It’s In the Details

To be, or not to be; ay, there's the point.

To die, to sleep—is that all? Ay, all.

.

No, to sleep, to dream—ay, marry, there it goes,

For in that dream of death, when we awake,

And borne before an everlasting judge,

From whence no passenger ever returned,

The undiscovered country, at whose sight

The happy smile and the accursed damned,

But for this, the joyful hope of this,

Who'd bear the scorns and flattery of the world,

Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor,

The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged,

The taste of hunger, or a tyrant's reign,

And thousand more calamities besides,

To grunt and sweat under this weary life,

When that he may his full quietus make,

With a bare bodkin? Who would this endure,

But for a hope of something after death,

Which puzzles the brain and doth confound the sense,

Which makes us rather bear those evils we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Ay, that. O this conscience makes cowards of us all.

                                        – Hamlet, Act III, Scene i

Thanks for reading this far. If you have even the most passing acquaintance with the most famous speech in the English language (or, if we're being honest, in any language, including made-up ones like Klingon!), you've probably already noted that the above just feels...off.

And you are not wrong.

The above is quoted from the First Quarto, an early version of the text of Shakespeare's play about the famous "melancholy Dane." As such it understandably reads more like a rough draft of the more polished, harder-hitting version from the First Folio, a later, more complete collection of Shakespeare's plays–and thus most familiar to modern audiences.

Current and prevailing scholarship holds that Shakespeare himself never made the least effort to preserve the text of any of his plays. Both the First Quarto and the First Folio (to say nothing of several other editions of both) were compiled and published by people other than Shakespeare: the Quarto during Shakespeare's lifetime (1603) and the Folio seven years after his passing (1623)

As nearly as we can tell, the plays in both of these editions were compiled from the scripts of the actors who trod the footboards of places like The Globe and Blackfriars when Shakespeare's company first produced them.

And for all that, each version is that much different. For comparison's sake, here is the more familiar version of Hamlet's famous fourth soliloquy:

To be, or not to be; that is the question:         

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—

No more, and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to—'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause. There's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life,

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns                            

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

See? It just feels right. Especially if you're a Shakespeare fan. The cognitive dissonance a Shakespeare fan likely feels when first experiencing an alternate draft of the Bard's work can be likened to listening to a live performance of a song one is well familiar with, and hearing someone blow a passage, a drummer lose time, the singer off-key. You know what sounds right to you.

If you've ever felt that way (and we all have!), then you know what it's like to be jarred right out of a book by something that just...doesn't...fit. Maybe you're scoffing at how a character reacts in a given situation "Ha! The narrator catches his wife cheating with the garbage man and he introduces himself, shakes the guy's hand offers to swap his expensive foreign for the garbage man's Bondo-encrusted 1983 Honda Prelude?!?!"). It's possible this is a twist introduced by the author, meant to disconcert and intrigue the reader (Gotta keep those pages a-turnin', after all!), or perhaps it's comic? Being played for laughs?

If that's the case, well and good. But if it's just a result of the author screwing up, well, like I said: jarring. 

And as an author, the last thing we want is for the reader to be pulled out of our story. Right? Right!

And with all the things it's possible for an author to get wrong, it can get worse: the author might write historical fiction.

Yep.

Historical fiction.

Which is what I write.

Well, historical crime fiction.

Why write a subcategory of fiction that requires not just the usual array of cheap parlor tricks, um, I mean, professional writing, well-drawn characters, memorable dialogue, vivid settings and a satisfying ending, but also a metric ton of research, all of it guaranteed to suck the author down rabbit hole after time-wasting rabbit hole?

Because it's fun.

Duh.

Challenging? Yes.

Maddening? For sure.

But, you know. Fun.

Unless you get something wrong. And someone lets you know it. Nowadays. In the Age of the Internet.

That can be....well. Not so fun.

I got to thinking about this sort of thing and how to best avoid the larger pitfalls particular to the writing of historical fiction just last week while reading a novel by an author I like and respect, with a long track record in successful fiction sales. This new novel is, to my knowledge, this particular author's first foray into writing historical fiction.

And no, I'm not going to reveal this author's name. Mind your own business Er, uh, That would be unprofessional. 

First things first: this author did so many things right in this book. They did their homework, the amount of background/historical research they did permeates the book, and the writing is solid.

That said, I got jerked out of the narrative within the first fifty pages. Why? Something so simple.

This novel is set several decades in the past, and yet at one point, the first-person narrator talks about a visceral rush of excitement they experienced thusly: "My adrenalin spiked."

There is simply no way anyone in the era in which this novel is set would describe that sensory experience in that way. No. Way.

Now, granted, I'm a history nerd. Got my MA in it, I teach it, and I've a bunch of nonfiction books  on historical subjects (mostly political corruption). So it's entirely possible most readers wouldn't catch the above mistake.

But if we're being honest, it only takes one.

Am I going to reach out to the author in question and say anything about the above historical malapropism? Of course not. Again, this author got so much right, including several wonderfully accurate runs of dialogue.

Plus, I have a life.

