vacate orders on your doors mean they don’t give a dam.

Once my brain juxtaposed my brother with his Tom Petty hair and live-by-his-own-rules attitude, a Southern gothic began to sketch itself in dark, dark tones. What if Edgar Allan Poe engaged in a forbidden romance with Bobbie Gentry? You know, Deliverance without all the fun and frolic?

---

Those rock shrimp and stone crabs are rolling to a boil. Beer tub in the sand, nutcrackers at the ready. Pick up the hammer and tongs, have at them.

Florida’s Broward College is sponsoring the launch party. It’s virtual. It’s Zoom. It’s free. It’s 11 March, 2021 at 07:30p. Sign up here!

And yeah, the Jimmy Buffett anthology has lots of damn good stories. Don’t be a crusty crustacean, pre-order at a discount. Do it quickly– it’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

As You Wish

  

FYI, I am not a screenwriter. I'm just a short-story writer who loves movies and has always been interested in the way they're written and made. And one of the things I have observed is that any discussion of screenwriters eventually includes the name William Goldman (Butch Cassidy, Misery, Marathon Man, All the President's Men), and anytime you talk long enough about movies that are loved by just about everyone, somebody usually mentions The Princess Bride.

 

Goldman, who wrote the book and then the movie, once said, "I was going to California on a trip and I told my daughters, 'I'll write you a story; what do you want it to be about?' And one of them said, 'Princesses,' and the other said something about 'brides.' And I said, 'Okay, that will be the title.'"

As it turned out, the movie version of The Princess Bride became a classic, one of those rare films loved by viewers of all ages. I've probably watched it a dozen times, and it even has the approval of my wife and kids and grandchildren, who are sometimes bored crosseyed by my movie suggestions. TPB is unlike any other film I can think of, a weird combination of fairy tale ("Have fun storming the castle"), comedy ("Don't rush me, sonny, you rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles"), love story ("Farm Boy, polish my horse's saddle; I want to see my face shining in it by morning"), revenge story ("My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die"), and adventure story ("You're trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen"). It features pirates, giants, wizards, torture, fire swamps, The Cliffs of Insanity, and R.O.U.S. (Rodents of Unusual Size). And another thing: The Princess Bride is one of those movies--among them The Silence of the Lambs, Jaws, Lonesome Dove, The Godfather, Cuckoo's Nest, No Country for Old Men, and Shawshank Redemption--that turned out to be as good as the novels and novellas from which they were adapted. That doesn't happen often.

A special treat for me was a book I acquired a few years ago called As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes, who played Westley in the movie. If you're familiar with the story, you might remember that the phrase "as you wish" was the reply Westley always gave Buttercup anytime she asked him for something (like fetching a pitcher or filling a bucket with water or polishing her saddle). And because of that, in one of those moments that make good stories great, there was this exchange at the very end of the movie, when Peter Falk is about to leave after reading the story to ten-year-old Fred Savage:

The Grandson: "Grandpa? Maybe you could come over and read it again to me tomorrow."

The Grandfather: "As you wish." 

Anyhow, it's a delightful and educational book about the filming of the movie and about the actors and their roles. In case you don't know, or in case you've forgotten, here's the cast:

Robin Wright as Buttercup/The Princess Bride

Cary Elwes as Westley/Farm Boy/The Man in Black/The Dread Pirate Roberts

Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya

Andre the Giant as Fezzik

Wallace Shawn as Vizzini

Chris Sarandon as Prince Humperdinck

Christopher Guest as Count Rugen/The Six-Fingered Man

Billy Crystal as Miracle Max

Carol Kane as Valerie

Peter Cook as The Impressive Clergyman

Peter Falk as The Grandfather

Fred Savage as The Grandson

 

There's also plenty of interesting inside info about director Rob Reiner, screenwriter William Goldman, and the many ups and downs of trying to put the movie together. Here are a few excerpts from the book:

Rob Reiner: "So I went with Andy [co-producer Andy Scheinman] to Bill's [Goldman's] apartment in New York, and he opened the door and said, 'This is my favorite thing that I've ever written in my life. I want it on my tombstone.' And the subtext was, 'What are you going to do to it?'"

