In Which A Line of Dialogue is Written

 The woman came back, followed by a man Menger had seen before.  Kirby.  It came to Menger that the man's name was Kirby.

The name brought more fragments of memory.  Denver.  The jewelry exchange.  The job that went sideways.

"It's about time you woke up," Kirby said.  "I was just about ready to start digging a grave."

I stop writing.  I read back over the last few paragraphs.  The voices in my head start chattering.

"Clumsy dialogue," the Editor says.  "Wordy.  And that repetition of 'about' is just ugly."

"Blech," Distraction chimes in.  "Hey, it's been a while since you checked your email.  You never know, there might be a story acceptance.  Plus you're waiting on your Bouchercon panel assignment."

"Probably won't even get one," Doubt moans.  "Certainly don't deserve one, since this is only the sixth story you've written this year."

"You could take a break and grade some papers," Responsibility timidly ventures.  There's a chorus of boos and he retreats to a back corner, resentfully planning to wake me in a cold sweat at three in the morning.

"Everybody pipe down," I order.  "Let's take a look at this."  I lean back in my chair and read through the last few paragraphs again.

"It's about time you woke up," Kirby said.  "I was just about ready to start digging a grave."

"Quick review," Exposition offers.  "Menger and Kirby were part of a heist that went wrong, and Menger got shot.  Now he's waking up, not knowing where he is or what happened.  Right?"

General murmurs of agreement.

I read the problematic line of dialogue yet again.  It sounds, to my ear, friendly, almost jovial.  It makes me picture Kirby as a big, grinning guy in a Hawaiian shirt.  "Is this the Kirby we want in the story?" I ask.

"No," says Kirby, who isn't exactly thrilled to be living in my head but at least wants a say in how he's depicted.  "I'm a survivalist, remember?  I think the world is on the brink of complete societal collapse.  I'm not walking around chuckling at people."

"Are you absolutely sure you didn't steal that character from somewhere?" Doubt puts in, leaping at another chance to ruin my day.

"Ignore him," says the Editor.  "Remember the tone you want here.  Tense, suspenseful.  Tighter dialogue moves you in that direction."

Okay.  I put my fingers on the keyboard.  Let's get rid of that extra about.  Which one to cut?  The problem is that Kirby's first sentence needs the word to make any sense.

"Why do you need the first sentence at all?" the Editor asks.

"I was just about ready to start digging a grave," Kirby said.

I read the line out loud.

"Still wordy," says the Editor.  "That 'just' isn't doing any real work.  Neither is 'start.'  How many times do you have to remember this?  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you write that a character starts to do something, you can cut the 'starts' and just have them do it."

"I was about ready to dig a grave," Kirby said.

Everybody thinks about this.

"Still doesn't quite sound like me," says Kirby.

"It's better," says the Editor.  "Still sounds more casual than I'd like, though.  Plus, since he's no longer saying the thing about Menger waking up, it's maybe not completely clear that the grave would be for Menger.  He could just be saying that's what he was doing when Lucia came to get him."

"Sure," says Doubt, who's being especially bratty today.  "The guy just hangs around the house thinking about digging graves.  That makes perfect sense.  What ever made you think you could write?  You'll probably never finish this one anyway."

"You want me to maybe kill this guy?"  Kirby asks.  "I'm going to be living in here, I might as well earn my keep."

I wave all this aside.  I'm almost there, I think.

"I was about ready to dig you a grave," Kirby said.

The Planner, pleased, pipes up.  "Now the line has a little bit of threat to it," he says.  "Kirby's letting Menger know that his death wouldn't be a problem.  That works well, given what we know is eventually going to happen between these characters."

The Editor is almost satisfied.  "I'm not crazy about 'about ready.'  It's too passive, like he was just sitting around waiting to do something.  That's not the Kirby we need in this story, right?"

"Right," says Kirby.  He was in the shadows before, but he's starting to emerge into the light.  He's not jovial, and he doesn't wear Hawaiian shirts.  He's a hard, lean man who rarely laughs, a man who approaches the world as a series of problems to be solved as efficiently as possible.

"I was about to dig you a grave," Kirby said.

The Editor reads this a couple of times, first on its own and then in the context of the previous few sentences, listening for rhythm and pace.  He gives a grudging nod of approval.  It will do for now.  Kirby, having been entirely remade, is satisfied that this is something he would say.  The Planner approves of the slight foreshadowing of future conflict.  Doubt isn't happy, but he never is.  Distraction is momentarily silent, because, at least for the moment, I'm fully engaged, living in the world of the sentence I just wrote.

"Okay," I say.  "Onward."

