Mr. Grisham Has Thoughts About Your "Book"

One of the classic tenets of the screenwriting trade is that writers make poor film protagonists. Yes, the writer character has been done well in movies such as Barton Fink, The Ghost Writer, Adaptation, and Stranger Than Fiction. But in general, it’s painful to watch a scene in a movie of someone writing a book. This applies as well to reading a novel in which a character is struggling to write…anything. This too has been done—The Shining, Wonder Boys—but it’s probably not the best premise for anyone contemplating their next book. I mean, where’s the action?

But what about a real-life story about a neophyte author who dreams of writing a thriller? The man in question is a former ad exec named Tony Vanderwarker. When we first meet him in his nonfiction memoir, he’s written a slew of unpublished books, mostly comic novels. His latest has recently landed with a splat on the desks of agents and editors in the Big Apple.

He longs to try yet again. Maybe a thriller, thinks he. His got an idea about a missing nuke he’s been itching to try. One night over dinner, he shares his pain with a fellow scribe. Mr. Vanderwarker tells us that while he himself grew up in an affluent Connecticut suburb, his friend is a son of a Mississippi cotton farmer. As the meal wraps, his buddy makes him an offer. What if I coach you through the novel-writing process? You do all the work, of course. It’s your book. But I’ll be on the sidelines, reading your outlines and manuscripts, giving you notes and pep talks along the way. What do you say?

It’s an offer Mr. Vanderwarker simply cannot refuse. The two men are dining in the tony historic city of Charlottesville, Virginia. And his neighbor and friend is none other than John Freaking Grisham.

And so the scene is set for a hilarious, rollicking Bildungsroman as these two nutty guys crisscross the nation in a nifty convertible in search—

Uh, no. Actually, it’s exactly what I told you it would be: a book called about a guy trying to write a book. It’s called Writing With the Master (Skyhorse, 2014).

Speaking as a writer who struggles to juggle my own writing with the demands of ghostwriting clients, admin tasks, my wife’s work, the house and garden, and all the other things life throws one’s way, including friends who want advice on their writing, I was frankly astonished that someone of Grisham’s caliber would surrender so much of his time to help a friend. In promo interviews, Mr. Vanderwarker said Grisham was inspired by his recent reading of an account of Chef Daniel Boulud’s mentoring of a younger chef.

In the course of 196 pages, the two writers embark on a process that is both fascinating and brutal to watch. Fascinating because it’s probably the best look anyone is ever going to get of Grisham’s creative process. (That’s the reason I bought the book. Grisham granted permission to excerpt his critiques.) Brutal because, let’s face it, unless you are a very special individual, the first few books you write will be unpublishable. They’re critical to your development, but they are usually not something you can sell. And thrillers are among the toughest genres to nail.

Mr. Vanderwarker can write. He proves it page after page, with a breezy, conversational, self-deprecating description of their process that will leave writers nodding, “Yep—been there, done that.” I must have found the book suspenseful as well, because I kept reading to find out what happens.

At that first dinner, Grisham tells Mr. V the plain truth: beginnings and endings are easy. It’s the middle that kills you. Grisham’s mantra is SIMPLICITY. The premise has to grab readers fast, hook them, and keep them reading for 360 pages without losing their attention to extraneous subplots. He instructs his pupil to first write a three-sentence synopsis, then a three-act outline.

Personally, I hate creating outlines for books. Never been able to make in-depth ones work. But many people swear by them. (If you have access to Master Class, you can actually download a PDF of one of James Patterson’s outlines.) Grisham shreds Mr. V’s first attempt, telling him to SLOW DOWN. There’s just too much going on in his proposed book. “Most plots fail because they’re too complicated,” Grisham explains. “A strong central plot that stays on track can afford the luxury of spinning off subplots, but not too many.”

Mr. Vanderwarker spends three months writing outlines before Grisham gives him the go-ahead to write—wait for it—a chapter-by-chapter outline. Mr. Vanderwarker splutters but acquiesces. When finally permitted to write the book, his first draft elicits a “Gee—that’s nice, honey,” response from his wife, and is later eviscerated by Grisham, who can only stand to read the first half.

The strength of Writing With the Master is reading the astonishingly thoughtful memos Grisham shoots back to each of Mr. V’s outlines and drafts. Some of them are so punchy and no-BS that they brought a smile to my face. You see, I read every one of my wife’s books, offering copious comments along the way. Her favorite comment of mine is the minuscule drawing I once sketched in a margin. It depicted a tiny Yoda, garbed in Jedi robes and brandishing a lightsaber. Rising from his mouth was a dialogue balloon that read: “A sentence this is not.”

