This Week's Barrel of Fun

The state of the world is making me cranky, so I thought I'd channel that feeling by providing a selection from Famous Insults:

Enjoy!

Why pay money to have your family tree traced? Go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. — Unknown

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages. — Mark Twain

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. — Oscar Wilde

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. — Abraham Lincoln

There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell 'em. — Yogi Berra

Don’t give up. Moses was once a basket case. — Unknown

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. — Marilyn Monroe

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and I'm also not blonde. — Dolly Parton

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other. — Oscar Ameringer

When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. — Elayne Boosler

Shaw: "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend ... if you have one."
Churchill, in response: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second ... if there is one."

The problem with most women is that they get all excited about nothing, then marry him. — Cher

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. — Lao Tzu

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. — Mark Twain

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. — Winston Churchill

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. - Dorothy Parker

Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen. - Michel de Montaigne

I've had men and I've had women, and there's got to be something better.—Tallulah Bankhead

Americans always try to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else first. ― Winston Churchill

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet. — Mark Twain

An irate British MP: Mr. Prime Minister, must you fall asleep while I'm speaking?
Winston Churchill: No, it's purely voluntary.

A British MP: Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease!
Benjamin Disraeli: That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your policies or your mistress!

Reporter: Coach, what do you think of your team's execution?
Yogi Berra: I'm all for it.

Lewis Morris: There's a conspiracy against me, a conspiracy of silence. What should I do?
Oscar Wilde: Join it.

Whatever women must do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. — Charlotte Whitton

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. — Aesop

And perhaps my favorite:

Actress: "I enjoyed reading your book. Who wrote it for you?"
Ilka Chase: "Darling, I'm so glad that you liked it! Who read it to you?"

*****

Meanwhile, one of the few pieces of good news that I found - check out this story about how scientists have finally deciphered and analyzed a 5,500 year old Sumerian Star Map which "shows that the Sumerians made an observation of an Aten asteroid over a kilometer in diameter that impacted Köfels in Austria in the early morning of 29th June 3123 BC."  (LINK)

Now if they could just find and decipher the Sumerian astronomers' diaries!  

 

My First Century

 

 Monday was the publication date for Happiness is a Warm Gun: Crime Stories Inspired by Songs of the Beatles.  My story is the lead-off, because "I Saw Her Standing There" appeared on the Fab Four's first album.

I am particularly delighted by this publication because it marks my one hundredth published story.  This seems like an excellent opportunity to crunch some numbers and look at my oeuvre, so to speak.

So let's get crunching.

 

 

As you will see here the majority of my publications have been in print magazines.  Of course, "print magazine" is a phrase that would have been completely unnecessary when I first got published, like "conventional produce" or "analog clock."

And now I feel like I am designing an annual report for a very small niche corporation.  

I was surprised to find that fully one quarter of my stories fall into the amateur sleuth category, largely because of my character Shanks.

The Other category is consists mostly of stories with so many characters I can't identify one as the protagonist and use her/him to identify the category.

 

Here we get to characters, with Shanks taking the lead.  He is still very much alive (with at least two stories coming out next year).  Unfortunately the next two,  Marty Crow and Uncle Victor, seem to be retired.  

We will probably hear from the other series characters, if the editors are willing.

 

Here are the decades in which my stories are set.  Since 8 of my tales get listed as fantasy/science fiction I was surprised that only one is set in the future.  Some were set in the future when I wrote them, but time has rolled past them.  I guess that makes them Alternative History stories by default.

 

 

And here we have publication dates.  So far the 2010s are in the lead but the 2020s are still young. 

Speaking of the future, as I was a couple of paragraphs ago, what does the future hold for my writing? 

Well, the day after the Beatles book was published the November/December issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine appeared, featuring "When You Put It That Way." It's my 101st story, so the next century is on its way.  

Let's see how far I get...

Daddy, Where Do Anthologies Come From?

“Daddy, where do anthologies come from?”

“Did you ask Mommy?”

“She told me to ask you.”

“Sigh. I knew you would ask this question someday, Little Writer, but I really hoped you’d be older. What happens is that a would-be editor spends alone time wrestling with his muse—”

“Like you and Mommy wrestle sometimes?”

“Not…exactly. We’ll discuss that kind of wrestling when you’re much, much older. Anyway, one day, about nine months after the would-be editor wrestles with his muse, the Stork of Inspiration arrives with a diaper in its beak, and inside the diaper is a nascent anthology: a concept, a catchy title, or something more.”

