Elvis
got his polio shot on a Sunday night in October, 1956, backstage at CBS Studio
50, right before he went on the Ed Sullivan show. On the right is NYC Public Health
Commissioner Leona Baumgartner, and the guy with the needle is Assistant
Commissioner Harold Fuerst. The
enormously influential Daily Mirror
columnist Walter Winchell had suggested the Salk vaccine might be as deadly as the
disease itself, but in the six months after Elvis was seen getting the shot, U.S.
vaccination levels shot up to 80 per cent.
In the
early 1950’s, there was a spike in U.S. polio cases, and a
surge of quiet hysteria. It was a little
like the fear of nuclear war, and as a kid, I remember confusing the two in my
mind. My mom warned me not to grab the
brass door handles at the Woolworth’s in Harvard Square, and we didn’t get to go
to Brigham’s afterwards for ice cream.
Polio was an invisible adversary, cold to the touch, and it was
everywhere.
The
approval of the vaccine in ‘55 put Jonas Salk on the cover of TIME. He was a national hero. The oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin
came along a couple of years later, and the Americas have been polio-free for
almost thirty years. There have been
outbreaks in Southwest Asia, but nowhere is it
epidemic anymore.
There
was, mind, a dedicated growth industry in anxiety back when.The aforementioned atomic holocaust, along
with fringe nuttiness - fluoridation of the public water supply being a Commie
plot, for example – but polio inspired an actual sub-genre.Stories featuring the iron lung became a staple,
all with roughly similar conventions.
An
explanation.One in five paralytic polio
cases develop respiratory symptoms.The
virus affects the upper cervical vertebrae, and paralyzes the diaphragm.You can’t breathe on your own; you’re kept
alive on a ventilator.In the 1950’s,
they used a negative-pressure ventilator called an iron lung.It was a coffin-sized metal tube, and your
entire body went into it.Only your head
stuck out.The vacuum created by
negative pressure inside sucks your chest up, and your lungs draw in air.
On an
episode of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian
Keith is in an iron lung, and his wife plans to pull the plug.The question is how he can possibly outwit
her when he’s flat on his back and immobilized, and there’s no way he can call
for help.There’s a delicious twist I
didn’t see coming.
The
iron lung is an obvious metaphor, but it’s also physical, the helplessness
cruelly literal.It’s interesting to me
that certain tropes are so much a product of their particular time.In this instance, representing the Cold War:
we’re in the grip of overwhelming, mechanical forces, and struggle like ants.
There
are clear echoes, or reflections, in the present day.
One difference, however, is that we don’t
have individual influencers as unifying as Elvis.We’ve lost consensus.We apparently can’t agree on a shared
reality.One thing you can say for
polio.It scared the shit out of enough
of us to tip the scales.
The winter solstice occurs when either of the Earth's poles reaches its maximum tilt away from the Sun. Both the North and South Poles have a winter solstice. For those of us living north of the equator, ours occurs today, December 21st. We experience the shortest period of daylight and the longest night of the year. The North Pole exists in twenty-four-hour darkness. Although the weather continues to get colder, the days grow incrementally longer from this point forward until we reach the summer solstice, and the cycle repeats.
The winter solstice is not the full day but rather a moment. Here in Fort Worth, that maximum tilt will occur at 11:59 CST.
Since prehistory, the day has been celebrated across the world with festivals and rituals to mark the death and rebirth of the sun. Across cultures, diverse peoples have recognized beginnings and endings on this date.
In keeping with that theme, I've made note of a few firsts and lasts.
In 1620, the Pilgrims left the Mayflower and came ashore in Plymouth Bay on this date. None of the arriving settlers noted exactly where they first stepped onto the new world. In 1741, Thomas Faunce, a 94-year old man who claimed to have learned of the exact spot from his father, an early settler, established the site of the landing to be Plymouth Rock. The mythology began from there.
In 1891, on this date, the first game of basketball was played. James Naismith wrote the original rules to give his students exercise during the cold winter months. That initial contest had two teams of nine players. The equipment consisted of a soccer ball and two peach baskets. With a made shot, the janitor had to drag a ladder onto the court and empty the basket. Later innovators cut a hole in the bottom of the baskets. The final score, 1-0. No player received a shoe contract.
Crossword puzzles began on this date. The first "word cross" game was printed in the New York World in 1913. The civic minded editor, Arthur Wynne had to fill a level space in his newspaper. The original puzzle had 32 clues and was shaped like a diamond. Much like Plymouth Rock, there is a bit of fact and mythology there. Word puzzles have existed for as long as we have had language. (Can you find a sentence with two one-word palindromes in this paragraph?)
Elvis Presley met President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office on this date in 1970. The meeting marked the beginning of Elvis' important work with the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Admittedly, this one is a little forced in a blog about beginnings but the tale is too much fun not to include.