Grisham’s pencil edits pull no punches. He underlines redundancies, questions plot points, tiny details, and calls his pupil out on his occasional authorial pontifications:

• Isn’t Sigma Nu a fraternity?
• not believable
• Isn’t it a Sunday?
• no one would ever trust the goons
• abrupt ending
• way too much plot
• sermon
• bad sermon

It’s tough going for our hero, who speaks often of steeling himself with a manly beverage to re-read Grisham’s notes, even weeks after he has received them.

As I read, I thought of the times I have read the work of newer writers. I wanted to value and honor what had been attempted, but often I found myself thinking, “Wow. The premise is cool. This could be really good…if they were a better writer.”

But I found that it’s really hard to put into words how something can be made better. This should be more vivid. Stronger. Tighten this. You can offer such advice, but unless you’re sitting at the keyboard, literally editing someone’s MS in front of them, they will interpret those words differently, and execute to their current level of skill.

I think that’s what Grisham is up against in this book. He knows when something isn’t working, but not always how to coach a better performance from his mentee. Like many experts, he’s running on instinct. He himself would never waste 100 words on a scene that goes nowhere because his gut just knows that it is a non-starter. But despite his caveats, the neophyte plods on, devoting thousands of words to a subplot that smacks into a wall, and must later be cut.

Years go by. Years. Mr. Vanderwarker’s third draft is far better. Grisham, perhaps up to eyeballs in missing nukes after all this time, announces that he can’t give much more help. The book is about as good as it’s ever going to be. He suggests sending it out to some agents and editors to elicit their verdict. Big shock—the book’s DOA as soon as it makes the rounds.

Mr. Vanderwarker has told interviewers that only after he wrote the nonfiction account of their mentorship did most of Grisham’s notes sink in. With fresh eyes, Mr. V revised his thriller. I don’t want to give too much away, but suffice to say the entire experience results in two published books.

And Mr. Vanderwarker surprises us all in the end with a satisfying career shift that was cleverly foreshadowed all along. Not thriller-worthy perhaps, but masterful nonetheless.

---

See you in three weeks!
— Joe
josephdagnese.com

When Writing Historical Fiction: It's Better to Travel

(A repost from a while back. Still useful. 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. Tune in next time when I break out the work of a Flemish diplomat and show how his long letters home from his posting in the court of the Turkish sultan helped inform the writing of a couple of my published works.

See you in two weeks!

Lawrence at 60 Years and Counting

Lawrence of Arabia changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. I’d seen pictures before that affected me deeply, and quite a few I’d gone back to see more than once. I knew vaguely about the auteur theory. I realized movies were made, they didn’t somehow spring from the brow of Zeus. But on the most basic level, I didn’t actually understand that a movie was intentional, that it was calculated and specific.

Lawrence changed that, and I can tell you exactly how: the moment when Peter O’Toole holds up the burning match, and blows it out, and they cut to the sunrise on the desert, the music swelling.

I’ve mentioned this before, and it’s subliminal, not literal, the light suddenly dawning, but I remember how jaw-dropping it was – the shot itself, for openers, and at the same time, that I’d been let in on this world-changing secret. I was struck with awe.

Lawrence is back, and not for the first time. It was released originally at three hours and forty-two minutes, a roadshow feature, in December, 1962. Then cut by twenty minutes for general release. Then re-cut in 1970, to 187 minutes. And then restored, in 1988, to 228 minutes – this is the Director’s Cut available on DVD. I just got to see it again, theatrically, in a 4K restoration. Granted, it’s digital, not film, but it’s spectacular.

A word about the cinematography. (Freddie Young won the Oscar for it, Anne Coates won for the editing.) The movie was shot in Super Panavision 70, which is a 65mm negative printed to 35mm, projected in anamorphic – meaning the compressed image on film is widened on the screen. One of the cool things about the newest release is the amount of visual detail. You can argue that there will always be more detail captured on film negative, but the image will degrade, as prints are reproduced from the master negative.

This new digital transfer is probably the best available capture of the original, even if the purist in me kicks against it. You can see the blowing sand, the texture of a man’s skin, in close-up, or the depth of distance. Lean and Freddie Young used a 500mm Panavision zoom lens to shoot Omar Sharif’s entrance, through the dust and the heat coming off the hardpan, the figure seeming to resolve out of a mirage, or a trick of the mind’s eye. Is there really a better entrance in all of the movies?