“Why does it arrive in a diaper?”

“Because sometimes the ideas are shi—aren’t very good and must be disposed of in the file of ideas-never-to-be-used.”

“But the good ones, the healthy ones, what happens to them?”

“That’s when the would-be editor starts feeding the anthology.”

“What does an anthology eat?”

“Writers, usually a dozen or more before it’s fully grown and is released to find its way in the world.”

“Can I edit an anthology someday, Daddy?”

“Oh, Little Writer, not everyone is experienced enough or responsible enough to edit an anthology, and that’s why you should always use protection when wrestling with some muse you pick up in the bar at a conference, especially when it’s likely to be a one-idea stand. But maybe someday, when you’re ready and you’ve developed a long-term relationship with your muse, you, too, can edit an anthology.”

“Oh, Daddy, I think I would like that.”

PROHIBITION PEEPERS

Prohibition Peepers: Private Eyes During the Noble Experiment (Down & Out Books, released September 2023) was a twinkle in my eye long before the Stork of Inspiration delivered an anthology diaper to my doorstep.

Anthology editors sometimes ask writers to commit to a concept before they pitch the concept to a publisher, and a great many years ago—so long ago I no longer have the original dated email, but likely in the mid-2000s based on some sketchy notes I made at the time—Robert J. Randisi asked if I would contribute to Club Noir, an anthology “to feature stories of night clubs in their heyday. Think of Nick & Nora Charles, martini glasses, hat check girls, cigarette girls, band singers like Frank Sinatra and Helen Morgan… and crime.”

After I told him I was quite interested, I wrote most of an opening scene featuring a cigarette girl and a private eye, made some additional notes, and stuck everything into a file to await word from Randisi that the anthology was a go.

Word never came.

In the late 2010s, while cruising through my idea file, I stumbled upon the barely started manuscript of “Cigarette Girl,” liked what I read, and started noodling with it. I completed the story in April 2020, sent it out to and, by late 2021, received it back from the two top short mystery fiction markets.

By then I had edited a handful of anthologies for Down & Out Books, so I pitched Prohibition Peepers: Private Eyes During the Noble Experiment, an anthology of private eye stories set during and just after the end of prohibition. (This is only the second time I have created an anthology specifically to utilize one of my own stories. The first was Small Crimes [Betancourt & Company, 2004], which included my story “Dreams Unborn,” a story that was my first to be included in the Other Distinguished list of The Best American Mystery Stories.)

I invited several writers with whom I had previously worked and a few I knew but with whom I’d not previously worked to contribute and, well-fed by fourteen writers, Prohibition Peepers was released to the world last month.

Contributors include Susanna Calkins, David Dean, Jim Doherty, John M. Floyd, Nils Gilbertson, Richard Helms, Hugh Lessig, Steve Liskow, Leigh Lundin, Adam Meyer, Penny Mickelbury, Joseph S. Walker, Stacy Woodson, and me.

Leigh Lundin created a cool book trailer for Prohibition Peepers. If you’ve been following his SleuthSayers posts, you know all about it. If not, watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zspr3Unrh0

Central Park in My Life and Stories

Like many New Yorkers, I have a lifelong love affair with Central Park. I've been watching, fascinated, as its iridescent pigeons court, its sleek sea lions leap for fish, and riding its classic merry-go-round since childhood. I pushed my son, now in his fifties, in a stroller many miles along its walking paths and now walk or run myself around the Great Lawn or the Reservoir almost daily. I may take a break to sit on a park bench reading while watching ducks and rowers on the Lake, listening to jazz, or enjoying the sound of birdsong, the drift of cherry and apple blossoms in spring, or the changing color of autumn leaves.

Writers of fiction have found Central Park an irresistible setting. Among the best known are J.D. Salinger, whose Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, meditates on where the ducks in the Pond go in the winter; and E.B. White, whose Stuart Little in the eponymous book wins a race on the model sailboat pond, formally known as the Conservatory Water.

Crime fiction writers have also used Central Park as a setting. Anne Perry's A New York Christmas gives readers a glimpse of the Park in 1904. In Linda Fairstein's Death Angel, the victim of a serial killer is found at the foot of the Bethesda Fountain, one of the Park's best known landmarks.

