When Writing Historical Fiction, It's Better to Travel

(A repost from a few years back. Still useful, still timely. Hope you enjoy! - B.T.)

[Elmore]Leonard was originally no more a man of the West than was the Ohio-born dentist Zane Grey. While a kid in Detroit, Westerns enthralled him as they did most people in the 1930s and 40s. When he grew interested in writing during college Western fiction seemed a promising genre he could work in part-time. Unlike many writers then selling Western tales to pulps, though, Leonard insisted on accuracy, and kept a ledger of his research over the years, later crediting his longtime subscription to Arizona Highways magazine for many of his authentic descriptions. All had to be genuine: the guns, Apache terms and clothing; the frontier knives, card games, liquor, and especially the horses. 

 — Nathan Ward, from "Elmore Leonard's Gritty Westerns," in Crime Reads

It's certainly never a bad idea to follow the writing advice of the great Elmore Leonard. His Ten Rules For Writing are rightly famous as terrific advice for any writer of fiction.

The Great Elmore Leonard

In those instances where Leonard's advice isn't readily available, it never hurts to follow his example, if at all possible. Take the one in the quote above from Nathan Ward's Crime Reads article on Leonard. For years Leonard apparently leaned heavily on the content of Arizona Highways magazine.

It's a fine notion. Now, don't get me wrong: it's always better to travel. There is no substitute for actually going to and spending time in the place you're writing about. But, if you're writing about someplace and you can't afford to go, read travel writers. For that matter, even if you can afford the investment in both time and treasure to visit the region where your work is set, read travel writers. No one can help you get a feel for a certain place like people who make their livings helping their readers get a feel for a certain place.

Take William Dalrymple. The British-born-and-raised son of a Scottish baronet, Dalrymple these days is best known for his recent run of riveting books on the history of the subcontinent: India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Dalrymple is a terrific writer and a first-rate historian who splits his time between a farm just outside Delhi, in India and a summer home in London.

William Dalrymple

But before he began to make a name for himself with books such as White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, The Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842, and The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of An Empire, Dalrymple began his writing career as a travel writer, taking readers on a tour through the Eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Land (From the Holy Mountain: a Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East), and of course, chronicling the early days of his life-long love affair with India. With his first book In Xanadu: a Quest, published in 1989, Dalrymple chronicles his modern retracing of the journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem in the summer palace of Kublai Khan in China. But it was with his second book, 1994's City of Djinns: a Year in Delhi, a memoir of his first visit to the city which has had such a tremendous impact on his adult life, that Dalrymple really began to make his mark.

And there is so much to this memoir which can be of use to the writer reading about the city. Here's an early excerpt laying out his introduction to Delhi and to India:

I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices. Moreover the city—so I soon discovered—possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. Friends would moan about the touts on Janpath and head off to the beaches in Goa, but for me Delhi always exerted a stronger spell. I lingered on, and soon found a job in a home for destitutes in the far north of the city. The nuns gave me a room overlooking a municipal rubbish dump. In the morning I would look out to see the sad regiment of rag-pickers trawling the stinking berms of refuse; overhead, under a copper sky, vultures circled the thermals forming patterns like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. In the afternoons, after I had swept the compound and the inmates were safely asleep, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me.

Now, I ask you. Can this guy set a scene, or what? Really helpful for drinking in the flavors, colors, scents and sounds of what on the face of it comes across as a truly unforgettable place. Really not a bad guide if you're interested in writing about modern-day India.

But what if, like me, you're a writer of historical fiction?

In Leonard's case, as stated above, he exploited a modern magazine to help give him local flavor not just for another region of the country, but for that region in another era. No mean feat. It's a testament to Leonard's talent, coupled with his singular vision that he was able to "world build" (to borrow a phrase from our friends who write speculative fiction) using these building blocks for his foundation.

So sure, you can (and should) definitely use your imagination to fill in the cracks. There is certainly no substitute for imagination in the fiction writer's tool kit. That said, you need more than one tool in order to get the job of writing fiction done. I've often felt like our "tool kit" as fiction writers should be more aptly called a "tool warehouse." And of course, another way to use travel writing as one of those tools, to help get the feel for a city or street, or region or state or county or what-have-you during a bygone time is to go and find travel writing from the time in which your work-in-progress is set. 