Vernon Presley, Elvis' father, apparently chastised Elvis for spending too much on Christmas presents (including 32 handguns and 10 Mercedes Benz automobiles.) Elvis left Memphis in a huff and ultimately flew to D.C. On the plane, he wrote a letter to President Nixon, offering his services to the president and the nation. All he wanted in exchange was the badge of a federal officer. (He already had a collection of local police badges.) Elvis' driver delivered him to the gates of the White House where the King deposited the letter.
Ollie Atkins, chief White House photographer at the time. See ARC record., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Egil "Bud" Krogh, H. R. Haldeman, and a host of others who later became infamous during the Watergate scandal received the letter and arranged the meeting. Presidential aides escorted Elvis, dressed in purple velvet and an oversized gold belt buckle into the Oval Office for his meeting. Nixon's infamous taping system had not been installed yet. As a result, history did not record the conversation between the two men, but Elvis got his badge.
Photos taken at the meeting are the most requested pictures in the history of the National Archives.
There are endings also. December 21st, 1872 marked the conclusion of Phileas Fogg's fictional around the world adventure. In Jules Verne's novel Around the World in 80 Days, the gentleman returned to London after circumnavigating the globe on this date. Fogg and his valet set off in response to a challenge lad dawn at Fogg's club. Spoiler alert: Fogg won the wager and collected ₤20,000.
Not on this date--In 1889, the American journalist, Nellie Bly, completed the feat described in the novel. She circled the globe in 72 days.
The biggest of all possible finishes, the end of the world was forecast for December 21st, 2012. Doomsday prophets based their predictions on an interpretation of the Mayan calendar. Mesoamerican scholars at the time reported that the interpretation failed to appreciate the nuances of the Grand Cycle of the Mayan's Long Count calendar, and possibly some problems converting the Mayan calendar into the correct Gregorian date. Oops.
December 21st is marked with beginnings and endings. My tenure with SleuthSayers began early in 2021. I've seen some of my stories come to print and had others accepted for future publication. Okay, a few stories had abrupt endings this year as well, but I like to focus on the positive.
I wish each of you the very best this holiday season and in the year to come.
Between the lockdown and various health issues, I lost track of time for most of 2021 (although I have managed to finish my Christmas shopping. Wrapping? Um, no way), so let's try to put the clock back on the wall.
2020 was a blur. I had a mis-diagnosed stroke (I told them is was only a pinched nerve!) in January, then got my second cancer diagnosis in March, only days before the lockdown commenced. Between heavy meds, stress, and lockdown agoraphobia, I could no longer concentrate on complex projects like planning a novel anymore and turned exclusively to short stories. I wrote over a dozen in the last six months of 2020. Before then, I never produced more than four or five in one year.
I published four stories, two of which I'd written years before and finally found submission calls that they matched.
Now 2021, very good and very bad, swinging like Poe's pendulum. The cancer, apparently vanquished through chemo and surgery the previous summer, staged an encore in March. Doctors, including one of my former students, inserted a stent in my kidney and started me on immunotherapy treatments every three weeks in April. They've worked, and I generally feel pretty good. No diet restrictions, I can drive to the health club two or three times a week in a futile effort to restore my rippling six-pack abs, and I can still play guitar badly and piano even worse. Age, the family arthritis, and getting needles stuck in both arms every three weeks make music and typing harder, but I can still do them. The worst part of the year was saying good-bye to Ernie, our Maine Coon, who lost his four-year battle to kidney disease and left us in June.
The sunny side:
This year, I wrote eleven new short stories and self-published Alma Murder, an early version of the book that eventually evolved into Blood on the Tracks about 70 rejections later. Five short stories appeared, and I sold seven others, a new career high.
Two will appear in Spring 2022, maybe within days of each other. The new MWA anthology Crime Hits Home, edited by SJ Rozan, will feature one of them. SleuthSayers' own Michael Bracken edited the other.
The rest will appear over the next year or so, but I don't have definite release dates. Fourteen submissions are still active, and I suspect that two or three have been accepted even though I don't have official word from the markets.
I helped judge the Derringer Awards last year and will do it again this year. The best way to learn to write good stories is to read good stories, and I read a lot of them. I only judge flash fiction because I never write that short, but it's good training in what you can leave out of a story. It also means that if I stumble on a useful idea, I have to treat it very differently anyway.
The most positive change this year is that two different editors approached me about submitting work for an upcoming anthology. One was because of a Sleuthsayers blog I wrote earlier this year. Talk about an ego boost. I'm doing research on two other stories, too. If those stories don't sell to the anthologies, they're flexible enough that I can send them to other markets, too. Always a good thing.
Am I getting rich (Cue uproarious laughter)? Of course not. But I'm getting somewhere, and that beats the alternative.
So, Merry Christmas, happy Channukah, Kwanzaa, and new year. Oh, and a belated happy birthday to Keith Richards.
When folks think of a romantic Christmas, some think of Barenaked Ladies. And Sarah McLachlan.
Wait, we’re not talking bare, naked ladies, although I fondly recall a holiday season with Bubbles LaFerne… Well, never mind.