Robin Wright: "My theory is that they were so completely tired of meeting girls--I think I was the five-hundredth girl they saw--at that point they were like, 'Just cast her. Make her the princess.' . . . That was my lucky fate--they were exhausted."

William Goldman: "I remember turning to Rob and saying, "You're setting fire to Robin on the first day?! What, are you nuts? It's not like we can replace her!"

Mandy Patinkin: "It was 1986. My father died in 1972. I read that script and I wanted to play Inigo because my mind immediately went, If I can get that six-fingered man, then I'll have my father back, in my imaginary world."

Cary Elwes (on meeting Andre the Giant): "I remember Rob introducing us, and watching my fingers disappear when we shook hands, completely engulfed by a palm bigger than a catcher's mitt . . . His shoe size was twenty-four and his wrist was nearly a foot in circumference. Standing next to him, I only came to his belly-button."

You get the idea. The point is, if you like movies, and if you liked The Princess Bride, you'll enjoy this book. 

Meanwhile, have fun storming the castle . . .

The Day I Hung Up My Fedora Forever

I was about 10 years old when I got my first business cards. I “printed” them up myself, laboriously writing them in longhand with pen on index cards I swiped from my Dad.

D’AGNESE DETECTIVE AGENCY, the first line read. After that came our home address in Jersey. There ended my originality. The rest of the copy is tattooed in the brain of anyone who loved mysteries as a kid: 25 cents per case, plus expenses. No case too small.

I don’t know how many of these cards I wrote up. But it was a lot, because I remember discarding a few of my Dad’s pens along the way. Some cards started in black or blue ink, but finished in red. Then I pressed my younger brothers into service. We dropped those cards into every home mailbox or mail slot in the neighborhood.

I set up my office in the garage. We always had some folding chairs tucked away in a closet; I appropriated a couple for myself and my operatives. My Dad had a very large metal gasoline can in the garage—also perfect, also fortuitous—which became my desk of sorts.

I don’t know how long I had to wait for my first case, but when it materialized, it came in the form of two big kids. I can’t be precise about their ages, or mine, because childhood memories are forever and ageless. One of the kids was the friend of our older, big-kid neighbor, Clint.

Big kids suck.

“Someone stole my bike,” he told me. “I need you to find it.”

As soon as his lips closed, a shocking thought passed through my head: What the hell was I doing? I had no freaking idea how to be a detective. How does one even begin to track a stolen bike?

“Do you have any suspects?” I said.

My client didn’t get a chance to respond, because at this point one of my brothers insisted on seeing the color of the fellow’s money. “It’s 25 cents!”

“Yeah, I know,” the big kid said. “I read those books too.”

Book #1 in the Series. Note the gas can!

The books in question, as you’ve no doubt guessed, were the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries that were written so wonderfully by a man named Donald J. Sobol over the course of 49 years.

Sobol wrote other books in his lifetime, but the Brown mysteries—about Leroy Brown, a kid sleuth who solved cases out of his garage in a small fictional town in Florida—will always be his claim to fame. The Brown books each contained about 10 short mysteries.

I hate dreaming up clues for the stories I write today. I’m terrible at it. Sobol’s genius was boiling every single case down to some abstruse factoid that revealed which person in the story was a liar. Things like which way water flowed in the Amazon basin, or the fact that dogs can’t see color, or the fact that fire never burns downward, only up. (I just made these up. They are not Sobol-approved.) No one in the stories, not even grown-ups, knew this kind of trivia, but Encyclopedia always did. That’s how he always nabbed the perp.

I never did read all the Brown books. My childhood ended before Sobol finished crafting them. But many years later, I had the chance to read the first volume of his Two-Minute Mysteries series, which were wickedly short newspaper puzzlers not unlike the ones in Woman’s World magazine today. Sobol published three books culled from this one syndicated mystery column, which he began writing for newspapers in 1959.