I have a writer friend whose current work-in-progress is set during World War II. One of his major characters has a back-story in which he lived in Germany during the 1930s, in the run-up to the war. I referred him to A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, the first volume in a superb three-volume memoir of a trip on foot across Europe, from Holland all the way to Turkey by travel writer, war-time British commando (the account of his part in a successful kidnapping of a German general in Crete is not to be missed), bon vivant, and (some say) one of Ian Fleming's models for his literary creation James Bond, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

 Leigh Fermor set out for Constantinople (Istanbul) in December of 1933, less than a year after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had come to power. His narrative is replete with rich details about German life during that period, laying out how the Nazis had both a heavy and in some ways, a negligible impact on the country they would eventually drive to absolute ruin. Here is Leigh Fermor's initial impression of Cologne, the first major German city he visited:

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest’s initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it. Tinsel and stars flashed in all the shops and banners saying Fröhliche Weihnacht! were suspended across the streets. Clogged villagers and women in fleece-lined rubber boots slipped about the icy pavements with exclamatory greetings and small screams, spilling their armfuls of parcels. The snow heaped up wherever it could and the sharp air and the lights gave the town an authentic Christmas card feeling. It was the real thing at last! Christmas was only five days away. Renaissance doors pierced walls of ancient brick, upper storeys jutted in salients of carved timber and glass, triangles of crow-steps outlined the steep gables, and eagles and lions and swans swung from convoluted iron brackets along a maze of lanes. As each quarter struck, the saint-encrusted towers challenged each other through the snow and the rivalry of those heavy bells left the air shaking. Beyond the Cathedral and directly beneath the flying-buttresses of the apse, a street dropped sharply to the quays. Tramp steamers and tugs and barges and fair-sized ships lay at anchor under the spans of the bridges, and cafés and bars were raucous with music. I had been toying with the idea, if I could make the right friends, of cadging a lift on a barge and sailing upstream in style for a bit.

 Again, this is quite a scene the writer is setting! So much good material, such a solid feel for the place. Leigh Fermor wrote the memoir some forty years after the trip, based on large part on the deep and thorough entries he made in his journal as an eighteen year-old looking for adventure in a rapidly changing world. And then he goes on to talk about his attempt to "make friends" in that timeless way young people have from time immemorial: he went to a bar:

I made friends all right. It was impossible not to. The first place was a haunt of seamen and bargees shod in tall sea-boots rolled down to the knee, with felt linings and thick wooden soles. They were throwing schnapps down their throats at a brisk rate. Each swig was followed by a chaser of beer, and I started doing the same. The girls who drifted in and out were pretty but a rough lot and there was one bulky terror, bursting out of a sailor’s jersey and wearing a bargeman’s cap askew on a nest of candy-floss hair, called Maggi—which was short for Magda—who greeted every newcomer with a cry of “Hallo, Bubi!” and a sharp, cunningly twisted and very painful pinch on the cheek. I liked the place, especially after several schnapps, and I was soon firm friends with two beaming bargemen whose Low German speech, even sober, would have been blurred beyond the most expert linguist’s grasp. They were called Uli and Peter. “Don’t keep on saying Sie,” Uli insisted, with a troubled brow and an unsteadily admonishing forefinger: “Say Du.” This advance from the plural to the greater intimacy of the singular was then celebrated by drinking Brüderschaft. Glasses in hand, with our right arms crooked through the other two with the complexity of the three Graces on a Parisian public fountain, we drank in unison. Then we reversed the process with our left arms, preparatory to ending with a triune embrace on both cheeks, a manoeuvre as elaborate as being knighted or invested with the Golden Fleece. The first half of the ceremony went without a hitch, but a loss of balance in the second, while our forearms were still interlocked, landed the three of us in the sawdust in a sottish heap. Later, in the fickle fashion of the very drunk, they lurched away into the night, leaving their newly-created brother dancing with a girl who had joined our unsteady group: my hobnail boots could do no more damage to her shiny dancing shoes, I thought, than the seaboots that were clumping all round us. She was very pretty except for two missing front teeth. They had been knocked out in a brawl the week before, she told me.