The first version of the sentence was eighteen words; the final version is ten.  I've successfully written a ten-word sentence that I'm happy--or at least momentarily satisfied--with.

Now all I have to do is write ten words I'm happy with five hundred more times, and I'll have a story.  Nothing to it!

***

If you're dying to hear more of my deep thoughts about writing fiction, I'll be at the 2024 Bouchercon in Nashville, starting just a few days after this is posted.

Saturday morning at 9:30 in the Bayou E Mezzanine, whatever that may turn out to be, I'll be on the panel "Is It Over Now?: Bringing Characters to Life in Short Stories," with moderator Meagan Lucas.

Thursday night, in my capacity as president of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, I'll be presenting this year's Derringer Awards as part of the opening ceremonies.  Fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman is receiving the Edward D. Hoch Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement, so be sure to congratulate her if you run into her!

The Shamus Awards will also be presented at the opening ceremonies, and my story "Making the Bad Guys Nervous" is a nominee for Best PI Story.

Other than that I'll be wandering about, so feel free to say hi.  Hope to see a lot of you there!

  

Los Angeles - The Novels

LOS ANGELES: THE NOVEL(S)

by Michael Mallory

Los Angeles has long emitted a siren song for writers of all stripes, particularly mystery authors and anyone concerned with the disparities of haves and have-nots, stars and nobodies, and the powerful and downtrodden. Given such a vast, contradictory, multi-tentacled megalopolis as L.A., and taking into account all of the writers who have attempted to plumb her depths, one has to ask: Is there such a thing as the Great Los Angeles Novel?

In short, no, there isn’t.

There are instead three Great Los Angeles Novels, all of them published within months of each other in 1939, and all written by transplanted Angelenos: Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep; Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and John Fante’s Ask the Dust. At the age of 85, none of them has lost their power over readers as great stories or as depictions of a city like no other. And so many decades worth of evolution, the City of Angels is still eminently recognizable in all three. (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is open for debate.)

Of the three, The Big Sleep has ascended to the status of L.A.’s unofficial pre-war biography. Raymond Chandler’s version of Los Angeles is the real Los Angeles of that time, the one built up and out from oil fields. Any references to Hollywood in the book refer to the actual, physical place, not the metonymic movie capital. Through his narrator, private eye Philip Marlowe, Chandler provides a Google Earth image of the city without seeming to do so. Rather than writing paragraphs of descriptive prose, Chandler offers snippets of the city’s characteristics such through off-handed remarks as one character’s “[having] a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard.” 

The notoriously convoluted plot (which inspired an even more convoluted film in 1946) was the combination of two of Chandler’s previously published short stories, “Killer in the Rain” (source of the A.G. Geiger blackmail subplot) and “Curtain” (the disappearance of Rusty Reagan). Both had appeared in Black Mask and featured powerful fathers struggling to control rebellious daughters. The L.A. of The Big Sleep is inhabited by the one percent: the wealthy, the powerful, the string-pullers, and the too-rich-to-jail class, who in turn are preyed upon by the city’s infrastructure of corruption, ranging from big-time racketeers to small-time blackmailers. At its core, The Big Sleep isn’t about power or ever murder, it’s about money. 

Standing in stark contrast to that is Ask the Dusk, which is about the lack of money. The book’s narrator is Arturo Bandini, an alter ego for author John Fante himself, who comes to Los Angeles with nothing but his dreams of being a great writer. He can only afford to live in a run-down apartment on Bunker Hill while he pursues both his dreams of fame and a beautiful, but emotionally unstable Latina waitress.

Something of a biography of Depression-era Los Angeles (while also laying the tracks for the darkly-populated noir novels that would follow), Ask the Dust is a jumble-tumble of thoughts, fantasies, fears and worries, all delivered by a protagonist with a desperate desire to fit in, but an even greater desire to rise above everybody else. Fante half-celebrates, half-condemns the dreamers of Los Angeles, those who possess a much sounder grip of the perceived future than the actual present. Along the way he fills the reader with the sights, sounds, smells, and ethnic tensions of the city as it then existed.  

Both The Big Sleep and Ask the Dust present the real Los Angeles; taken together, they span the city’s socio-economic range. The Day of the Locust, however, compensates for that by presenting a Los Angeles that is as genuinely real as a painted backdrop behind a Busby Berkeley musical number. 

Nathanael West’s short novel is almost exclusively concerned with Tinseltown in its Golden Age, and tells a story that could not possibly be set anywhere else. The picture of Hollywood it offers is not that of a puffed-up article in a movie magazine. Instead it’s a snapshot of fake imagery taken through a smudged and broken lens by a novelist who had already slogged through the trenches of Hollywood screenwriting.