But here’s what blew my mind: In the same way that Raymond Chandler “cannibalized” his short stories and their plots in later novels, or the way Ellery Queen repurposed their old radio scripts for later books, Sobol clearly tapped some of his old Dr. Haledjian newspaper shorts for later Encyclopedia Brown material.

Because clues are just that precious.

None of this helped me, by the way, back in the 1970s. The Case of the Purloined Bike didn’t have a single critical clue to guide me. (I wouldn’t have spotted it if it had.) As I recall, the case fell apart when the client threatened to steal our bikes, mine and my brothers. Isn’t that just like a big kid?!

Terrified, I fled my newly hatched office for the safety of my upstairs bedroom, bolting the door. If the world was not going to challenge my ratiocinative abilities, I would not be a party to its madness.

Book #29 —the last in the series.

My younger brother, who has always been physically bigger than me, fought off the big kids with a stick and locked the garage door. He’s the only hero of this story.

I never had another case. But some months later, a commuter on the bus to the big city plopped down next to my father one morning and innocently asked, “Are you a detective?”

My father spluttered that he was no such thing.

The woman showed him my business card.

“That’s gotta be one of my idiot kids!” he told her.

“I thought so,” she said. “But I thought I would ask. I need someone to find my sweater. I can’t find it anywhere.”

Where was this paragon of clienthood when I needed her?

By rights my story ends there. But many years later, when I was working at the children’s publishing company, Scholastic, I had the chance to interview Sobol, who lived in Florida, by phone.

I found him to be incredibly down to earth. He chuckled when I told him about my detective agency. I was not the only grown-up who’d shared such an anecdote with him over the years. Pulling some questions from old bios of him, I asked if he still fished or golfed. He laughed. He said most days he was lucky if he got up from his desk and made it to the refrigerator.

At the end of the interview, I mentioned in passing that our children’s magazine would be reprinting one of the Brown mysteries to accompany the Q&A I was writing.

In a line that sort of presaged my own future, Sobol replied, “Am I getting paid for this? I mean, if it’s just a few bucks, no big deal. But if it’s $25, send me the check.”

His last Brown title was published a few months after he died in the summer of 2012, at age 87. The best estimate I’ve found says the Brown books have sold more than 50 million copies—and counting. That should keep us in budding detectives until the end of this century, at least.

Count me out.

* * * 

You will enjoy this Crime Reads piece that profiles Sobol and interviews his grown children.

Sobol’s 2012 obituary in the New York Times.

See you in three weeks!

"Clarice, Don't Be A Naughty Girl..." Or, Fun With Dialogue

Happy Presidents Week! 

It's time we talked. You know, a real back-and-forth. A rap session.

A dialogue.

You know you're a writer if you're having them with yourself. And the more often you're having them, the more likely you are to be having a productive stretch at the ol' keyboard.

(And don't believe the alarmists. Shrinks overwhelmingly cite conversations with oneself as a sign of robust mental health.)

I have them everywhere. All the time.

Sometimes they're dead ends. Sometimes they're the start of something. Snatches of conversation. Bits of overheard dialogue.

A friend of mine (also a writer) has a popular and long-running series of snatches of other people's conversations overheard in public places and immortalized in his social media platforms. They are engaging, bizarre, and usually unforgettable. At times for their "quip" factor. At times for their sheer mundanity. 

And always for their utter humanity.

The best dialogue is not that written by the likes of Aaron Sorkin (whose work I admittedly love), because there is no situation arising in real life where everyone you work with comes armed with a knapsack full of relevant facts, a closet full of debate trophies, and barks at each other like an auctioneer who has just drunk their tenth Red Bull. Love it on the screen and can suspend my disbelief there, mostly because Sorkin's work is fun to watch. However, it doesn't translate well to the written page. 

For that you need realistic dialogue.

You notice, I didn't say, "real dialogue." "Realism" and "reality" are not exactly the same animal. We're staging something when we're writing, not memorializing it.