 And that's just a taste. Leigh Fermor's three volumes here truly form a treasure trove: a window into a long-vanished world, and a feel for both the time itself and the timeless humanity of its cast of thousands. Well worth a read whether you're writing something set in Middle Europe during the 1930s, are a student of human nature, history, great writing, or (most likely) some combination of all of the above.

 

Patrick Leigh Fermor (Right) in Crete, 1943

And that's all for now. Let's hear from you in the comments! Favorite travel writer(s)? I'm always on the lookout for new material!

See you in two weeks!

Annika

Unforgotten, it ain’t.  But it’s still Nicola Walker.  And even if we don’t have Sunny and the rest of the Unforgotten crew, we have a new team, up in the wilds of Glasgow.

Annika is another police procedural, courtesy of the PBS Masterpiece channel (which, along with Acorn, carries a bunch of good stuff).  It follows the Marine Homicide Unit – is there, in fact, such a thing?  Not that it matters, it makes for a good set-up.  The episodes are self-contained, so unlike Unforgotten, or Shetland, there’s no story arc over the full season.  Nor is Annika as dark as either of the aforementioned.  It has a lighter touch.  And it has a gimmick where Nicola’s character breaks the fourth wall, and speaks directly to us, sharing not so much her thoughts about the specific case in hand, but more her textural observations, Ibsen or Sophocles, whatever pops into her floating stream of consciousness.  I find this device both charming and revealing, it has transparency; I can also see where people could find it aggravating, fey and cutesy. 

The show has grit, without being horrifically brutal or down in the mouth.  Glasgow has the rap of being a pretty tough burg, but as shown here, it’s not all murk and spit and shadows.  And people don’t seem oppressed or bitter.  It doesn’t come across like a province of the former Soviet Union. 

The other three cops on the squad are individuated enough to give them flavor and specifics, without falling into the generic, or caricature, but it’s Annika herself who has an inner life, and a domestic one.  She’s a single mom, with a teenage daughter, and this is nowhere near as deadly as it might sound.  Their relationship is prickly, and feels organic, and it’s interesting from the outside.  Both actresses feed into a natural dynamic, adversarial and anything but treacly.  Part of what makes it work is that our hero, while very perceptive and on-game as a cop, is a lot less skillful as a mom.  She has a hard time navigating the shoals. 

The mysteries are better than serviceable, although not terribly mystifying; the cop shop stuff is convincing; the cops are really good, you get to like them, the cast wins you over.  Mind you, they can be rather dour (dure, the Scots would say), and the humor – of which there’s a fair amount – is delivered very deadpan.  You can turn on the subtitles, too, but if you’ve gotten used to the accents in Shetland, it shouldn’t pose a problem here.

You kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. The first season in, I think this one’s a keeper.

West of Here

I was driving through West Texas when a story idea struck me.

I'm speaking about West Texas, the geographically vague portion of my state that is, well, west. That landmass, by the way, does not include West, Texas, the Czech community located in the central part of the state. You'll likely pass through there if you're heading down to visit Michael Bracken in Waco. Should you be near that West, pause, pull over, and take a kolache break. They're pretty good. 

It's hard to pin down the precise borders of West Texas, the region. Some people set the boundary at the Brazos River. Others argue that the line is linguistic. The border between East Texas and West Texas gets crossed when twang slides into drawl. 

Basil the Bat Lord, Creative Commons

The boundary may be imprecise, but at some point, westbound motorists realize they've entered West Texas. 

A while back, a friend and I were driving to Lubbock. His Texas Tech football team was squaring off against my alma mater. He'd offered me a ticket. 

Many miles of semi-arid country separate the communities in that region. When you come to a town, you notice. 

Every community, everywhere, has character and characters, but I think the isolation of the towns in West Texas encourages a particular eccentricity. No town can model itself on the neighboring community because, likely as not, there isn't one. Each hamlet is a big fish. 