I went back to see Lawrence twice, the initial 222-minute roadshow release, and then I saw it another three times, in its 202-minute general theatrical release. I couldn’t get enough. My pal John Davis and I could retail entire scenes of dialogue to each other – “The best of them won’t come for money, they’ll come for me” – and ape Peter O’Toole’s mannerisms. I didn’t, at that point, even know David Lean was a big deal, that he and Olivier and the Kordas had brought British cinema back from the dead, after the war, or at least brought American audiences into theaters, which is what mattered to the box office. Later on, when I was living at the Y on Huntington Avenue, I discovered a revival house up the street, and saw Great Expectations for the first time. It was Lean’s two Dickens adaptions that put him on the postwar map, Great Expectations in 1946, and Oliver Twist in 1948, but this wasn’t on my radar. I was just knocked out by the picture itself, and it was icing on the cake to realize it was guy who’d made Lawrence.

Oh, and that Maurice Jarre score!

I think it was his big break. It was sweeping, and eerie, and thunderous, and sometimes all at the same time. Lots of tympani. I tried to recreate it the following summer, at a pump organ. Four of us, teenage boys. Driving a van filled with mattresses up to a summer cabin in Canada, and a shaving kit full of bathtub benzedrine, courtesy of a chemistry-adjacent friend of a friend. The four of us stoned out of our minds and flying, me pumping the foot pedals on that organ with physical fury, and picking out Maurice’s main theme on the keyboard, DOO-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-DOO-doo. It must have driven the other guys crazy, except that they were doing much the same, banging on a typewriter instead of an instrument. I think this is a story for another time. Too much left in already, when I should leave most of it out.

In any case, I think I’ve hit the highlights. Lawrence is the most important movie of my life, both as a movie that made me think organically about the movies, and as a totem, in terms of personal history. I’m enormously grateful it pointed the way.

August 13th, A Thrilling Day

My phone, a reliably clever device, routinely tells me about newsworthy events that I should probably know happened that day.

            August 13^th has been monumental in shaping world affairs. If you're a fan of political thrillers, it should be a red circle day.

            Barbed Wire Sunday occurred on this date in 1961. Beginning at midnight, soldiers from the East German military arrived at critical points along the line separating East and West Berlin. They quickly unloaded barbed wire and concrete and began erecting the barrier that became the Berlin Wall. The government deemed the move necessary to stem the brain drain and hemorrhage of the workforce from communist East Berlin to the West. The East German secret police, the Stasi, blocked intersections between the sectors of the divided city. 

            Where would the Cold War political thriller be without referencing Checkpoint Charlie, the best-known crossing point between the city's two halves? Here, Soviet and American tanks squared off 100 yards apart in a showdown that brought the two sides perilously close to war. Prisoner exchanges occurred, and daring escapes were attempted at the thin space separating the two superpowers.

GZen, Creative Commons

Roger Moore, as James Bond, crossed through Checkpoint Charlie in Octopussy. Tom Hanks surveyed the wall in Bridge of Spies. Illya Kuryakin was frustrated in his attempts to rundown Napoleon Solo as he extracted Gaby to the West in The Man from UNCLE (the movie). Countless books have used the wall as a physical challenge or metaphor. And it all started on this date.

            The Manhattan Project got underway on this date in 1942. The research and development program that culminated in the atomic bomb was initially labeled the Development of Substitute Materials. The development project was run by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Engineering districts routinely took the name of the city where they were located. The Development of Substitute Materials had temporary offices on Broadway. Thus, they became the Manhattan District. The term “Manhattan” gradually substituted for the name of the atomic project. Always concerned about spies, Manhattan was believed to attract less attention and reveal less about the nature of the bomb's development.

            The Manhattan District was officially created on August 13^th under orders signed by Major General Eugene Reybold.

            The movie Oppenheimer most recently explored the Manhattan Project. Since the project's creation, the name has become synonymous with any apocalyptic device. Biological weapons and crippling computer viruses have all been labeled the Manhattan Project. The program established a model for government-sponsored, project-specific, big science. The world may be in more jeopardy, but the thriller writer has had an efficient tool for warning the reader about a developing doomsday mechanism since August 13^th, 1942.