And that's in part because of the utter mundanity of most human conversation. Let me give you an example:

"The Costco order is here," my wife said.

"Okay, I'll be right there." And I got up to go help bring it in.

Real? Yes. It happened today, in fact. But it's mundane. It serves no other purpose than to let you know that my wife and I got a Costco order today. As such it's not so much written dialogue as it is a snatch of memorialized conversation.

And written dialogue must do much more heavy lifting than memorialized conversations. Like every other part of the story, dialogue must work in service of the plot. It must advance it. Realistic dialogue, when employed correctly, reveals character, ratchets up the tension and advances the plot. Otherwise, no matter how artful, no matter how witty, no matter how poetic, it must be (and in the best writing, is) cut.

When I'm trying to get dialogue to work, I try to keep in mind two maxims, each laid out by one of the best writers of the last century or so: Elmore Leonard and John Le Carré.

Leonard once famously said: "My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip."

As for Le Carré, he said of a plot: "The cat sat on the mat is not the beginning of a story. The sat on the dog's mat is."

The best dialogue obeys both of these dictums.

Leonard's is key because (of course) the best writing does not bore the reader. Le Carré's because it points up how essential conflict is to advancing the plot.

And that is what separates realistic dialogue from real dialogue. "Realistic" writing is a construct, not a transcription. It's a tool intended to convey the writer's message. As such, it works in service of the message, rather than serving as the message itself.

As such it can and must be massaged, worked and reworked, tweaked, larded with subtext, whatever it takes to get your point across.

Someone a lot more success than I am once said, "There must be conflict on every page" of a work of fiction, otherwise it's wasted writing. I'll take that one step further. There must conflict in every conversation the writer choose to employ, otherwise that writing, too, is wasted.

And where a playwright or a screenwriter has collaborators: actors to speak their words, lighting directors to set the mood, cinematographers to make effective use of the best camera angles, fiction writers tend to be solo acts (editors and beta readers are not only helpful, but essential, but they play their parts in the process once a draft is completed). We are the writers, the directors, the scene-setters, the dialogue coaches. We play all of the parts.

And oftentimes that includes having conversations with ourselves. Out loud.

I've never been lucky enough to hear a snatch of conversation so inspiring that it led to my creating a work of fiction. My ideas tend to spring from something I read, or, as I've laid out above, from conversations I have with myself.

My incredibly talented wife, however, is currently putting the finishing touches on her first novel, the germ of which story came to her in an overheard snatch of conversation. In fact, it was a bit of conversation we both overheard, a decade ago, while honeymooning in the U.K.

We were driving from Edinburgh to York, and stopped at Housesteads, an archeological site featuring a partial restoration of one of the many Roman-built mile castles which dotted the length of Hadrian's Wall. While touring the site we happened upon a British family: a father and mother, and two small girls, somewhere between the ages of 6 and 8 or so.

The rock wall in question looked a lot like this.

Just as we advanced within earshot, the mother, in a tone uncannily similar to that of one of the members of Monty Python in drag, called out to one of her daughters, "Clarice (pronounce "Clair-Iss."), don't be a naughty girl!" In reply to which the younger of the two girls, at that moment perched atop a two-foot high rock fence, stood straight and protested bitterly that her sister was climbing on the rocks too.

And just like that, my wife had an idea for a main character with a life-defining relationship. Sometimes it happens that quickly, that completely. Like the story about how car trouble on New York's George Washington Bridge led to Donald Westlake creating both the amoral thief Parker, and the pseudonym under which he would populate Parker's world, Richard Stark.

I'm not so talented as either my wife or the late Mr. Westlake (to say nothing of the late Mssrs. Leonard and Le Carré). So, for the time being at least, I'm going to continue having conversations with myself.

See you in two weeks!

Brand New Cliches

 

Yesterday the March/April issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine hit the newsstand, assuming such institutions still exist.  I am delighted to be making my 33rd appearance in those distinguished pages.  "Shanks' Locked Room" is the eleventh showing there by my grumpy crime writer, so he stars in one-third of my tales  in that market.