Lubbock came to be an urban oasis in the middle of the high plains. It fostered a music scene producing most famously Buddy Holly but also a host of other musicians from both country and rock genres. 

Sweetwater chose a different direction. It celebrates its rocky isolation through an annual rattlesnake roundup. Volunteers roam the local countryside, collecting Western Diamondback Rattlers and maintaining the local wildlife population. They bring the snakes back for milking, skinning, and eating. The high school girl chosen Miss Snake Charmer will likely have to pass by the occasional PETA protester. 

A visitor to the region needs to check out Marfa. At the far end of West Texas, this town was named for a character in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Hardscrabble farmers work alongside modernist art installations. The art crowd and the agriculture crowd don't always get along. The higher prices brought about by the hip community burden the working-class locals. A casual visitor might miss the tension, distracted by the weirdness. The town has a public radio station worth a listen, public art along a farm-to-market road, a mocked-up Prada store, and supernatural lights. Some folks say the lights betray the presence of space aliens. 

There are the towns of Plainview and Levelland, so named because they're...well, you can probably figure it out. 

Post, however, is the place that really got me thinking about a story. Given the rural setting, many assume the name derives from a fence post. The town is actually named for C.W. Post, the cereal manufacturer. He sought to build a utopian community from a ranch he purchased just below the Caprock Escarpment. C. W. Post planned the town from his office in Battle Creek, Michigan. The local chamber of commerce might better testify to whether the founder's vision as a capitalist haven for hardworking, honest, simple folk was achieved. He spent years trying to better the locals' lives. He theorized, for instance, that exploding dynamite in the clouds would generate reliable rainfall. The plan failed. 

In West Texas, communities settle bragging rights on the athletic fields. This area is the home of Friday night lights. 

Quirkiness, secrets, and conflicts hidden below a seemingly peaceful surface, the settlements of West Texas have all those things. But towns everywhere probably do. All a writer needs is a Miss Marple to ferret out the truth. 

The current issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine includes my story, "The
Experimental Theater Company of Barb Wire, Texas." In it, I try to tell a whodunit while incorporating those hints of place I see when I point my car west. 

Building a sense of place when "place" is thousands of square miles and includes hundreds of independent communities presented a challenge. I thought about the elements any representation would have to include. The story must grab the peculiar oddity of the place. It would need to incorporate isolation. A West Texas story ought to have football, not only because the sport brought me to Post, but also because it is a lifeblood of the region. The short story needed a splash of art because, I think, it's an underappreciated element of West Texas. And any story had to have some cowboy spirit. 

Admittedly some elements, such as isolation and an independent protagonist, frequent many amateur sleuth mysteries. Fortunately, they are cowboy tropes and are easy to place in West Texas. The story that emerged from that germ of an idea, I hope, not only entertains but also gives a fair flavor of the land beyond the Brazos. 

What started as a trip to a football game became a research junket. That's a win. "The Experimental Theater Company of Barb Wire, Texas" was a fun story to write. I hope you enjoy reading it. 

I'll be on the road Tuesday when this posts. I apologize in advance if I'm slow to reply. 

Until next time. 

To __, or not to ___.

My computer just developed a strange glitch.  It stopped letting me type the letter that lives right after A, and ahead of C .  It’s the second letter in that thing we learn in grade school (often sung in an cloying little ditty) that I can’t name, since the word includes the letter that my computer no longer allows.  This has resulted in moments of frustration, and creative resilience, since I need to write around the impediment. 

It's not too much to ask, I think, to have access to all the letters at the tip of my fingers.  We are accustomed to this handy array, and hardly need some censorious technical quirk to interfere with the free flow of expression.  Though here I am, tethered to the need to come up with endless workarounds that I hope make sense, and with luck, still demonstrate a facility with the language. 

If you’re still wondering which letter is now out of reach, it's also the name of a stinging insect.  Think of a creature with orange stripes that zings around flowers and often lands on your egg and croissant sandwich when you’re having an outdoor, early morning repast.  I’ve come to deeply respect the utility of this letter, and wonder if the whole experience wasn’t instigated to alert my attention to its value in written discourse. 