The book’s protagonist Tod Hackett represents the kind of artist who lemming-rushed to Hollywood on the promise of fame and fortune, while striving to convince themselves that they will be the one who survives the seduction of the industry without selling out. (Todd’s very surname cynically indicates how that particular struggle will end.) 

Much of the story takes place within the confines of the studio, which allows the real L.A. to be seen only through windows, and even the scenes depicting Hackett’s life outside of work are influenced by the shadow of the Hollywood Sign. Virtually every character in the book is a Hollywood hanger-on, struggling to find the dream before it turns into a nightmare. A quarter-century later, a shot in the classic film Chinatown perfectly recaptured the host/parasite nature of Los Angeles/Hollywood, or Hollywood/Los Angeles that Nathanael West presented so well. It’s the scene where detective Jake Gittes is searching the court apartment of the murdered Ida Sessions, and while looking through her wallet, the tiniest glimpse of a Screen Actors Guild card can be seen. Poor Ida was one of the many hopefuls who straddled the fake and the real halves of the city, and lost in both. 

The Day of the Locust entwines reality, cinematic artifice, and surreal fantasizing into one troubling rope, and while not a mystery per se, the brutal murder of a child (by a character named Homer Simpson!) causes a mob to rise and incite a riot at a movie premiere, though it is hard to tell what version of reality is actually being described.

Taken independent of one another, each book delineates a different societal, economic, and industrial facet of the City of Angels, with its own rules, prejudices, and beliefs. But when read as a triptych, The Big Sleep, Ask the Dust and The Day of the Locust reveal the picture of L.A. in all its sprawling and contradictory glory, laying bare the beating heart and corruptible soul of a unique conurbation.

Home Is Where They Have to Take You In

 The Robert Frost line in the title is often how a lot of stories, particularly crime, evoke setting. In particular, when a character returns home after a long absence. Jim Thomsen, an editor friend, set me to thinking about this when he tossed out a quote from Justin Ward's An Unfinished Season:

“The Midwest was so fertile, so enormous, the horizon line stretched to the limits of the known world. But there was no space to breathe.”

Growing up in and around Cleveland as the steels mills and auto plants died, I had a different take. But Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, all those lakeshore cities, have more in common with Chicago and New England than they do the Midwest in general. It also depends on your definition of "Midwest." I grew up thinking it was Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. That could easily be called the Rust Belt and was called the Steel Belt when I was a child. The passage could just as easily apply to Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. When you get about fifty miles away from the rump auto industry along the Great Lakes, the above quote pretty much describes the rest of Ohio, most of Indiana, and southern Illinois. The slavish adherence to the evangelical creed and 1950s notions of decency die hard here.

But group think isn't limited to the heartland. Mention Texas, the deep south, New York City, or California, and you get some pretty solid notions of what the culture is like there, whether it's accurate or not. And the less someone's been to these regions, the more adamant they are about their image of it. And the more annoyed someone who lives there gets with it. Ross McDonald, a fixture in Santa Barbara (upon which he and Sue Grafton based their respective Santa Teresas), once wrote there was nothing wrong with coastal California that a sudden rise in sea level couldn't fix.

It's not all negative, of course. Ohio recently hijacked Threads for about six weeks before the election stole everyone's thunder. And it wasn't about JD Vance or legalizing pot. It was about Hocking Hills and Amish country and Cincinnati-style chili. The entire state took a page from Cleveland's playbook and said, "Screw the bad image. This is who we are."  Likewise, when you read about New York, you see the familiar (because we're all forced to see NYC and LA on television like there aren't other cities in the northeast or California), but you see what individuals do with their lives. Suddenly, the places are not monoliths. They're home.

Well, someone's home. 

Four Stories and Two Hotdishes

Every morning, I watch Good Morning America for about half an hour while I eat my breakfast, mostly for the news scroll they provide at the bottom of the screen.  There's always something to catch my attention, something that isn't necessarily covered in prime time anywhere.  

For example:

"2,300 Pounds of Meth Hidden in Celery in Georgia Farmer's Market."  

Well, that certainly gave me something to munch on mentally while eating my peanut butter toast.  

Which Georgia Farmer's Market?  (Forrest Hill, right outside of Atlanta).  

Why celery?  Wouldn't it would be easier to hide the meth in the cauliflower?  

Who brings enough celery to a farmer's market to hide 2,300 pounds of meth?  

Were they actually planning to sell the celery as well as the meth? 

Did someone pick up a stalk of celery, notice the meth, and ask if that cost extra?