You may notice the "locked room" in the title.  It is a subgenre of the mystery story, of course, going all the way back to the very first: Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue."  I thought it might be fun to play around with the old gimmick and I wound up turning it inside out.  The puzzle Shanks has to solve is not "how did the villain get into a room without a key?" but "why did the villain steal the key and not enter the room?"

I enjoy turning a cliche around.  I had written what I thought would be a follow-up called "Shanks' Last Words," involving the famous dying-message clue, but it turned out that technology had gotten ahead of me and made my story outdated.  Such is life.

One master of the upturned cliche was Jack Ritchie, a genius of the comic short story whom John Floyd and I have praised to the sky on this page.  He wrote a book about Henry Turnbuckle, a Milwaukee police detective.  Henry loved mystery fiction and was constantly being disappointed that reality cruelly ignored the cliches and motifs of the field.

For example, in one story two of the suspects are identical twins.  Alas,  in violation of every rule of mystery fiction that turns out to have nothing to do with the solution.  In another tale Henry gathers all the suspects and dramatically reveals the killer - only to have the suspects point out a fatal flaw in his logic, which involved a fact no one had bothered to mention to him.  Why is it in crime fiction the detective always gets all the necessary information?  Doesn't happen in real life.  

 By coincidence I was reading a story today and gave up on it because it stuck to a very tired cliche: The villain was about to kill the hero but first gave him a detailed explanation of his plan, and damned near a blueprint of the house where he was being held.  

This peculiar generosity on the part of some bad guys was brilliantly skewered in the movie Austin Powers.  

So, which cliches of the field bug you the most?

When Red Herrings Stink

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something that may be controversial, at least among writers: Readers should understand why a red herring (something that is said or happens in a novel or story that leads the reader to a false conclusion) was not the solution to the puzzle by the time the tale is over.

Until recently I didn't think this was a controversial opinion. I thought it was a standard approach to writing mysteries. Sure, I'd sometimes heard authors say before that they didn't need to explain by the end of their stories why Character X said Y because Y was a red herring, but I thought they were mistaken, and since I wasn't their teacher, it wasn't my place to correct their misguided notion. But recently I edited a story by an author I respect, someone who's a solid writer, and the issue arose. Since I was this person's editor, it was my job to say my piece.

I'm going to talk about the story, but I'm completely changing the names and plot so that you can't identify the author because who this person is doesn't matter. In the whodunit story, Princess Consuella tells Annie the Amateur Sleuth that murder suspect Bad Bad Leroy Brown lied about something, based on personal observation, and therefore, it seems, Leroy must be the killer. Princess Consuella was believable and seemed absolutely certain, so I suspect most readers would have finished that scene believing Leroy had indeed lied and thus must have been the killer. It's what I thought. Yet at the end of the story, I learned I'd been fooled. Leroy may be bad, but he never killed anyone--at least not in that story.

I raised the problem with the author--that no explanation of Princess Consuella's statement about Bad Bad Leroy Brown was provided by the story's end. Either Leroy did lie (which by the story's end didn't seem right, since we never learned any reason Leroy would have lied about the issue in question) or the princess had been wrong (but how could that have been true, since she had seen with her own eyes the thing she was certain Leroy lied about, and it wasn't the type of thing that could have been misunderstood, and she had no reason to lie, either). The reader would be left wondering how to reconcile this situation, so some  explanation should be provided, I said. The author pushed back, saying that no explanation was necessary since it was a red herring designed to fool the reader into thinking the wrong suspect was the killer. The reader learns who the actual killer is by the end, and that's what matters, the author said; we don't need to revisit the red herring. 

That response prompted me to do some research about red herrings. Had I been wrong all these years? Did red herrings, by their very nature, not require explanation? To my surprise, I found nothing addressing this issue. There are a lot of articles about crafting solid red herrings, but I found nothing addressing the idea that red herrings should be explained by a story's end, that the reader should be able to understand how she got fooled. Even now, some time later, I remain quite surprised, because if authors can toss in red herrings without eventually providing an explanation for them, it makes writing too easy. It feels like a cheat.