We’re discussing the Ontario retro pop rock band that isn’t bare, isn’t naked, and isn’t ladies. They’re also damn smart lyricists.
You probably know then from one or more hits such as ‘One Week’, which has a higher rapid-fire word count (600) than some short stories. Founders Ed Robertson and Steven Page also wrote ‘The History of Everything’, the theme song of The Big Bang Theory, and the Grinch theme.
Beyond clever, clever wordsmithing, the group likes to collaborate. In 2004, they released a Christmas album, Barenaked for the Holidays, which reminds me that Bubbles… Sorry, pay no attention. It’s been a long pandemic.
The collection includes Christmas and Chanukah songs, traditional and some newly written by BNL’s Page, Robertson, Kevin Hearn, and the Creeggan brothers. Here is a collaboration with Sarah McLachlan practicing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ / ‘We Three Kings’.
Did I mention Barenaked Ladies wrote and performed ‘Green Christmas’, the 2000 soundtrack for How the Grinch Stole Christmas?
Listen, class, for the third Christmas in a row, we’re living under threat of the COVID pandemic. As Eve Fisher and others have pointed out, people haven’t stopped dying, but we’ve grown weary… and careless.
Canadians have taken the coronavirus seriously, mourning a total of 30,000 deaths. In contrast, Florida with 5/9th the population of Canada, has more than doubled Canada’s total. America has surpassed 828 000 deaths out of 52-million known cases. Professionals believe the majority could have been saved with mandatory masks and vaccinations.
Like Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, it’s looking to be a forlorn Christmas, friends still in lockdown, no decorations… Wait… incoming text message… Bubbles LaFerne… Hey! Like Santa, she’s flying into town and she’s vaccinated! (Humming a brand new song, ‘Baby, it’s warm inside…’)
Today's column is about the written word, but hang on: the first part is about pronunciation.
One of my quirks is, I don't watch network TV except for the news. What I do watch are movies on DVD and Netflix and Amazon Prime. That's probably because of my age; I wish I could say it's because I'm too intelligent to get into these current reality shows and sitcoms, etc.--but that's not true, because you should see some of the movies I watch. My wife just rolls her eyes.
My point is, I do watch the nightly news and during those broadcasts I've found myself thinking about the way anchors and reporters pronounce certain words. My favorite is data. There are two different ways to say it: dayta and datta. As an IBM retiree, I pronounce it dayta--and while I realize either way is right, datta remains one of my pet peeves. Another funny word is short-lived. Almost every weatherman says short-livved, with a short i as in give. I prefer a long i, because it's describing something that has a short life. But I've given up on that one, since no one else in this solar system seems to agree with me. Other words that mean the same thing but can be pronounced two different ways: gala, vase, electoral, either, neither, caramel, etc. And while we're on this, how do you pronounce omicron? Oh or ah? I'm leaning toward oh.
Enough pronunciation. Something all of us can relate to is the way we spell certain words, in our writing. Most spelling is either correct or incorrect, period, but some words can have more than one acceptable spelling. I'm talking about variant spellings here, not regional spellings like neighbor/neighbour or archaic spellings like jail/gaol.
So . . . I've come up with some of those, as follows. Again, all of them can be spelled either way, usually without incurring an editor's wrath, but what I'd like you to do is consider which way you would choose to spell them in a story or novel. I've even included a few variant phrases, at the end.
NOTE 1: Some of these do involve regional spellings, usually American vs. British, but I've tried to avoid the truly obvious ones like center/centre, color/colour, etc. Also, not that it matters, for each one I've put my preference first.
Here goes:
axe/ax
whiskey/whisky
okay/OK
mike/mic (as in microphone)
toward/towards
theater/theatre
woolen/woollen
racket/racquet (as in tennis)
sulfur/sulphur
T-shirt/tee-shirt
barbecue/barbeque
queasy/queasey
wintry/wintery
lit/lighted
installment/instalment
likable/likeable
wrack/rack (as in your brain)
fulfill/fulfil
mustache/moustache
donut/doughnut
dialogue/dialog
jibe/gibe
hurray/hooray
curtsey/curtsy
amok/amuck
counselor/counsellor
flier/flyer (as in pilot)
linchpin/lynchpin
omelet/omelette
dreamed/dreamt
leaped/leapt
dove/dived
disc/disk -- At IBM, storage devices were disks; things frisbeelike or slipped were discs.
advisor/adviser
traveling/travelling
among/amongst
amid/amidst
yogurt/yoghurt
collectible/collectable -- I think of this as deserves to be collected vs. is able to be collected
crawfish/crayfish
hippie/hippy
adrenaline/adrenalin
forgo/forego
duffle/duffel
speak English/speak in English
can not/cannot
I couldn't care less/I could care less
for example/for instance
NOTE 2: I believe there's a rule about traveling/travelling, cancel/cancelling, controling/controlling, etc.: If the accent is on the second syllable, double the final consonant; if the accent is on the first syllable, don't double the final consonant. So traveling, canceling, and controlling would be correct. I think.