I’ve strewn a few dead bodies in Central Park myself. In the short story, “Death Will Help You Imagine,” Bruce Kohler and his friend Barbara, finishing an early morning run in Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon memorial, find a corpse flung across the Imagine mosaic, the Park’s most beloved tourist attraction. In “Death Will Finish Your Marathon,” the winning runner stumbles across the finish line and trips over the body of a New York character known as the Ancient Marathoner. In “Death Will Give You A Reason,” Bruce’s girlfriend, NYPD detective Cindy, and her partner fish a body out of Harlem Meer, the artificial lake at the north end of the Park.

“The witnesses know nothing,” Natali said. “Coupla dog walkers. The dogs all started barking when the body bumped up against the bank.”

“Photos?” Cindy asked. Some bystander always had an iPhone.

“Professional dog walkers,” Natali snarled. “Six leashes in each hand. Labs, beagles, terriers, dachshunds. Two dozen witnesses. If we had someone who spoke Bark, we might have eyewitnesses instead of shit. By the time anyone else realized the circus had come to town, the leashes were all tangled up in each other and doggy legs and corpse’s arms.”

“What did you do, arrest the dogs?”

“I was tempted,” Natali said. “The idiots tried to pull him out—without letting go of the leashes. They seemed to think I’d give them a medal for obeying the leash law. By the time the uniforms arrived, the scene was already compromised.”

“Let’s see the deceased,” Cindy said.

“Go ahead. I already looked. I sniffed him up and down too. The pooches inspired me.”

“Anything of interest?”

“Alcohol and weed.”

“Lake or marijuana?”

“Both.”

The aroma of marijuana in the Park has increased from occasional to omnipresent since legalization. The dogs have always been there. I read recently that there are more dogs in New York City than there are people in Cleveland, and I believe it. Even though most people obey the leash law except in designated areas, the Park’s a paradise for dogs and a perfect meeting place for dog lovers. It also allows drop-in admirers like me to learn, for example, that Australian shepherds are In this year. I see a dozen of them within a week tugging different people along. Maybe one of those shaggy, alert gray-and-black-spotted dogs with brown legs will participate in an investigation one day.

Central Park is only half a mile across, and New York is a walking city. Since Bruce lives on the East Side and Barbara and Jimmy on the Upper West Side, they are constantly crossing the Park to visit each other. Bruce and Barbara run around the upper and lower loops formed by the East and West Park Drives and the 79th Street Transverse and around the Reservoir track. In the novel, Death Will Help You Leave Him, Bruce’s early love interest Luz was almost run down by a bicycle crossing the Park West Drive. This could still happen, and the offender doesn’t have to be a possible murder suspect. Cyclists—not the tourists on Citi Bikes, which didn’t exist back then, but the experts on fancy bikes with fancy gear—have a great sense of entitlement. On the other hand, today I couldn’t write the scene in which the horses that had shed their riders came galloping along the bridle path and out of the Park, where they stopped for the light at Central Park West and trotted with docility back to the Claremont Stable on West 93rd near Amsterdam. Only occasional mounted police now ride the bridle path, and the Claremont is no longer a stable—but it still was when I saw that happen in real life.

My biggest set piece in the Park was Barbara and Jimmy’s wedding near the end of Death Will Pay Your Debts, which I wrote as “under the gazebo near the lake.” I was thinking of a cross between the Ladies Pavilion, very popular for weddings, and the Hernshead Boat Landing, where a jazz band often plays, both on the west side of the Lake, south of the Ramble. So I didn’t want to be tied down to real-life details, although the “big rock” that Bruce and Cindy sit and talk on at the end of the party is the real-life Hernshead Rock. That’s the beauty of writing fiction about a real-life magical place you’ve known forever.

Prohibition Peepers part 1 — How to create book trailer audio

Gorgeous cover!

Trailer Perq

Last time, I introduced my 12yo detective heroes, Penrod and Sam, taking on Chicago mobsters at the height of Prohibition and the depth of the Great Depression. That article revealed inspirations for characters and the story, one of fourteen tales in Michael Bracken’s Prohibition Peepers. This week I’ll describe how I created the audio for a book trailer (a preview) and next week we’ll discuss the associated video.