In the case of Bad Bad Leroy Brown, sure, he could have been lying for reasons the reader never learns, despite seeming to have no reason to lie. Alternately, Princess Consuella could have lied for reasons the reader never learns about or she could have been wrong, despite being so certain and giving the reader no reason to explain how she could have been so mistaken. It certainly would make life easy for authors if they could write red herrings that didn't have to be explained in the end, but I think it would leave readers with a bad taste in their mouths. That is why I believe such scenarios need to be resolved. Did Leroy lie and why? Or did the princess get it wrong and how could that be? Without an explanation, the red herring feels contrived. It makes me feel like the author was playing games with me. 

This is why I recommended the author use a little misdirection when the red herring was introduced. More specifically, I suggested that when the princess called Leroy a liar, the author should use the wiggle word "recall" in the dialogue. Notice the slight difference:

Scenario A: The princess slams her hand on the table, its sound echoing throughout the castle. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown is a liar! I was sitting right next to him in the dungeon cafe last week, and he didn't leave money for his meal on the table when he left. I wonder what else he's lying about. I bet he rips off restaurants throughout the kingdom all the time. He's a rip-off artist."

Scenario B: The princess slams her hand on the table, its sound echoing throughout the castle. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown is a liar! I was sitting right next to him in the dungeon cafe last week, and I don't recall him leaving money for his meal on the table when he left. I wonder what else he's lying about. I bet he rips off restaurants throughout the kingdom all the time. He's a rip-off artist."

In Scenario A, the reader ends the story shrugging, thinking Leroy (who has a reputation for honesty, despite his name) had no reason to lie when he said he paid for his lunch, yet the princess's adamant accusation against Leroy remains unexplained. (She too had no reason to lie and her certainty indicated she hadn't made a mistake.)  In Scenario B, the reader can go back and reread the language of the princess's accusation and think, "Oh. The author fooled me."

Here's why Scenario B works: Because (1) the reader has no reason to think the princess lied; (2) the princess seems so certain, so the reader will believe her account; and (3) the princess distracts the reader by slamming the table, muttering about what else Leroy might have lied about, and declaring that he's a rip-off artist, the reader easily could read right past the key words--the princess didn't recall Leroy leaving his payment. When the reader gets to the end of the story, she could flip back to reread the princess's accusation and think, "Oh! It was right there. She merely didn't remember it. I was distracted by her certainty. I was fooled fair and square." That's the way to make a red herring work. That's the way to make the reader feel satisfied rather than feeling played.

Alternately, the reader could learn by the story's end that Leroy did lie for reasons unrelated to the murder. If there was a good reason for his lie, especially something that worked well with the plot, then revealing both the lie and the reason for it could have elevated the story. It also could have left the reader feeling satisfied because, while she was fooled, she wasn't played for a fool. Distracting the reader into missing a key word is playing fair with the reader. In contrast, dropping a lie into the story to fool the reader without any ultimate explanation isn't playing fair,  not to me, at least.

So that's my advice about red herrings. If you're going to use them,  make sure they're explained by the end so they don't seem contrived. Otherwise, you're taking an easy way out and you're not playing fair with the reader. Just like fish that sits out too long, that approach stinks.

I welcome your comments on this issue. And if I'm wrong and there are tons of articles addressing this subject and I need to brush up on my research skills, please share that information too.

***

In other news, here's a little BSP: I recently had a new short story published. "An Inconvenient Sleuth" appears in issue eight of Black Cat Mystery Magazine. In this whodunit, Kendra Silver, Dogwood Valley's celebrated amateur sleuth, is murdered. Who saw that coming? Certainly not anyone who thought  Kendra was invincible because she led a cozy life in a cozy town. But now that someone has killed Kendra, her best friend, Whitney, feels compelled to help the police unmask the culprit.  