Some of these spellings are up in the air (fliers/flyers?), and I often change my mind about them. I can remember several times when I used duffel bags in one story and duffle bags in another. Same goes for adrenaline/adrenalin, barbecue/barbeque, queasy/queasey, theater/theatre, dialogue/dialog, installment/instalment, mustache/moustache, hurray/hooray, and a few others. I seem to go back and forth.
What's your opinion? Do you think some of these that I've called variant really aren't? What are your preferences--or peeves, if you feel strongly enough about them? Can you supply other variant words or phrases I've missed?
Every year, since about 2006 or so, I've always posted a riff on Tom Waits around Christmas time, supposedly from the point of view of one of the reindeer. I've posted it here at least once, and since next Friday is Christmas Eve...
Well, here we are.
A VERY TOM WAITS CHRISTMAS
By Jim Winter
I pulled on Santa’s sleigh Christmas Eve was dark, and the snow fell like cocaine off some politician’s coffee table Rudolph looked to the sky. He had a shiny nose, but it was from too much vodka He said, “Boys, it’s gonna be a rough one this year.”
I pulled on Santa’s sleigh The elves scrambled to pack up the last of the lumps of coal for deserving suburban brats And a bottle of Jamie for some forgotten soul whose wife just left him Santa’s like that. He’s been there. Oh, he still loves Mrs. Claus, a spent piece of used sleigh trash who Makes good vodka martnis, knows when to keep her mouth shut But it’s the lonlieness, the lonliness only Santa knows
I pulled on Santa’s sleigh And the workshop reeks of too much peppermint The candy canes all have the names of prostitutes And Santa stands there, breathing in the lonliness The lonliness that creeps out of the main house And out through the stables Sometimes it follows the big guy down the chimneys Wraps itself around your tannenbaum and sleeps in your hat
I pulled on Santa’s sleigh We all line up for the annual ride I’m behind Vixen, who’s showin’ her age these days She has a certain tiredness that comes with being the only girl on the team Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars wouldn’t fix She’s got a tear drop tattooed under her eye now, one for every year Dancer’s away
I pulled on Santa’s sleigh and I asked myself, “That elf. What’s he building in there?” He has no elf friends, no elf children What’s he building in there? He doesn’t make toys like the other elves I heard he used to work for Halliburton, And he’s got an ex-wife in someplace called Santa Claus, Pennsylvania But what’s he building in there? We got a right to know.
I pulled on Santa’s sleigh And we’re off Off into the night Watching the world burn below All chimney red and Halloween orange
I’ve seen it all I’ve seen it all Every Christmas Eve, I’ve seen it all There’s nothing sadder than landing on a roof in a town with no cheer.
Notes from my brain as I rewatched Otto Preminger's Laura:
My God, look how young Vincent Price was in 1944. This was nine years before he began his career in horror movies. Otherwise he'd never have gotten the 4 year gig on radio as The Saint. But I have to say when I was young I read my way through a stack of Charteris' The Saint novels, and Price's was certainly not the voice I ever imagined for that British swash-buckler. (You can listen to the episodes HERE.) Meanwhile, Price's Shelby is tall and soft and definitely a gigolo, which makes the idea that Gene Tierney's [breathtakingly beautiful] Laura would fall for him a real problem. Judith Anderson's Ann Treadwell (Laura's aunt) is more understandable, although I think they should have had Agnes Moorehead reprise her role as Emily Hawkins in Since You Went Away. She would have eaten Shelby alive, purring the whole time.
Musing: Agnes Moorehead is the main reason to watch Since You Went Away, because I find the movie pretty saccharine, not to mention trite, melodramatic, and I get tired of watching Claudette Colbert only being filmed from one angle. Oh, and I keep waiting for Jane to run into one of the posts as she runs after Bill's departing train. They spoofed that in some movie, but I can't remember which one.
BTW, Dana Andrews (Detective McPherson) and Gene Tierney had real chemistry. I looked it up, and they ended up doing 5 movies together - Tobacco Road, Belle Starr, Laura, The Iron Curtain, and Where The Sidewalk Ends. BTW, my favorite Dana Andrews movie is The Best Years of Our Lives.
And my favorite comment about him comes from Radio Days, where all the kids are down at the Rockaway shore and talking about their favorite actresses:
Young Joe's Friend #1: My favorite is Rita Hayworth.
Young Joe's Friend #2: I like Betty Grable.
Young Joe's Friend #3: I like Dana Andrews.
Young Joe's Friend #2: Are you kidding? Dana Andrews is a man.
He alternated between character actor and leads, nominated 3 times for an Academy Award - Laura, Sitting Pretty, and The Razor's Edge - and deservedly won it for The Razor's Edge (and if you've never seen it, watch it - Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney are the leads.) He also played Frank Galbraith in Cheaper by the Dozen (with Myrna Loy as his wife), and his character, Mr. Belvedere (in Sitting Pretty and Mr. Belvedere Goes to College) was the model for Mr. Peabody in my favorite cartoon series of all time, Rocky & Bullwinkle.