            German-born Klaus Fuchs was a theoretical physicist. As part of the Manhattan Project team, he worked on developing the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. During his work, Fuchs spied on the project for the Soviet Union. After the war, he moved to the United Kingdom and continued his weapons research. In January 1950, he confessed to passing atomic information to the Soviets. Upon his release from a British prison in 1959, Fuchs migrated to East Germany. There, he became the deputy director of the Central Institute for Nuclear Physics. His work undoubtedly took him to numerous meetings in East Berlin, within easy walking distance of the wall.

            And thus, we're brought full circle.

            Fidel Castro and Alfred Hitchcock were both born on this date. Both impacted thrillers in differing ways. Finally, a shout out to William Caxton, who was also born on this date in 1422. He set up the first printing press in England. His first publication is believed to be an edition of The Canterbury Tales. 

Ilgar Jafarov, CC

            Where would writers be without publishers?

            Until next time.

            Postscript:

            In my last blog, I discussed the upcoming Olympics and made fun of rhythmic gymnastics. I've watched some of the individual and team competitions. While I'm still unclear on the ribbon, the routines performed with the ball and, later, the hoop grabbed my attention. I'd like to offer a sincere apology to all rhythmic gymnastics fans and athletes.

No obits necessary for the life of the mind.

These are times when optimism is about as easy to sustain as the suspension of disbelief during a superhero movie.  Especially in the face of all the media fury, of which I consume way too much.  So I won’t add to it here.  Rather, I’d like to address one small slice of the public debate, at least among those who are literate enough to ask:  Are we moving into a post-literate society?

Maybe, though it might depend on how you define literate. 

Just as there’s a natural distribution of bad hairdos, nice teeth and athletic grace across the population, there’s a percentage of people who like to read, absorb information and artistic expression, and formulate their own opinions from the swelter of competing views.  Let’s assume that the qualities described above are encouraged, for some, by achieving at least some education.  This means the percentage of the thoughtful and inquisitive is larger than ever:  In 1940, only about five percent of the country had graduated from college.  Now it’s over a third.

  You’ll hear it said, “People don’t read anymore.”  That’s not exactly true.  While overall book sales and reported reading habits have slid a bit, they’re certainly not gone.  After a long bloodletting of independent bookstores, their numbers have actually increased, if you discount some fatalities of the pandemic.  Barnes & Noble is still in operation, and doing pretty well, even if their big box competitors have mostly disappeared. 

          Social media and other forms of media engagement have eroded book reading, for sure, especially among the young.  But that’s an understandable outgrowth of the surging digital environment.  But as with all fresh trends, this too will stabilize and a new balance of wider choice will emerge.

Movies didn’t kill books.  Television didn’t kill movies (even streaming).  CDs didn’t kill records.  For that matter, the novel didn’t kill poetry, jazz has survived rock ‘n’ roll, synthesizers didn’t wipe out drums and guitars and song writers are still writing beautiful melodies and captivating lyrics.

There are temporary swells of artistic fashion, but the end result is additive, not wholesale extinction.   

Journalism is another institution that is supposedly dying on the vine, and print media is particularly under huge duress.  Though for every daily newspaper that goes under there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fresh news outlets appearing online.  You may rightly assert that many, or most, are poorly managed and edited, and filled with uncurated dreck.  That still leaves so much worthy and enriching information, and commentary, that you’ll never be able to absorb it all.

You can make a case that the once and possibly future cretin in the White House has caused an upsurge in media consumption, however polarized individual outlets have become.  Trust in the media favored by Democrats has actually improved in recent times.  I submit this is because people are paying more attention, that they’re reading more. I also believe that responsible journalism, in an era of propaganda and phony news, is trying harder to keep their facts straight and their commentary thoughtfully nuanced. 

A good friend of mine has a theory of the human mind:  “People have a tendency to extrapolate current circumstances indefinitely into the future.”  Even the scantest understanding of the past ought to unburden you of this fallacy.  We are, no doubt, going through some monumental changes, occurring at an unprecedented pace.  This is much of the problem, since rapid change makes it feel like everything is going to hell in a hand basket.  The originators of Chaos Theory, a scientific paradigm that explains the behavior of complex systems, say that nature moves from order to disorder, and back again, in irregular, but relentless, cycles.  They call the state between these cycles “phase transition”, when things become the most chaotic. 

            This is where we’re living today.  It’s not a post-literate society, it’s a society making a painful adjustment to the Information Age, finding its way through the torrent of books, articles and essays, along with posts, podcasts, online rants and blogs, just like this.