You don’t know what you’re missing till it’s gone.   If you want to know what it’s like to live without sight, put an opaque cloth across your eyes for an hour or two.  Try walking around with one leg pulled up at the knee.  Or try writing the expression, “With one hand tied….” without that crucial letter.   Or refer to the most significant rock group in history, whose name also gives indirect reference to a common insect. 

I’m grateful the computer didn’t rule out the letter E, which that famous word game (which kicks off with an S and has two of the omitted letters in the middle) tells us is the most common.  Indispensable.  As is true of the other vowels.  Losing S would also pose a major hurdle. Try making a plural without an S.

When I write an email, spell check is now an ally, rather than a nagging, and often presumptuous, irritant.  I write a word with the missing letter, and it often offers up the correct version.  This works, though not always.  I can also scope out older documents for the word I want, copy it, and paste it in.  This also works, though I would need a longer lifespan to compose a decent amount of text. 

When writing a Word document, I would love to go to the thesaurus function to find an alternative, yet can’t write the word I’m trying to replace.  So I just mutter, “This is all such _ullshit.”

I’ve scoured Microsoft and Lenovo help screens hoping to find a quick fix, for naught.  Try asking, “Why can’t I type the letter…?” Oh, yeah.  I can’t type it.  My Apple devices, the iPad and iPhone, have no such restrictions.  This could also provide a workaround, though I can’t type nearly as fast with the two fingers scientists claim gave us an evolutionary advantage.  Good for flipping coins and catching a ride on the highway. 

I’ve determined that the world could go on without this mislaid letter, though in a very diminished state.  We would discover new creative powers, and perhaps accomplish unexpected works of art.  Yet at the end of the day, having exhausted ourselves dodging and weaving around this lexicographical curse, how satisfied would you feel saying, “I’m so tired, I just want to fall into that piece of furniture uniquely configured to facilitate sleep.” 

 

 

Prohibition Peepers part 2 — How to create book trailer video

Love that cover!

Prohibition Peepers, the trailer how-to continues from last week. Visual presentation typically drives videos, but as described last week, ours is centered around a soundtrack of a 1932 radio news broadcast. Today I'll thread two paths, a how-to for those interested simple, quick video creation and, historical notes and thoughts as I’m constructing this castle in the air.

Tools of the Trade

Any straightforward graphics apps and video creation program will do. I chose simple apps, nothing fancy.¹

Apple’s iMovie assembled pictures along with last week’s sound track, which was handed off to YouTube. Any simple video builder should work; Windows offers several options. It should be possible to create a slide show with Microsoft Power Point, but its learning curve requires more patience than I have Adderal. I opted for a dedicated video program.

It is possible to create a presentation with nothing but YouTube, but maintaining files locally felt more comfortable.

For graphics, I used both raster (bitmap) and vector images. Abandoning high-priced Adobe, I switched to Serif’s Affinity suite. It’s a clean, easy to use, inexpensive panel of picture programs. One of the best features is that Affinity files are interchangeable, meaning any Affinity program can work directly with any Affinity file. It makes life easy.²

Finally, we’ll touch upon AI.

To Err is Human

Abruptly, I made my first mistake. In the past, I’d loaded a few items to YouTube, mainly a collection of Rocky King TV shows. Visual recordings of the era weren’t locked into any one size. Historically, aspect ratios have appeared as 1:1, 3:2, 4:3, and 16:9, but others proliferated.

I erred immediately. I had decided upon YouTube’s original default 3:2 as a compromise between stretching, cropping, and ‘letterboxing’, awkward ways of dealing with aspect ratios outside the norm. After creating an initial half dozen or so 1800×1200 images, I opened iMovie… and could not find the menu item for aspect items. Annoyed, I opened YouTube’s editor… and once again could not find the menu for screen rations. They were gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Demised.

WTF? (Lithuanian for Huh?) I googled and googled and finally learned in recent versions, YouTube and iMovie have settled upon a common aspect ratio, 16:9. Damn. Never guessing both Apple and Google had finally standardized, I’d wasted valuable time and effort. Let my error guide you.