I grew up with antique radios and still have a few. I built a crystal radio at age 8, just a few odd parts. Unsurprisingly, radio plays a major role in Dime Detective. Penrod, my little hero, nightly tunes in a homemade crystal radio. That sparked an idea…

Different anthology editors devise different promotions, so I wasn’t sure what Michael might have in mind after Prohibition Peepers hit bookstores. A book trailer by James Lincoln Warren initiated a desire to create a preview for Dime Detective built around an old-time radio broadcast. Like many solitary writers, I’m used to doing things on my own, but the anthology is Michael’s project and we had another dozen contributors to consider.

We sent out a request for participants with stories fitting the time and place of Chicago 1932. With a half dozen participants and their stories, I mapped out a script centered around a newscast.

 

 

 

  

© 2023 Prohibition Peepers

  

We begin with homage to early radio, tuning in a half million watt Mexican ‘X-band’ border station, a radio evangelist (with hints that a listener has a romantic interest), and a patent medicine ad, before launching into a Clyde McCoy rouser. McCoy is considered the inventor of the wah-wah mute, a technique imitated by electric guitarists.

The nightly news intersperses fictional and factual items. The Chicago Bears playoffs must have been one hell of a game, one that set the stage for the Super Bowl, as hinted by the commissioner.

Items that didn’t fit the December 1932 Chicago setting I cast as wire stories, a historical reflection, or an ad. For the same reason, Penny Mickelbury led sports with an advertisement, a break from the rapid string of news.

The schematic following the newscast accurately depicts a real, operational crystal circuit. The video ends in a reversal of how it began, culminating with Benny Goodman playing through the credits.

How It’s Done

I’m a rank amateur when it comes to videos and some decisions reflect that. One example: Would recording the news in one or two long continuous takes be preferable to recording each segment separately? A single take could provide simplicity and consistency in sound quality, but I chose to manage about two dozen segments separately. It gave me more flexibility in article arrangement and sound effects.

But I made mistakes. I deliberately purchased an inexpensive microphone. Duh, you might say, you get what you pay for… but not what I hoped for. Early microphones suffered tinny, attenuated audio ranges and I was seeking that sound. Instead, the surprisingly solidly made cheap mic didn’t attenuate as hoped but merely responded dully. I bought a Snowball, which exhibited excellent range for the price and I thinned the voice by restricting frequency range after recording.

Macintoshes ship with iMovie video and Garage Band audio programs. Although most Mac users prefer Garage Band, I opted for Audacity. I had experience with the program, plus it’s cross-platform if for some reason Windows became a factor. I didn’t entirely abandon Garage Band;  as mentioned a moment ago, I created the tinny newscaster effect by tweaking Garage Band’s ’telephone’ filter.

Back on Track

In Audacity, I laid out three sets of tracks, two monaural tracks for voice and sound effects, and a pair of stereo tracks for music. The project didn’t require stereo, but imported sound came in stereo and I left it.

I edited three musical segments.

Sunny Side of the Street

Ted Lewis

Sugar Boogie

Clyde McCoy

Let's Dance

Benny Goodman

Listening to the trailer, you may easily miss ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. It plays quietly in the background of Dr Cruikshank’s breathy advert.

To give the illusion of complete songs, I edited out the middles of Sugar Boogie and Let’s Dance, reducing the pieces to 20 seconds and 45 seconds respectively.

Noise

Static, tuning sounds, and a teletype constitute primary sound effects. A telegraph key beep-beeps in the introduction of the news that overlaps the telex. The music track quiesced emptily at that point, so I placed the Morse clip there, allowing me to maintain it separately without adding a track.

During my consulting career, I communicated by telex to offices in Europe. That oddly hypnotic clatter stuck in my head. I entered the project wanting to match that distinct teletype sound in my ears.

Dozens of ‘TTY’ clips were available on the internet, but that particular tone eluded me except for one YouTube video in which the owner incessantly talked all the way through it. And talked. And talked. I wanted to scream, “STFU!” which in Bulgarian means, “Please be quiet.”

Listening to the clip a few more times, I found a little less than 15 seconds where he actually fell silent. I captured those few seconds and replicated them several times for my purposes. The resulting teletype runs in the background under the news reader.

Voices in Secret

I’d planned for a professional stage presenter to handle the ballroom announcer, but he was on vacation in Europe and, unfortunately, he didn’t return in time to complete his part. Michael called time. He said, “Go with what you got, Sparky.” I’m pretty sure he said that.