If you believe civilization is worth preserving, you have to believe that wisdom and critical thinking are essential ingredients in that preservation.  Thought in isolation from information is valuable, but closed-ended.  You can only go so far on your own.  I maintain that the richest source of revelation and enrichment are books.  Whatever form they take, physical or electronic, books will save us from annihilation, from the foolishness – economic, military, environmental, cultural – that is also an irredeemable aspect of the human experience. 

Don’t despair.  Publishers are publishing, readers are reading. Thus, thinkers keep thinking. 

 

Sleeping Giants

Mysteries rely, perhaps more than we like to admit, on evil. Murder and violence are essential to the genre and often simply a given. Not so in the novels of Rene Denfeld. Yes, there is violence, including violence against children, and murder pops up as often as it does in most mysteries. What makes her four novels different is an obsession with the the roots of evil.

In Denfeld's work, evil stems from evil with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, and it has its roots in the same institution: the family. The sacrifice of children in the House of Atreus caused a cascade of blood violence. In Sleeping Giants, as in Denfeld's terrific The Enchanted and the Child Finder stories, cruelty to children produces monsters who, in turn, terrify and traumatize the next generation.

All this may sound rather grim and formulaic, but Denfeld is an excellent writer with a real knack for creating rounded characters, especially young ones. She also produces sensitive portraits of characters who are more or less outside the norm. These range from the poetic, but truly psychopathic, hero of The Enchanted to Amanda, the dedicated zoo keeper of Sleeping Giants, whose mind, as she admits, does not work quite like other people's.

Amanda has trouble with clocks and making change and simple math, but she understands her charge, Molly, an unhappy polar bear. She proves to be brave and resilient and, though no great student, a very competent researcher.

Unsurprisingly, her twin areas of interest both involve families. She wants to know just how Molly came to be orphaned in the far north of Alaska, and she wants to know what happened to her older brother Dennis, who, unlike her, was not adopted as an infant, but confined in Brightwood, a supposedly progressive facility for disturbed children and youth.

Located on the wild northern coast of Oregon, Brightwood is an abandoned relic by the time Amanda sets foot in it. But the reader knows from the opening pages that Dennis was indeed incarcerated there and that, subjected to holding time, a popular crank therapy, he committed suicide by running into the treacherous and dangerous surf. All that's left is a gravestone and the general reluctance of locals in the small town to discuss Brightwood, although they have some good things to say about Martha King, the former superintendent.

Amanda might well have become discouraged but for another well drawn character, Larry, an ex-cop who is mourning his late wife and falling into depression in his remote cabin. A chance meeting with Amanda arouses his protective instincts, and he adds his expertise and some of his former professional contacts to her search.

The unraveling of the mystery of Dennis's life is nicely done, but the heart of the book lies elsewhere, in the glimpses of the difficult and withdrawn child's life, his friendship with Ralph, the custodian, and his brief moments of joy. Denfeld has some surprises with her adult characters, too, and despite the grim events and the narrowness of many of the characters' lives, the novel eventually comes down on the side of cautious hope.

Rene Denfeld

Evil generates evil, but goodness has its powers, too, if much less spectacular ones. Evil flashes out in violence, all is quick and final. Goodness is slow, patient, in for the long haul. Not too many books in any genre illustrate this contrast as well as Sleeping Giants, which manages to produce an entertaining mystery as well.

---

Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books.

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is also available from Apple Books.

A Title So Good I Couldn't Use It

Years ago, I came across a great story idea. A half-idea. Okay, a title for a half-idea. For our purposes, let's say the awesome title was "I Gotta Use This." The real inspiration was way better than that, trust me. A title as spectacular as "I Gotta Use This" must surely propel an equally glorious story. I played with plots and characters worthy enough, but nothing cleared that mark. Finally, in 2022, a glimmer came--and also the notion that I'm not getting any younger. I did it. I put words to page under "I Gotta Use This." What follows isn't a tale about its glorious quest fulfilled. This is about how I had to let it go.

Rewind to me reading an article on game-playing and gamesmanship. Bam! There it was, a concept wrapped in a killer turn of phrase. That's how the spark happens, some phrase or concept grabs my attention. If the idea gels enough, I'll give it a try. 

I don't usually get attached to titles. "Needs A Title" has topped several early-draft manuscripts that went on to publication. My story in the MWA anthology Ice Cold started as "The Hungarian Thing." I have early manuscripts titled "Drinkin' Story" and "New Project." The final title emerges as the manuscript rounds into collective shape. More than half of my published stories had a major title change along the way. But that also leaves a chunk where the working title survived, and if words could glow on a page, "I Gotta Use This" glowed.