Excuse me while I wallow in nostalgia: Mr. Peabody, Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties, Boris Badenov, Natasha & Fearless Leader, Fractured Fairytales, Aesop & Son, Bullwinkle's Corner & Mr. Know-It-All...
And Myrna Loy was also Frederic March's loyal wife in The Best Years of Our Lives, which brings us back to Dana Andrews, and back to Gene Tierney:
Very beautiful, with great range. Watch Laura, and then watch her Oscar nominated performance in Leave Her to Heaven and The Razor's Edge. Great success, interrupted more than once by tragedy. Manic-depressive before anyone knew what that really was, and the shock treatments made her lose much of her memory. And of course, hers was the source of the tragedy in Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd: her daughter, Daria, was born deaf and mentally disabled, because a fan broke a rubella quarantine and infected the pregnant Tierney while she volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen.
EDITORIAL INTRUSION: GET YOUR DAMN VACCINATION OR STAY HOME!!!!
YOUR ACTIONS DO HAVE EFFING CONSEQUENCES!!!
Otto Preminger was a great director. Here are the ones (besides Laura) that I remember watching a long, long time ago:
The Man With the Golden Arm Bonjour Tristesse Anatomy of a Murder Exodus Advise and Consent Bunny Lake is Missing (this one will twist your head off) Hurry Sundown (Michael Caine in one of his many appalling American accents, but otherwise, like all of these, very educational for a young girl/teen in the 1960s…)
Oh, and can anyone point me to where I can find a maid like Bessie Clary, Fidelia (Since You Went Away), Matilda (The Bishop's Wife), etc., etc., etc.?
Oh, damn - the movie's over. What's up next?
The Bishop's Wife, or The Man Who Came to Dinner?
Monty Woolley's in both,
and Bette Davis is in The Man Who Came to Dinner,
and she starred with Humphrey Bogart in Dark Victory,
and Bogart starred with Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray in We're No Angels...
Let's get a bit convoluted, shall we? Last month on the Short
Mystery Fiction Society* list Judy Penz Sheluk pointed to a blog piece
she wrote about a
webinar Iona Whishaw gave. Her subject was Ngrams. According to
Wikipedia "an n-gram (sometimes also called Q-gram) is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech."
And what the hell does that mean, you may ask. Take a look at the diagram below. This is an ngram of Google books showing how often the terms crime fiction, detective fiction, mystery fiction, and noir fiction showed up in each year. More accurately, it indicates what percentage of pairs of words published in a given year consists of the pair you are looking for. So detective fiction was the most popular term until 2011 when crime fiction surpassed it. I would have guessed that happened decades earlier.
Pretty cool? But wait: we are just starting. Not visible at the bottom of the screen is the fact that you can look up all the books (magazines, law codes, etc.) that contain your phrase in a given year or time period.
If you are writing historical fiction you have just acquired an amazing new tool, thanks to Sheluk and Wishaw.
I wrote a story earlier this year set in 1967 and I used the word groovy. So let's see how that word does in the ngram world. The diagram below shows the word was very popular in 1967, although it peaked in 1970.
But wait - why do we see that huge jump around 2010? A quick click on the 2009-2011 button reveals a programming language called Groovy. And sure enough, if we make the ngram case sensitive Groovy becomes briefly more popular than its lower case sibling.
But I learned something even weirder. Groovy was being used long before the flower children's parents were even born. I found this quotation from the Saturday Review, January 1864: "For a groovy parent trains a groovy child, and the groovy child must be father of a groovy man."
How hip those Victorian English dudes were, you may be saying. Alas, the anonymous writer did not mean it as a compliment. He was talking about being stuck in a rut, thinking inside the box. Very much not groovy.
I am also writing a story set in 1959 and one of the characters is socially awkward, has certain verbal tics, and can do amazing mathematical feats in his head. Today most of us amateur diagnosticians would say "he's on the autistic spectrum." But would anyone have used that term sixty years ago? We can go to ngrams again, but this reveals a weakness of the tool.
Because when I search for uses before 1960 I find publications that supposedly have that date, but were really published later. There is a 1992 edition, for example, of a psychiatric manual which was first published in the 1950s, and Google Books can't spot the difference. There is a similar problem with journals that were founded a long time ago. (HathiTrust, another great free tool for historical sources, suffers from the same limitation.)
On the other hand... A few weeks ago Leigh wrote a fascinating piece here about words and concepts that started in the 1980s. His source claimed that "eggs benedict" wasn't given that name until 1984. Google Books Ngrams quickly found it in a the Hotel St. Francis Cookbook, 1919 edition.
And now I'm hungry. But before I head to the fridge, much thanks to Judy Penz Sheluk and Iona Wishaw for pointing out this cool tool. You can play around with the Google Books ngram viewer here.