Black Cat Mystery Magazine is available in trade paperback and ebooks from all the usual sources. You also can buy it directly from the publisher, Wildside Press, by clicking here.

More About First Person

 by Steve Liskow

I've discussed point of view before, mostly about the unreliable narrator. That's someone who tells the story but whose word is suspect. That person my be lying to cover his own guilt over some event, or maybe he is biased or misunderstands a situtation. Nelly Dean, the caretake in Wuthering Heights, hates Heathcliff and glosses over her own responsibility for many of the things that go wrong in that book, including the elder Catherine's death. Lockwood, the twit who rents the estate and listens to her account, is too self-centered and dumb to understand the significance of what she says. 

Huckleberry Finn was raised by an illiterate drunken racist, so he doesn't recognize his own racist attitude toward Jim.

He comes to understand through the adventures he and Jim share. Critics often compare The Catcher in the Rye with the emotionally shattered Holden Caulfield to Huck. Others point to Chief Bromden, the paranoid schizophrenic Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. All these books gain their power from a narrator who doesn't tell us the truth, expecially since he doesn't lie on purpose.

Many other books, both classic and newer, continue this tradition: The Great Gatsby, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Gone Girl...

But what about books where the narrator tells us the truth? That's a staple of the classic mystery story. I remember being told that a mystery should always use first person point of view, a dictum I tossed as soon as I read The Maltese Falcon, which uses third person through Sam Spade. 

Poe used an unnamed narrator to highlight the brilliance of C. Auguste Dupin. Maybe that's where Conan Doyle got the idea for Dr. Watson, who narrates all except one of the tales of Sherlock Holmes. Captain Hastings, who sounds a lot like Watson, shares his own awe of Hercule Poirot.

Once challenge of using first person point of view is that the narrator needs an interesting voice or persona to keep the reader engaged. If we're going to listen to someone tell an entire book, they have to be interesting, right?

That's true of the unreliable narratiors I mentioned above, but Watson and Hastings are, frankly, boring. They're nice, dull, unimaginative men of a certain age and class, and that narrow mindset exists to make their sleuths seem even more brilliant and dynamic. It also allows us to forgive (as they do) those detectives' personality quirks and shortcomings. Poirot is an arrogant ass, more concerned with his moustaches and his little gray cells than with anyone around him. Holmes is an off-again-on-again cocaine (or morphine, it changes from story to story) user who practices his marksmanship by shooting holes in the wall of his London flat. Apparently, zoning laws were different then.

Another advantage of having these characters as narrators is that Christie and Conan Doyle could hide clues from the reader because Hastings and Watson didn't recognize their importance. It's not really cheating. It's more like slight of hand where the magician makes you look at the wrong hand while the other one palms the ace. 

But Hastings and Watson and a whole generation of Golden Age narrators were dull. Their only reason to exist was the genius of the character solving complex plots that resembled higher calculus. I read a lot of those books and tolerated them, but at some point I lost interest because the characters were incidental to stories that were little more than the word problems in my math book. 

Rex Stout came along, too. I haven't read all the Nero Wolfe stories, but I don't know which ones I missed.

Stout realized that Nero Wolfe was insufferably vain. He weighed "a seventh of a ton," bred orchids, drank innumberable bottles of beer daily (keeping track by the bottle caps on his desk), and never left his brownstone residence. The traditional dull sidekick would have disappeared in his ego and rendered the books unreadable.

But Stout gave us Archie Godwin. Archie is a good PI in his own right. He's charming, loves the ladies (And Lily Rowan and others reciprocate), and can take care of himself in a fight. He's smart. He's also funny and constantly needles Wolfe and deflates him. The relationship between the two characters has more depth and complexity than their predecessors, and it makes for more interesting reading

.After World War II, Lew Archer and Phillip Marlowe came along to relate more character-driven stores with more complex people as narrators and investigators. I don't know if it's significant that they're both American while Christie and Conan Doyle were British. I do remember Chandler's snide comment in "The Simple Art of Murder," though. "The English are not necessarily the best writers, but they are unquestionably the best dull writers." 