Cut forward to me and the title. A title about gameplaying, so the story innards needed to be about games somehow. Progress! Me and a title and a kind-of form already. And while I'd always envisioned "I Gotta Use This" headlining a Serious Achievement, my premise glimmer was hardly Serious. I was setting a goofball in motion. For the comic innards, I considered and dismissed all kinds of games that could hold a goofball slant. Cards? Too easy. Sports? Too structured. Video games? Another of my long-held ideas has dibs on gamers. Eventually, I decided on a bet. 

Other decisions sprung from there, landing on two small-time crooks making a small-time bet over who is the better small-time crook. The protagonist's specialty is shoplifting frozen foods. The antagonist buys shoes online with stolen credit card numbers. All of that is important to their story, but the important part to this story, the one about "I Gotta Use This" crashing and burning, is that I was making all those plot and character decisions. Like any idea worth the chase, their story was finding a life of its own. The author's job is to recognize it and roll with it.

Which I thought I'd done. My edit rounds sharpened things to a proper balance of goofball. I focused on depth and relatability, on local backdrop and fuller context. I didn't switch the title. Never considered it. It was, after all, perfect.

"I don't get the title," my critique group said. "It's not working for me," they said, and this was even after I explained its perfection. 

We'll skip past the stages of denial and the switching of gears. I had to confront that I'd written a solid piece with real acceptance potential. It just had the wrong title. 

Stories are singularities, and a great title springs from the oneness, frames it. Mine didn't. Titles reveal the story's core. My didn't. "I Gotta Use This" was merely catchy, something I'd read once.

So I changed it. Was I bitter about a perfect title going splat? No. Much. I was more palm-to-forehead like in those old V-8 commercials. I should've spotted the problem. Me, the guy who starts pieces with placeholders like "Vernon Story #4." But you do have to roll with it in this work, and the group did me a huge favor. If they didn't get understand the title, no editor would, either. So long, acceptance potential. 

The piece ended up titled "Bet You're Wrong." Not great, but it speaks to what the story is about, a bet, and its deeper level, that both goofballs are sure to lose. The only winner is whoever walks away. Off "Bet You're Wrong" went on blind submission. It's in the new Sisters in Crime East Tennessee anthology, Smoking Guns. 

As for "I Gotta Use This," it helped get another story born, so there's that. There's also the reason I haven't shared the actual title idea: Because that thing is still awesome, and as it happens, it's still available.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2024-08-025, Blast

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

Bridge of Birds

One of my favorite historical fantasy / thriller / mystery novels of all time is Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was. I read it when it first came out in 1984, and almost immediately went right down to my local bookstore and ordered it (no Amazon then, folks!) in hardcover.

Why my love of this book? For one thing, the pace never slackens, the cultural and historical references are impeccable, there are enough twists and turns in the plot to make almost any modern thriller look really unsurprising, and there are characters that you will never forget. It's chock full of Chinese mythology, fairy tales, and history. And best of all, it is so witty and hilarious that, no matter what happens, you can't help but laugh at least once a page, and often more. But then I have, like one of the two heroes, Li Kao, "a slight flaw in my character."

The narrator, Number Ten Ox, the tenth son of a peasant family, is without guile, but willingly does what Master Li tells him to, from (after an exhausting, grueling, and hard first quest) relaxing in the bedroom of the concubine of the town miser (Miser Shen), to killing... well, quite a few villains.

Ten Ox is the one who tracks down Master Li when all the children of the village of Ku-Fu between the ages 8-13 fall into a coma plague, thanks to the two pawnbrokers of the village (Pawnbroker Fang and Ma the Grub) who have decided to get and keep ALL the money in the village by poisoning the mulberry leaves so all the silk worms die. The pawnbrokers fake their own deaths, and we meet them again and again and again... (as in real life, so in fiction.) One of my favorites is when the pawnbrokers go forth with "his mother's ashes", and on the road, they spot the cow.

"Mother!" he screeched. "My beloved mother has been reborn as a cow!".. The cow's eyes were streaming with tears of joy as she lovingly licked the bald fellow's skull. "Mother! What joy to see you again!" he sobbed, kissing her hairy legs. What choice did the farmer have? ... He was only a gentleman farmer, and he was quite surprised when he was informed that cows always weep when they lick salt...

"Lies, all lies!" screamed Pawnbroker Fang.