*I am the Society's current president and I hereby invite you to join. It's free but new memberships are not accepted between January 1- May 1, so hop to it here.
Although there are some minor variations, editors of anthologies of original fiction find content in three primary ways:
Michael's first anthology.
Open Call. An open-call anthology is one for which anyone may submit.
Limited Open Call. A limited-open-call anthology is one for which only a limited number of people may submit, and how many writers are included in the limited call can vary from a few dozen to several hundred. For example, various Sisters in Crime chapters produce anthologies that allow submissions only from chapter members.
Invitation Only. An invitation-only anthology is one for which only writers who have been specifically invited may submit.
There are hybrid forms as well:
Invitation Only/Open Call Mix. The Bouchercon anthologies and several anthologies I’ve seen promoted via Kickstarter campaigns combine invitation-only, by which they acquire stories from a handful of well-known authors, and open-call, by which they acquire the balance of the content.
Invitation Only/Limited Open Call Mix. The Mystery Writers of America anthologies acquire a few stories via invitation and then have a limited open call for the balance of the content. In this case, the call is limited to MWA members.
ADVANTAGES and DISADVANTAGES
Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, and anthology editors must weigh the pros and cons of each when deciding how to approach any particular project.
Open Call. An open-call anthology has the potential to attract contributors unknown to the editor, and those contributors might be talented and have a unique approach to the anthology’s theme that results in great stories.
The downside is that a widely announced anthology with an appealing theme might attract a great number of submissions of wildly variable quality and appropriateness, potentially overwhelming the editor.
Limited Open Call. The advantages and disadvantages of a limited-open-call anthology are quite dependent on which writers are included in the call. Limiting the call to writers with whom the editor has previously worked will likely result in submitted stories that meet or exceed the requirements, and it may prove difficult to narrow the selections.
On the flip side, the quality of submissions to a limited open call where the submission pool is defined by membership in a particular organization may be quite variable depending on the organization and, because the editor may not be able to seek submissions outside the defined pool, may require the editor to do more work bringing all the accepted stories up to snuff.
Invitation Only. From an editor’s standpoint, this may be the best way to assemble an anthology. By inviting only writers with whom the editor has previously worked and/or writers the editor admires, it almost guarantees that every submission will be appropriate. Almost.
The downside is that inevitably one or more of the invitees fails to deliver, and if the editor hasn’t planned ahead, this can lead to some last-minute scrambling to complete and deliver the project to the publisher on time.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES
I edited five open-call anthologies for Wildside Press and Betancourt & Company in the early 2000s and then spent several years randomly pitching anthology concepts that, at best, received “We like this, but” responses and, at worst, were completely ignored.
I returned to anthology editing in February 2017 when Down & Out Books greenlit The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods (2019). I’ve since edited and co-edited nine more (if I include the two due out later this month), and I’m in the process of editing or co-editing four due out in 2022, four tentatively due out in 2023, and one that does not yet have a release date because it does not yet have a publisher.
I have used all three methods (and some hybrid methods) to create these anthologies.
The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods (Down & Out Books, 2019) was an open-call anthology, though there was one exception. During a conversation at Bouchercon in Toronto I mentioned a specific historical event in Texas that I was surprised no writer had used in a story. That conversation turned into an invitation when the writer I was speaking with said he could use that event in a story.
Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, vol. 1 (Down & Out Books, 2020) was an Invitation Only/Open Call Mix. I invited four writers to submit and three of them did; the balance of the content came via open call. Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, vol. 2 (Down & Out Books, 2021), which was officially released yesterday, and MF3 (scheduled for 2022) were both open call. I recently released a limited open call for MF4 and have not yet decided if I’m going to switch to an open call.
Jukes & Tonks (Down & Out Books, 2021), co-edited with Gary Phillips, was invitation only. We each wrote a story and invited five other writers, for a total of twelve contributors. I don’t know how Gary chose his five, but my five were all writers with whom I had previously worked, that I knew could deliver what I wanted to see when I wanted to see it, and who I thought had at least a passing familiarity with the anthology’s theme.
Guns + Tacos (Down & Out Books), a serial novella anthology series co-created and co-edited with Trey R. Barker is an anomaly. Each novella is released as a separate e-book. Ultimately, though, all of the the novellas are gathered into three-novella anthologies. Volumes 1 and 2 were published in 2019, volumes 3 and 4 in 2020, volumes 5 and 6 later this month, and volumes 7 and 8 will appear in 2022. Guns + Tacos is invitation only, and Trey and I arm wrestle each year over which writers to invite. If there are additional entries in the G+T series, they will continue to be by invitation only.
Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties (due out April 2022) began as a single open-call anthology. I received more good stories than I could fit into a single volume, so I held back—with contributors’ approval—enough for a second volume with no assurance that there would even be a second volume. By the time Down & Out Books greenlit the second volume—More Groovy Gumshoes (due out in April 2023)—I’d lost a few stories to other publications. So, I invited two writers to come aboard at the last minute, making More Groovy Gumshoes an Invitation Only/Open Call Mix.