Fortunately, the waste wasn’t as bad as first thought. Many of my source images were 1800 pixels high. I settled upon 3200×1800 as my working size in the Affinity programs. A multiple of 100 and a power of two facilitates quick, mental calculations. YouTube’s HD maximum is 1920×1080, so I was over-engineering.³

Action

I had numbered each paragraph of the script and appended that same number to graphics I intended to use. iMovie permitted me to load all at once and optionally space them n seconds apart. The final result would not be evenly spaced, but 5 minutes ÷ 28 slides allowed me to spread them across the timeline, meaning each was somewhat proximate to its intended position.

1. The first slide recognized the significance of border radio, chiefly remembered in songs by the Doors, Z Z Top and others, and at least one movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou.
2. Next we hear a sly evangelist trawling for donations. I had a little fun with the picture, an interrupted letter suggesting a small story in itself. Earlier in 1932, the post office had raised first class rates from 2¢ to 3¢. On the theory people like my mother might still have 2¢ stamps, I pasted a 1932 2¢ and 1¢ on the envelope.
3. Likewise, the $2 bill series date was consistent with 1932, but a sharp detective might notice oddities. The handwriting is feminine but looks a bit young or naïve. The Reverend asks for a dollar donation, but Prunella intends to send two dollars (value of $45 today) plus a letter. He suggests a plain white envelope, but our charming correspondent selects pink lavender stationery… you can almost catch a scent of perfumed powder in it. What might happen when the Rev read the letter?
4. Unregulated patent medicines were loaded with alcohol and opiates. Little wonder laudanum became the preferred energy drink, the feel-good medication sold by the doctor’s breathy assistant. Dr Cruikshank looks awfully familiar.
5. When I was a child, ‘Tear It Down’ and other Clyde McCoy pieces appealed to me. His lip control and wah-wah mute could almost make a jazz trumpet talk. The hotel interior pictured is the real McCoy… the actual Congress Hotel ballroom.
6. A teletype introduces the news with a silent movie news placard bearing ‘A Mixed Metaphor Production’, suggesting the irony of radio visual aids hasn’t been lost.
7. The news opening referring to the incoming president and that Congress just approved 3.2% beer is factual. The next part about Ness, Moran, and Capone appears in support of the events in my story ‘Dime Detective’. Likewise the next paragraph refers to John Floyd’s story, ‘River Road’, and the awesome Windsor Manor without giving away the plot.
8. Celebrity news comes next, homicides involving a dancer and an actress (‘Getting Away Clean’ by Joseph Walker and ‘Bearcat Blues’ by Susanna Calkins). Here we make an unusual departure. Neither pictured performer is real. Each is AI computer generated using ChatGPT teamed with Dall-E. I experienced a LOT of difficulty rendering the images. The programs has great difficulty with rendering eyes and counting fingers and arms.
9. An ad for Penny Mickelbury’s Bubba’s Gym in ‘The Devil You Know’ provides a transition to sports. The Chicago Bears playoff is factual, but of course Steve Liskow’s story, ‘Peace of Mind Guaranteed’, is fanciful.
10. Hugh Lessig returns us to a fictional page of mystery history in ‘Cloths of Heaven’, a sad tale of the first woman Prohibition casualty. Amazingly, I found a photo of an actual rum-runners boat seized in Virginia.
11. I slipped in a slide of a simple (and operational) crystal radio schematic where my real voice can be heard.
12. The wrap-up reflects the beginning. The outro pictures the actual Blackstone Hotel featuring homeboy Benny Goodman who, in 1932, hasn’t yet made a national splash. He plays as credits roll, wrapping up with the message that Prohibition Peepers can be found in fine speakeasies and bookstores everywhere.

 

 

 

  

© 2023 Prohibition Peepers

  

Done! I saved the file as an .mp4, ready to upload to SleuthSayers’ channel.

This article grew longer than I like, so next week I’ll explain how to add closed captioning.

Tables

Happiness is a Beatles Anthology

 

Earlier this week, my old friend Josh Pachter announced the publication of his latest music-themed anthology, Happiness Is a Warm Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Beatles (Down & Out Books). I'm looking forward to it, for several reasons. One is that I and many of my writer friends have stories featured in there, and a second is that Josh always knows what he's doing with these antho-editing projects. My third reason is that all the stories in the book are based on songs by a group whose music has good memories for me.