"We demand compensation for slander!" howled Ma the Grub.

Or Doctor Death:

We walked through the open door into a room that was littered with carcasses, and where a little old man with a bloodstained beard was attempting to install a pig's heart into a man's cadaver while cauldrons burped and kettles bubbled and seething vials emitted green and yellow vapors.

Doctor Death sprinkled the heart with purple powder and made mystical signs with his hands. "Beat!" he commanded. Nothing happened so he tried yellow powder. "Beat, beat, beat!" He tried blue powder. "Ten thousand curses why won't you beat?" he yelled and then he turned around. "Who you?" asked Doctor Death.

"My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao and there is a slight flaw in my character, and this is my esteemed client, Number Ten Ox."

"Well, my surname is Lo and my personal name is Chan, and I am rapidly losing patience with a corpse that absolutely refuses to be resurrected!"

Doctor Death is trying, desperately, to resurrect his late wife. "Don't worry, my love, I'll have you out of that coffin in no time!" He is also a wonderful source for the Elixir of Life, which will surely allow you to live forever, unless, of course you get the distressing side effects, so it's best to try it first on a cat, a crow or a cow... Just in case... It fells an elephant in 20 seconds.

Then there's Henpecked Ho, the unfortunate husband of the Ancestress' daughter, and who one day has finally had enough of living with a mother-in-law who is a 500 pound genocidal maniac. Almost as ancient as Li Kao, the Ancestress, is still waiting for grandchildren and decides Number Ten Ox will be a good son-in-law. In her already prepared schoolroom for the grandkids is written:

HEAVEN PRODUCES MYRIADS OF THINGS TO NOURISH MAN;
MAN NEVER DOES ONE GOOD TO RECOMPENSE HEAVEN.
KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!

And she lives by what she preaches. Until one day, thanks to Li Kao and Number Ten Ox, Henpecked Ho realizes that an axe can be an excellent relative remover. When he dies, successful, his last words are

"Immortality is for the Gods. I wonder how they can stand it."

Of course, there is a major villain in the piece, the Duke of Chi'in, a thinly disguised Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (259-210 BC) whose empire barely survived three years after his death. He left a holocaust of victims behind him and a mausoleum that (in real life) is the source of the famous terracotta warriors. And in the novel... well, his one and only punishment is death.

The Duke of Ch'in has an Assessor (the ultimate tax man), Key Rabbit, who is married to a peasant girl, Lotus Cloud, who has "fallen victim to insatiable greed." Every man who meets her falls in love with her except for Li Kao, who again explains "I have a slight flaw in my character."

There's a fairy tale about the Star Shepherd and Jade Pearl, the Chinese version of Psyche and Eros, and Jade Pearl's mentor and guardian, the Queen of Ginseng.

There's the story of how a stretch of the Great Wall called the Dragon's Pillow was built 122 miles away from the rest of the Great Wall, on orders of the Ruler of Heaven, the August Personage of Jade, who delivered the plans in a dream to the builder. And of Wan the soldier, buried in the Dragon's Pillow to guard it for all eternity from his lonely watch on the Dragon's Tower.

There's the… oh, there are so many stories... and they all intertwine and mingle.

Jade plate,
six, eight.
Fire that burns hot,
Night that is not,
Fire that burns cold,
First silver, then gold.

And the ending is a knockout, that rises for a whole chapter in a glorious symphony in words and images, and mixes, somehow, laughter with wet eyes, and is totally satisfying. That is rare.

The beautiful Bridge of Birds was climbing slowly toward the stars, and a great song was spreading across China. Faster and faster we sped through the sky, and on the ground below the peasants were running from cottages and lifting little children in their arms to gaze at glory.

"You see?" said the peasants. "That is why you must never give up, no matter how bad things may seem. Anything is possible in China!"

Indeed it is in Bridge of Birds.

Today in Mystery History: August 7

 

Welcome to episode 13 in our continuing investigation of our genre's history.

Bruce

 August 7, 1885.  Dornford Yates was born.  Besides being a soldier and attorney he was a writer of humor and then of very successful thriller novels, known as the Chandos series.  He was apparently a nasty piece of work, not even accounting for his typical 1920s attitudes toward foreigners and women. 

August 7, 1924.  John E. Bruce died on this day.  He had been born a slave. He grew up to be a journalist and civil rights activist.  His novel The Black Sleuth is one of the earliest mysteries by an African American. 