The other projects—which will go unnamed—include two invitation-only anthologies and a limited-open-call anthology I am co-editing.
DECIDING WHICH APPROACH
If you’ve worked your way through the above overview of the various anthologies I have edited or am in the process of editing, you’ll note that I’ve slowly moved away from open-call anthologies toward invitation-only anthologies, with a few hybrids along the way.
There are two key reasons for this decision:
Success. It is, perhaps, egotistical to say this, but the first two anthologies I edited since returning to this side of the editorial desk resulted in an Anthony Award nomination for Best Anthology, six stories receiving or nominated for major awards, and two stories included or long-listed for inclusion in a best-of-year anthology. Writers want to submit to editors with this kind of track record, so the number of submissions has increased substantially with each new open-call project.
Other editorial responsibilities. As editor of Black Cat Mystery Magazine, which remains an open-call project, I read a significant number of submissions from writers of all experience levels and across all the crime fiction subgenres. (See “Killing Dreams One Rejection at a Time, the Sequel” for a glimpse at what it’s like evaluating 264 submissions.) Thus, I am exposed to, and have the opportunity to work with, many new and new-to-me writers.
So, to reduce my workload without reducing the number of projects I edit, I’m increasingly relying on limited-invitation calls and personal invitations to acquire content.
MAKING AN EDITOR’S INVITATION LIST
These days, I appreciate it when I’m asked to contribute to an anthology, but early in my career I had no idea how to get on an editor’s invitation list. The first few times I was approached I had no idea how the editor selected me. (See “Pay It Forward” to learn how I was invited to contribute to Max Allan Collins and Jeff Gelb’s Flesh and Blood: Guilty as Sin.) That, combined with the number of times I’ve seen beginning and early career writers asking the same questions I’d once had, leads me to offer a few suggestions.
Write, Submit, and Get Published. If you’ve never been published, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever be invited to submit to an anthology. So, write, submit what you write, and improve your skills. Once your work is being accepted on a regular basis via open-call projects, create a formal or informal list of all the editors you’ve worked with and would like to work with again. Then cross-reference that list with editors of invitation-only projects to determine where you might have opportunities to step up your game.
Be Professional and Easy to Work With. I wish this didn’t have to be restated, but, unless you’re a creative genius, your work will be edited. Meet deadlines at every step of a project. You must complete ancillary paperwork—contracts, author bios, story blurbs—so be available and easily reached via mail, email, and telephone. Understand how to use Microsoft Word.
If you have proven yourself professional and easy to work with on an open-call project, you increase your odds of being added to that editor’s list of potential writers for future invitation-only projects.
Make Your Desire Known. This last suggestion requires a bit of finesse. Do it wrong and you look like a suck-up. Do it right and your opportunities increase.
If you have worked with an editor, enjoyed the process, and would like to work with that editor again, let the editor know. A simple email stating something like: “I enjoyed working with you on Project X and would appreciate the opportunity to work with you again. Please keep me in mind for future projects.” I regularly work with writers who have sent me similar emails.
If there’s an editor you think you would like to work with, you can send a similar email: “Although we’ve not previously worked together, I have enjoyed reading Project X, Project Y, and Project Z. I write in the same subgenre, my work has appeared in Magazine A and Magazine B, and I would welcome the opportunity to be considered for one of your future projects.” One of the contributors to the Guns + Tacos series approached Trey and I with a similar email.
If you do these three things, you will increase your odds of having your work included in an invitation-only anthology. If you write a great story, act professionally, and let the editor know you’re interested in doing it again, odds are great that your name will be included on that editor’s list of “writers to work with again.”
CONCLUSION
If I receive several hundred emails today from writers who want to be included on my invitation list for future projects, I’m going to put y’all on my suck-up list. You need to wait long enough for me to forget I wrote this so that I’ll think your emails are truly heartfelt.
And if nobody sends me an email about this, I’m going to have to rethink my entire approach to editing.
My “Christmas Enchiladas and a Gold-Plated Derringer” was the bonus story for subscribers to Season 3 of Guns + Tacos, and it accompanied Andrew Welsh-Huggins’s “A Smith & Wesson with a Side of Chorizo.”
Back in 2018, Leigh Lundin posted an opportunity for SleuthSayers readers to
identify 100 books and authors by their opening lines. His source was
American Book Review's list of 100 Best First Lines from Novels. I got
about 25 of them and recognized more that I couldn't identify off the cuff.
Let's play again. My list of 50 includes some of ABR's, some culled from various
other lists, and some favorites of my own.
As I compiled this list, I realized that the body of common knowledge it depends
on is shrinking, but not because people are necessarily reading less. In the
culture many of us have lived most of our lives in, to some extent, we all read
the same books.