I was a schoolkid just learning to play guitar when the Beatles first appeared, and I'll always remember how taken I was with their music, then and over the next few years. I still believe Lennon and McCartney (and Harrison, too) created some of the best songs ever written, and I'm not at all surprised by the fact that their music is still played and performed and appreciated after all this time. When our oldest grandson--he just turned sixteen--came over to our house a couple weeks ago, he and I spent four straight hours on our guitars, picking out some of the songs from the Beatles' later years. He loves their music. (He also dearly loves movies--wonder where he picked that up?)

Anyhow, I hoped as soon as I heard about this Beatles anthology that I'd be able to have a story in it, and somehow I was fortunate enough to sneak in past the palace guards. My story is called "We Can Work It Out," which is also the title of the song that inspired it. And it really did inspire it, because in this story the plot changes direction several times and requires its two protagonists to change with it--they're constantly having to backtrack and re-draw their plans, which weren't that great to begin with. Neither of these two jokers are the brightest bulbs in the fixture (how is it that I can relate so easily to guys like that??), so most of their problems are self-inflicted, but they're still problems that have to be "worked out," and somehow they manage. (With a little help from their friends, which I guess could've also been the title.)

Quick teaser: My heroes in this story, if you could call them that, are two down-on-their-luck roommates working dead-end jobs in east Texas, who decide the best solution to their financial troubles is kidnapping the feisty daughter of a wealthy rancher and holding her for a never-have-to-work-again ransom. And believe it or not, the first part of the scheme--the snatching of the kidnappee at a high-school football game (if you're wondering why a rich socialite would attend a high-school ballgame, you don't know Texas)--works as planned. But soon after that, things start to go the wrong way. NOTE: As a reader I love it when those sudden reversals happen, and as a writer I love it even more. The road to the end should be as bumpy and twisty (and long and winding?) as possible. 

Besides the convoluted plotting, I think the thing I enjoyed most in writing this story was the hiding of Easter eggs in the form of occasional snippets of lyrics from its title song. It's fun to do that, especially in dialog, if it fits and if you don't quote closely enough to get into copyright trouble, and it's not as hard as it might seem. This is the fifth or sixth time I've had stories in music-themed anthologies (most of them Josh's) and since I often find myself humming the title song while I'm writing, those short words and phrases from the lyrics are right there in my head the whole time, waiting to be plucked and used. In fact, here's a suggestion. If you buy and read this anthology and you see in the table of contents a story-title/song-title that by chance you aren't familiar with, Google the lyrics and read them before reading the story. That'll probably make it even more fun.

Questions that come to mind: Have you been involved in any music-themed/music-inspired anthologies? If so, which ones? Did you choose the song for your story, or were you "assigned" one? To what degree did your song inspire your story? Did you incorporate parts of lyrics into your narrative? Did you use the title of the song as your story's title (that's usually the case), or were you free to choose a different title? Did you write your story from scratch, using the song as a guide, or did you renovate and retitle an existing and unsold story to fit the theme? Just wondering.

Bottom line is, "We Can Work It Out" was a story I thoroughly enjoyed writing and Happiness Is a Warm Gun is a project I'm proud to be a part of, and I so appreciate having been allowed to climb aboard. I look forward to reading every story featured, and to adding this book to my already-great memories of the Beatles and their music.

Thanks once again to Josh Pachter for the opportunity.

The Last Stephen King Post. For Now.

Stephen King © Rolling Stone

It finally happened. Last night, I finished Holly, the latest Stephen King novel, which concludes my reading of his entire canon. There was, of course, a sense of "What do I do next?" (Answer: Read someone else. Congratulations, Mark Twain. I'm already halfway through your canon.) Something tells me I'd have enjoyed this journey more if I'd have started with Carrie in 1974. My mother did, and as my eighth birthday was a month away the day Carrie debuted, Mom was not about to let her oldest boy read it. My oldest brother had just turned one. My youngest brother had yet to appear.