August 7, 1937. San Quentin premiered.  This movie was actually partially filmed in  the famous prison.  It starred Humphrey Bogart as a prisoner and Pat O'Brien as a guard who is dating Bogie's sister.

August 7, 1940.  "The Case of the Gentleman Poet" was published.  It was the last of the series of stories Eric Ambler wrote while waiting to be enlisted in the British armed forces.  They were collected in a book called, logically enough, Waiting for Orders.

August 7, 1949. Martin Kane, Private Eye premiered on radio.  During the three years it was on the air the P.I. was played by William Gargan, Lloyd Nolan, and Lee Tracy. The TV version started a month after the radio series and starred the same three actors, plus Mark Stevens, all playing the same part (though not in the same episodes, I hope.)  On TV Kane was always smoking a pipe. By sheer coincidence, I guess, the sponsor was a tobacco company. 

August 7, 1951. Ray Bradbury's "The Pedestrian" appeared in Reporter Magazine.  It is sort of science fiction, sort of crime story, and all social commentary.  Still worth reading (you can find it on the web, but I don't know about copyright status so I won't link to it.)  Bradbury, you may remember, said "I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm trying to prevent it."

 August 7, 1953. The Band Wagon premiered. It was a Fred Astaire/Cyd Charisse dance movie.  So why is on my list? Because it includes "GIRL HUNT: A Murder Mystery in Jazz."

August 7, 1962. On this date Archie Goodwin received a blood-stained necktie in the mail.  Thus began Rex Stout's "Blood Will Tell," a Nero Wolfe novella which appeared in EQMM and was reprinted in Trio For Blunt Instruments. (Stout liked that latter title so much he offered the man who suggested it part of the royalties.)

August 7, 1962. On the same day in South Africa, Trompie Kramer met Mickey Zondi.  The unlikely partnership of White and Black police officers fueled James McClure's excellent novels about crime under apartheid.  Confusingly, this meeting was reported in the last McClure novel, The Song Dog.

August 7, 2011. Publication date for Murder in Havana, by Margaret Truman. Or should I say "by" Margaret Truman?   Donald Bain and William Harrington both claimed to be the ghost writer of her Capital Crimes series. 

Don’t Worry. Write Happy.

In a recent Zoom presentation, Linda Landrigan, editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, recommended Joni B. Cole’s Good Naked: How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier, so I read the revised and expanded edition released by University of New Mexico Press in 2022.

Linda recommended the book because of Cole’s advice about, as Linda put it, “writing from the middle.” Cole advocates that you “dive into a first draft by writing any scene or memory or passage that asserts itself in your consciousness and feels like it might belong somewhere, anywhere, in the story” (p 79). Further, you should “[w]rite the hot spots—the stuff that feels vivid and demanding of your time now—and figure out later how they flow and fit together” (p 79).

Though I nearly always write the first scene first—without it I have nothing—I often do something similar to what Cole advocates: I write scenes out of order, leaving notes between the scenes to let me know what I think should move the reader from one to the other, be it a simple transition or a complete scene or sometimes even multiple scenes.

Writing out of order is one of the ways Cole suggests that we can avoid writer’s block. Putting anything—anything at all—on a page indicates that the muse is still with us, even if not focused on what we wish it to focus on.

Cole also notes that staring at the computer screen until she “came up with a brilliant idea” was for her and is for us counter-productive because “writing is what happens when we are busy looking away from the page” (178). Many of us know this, and it’s why we walk the dog, take extra showers, rearrange the refrigerator’s contents, hang out in coffee shops, and do other things when we are vexed with a piece of writing. The solution often comes when we aren’t trying to force it.

One theme that runs through the entire book—it’s right there in the subtitle—is the belief that happiness and productivity go hand-in-hand. A happy writer produces more and better work and that, in turn, feeds the writer’s happiness. (Don’t we all feel better when we’ve had a good day at the keyboard?)

“Happiness can be an elusive goal,” Cole writes (p 219-220), “and while we have the inalienable right to pursue it, what often remains in doubt is whether we have the gumption and energy to do so. To cultivate a sense of well-being, and open ourselves up to joy, requires a commitment to positive practices.”

So, stop being a writer who claims not to be happy writing, but only happy having written.

Instead, find joy in the creative process itself.

Reward yourself for a well-turned phrase, pat yourself on the back for drafting a complete scene, and celebrate devising the perfect plot twist. In short, find happiness in each step of the process.

If you do this, you will be eager to return to the keyboard, and you will return again and again and again. You will be more productive, you will write better, and you will be happier.