Here’s a secret: I had created vocal placeholders with Macintosh-generated voices. In fact, Mac text-to-speech appears throughout, and I admit a couple I considerably liked. I wasn’t as keen about the big band ballroom voice, but without a professional announcer, we went digital.

Audacity blended all the clips together. Michael and the gang approved the audio draft, but then what? Next week: I inveigle the video.

Before departing today, I’ve created a timeline and jotted notes of our hearty pioneers settling the Great Plains and the role of radio in that lonely landscape. A bit backward, yes, but feel free to skip.

I Recapped the Meddling So You Don't Have To

My last two October slots delved into Shirley Jackson's A Haunting at Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle. For this Halloween season, let's really go creeps and crawls. Let's talk Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?

Scoob is everywhere these days. He's on Max and Tubi. He's in the cookie aisle, the t-shirt rack, the toy section. It's hard to remember that Scoob only got started as 25 Saturday morning episodes, in 1969 and 1970. The show was a hit, and Hanna-Barbera immediately set about expanding the franchise concept. Nothing clicks or brings the style like the original Scoob, though. 

Scoob almost didn't get started at all. The Hanna-Barbera writers pitched CBS the original concept as The Mysteries Five, inspired by the 1940s I Love a Mystery radio serial and Enid Blyton's Famous Five kid stories. That first pitch had a five-person Archies-style traveling rock group that solved supernatural-related mysteries. Their bongo-playing sheepdog was named Too Much.

It didn't fly. Neither did a second pass, Who's S-S-Scared?, floated after the fifth character, "Geoff," was cut to streamline the gang. Ah, Geoff, we never knew ya. Anyway, CBS thought the mock-ups were too scary. The execs already had a snoot-full of parent groups complaining that cartoons were too violent.

It was the third try that sold, with no rock band angle and Scooby-Doo as the dog. CBS exec Fred Silverman took the name from Frank Sinatra's scat closer to "Strangers in the Night," after hearing it on a red-eye flight to a production meeting. As things happened, "Fred" also replaced "Ronnie" as the leader guy. All four of this final gang were borrowed straight off Dobie Gillis. 

Original Scoob was in re-runs by when my Saturday mornings came around. I consider it a virtue that I've never outgrown this kind of good fun. And Scoob has something for the adult side, a surprisingly gothic vibe if you delve past those chase scene gags and improvised traps. Walter Peregoy, the Disney vet behind 101 Dalmatians, designed gorgeously bleak background paintings, blurred reality studies of fog and shadow and desolate places, in sharp juxtaposition to the gang's bright colors. Those hallway chase scenes pop because the place feels legit haunted. Even Velma is often creeped out that this ghost might be real. 

This is a crime blog, so let's talk the crimes in Original Scoob. Glorious, goofball crimes. Behind each supposed monster was the inevitable family treasure, land swindle, or hoax to scare away meddlers. Sometimes, the motive was just old-fashioned revenge. And each scheme was needlessly extravagant. Pay off a few locals, already. Why draw inevitable attention with the supernatural hoo-hah? 

In that spirit, I've analyzed Original Scoob's 25 monster hoaxes so that you don't have to.  

Meta-capers emerge. In classic Scoob, there's something of value in play or rumored to be nearby. Bluestone the Great, a washed-up magician, concocted a ghost scare while he searched Vasquez Castle for pirate treasure. No one else seemed to have the least interest in that lonely island, but hey, Bluestone does Bluestone. 

A lot of plain criming goes on in Original Scoob. The gang breaks up an art forgery operation (the Black Knight, aka Mr. Wickles the curator), counterfeiters (the Puppet Master, aka Mr. Pietro the theatre owner), a jewel theft ring (the Snow Ghost, aka Mr. Greenway the Inn owner and an appreciated hat tip to Sidney Greenstreet), and sheep rustlers (the Ghost Werewolf, aka, well, a sheep rustler). 

Yes, many of these monster-fakers are organized. How a crime organization decided on a cover so hard to maintain and so sure to draw curiosity need not be explained in the Scoobyverse. Still, no wonder they don't get away with it. 

But some of these schemes are downright clever, stuff you might see in crime fiction. Zeb and Zeke pose as a witch and zombie while they search the swamps for an armored car score they'd ditched there. Professor Wayne poses as a caveman to steal the rights to cutting-edge technology. Hank Buds the caretaker faked being the Miner Forty-Niner to scare the schlub of a ghost town owner into missing out on an undiscovered oil claim. 