But there are folks out there who are passionate about the minutiae. Especially in this age of hyper-specialization, where the details are ready available for confirmation at the end of your internet connection.

So how to avoid a flub like the above mistake?

Simple: immerse yourself in the conversational tone of the time about which you're writing. Read diaries, watching documentaries produced during the era in question (if they had film technology during that time). Check out the published correspondence of local people who correspond (see what I did there?) with the general make-up of your characters.

In any number of ways it's a lot like learning another language. When you can think in it, you've mastered it. I have two current works in progress: one a short story set in 1890 Seattle. The other, a novel set in 1844 Washington, D.C. The research that has gone into both of these projects is considerable, but I am confident in my ability to "talk" like any number of my characters. It takes hard work, a fair amount of research, and a ton of imagination, but hey, we're writers. Isn't all of this sort of our jam?

Try it. It works.

And that's it for me this go-round. Tune in next time to see how to successfully navigate the potential pitfalls of nailing the sorts of specialized historical analysis/fiction writing that concern members of the following thriving hobbyist subcultures sure to know if you've erred in describing those things near and dear to their hearts:

You haven't lived until you've had a member of this club show up at one of your readings.

Wouldn't we all?

You gotta admire the passion.

I know which one I'm voting for!

Okay, I'm out.

See you in two weeks!

Fall Guys

  

We went to see The Fall Guy, and it’s terrific.  Not what you’d call deep, by any means, but enormously entertaining.  Some thoughts about that.

John Wayne made The Big Trail, directed by Raoul Walsh, in 1930.  It did not, however, to Walsh’s surprise, make Wayne a star.  Watching it, you can see why.  The Big Trail is a good picture, shot in any early version of ‘scope, and by most any yardstick, pretty spectacular.  Wayne, on the other hand, is pretty callow.  He hasn’t really grown into his own shoes.  This doesn’t happen until 1939, and the release of Stagecoach.  In between, over about ten years, Wayne cranked out some sixty movies for Republic Pictures, most of them hour-long B-westerns, made for the bottom half of a double bill at a kids’ matinee. 

They were shot very fast and loose – in a typical year, 1934, Wayne appeared in nine of them, and Randy Rides Alone is probably the only one still worth watching – and they followed a formula: the trick was in the stunts.  The scripts were lame, the characters were cardboard, but Wayne and Yakima Canutt staged their fight scenes together, and Yakima doubled for Wayne in the more dangerous gags.  (You can see Wayne riding a shovel down a plume of water in a spillway, in Randy, but it’s Yakima who jumps off a running horse, onto a bridge railing, and into a river.  There’s also a great jump, off a moving train into a river, in The Trail Beyond.)  There were, on average, three of these stunts per picture, and at least one knock-down, drag-out brawl – one of the best is Wayne and Ward Bond (doing an uncharacteristic turn as a crooked lawyer, defrauding a widder woman), in Tall in the Saddle.  You weren’t going to these pictures for uplift, you went to hold your breath.

Yakima Canutt famously doubled Wayne in Stagecoach, too.  He jumps from the box down between the team of runaway horses pulling the stage, and dances along the doubletrees to mount the lead horse and gather up the reins.  Wayne later remarked, Canutt did the stunt, I got the close-up.  Canutt’s the Apache that gets shot off the horses, too, does the fall under their hooves, and then lies flat between the stagecoach wheels, going by on either side.  I think it’s the first time that was ever done.  And he’s most famously second unit on Ben-Hur, stunt coordinator for the chariot race.  He won them those eleven Oscars.

All this in aid of why The Fall Guy is so good.  Stunt guys have gotten screen time before; Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham collaborated on half a dozen pictures - Needham reportedly punctured a lung and broke his back along the way, invented the cannon roll and the airbag, and essentially established the category of stunt designer.  David Leitch, who directed The Fall Guy (his previous credits include Bullet Train and Atomic Blonde) started his career in stunts: Fight Club, Buffy, Ghosts of Mars, Troy, Ocean’s Eleven, he’s doubled Brad Pitt a lot.  The Fall Guy is very much an homage, then.

It’s not so much an homage to the Lee Majors television series, though, which ran from 1981 to 1986, as it is inspired by it.  And one of the cooler conceits of the movie is a sort of meta narrative.  Not just the inside baseball, and Easter eggs, which abound, and which are used to terrific comic effect, but a sense that you’re drawing on the physicality of movies themselves, the real in service of the pretend: it hurts to fall off a building.  (Or the alternative, to see Buster Keaton miss being hit by a collapsing building; the earth moves, he remains still.)  I briefly had some fanboy letters back and forth with Peter Breck before he died, and he said Lee Majors was a real gent.  This was when I asked Peter about his guest shots on Fall Guy, the series.  He pointed out that he wasn’t the only one, that there was Doug McClure, and Jock Mahoney, and Clu Gulager, and a host of others.  Not that there weren’t a lot of terrific character actors guesting on the show, but these guys in particular had all been regulars on older TV series, the era of The Big Valley and before.