Even crime fiction readers, until ten or twenty years ago, could
talk about the classics and favorite current authors and series in the
expectation that most other readers of the genre would be familiar with them.
That is no longer true. Attendees of Malice Domestic and of ThrillerFest may
have widely divergent reading lists. On eclectic mystery lovers e-list DorothyL,
reading recommendations have grown exponentially more varied. In the past couple
of years, members' Best of Year lists have had almost as many titles as
submitters, with only a handful of authors garnering five or six votes. And this year, as we all know, two widely circulated anthologies of the best mystery stories of the year have included widely divergent representatives of the genre. How many lines from any of them, if any, will be remembered in fifty or a hundred years?
So while we still can, let's savor and honor these memorable lines and see how
many of them you can identify by title and author.
I was in a parade. I walked just behind the gossiwors and just before the king. It was raining.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself
transformed into a giant cockroach.
"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the
rug.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the
hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
You better not never tell nobody but God.
"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting
the table for breakfast.
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and
I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks
before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in
discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.
It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.
I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never
been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort
and support.
It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt,
sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing
of the wind.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal,
thank you very much.
I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes.
My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed by
the state of California. I'm thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids. The
day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing
you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood
was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all
that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you
want to know the truth.
I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.
In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.
When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of
special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the
farmer's wife.
It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting
little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out
of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade
of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
George is my name; my deeds have been heard of in Tower Hall, and my childhood
has been chronicled in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. I am he that was
called in those days Billy Bocksfuss—cruel misnomer. For had I indeed a cloven
foot I'd not now hobble upon a stick or need ride pick-a-back to class in humid
weather. Aye, it was just for want of a proper hoof that in my fourteenth year I
was the kicked instead of the kicker; that I lay crippled on the reeking peat
and saw my first loved tupped by a brute Angora.
A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the
sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an
impetuous embrace.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills,
resting.
Mother died today.
Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them;
rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered
hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations
of it and resdiscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There
was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of
it.
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look
right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway,
instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a
boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there
had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
I took the battery out of my arm and fed it into the recharger, and
only realized I'd done it when ten seconds later the fingers wouldn't work. How
odd, I thought. Recharging the battery, and the maneuver needed to accomplish
it, had become such second nature that I had done them instinctively, without
conscious decision, like brushing my teeth. And I realized for the first time
that I had finally squared my subconscious, at least when I was awake, to the
fact that awhat I now had as a left hand was a matter of metal and plastic, not
muscle and bone and blood.
There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood. The judge was an old man; so old,
he seemed to have outlived time and change and death. His parrot-face and
parrot-voice were dry, like his old, heavily-veined hands. His scarlet robed
clashed harshly with the crimson of the roses. He had sat for three days in the
stuffy court, but he showed no sign of fatigue.
His green-and-vermilion topknot was as colorful as a parrot's, and in Colleton
County's courtroom that afternoon, with its stripped-down modern light oak
benches and pale navy carpet, a cherryhead parrot couldn't have looked much more
exotic than this Michael Czarnecki.
"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's
the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get."
"That's what you said about the brother."
"The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability."
"Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He's too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else's
will."
"Not if the other person is his enemy."
"So what do we do? Surround him with enemies all the time?"
"If we have to."
"I thought you said you liked this kid." "If the buggers get him, they'll make me look like his favorite uncle."
"All right. We're saving the world, after all. Take him."
The day they drowned Dendale I were seven years old.
...it was green, all green, all over me, choking, the water,
then boiling at first, and roaring, and seething, till all settled down,
cooling, clearing, and my sight up drifting with the few last bubbles, till
through the glassy water I see the sky clearly, and the sun bright as a lemon,
and the birds with wings wide as a windmill's sails slowly drifting round it,
and over the bank's rim small dark faces peering, timid as beasts at their
watering, nostrils sniffing danger and shy eyes bright and wary, till a current
turns me over, and I drift, and still am drifting, and...
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the
main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and in
a shield, the World State's motto, Community, Identity, Stability.
On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the
market town of Meung, in which the author of Romance of the Rose was born,
appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just
made a second La Rochelle of it. Many citizens, seeing the women flying toward
the High Street, leaving their children crying at the open doors, hastened to
don the cuirass, and supporting their somewhat uncertain courage with a musket
or a partisan, directed their steps toward the hostelry of the Jolly Miller,
before which was gathered, increasing every minute, a compact group, vociferous
and full of curiosity.
In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded
to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.
The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best
as I could, but when he went upon insult I vowed revenge.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
I woke up in detox with the taste of stale puke in my
mouth. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see twinkling lights. This had
happened before as I came out of a blackout. I rolled my head heavily sideways
on the pillow. The light came from a drooping strand of blinking bulbs flung
over a dispirited looking artificial pine. A plastic Santa, looking as drunk as
I remembered being when I went into the blackout, grinned at me from the
treetop. I had an awful feeling it was Christmas Day.
And for extra credit: Which opening solves a mystery in the first four words?