In the seventies, Sara Paretsky gave us V. I. Warshawski. A few years later, Linda Barnes gave us Carlotta Carlyle and Sue Grafton gave us Kinsey Milhone. Three feisty, intelligent women PI narrators.

It's probably simplistic to give Stout credit for the rise of the detective teams who appeared in the 1990s, but I'll do it anyway.

Dennis Lehane's Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are smart and damaged. They explore the dark depths of the human condition and come away even more deeply scarred. They finally married between the last two books in the series, and Patrick left investigating for a nine to five while Angie became a terrific mom to their daughter.

Robert Crais's Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are both military veterans (Vietnam, which would put them both at 70 now) and their youths were littered with emotional fallout that give them a deeper understanding of the people they both help and hunt. Elvis can be funny, too. 

I appreciate them more because I grew up with Archie Godwin's voice and vision coloring my own tastes and guiding my reading. When I started writing seriously (who writes frivolously?), Stout was one of my biggest influences.

The Pandemic: Babies and Stories

With so much time together with our lovers, many expected a pandemic baby boom, but it is looking more like a bust.

I get it.

My writing fantasy is to have stories - the ones that reveal the places we live and breathe, the dark places, the places of joy - and also the time to write them. 

I now have the time but the onslaught of stories is just too much. The edits on my book are not a boom but a bust. A total bust.

Normally, when I work I shut out the world. Ignore it. However, this is a time in history when absorbing what is going on in the world is needed.

When I sit down to write, my head swirls from the page outward. Perhaps my characters are talking on the phone - I think of all the people isolated by #COVID19 who can only talk to those they love by phone. When my characters sit for coffee, I think of all the lonely people unable to gather and the small coffee shops struggling to survive in this pandemic.

Then there are the elderly in long term care homes, isolated and at times suffering with dementia - how do they make sense of the long days when no familiar faces come? Do they forget them? Do they remember them in their dreams?

The children who once rushed up to playgrounds to do what we have forgotten to do - play with abandon with children they have just met. Now, they are masked and are asked to keep their distance. Will they play with abandon when the virus is gone or will they grow up too soon into the far more distanced adults that surround them? Hell, we are asking them to keep their distance so it would be a small wonder if they don’t.

The lovers, the ones that had planned romantic trips, weddings and parties - what happens when none of that is possible? Do they put that spontaneous side - the most romantic moments - on hold. Can they return?

And then there are those who don’t return at all.  Their families watch them disappear into the bowels of an ambulance or hospital and then can’t see them, hold them before they die. 

I’m bombarded by stories of my colleagues in the #COVID ICUs. They have so many tools to save people but now, their tools are often useless against Covid-19. Death after death. It's everything they've been trained to fight and yet they lose the battle constantly. They are tired and demoralized when one patient dies, the numerous deaths are just too much for them.

And, perhaps a few blocks from these ICUs, people are gathering without masks, perhaps in homes, to have a drink, laugh and spread this damn virus around another room.

Will all the pandemic stories raging around demanding attention finally settle when the worst of this pandemic is over? Will we have time to write them when life returns to normal?

My hope is that these stories will be written and we will take the time to pay tribute to each person we can. There have never in my lifetime been so many stories crying out to be told. There are also so many people who are now no longer with us to tell their story and we need to honour them by telling it.

I have practiced medicine. I have written. Both involve a similar process.

In medicine, the key to a diagnosis is always the story - the more fulsome the story, the more likely the diagnosis will be accurate. And after diagnosis, following the story allows us to assess the treatment and, more importantly, how the patient is doing. 

With writing, the key is always the story and the more fulsome, the more accurate. 

With the pandemic stories that will be written, I hope that that they will be about how we recover, or don’t, from this terrible time in our history. Like a medical story, we need to follow this up. 

At this point in time I have no idea how the story ends for us all.

Oh, and babies. We need to see more babies please. We need a new generation to whom we pass on our stories, because this has been a time of such important stories. But until we pass on our stories, we need the joy of a new beginning.