The Scoob writers pulled a few nice switcheroos. The descendent of Dr. Jekyll confesses to the gang he might or might not be turning into a new Mr. Hyde, but it's head-casing. Jekyll dresses up as Hyde the jewel thief after he's failed at honest science. In a tweak of the formula, the gang and a phantom chase each other around a mansion over some lost family jewels. The phantom, though, turns out to be the rightful owner there looking for his property. Those knocking noises have been the other fake ghost we forgot was in Scene One. He's the real crook after those jewels.

There are a few proper ghost stories. Stewart Weatherby poses as the ghost of neighbor Elias Kingston to cheat Daphne's friend out of a fortune. The plot comes with spooky graveyards and disembodied voices and strange disappearances. 

Perhaps the most traditional ghost story hides inside one of the silliest episodes. The gang heads to bayou country--Southern goth--to collect Scoob's surprise inheritance from Colonel Beauregard. The Colonel's whole family has come for their shares, but the will has a catch: Whoever can survive the night in the haunted mansion gets the Colonel's money. Sure enough, family members start disappearing one-by-one.

Well, none of them were ghosts. 25 hoaxes out of 25 cases. Scoob and The Haunting Of Hill House have an overlay here. Way different audiences and methods, sure, but both explore how human minds can cope with the supernatural. Such things aren't even supernatural. Jackson's ghosts at Hill House were as much part of a natural order as you and I. We just don't have a scientific explanation for ghosts--yet. 

Dobie Gillis, AP 1960

In Scoob, that explanation comes and is pretty mundane. Hauntings are smoke and mirrors. 

Then again, Scoob and Shaggy did come across talking skulls and floating sandwiches that remain unconnected to the caper solution. Maybe the supernatural does exist in Original Scoob. Fine if so. Jackson would agree that humans do commit worse sins in this world than ghosts. 

Which is pretty deep, sure. You can ruin things through analysis. Not Scoob, though. Original Scoob's embrace of goofball makes it impervious to overthinking. The Rube Goldberg stuff and Scooby Snack bribes and those extravagant capers are pure fun, and those shadowy backdrops are pure art. There are a lot worse ways to spend October than to fire up Scoob and the gang. 

Eating My Words

 

Not accepted as a form of payment anywhere in the world.

I have told this story in various ways over the years, and it always makes people chuckle. So here I go again.

When I was freelancing years ago for The New York Times, I calculated that they were paying me under 50 cents a word for the twice-monthly, 750-1,000-word columns I wrote for the Sunday New Jersey section. 

I know that short story writers are accustomed to payment rates under 10 cents a word, but in the realm of journalism you tend to get paid better. Not far better, mind you; just better. Most writers know that there’s not much money in freelancing for newspapers, especially ones like the Times. Still, every month I could count on $1,000 income from this gig alone. And it was fun. I wrote about “destinations,” places to go and things to do in ye Olde Garden State.

One day my editor called with a weird proposition. They were running short, under-300-word reviews of local restaurants, and he wondered if I could contribute a few. I asked about payment.

“We used to pay about $50 each,” he said, “but now we have these coupons for pie.”

I’ve had hearing issues my whole life, and wear hearing aids. So I often second-guess myself and ask people to restate what they just said. (Not a bad practice for a reporter.) My editor explained that a fancy bakery near the newspaper had given them these vouchers and that they were using them as a way to thank people. An extra bonus, so to speak, to make up for the low $50 payment.

Or that’s how I heard it.

Of course, I misheard. Actually, instead of paying $50, these coupons were the only form of payment I was to receive.

There’s so much wrong with this picture. For starters, to write a decent restaurant review—even a capsule review—you still have to eat at the place. Ideally, you would eat there more than once, with guests each time. That’s how the pros do it; you bring as many appetites as possible so you can try different dishes. But by their action, my editors were basically saying that since they were unable to reimburse reporters for these meals, they were offering them dessert instead.

Like any brainless freelancer, I said yes and started working these capsule reviews into my reporting/writing schedule. I’d eat at a place incognito, then phone later to speak to a chef, manager, or owner if I had any questions about ingredients, menu items, or the restaurant’s history. If anyone asked, I’d say I was writing a review for the Times. It was true. They didn’t need to know that it was for the New Jersey section of the paper, how short they were, or the absurd writer compensation.