This is what I’m driving at with The Fall Guy, the movie.  It has a respectful sense of itself.  Yes, it’s a series of set pieces.  Yes, the plot’s nothing to write home about.  Yes, the leads are hugely charming, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt bring their A-game, without being self-consciously cute.  (Although they are indeed cute.)  And the way that the stunt gags are deployed are, yes, breathtaking - but something else.  You’re both in on the game, yet ready to be astonished, at the audacity of it all, the suspension of disbelief.  It’s magic.  It’s sleight of hand, or eye.  We know it’s a trick, and that simply adds to our delight.  We go to the show to be fooled. 

Three Strikes--You're Dead!

I have a bad cold, so my good friend and fellow editor Donna Andrews has agreed to step in and write today's post. Thank you, and take it away, Donna!

--Barb Goffman

Three Strikes--You’re Dead!

 

by Donna Andrews

Thank you, SleuthSayers, for giving me a chance to apologize to SJ Rozan, basketball fan extraordinaire. Marcia Talley, Barb Goffman, and I didn’t exactly promise her a hoops story when we recruited her to do the introduction to our sports-themed anthology. But you’d think at least one of our contributors would have been captured by the thrill of a fast-paced court battle, the lure of the layup, the drama of dribbling and dunking. But no.

And now it can be revealed for the first time--I tried, SJ, I really did. I tried so hard to convince at least one of the contributors to revise their story to feature basketball instead of whatever sport they’d chosen instead.

I started with Robin Templeton, who’s always eager to listen to good editorial input. But she reminded me that “Eight Seconds to Live” was about bull-riding, and a dangerous bull being used as a weapon. She very rationally pointed out that basketballs rarely go on murderous rampages, and did we want to lose all her carefully researched rodeo local color? She had a point.

I made the same pitch to Kathryn Prater Bomey, whose “Running Interference” features high school football. Why not high school basketball instead? She reminded me that a marching band also plays a

part in the plot, and when was the last time you saw one of those invading the court between quarters?

Sherry Harris pointed out that while it was perfectly plausible for her hard-working PI to get roped into a coeducational game of ultimate Frisbee while working undercover, basketball teams rarely need to draft spectators from the stands when one of their teammates goes AWOL, so adding hoops to “The Ultimate Bounty Hunter” was a no-go.

I could have made a good pitch to the authors of the three baseball stories in the collection--“hey, we’ve got other baseball stories . . . don’t you want to stand out as the only basketball tale?” But Alan Orloff’s “Murder at Home” features such a unique method of dealing death on the diamond. F. J. Talley’s “Cui Bono” captures so nicely the pressure of a minor leaguer wanting to move up to the majors. And Rosalie Spielman’s “Of Mice and Murdered Men” reminded me of those bygone days when I spent many long summer afternoons watching my nephews’ Little League games. I left them alone. We did call the book Three Strikes--You’re Dead! We needed a good dose of baseball.

I didn’t even ask Sharon Taft to consider changing “Race to the Bottom,” her story about zorbing, which is a sport invented (some say) in the 1980s by England’s Dangerous Sports Club. Alas, when you zorb, you’re traveling inside a giant transparent plastic ball, not bouncing one around a court.

And I knew better than to suggest to Barb Goffman that she have the out-of-shape protagonist of “A Matter of Trust” take up basketball instead of biking. For one thing, basketball isn’t something you can ease into gently to regain fitness. And for another, she’d probably have told me that she knows a little about biking and absolutely nothing about basketball.

Nor did I suggest Maddi Davidson bring “Off the Beaten Trail” indoors, when the whole point of the story was to pit a solitary biathlon competitor in training against danger in a challenging wintry setting.

The same with Smita Harish Jain’s “Run for Your Life,” which sets an ingenious murder plot against the backdrop of the Boston Marathon.

By this time I’d gained a new appreciation for what our contributors had accomplished. Joseph S. Walker’s “And Now, an Inspiring Story of Tragedy Overcome” takes our collective memory of the attack on ice skater Nancy Kerrigan and asks a compelling “what it?” William Ade’s “Punch-Drunk” brings to life the seedy 60s milieu of a world-weary detective and a has-been boxer. Lynne Ewing’s “The Last Lap Goodbye” takes such perfect advantage of the plight of a solitary swimmer practicing late at night at a deserted pool. And Adam Meyer’s “Double Fault,” with its slow, insidious build as two tennis opponents exchange verbal volleys along with balls . . . all our contributors did a wonderful job of weaving murder into their chosen sports.

I gave up. When I was discussing the draft manuscript of Murder with Peacocks with Ruth Cavin, my first editor, she asked me why I’d done something or other that she didn’t like. And after I’d explained that I’d done it to comply with what I thought was one of the unwritten rules of writing a mystery, she said something that lived on in my memory: “Let it be the story it is.”

So I stopped trying to guilt-trip any of our wonderful contributors into adding basketball to their stories. Let them be the stories they are. They’re fine as is. In fact, they’re pretty darned great.

Sorry about that, SJ!

(And thanks again to Lucy Burdette, Dan Hale, and Naomi Hirahara for serving as judges for Three Strikes--You’re Dead!)

You can buy the paperback of this recently released book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and directly from the publisher. Ebook version should be available soon.