Mom loved scary novels. Not an out-and-out horror fan, she did, however, enjoy The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. Then again, she and Dad every Friday night religiously watched the schlock horror show Ghoulardi/Houlihan and Big Chuck/Big Chuck and Li'l John, introducing us boys to its UHF counterpart Superhost. So the spooky, despite some early religious admonitions, was always there for them. 

But The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby were a different kind of horror from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the lurid type of paperbacks King referred to as "Just Plain Books." I bought a few of those when I turned eleven and never really got through the first chapter of Hand of Cain. Amazingly, I also bought a Western from such a desolate rack and somehow held onto it into middle age. I'm glad I did. It was written by Elmore Leonard. 

Carrie fit the mold of The Exorcist, but the writing also attracted Mom. (Dad was a TV-and-movie guy and went to his grave sick to death of Star Trek. Sorry, Dad. I might have been a little overzealous.) She eagerly snapped up Salem's Lot when it came out in paperback. By then I was ten, and while again, I was not allowed to read it, I was allowed to watch the miniseries three years later. And then I saw why mom loved King.

I didn't read The Stand at that age, and missed The Shining and Firestarter. I did see the Kubrick movie. Despite King's protestations how Jack Nicholson was wrong for the part of Jack Torrance and Kubrick missed the point, there was a vibe that would inhabit all the best King adaptations and even one of the worst. Lawnmower Man retained only the title, but the script they slapped it on could easily have come out of King's trunk.

So my first King novel was actually The Dead Zone, which bewildered me. I, being a sheltered, naive teen, didn't get a lot of the adult references. I did, however, take special glee in the fate of Gregory Stilson. I went back and read Salem's Lot. Tell no one this, but I like it better than Dracula (which I've reread a few times.) My first King to be gifted was It, which I absolutely loved as I was in that stage halfway between child and adult. I even had a mental cast for the movie. I was disappointed the miniseries did not cast Marilu Henner as the adult Bevvie.

The original Mrs. Winter bought me Gerald's Game shortly after our wedding, partly knowing I loved King, partly as a gag, and mostly as a... hint. By then, I was stuck on Mr. King from Maine. I missed a few novels and came back to them over the years. Hated Christine. Found some of the 90s books meh. Was impressed by the effort of the Dark Tower Series but not really connecting to it.

And absolutely fell in love with On Writing. Harold Bloom should have been made to read it aloud to students before his death. OK, I'm still bitter about Portrait of a Lady on his novels list. 

And so here we are, in 2023. I started in 2010 to read his entire canon, minus Faithful, a collaboration about the Red Sox season in which they won the World Series. Sorry, Steve, but I came of age in Cleveland when the then-Indians were owned by a dead guy. When your team becomes a farm team for the Yankees and the Blue Jays, then you can talk to me about true sports suffering. (And Cubs fans would like a word.) But I even read the screenplay Storm of the Century. 

But I just finished Holly last night. It's a straight-up crime novel, a serial killer novel actually. There are references to Brady Hartsfield (who became supernatural in the third Bill Hodges novel) and the Holly Gibney novels The Outsider and If It Bleeds. But Holly laments her quarry is a pair of plain ol' evil human beings (and wildly off their rockers, which you figure out within the first 50 pages.) One thing odd about this particular story is King's tendency to go off into the past and tell a related story. Sometimes this works. Often it doesn't. Instead, he uses flashbacks to show the reader what horrific monsters the nonegenarian Harris's are, not to mention racists, homophobes, and intellectual snobs. You just want to punch Emily in the face despite her nearly debilitating sciatica. And Rodney? Oh, my God! Some people should not be permitted to read Jonathan Swift, and he tops the list.

That said, finishing the book, which I enjoyed very much, capped a years-long personal project for me. King is by no means done. He has a collection due out next year, You Like It Darker, and that always accompanies a novel. So what next?

Does there have to be a next? I edit. I write. And there are thousands of books out there, some of which we talk about here. Some of them we write. But I got through this author's canon, and I'm glad I did.

Now, off to read Tom Sawyer Abroad.

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.