I did a bunch of these reviews. And because I had misheard the editor, believing the pie thing to be a joke or perhaps an extra thank-you, I actually invoiced them $50, plus expenses, for each review. They always paid. But after each one, I’d get a coupon in the mail for a free pie at the fancy bakery.

I had a stack of these coupons and collected a few hundred dollars before accounting caught on and my poor editor called, embarrassed, to explain the situation. I forget how we remedied the overpayment. I’m guessing they recovered the article fees from my later assignments, but let me keep the expense money. (They were always generous on expenses, covering meals, phone calls, and mileage for other stories I wrote for them.)

I redeemed the pie coupons infrequently, I must say. The pie shop was in an inconvenient location in Midtown that I rarely visited. The one time I called to claim a bunch of pies for a party I was about to attend, the baker-in-chief told me that I could only get two free pies at any one time with those coupons. To make things worse, the pies were a little on the small side. Stereotypical Manhattan meal pricing. Delicious, but minuscule.

It remains one of the strangest ways I’ve ever been paid for my work. And for a little while, perhaps a summer or so, I liked to think of myself as being the hit of parties when I showed up with two boxes of free pie and a story of professional debasement and exploitation to boot.

Now let us pray at the Church of Uncle Harlan. Apologies in advance if his language offends you. If it does, how dare you call yourself a writer? Get to a bar this very minute and practice cussing between rounds. I know you have it in you!

To which I would add, the writer must be paid in currency, not pie.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Sincerest Form of Flattery? Part 2

Oh Marlowe,’ she patted my shoulder. ‘Women tell each other things we would never tell a man. You don’t know how it is. There’s just so much backstory to being a woman. Chadwick used to be a lot worse. He committed her mother to a sanatorium and they drugged her so heavily she drowned in a bath. It’s not as dramatic as it looks. Anneliese bruises easy and every time he beats her up she figures he’s bringing himself closer to death.‘

                    - Denise Mina, The Second Murderer

Great speech, right? It's Anne Riordan talking to fellow P.I. Phillip Marlowe in a scene written by Scottish writer Denise Mina. Can you imagine the girl reporter Anne Riordan of Farewell, My Lovely talking like that to Marlowe in the first place, and him just accepting it, in the second? That’s just one of the many differences between Raymond Chandler’s original take on these characters, and Denise Mina’s successful update of them in The Second Murderer, the first Marlowe novel commissioned by the Chandler estate, to be written by a woman.

Of course, Mina is hardly the first “successor writer” to take on Chandler’s iconic private eye at the behest of the late author’s heirs. There have in fact been several; some of them decent, all of them not really successful. In my last round on our blog carousel, I laid out the history of approved Chandler sequel novels, with brief commentary on how authors such as Robert B. Parker, Benjamin Black and Lawrence Osborne fared in their attempts to bring Marlowe and his world to life. If you’re interested, you can find that entry here.

I also laid down a marker that, in my opinion, Mina’s work surpassed them all. And I stand by that conclusion. Here’s why.

Mina’s Marlowe closely resembles Chandler’s original, but is hardly a carbon copy, and definitely not some sort of slavish homage. She gives us Marlowe’s familiar, abiding righteous anger at the injustice inherent in daily life in 1930s/40s Los Angeles. Also making frequent appearances are the wisecracks Marlowe so often deploys as part of his attempts to cope with the injustice he sees all around him. These are a mixed bag. Chandler’s humor rarely missed (“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake.”), and Mina’s wisecracks, when they land, stand up by comparison (“Chrissie Montgomery was easier to find than an optimist in a casino.” “He looked like a headache in a suit.” “The windows were small and many and a heavy roof hung over it all like a furrowed brow.”), but when they don’t land, they really don’t (“Her laugh had a tinny rattle now, sharp edged, like a comedian’s wife planning her divorce during a live show.”), mostly because it feels like there's an element of trying too hard about them.

As with Chandler's best work, the city of Los Angeles itself acts as another character, well-developed and deftly fleshed out:

A mid-September heatwave had descended on the city. Brittle heat rolled down from parched hills, lifting thin dust from roads and sidewalks, suspending it in the rising air and turning the sky yellow. Sounds became crisp and metallic. Everywhere people were gliding along through a gritty yellow fog, mean and squinting, spitting on sidewalks, waiting for the heat to break.

Avid Chandler fans will note how deftly the above passage calls to mind the famous opening paragraph for Chandler's short story "Red Wind," first published in Dime Detective in January, 1938, a little more than a year before Marlowe's full-length novel debut in 1939's The Big Sleep:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

A comparison of the two passages strikes me how skillfully Mina evokes Chandler's descriptive prose without trying to closely duplicate it. It's the difference between an homage written by an author who has clearly been influenced by the original, and a true "pastiche," little more than a copy.

The similarities don't end there. As with The Big Sleep, there is a wealthy, aged, dying client. But where General Sternwood in The Big Sleep is a likeable old cuss,  The Second Murderer's Chadwick Montgomery is not. At all. Both rich old men have rebellious daughters, both families possess secrets they are loathe to have exposed to the light of day.

There are a plethora of other sly references to the original novels. My personal favorite among them is Mina's cleverly naming one of the city's seedy residential hotels the "Brody," an obvious reference to the Chandler character of Joe Brody, the "half-smart" blackmailer so dramatically gunned down halfway through the action of The Big Sleep. A close second was Mina's use of the famous Bradbury Building, renamed the "Belfont" by Chandler when he also made use of it as a setting for part of his third novel, The High Window.

But it's not just the similarities to the original material that make The Second Murderer so compelling. It's also the differences.

The original Marlowe comes across to modern readers as such an outright misogynist and downright homophobe that passages revealing him as such have become the stuff of cliché. As such an update to the character is not only called for–and I say this as a lifelong Chandler fan–but welcome.

Mina's Chandler isn't some "woke" construct. He simply reserves judgement, where Chandler himself always seemed unable to. He's still hardly the driver of the neighborhood Welcome Wago, as demonstrated in this scene where he and Riordan visit the home of an LAPD homicide detective with four annoying school-aged sons, all trying to block them from entering:

'Good morning, gentlemen,' said Riordan.

The oldest boy conceded the stick to the dog and stepped through a carefully tended flowerbed to get into her way.

'What do you want here?' he said. 'Father has been told not to bring his underlings to the door.'

She looked at him, 'We don't work for your father.'

He looked around at his rat-fink brothers. 'Are you from the school?' He wasn't going to let us pass him, not without answers.

'Son, we're here to see your daddy,' I explained carefully. 'So git. Because if you don't git I'll get angry and you'll be picking little tiny bits of your pug-ugly face out of that flowerbed over there.'

The boy did git, which was judicious of him. He was used to talking down to people who worked for his father but I like to think I extended his repertoire of engagement with underlings that day, perhaps in a way that was useful. We walked up to the door.

'Father of the year over here,' said Riordan. 'Is it snotty kids you hate or all kids?'

'I don't hate kids. I hate people.'

And then there's the character of Anne Riordan herself. As shown above, this Anne Riordan is still a "nice girl," but is also a business owner (started her own detective agency when Marlowe earlier rebuffed her request to apprentice with him), and more than equal to the task of fencing/flirting with Marlowe himself. As such she is a welcome update to the original.

It's hardly all positive, though. Nobody is perfect, and novels, being human-made constructs (at least for the time being), are also not perfect. The single aspect of Mina's approach to the character and world of Marlowe that consistently pulled me out of the story is something I can't recall Chandler ever employing in his work (and something of which, as both a reader and a writer, I am most definitely not a fan), a very particular type of foreshadowing, as with this final sentence of one of the novel's early chapters:

The next time we looked each other in the eye it would be over the body of a dead man.

It's not something Mina does more than a handful of times, but it occurred enough for me to make note of it. Hence my mentioning it here. But even mentioning it, I didn't find it jarring enough to make me give up on the book.

When I first heard the premise for The Second Murderer, I wondered whether it would be the sort of bait and switch that the latest season of the Disney Plus series The Mandalorian has been (the title character is barely a factor in this season. It's clearly all about reintroducing the character of Bo Katan...Uhhh anyway, I digress). You know, it's ostensibly a Phillip Marlowe novel, but in reality it's an Anne Riordan novel, with Marlowe doing enough and showing up enough to serve as literary window dressing.

It definitely wasn't. This is a Marlowe novel. And it's a damned good one. Well worth your time. I enjoyed it start to end.

And now I'm wondering what enticement it would take for Denise Mina to once again agree to take us to 1940s Los Angeles. This time in a story featuring Anne Riordan as the main character, perhaps.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below. And for me, I would definitely read that book!

And that's it for me this time around. See you in two weeks!