New Zealand food bank distributes candy made from a potentially lethal amount of methamphetamine

"A New Zealand charity working with homeless people in Auckland unknowingly distributed candies filled with a potentially lethal dose of methamphetamine in its food parcels after the sweets were donated by a member of the public.

"The charity’s food bank accepts only donations of commercially produced food in sealed packaging, Robinson said. The pineapple candies, stamped with the label of Malaysian brand Rinda, “appeared as such when they were donated,” arriving in a retail-sized bag, she added."
(LINK)

Wow. Someone went to a lot of trouble, individually wrapping meth in candy wrappers...

And why? Especially since they were given away.  Did they think they were going to get more customers? For meth or for Rinda?

Haven't been able to find an update on this story yet, but I'm keeping an eye out.

"Hippopotamuses can become airborne for substantial periods of time, researchers discover."

So of course I instantly thought of the dancing hippos in Disney's Fantasia. Some images never leave you...

Now I don't know about you, but I would cheerfully watch airborne hippos for 'a substantial period of time'.  A steeplechase? I'm there for it.  "Le Corsaire" ballet?  Oh, yeah.  Hippo v. Seabiscuit?  Bring it on.

So I was saddened to learn that, while hippos trot, not gallop, their airborne time is only about 0.3 seconds.  (LINK)

And, if you can figure out how to slow this video down, you can probably see it:

Tim Walz Accused of Lying About His White Guy Tacos!

I love this story and the whole meltdown that's going on in a certain sphere.
(LINK)

Apparently, no one in certain circles has ever heard of "joshing", i.e., making gentle fun of oneself.  Nor do they know squat about Norwegian Lutheran Culture.

Folks, you have to understand that, up here in the Midwest / High Plains area (including both Minnesota and the Dakotas), there is indeed a Northern European (which we often call Norwegian Lutheran, in gentle joshing fashion) food culture that largely eschews seasoning.  Up here, "hot" means the actual temperature of the food, not the spice. 

"Church Basement Ladies Pale Food Polka"

For example: lutefisk, a/k/a "The piece of cod which passeth all understanding" (and no, I did not make that up).  I have been invited to lutefisk dinners, which are a highlight of the Christmas season, and do not attend, because lutefisk is basically warm fish jello. With the lutefisk comes lefse (riced potatoes mixed with flour, salt, butter and cream, cooked like thin potato tortillas, and served with butter and sugar), boiled potatoes, and (if you're lucky) the one bit of color on the whole plate:  red Jello.

Now while I hate lutefisk, I have really leaned into hotdishes.  They're filling, they're easy to make, they're comfort food in the long, long, long winters.  And they are standard fare at funerals, potlucks, and other church gatherings.

The main point of a hotdish is that they are a full meal in a baking dish: a protein and a starch, mixed with canned soup and sometimes a frozen / canned vegetable.  Tatertot hotdish!  (Generally ground beef in mushroom soup with - you guessed it - tatertots for the topping.)  Chicken with biscuits! Tuna noodle casserole! Turkey noodle casserole! Swedish meatballs in white gravy!

NOTE:  True Swedish meatball gravy has beef broth and a dash of nutmeg in it.  Mmm...  Exotic.

And more endless iterations of hotdish, using cream of mushroom soup, cream of chicken soup, cream of celery soup, cream of ____ soup, topped with biscuits or mashed potatoes or tater tots.  Of late, some people have also been doing spaghetti bake, with tomato sauce and a thick coating of mozzarella cheese.

Here's a classic Chicken and Biscuits Hotdish passed down through the ages (thank you Dark Ally!), in my modern variation (i.e., the onion and mushrooms):

1 can cooked chicken, drained and chopped fine 

1 can cream of chicken soup 

1/2 cup of milk 

1 onion, sauteed with 1 package of mushrooms chopped 

Pinch of sage 

Mix the above together and bake at 350 for about 45 minutes. 

Turn the oven up to 400 degrees. 

Open can of biscuits, and put biscuits on top of chicken hot dish 

Bake for 10-15 minutes, until the biscuits are brown.

Now here's Tim Walz' Award-Winning Taco Hotdish:

1 lb ground turkey
1 large red bell pepper (or two medium ones)
1 yellow onion
1 can sliced black olives
1 can diced mild green chilies  
1 bottle taco sauce (medium)  
1 16 oz sour cream
1 bag of frozen tots
4 cups shredded cheddar cheese
3 cups sweet corn
Cherry tomatoes
Green onions
Shredded iceberg lettuce
Paprika
Chili powder
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Olive oil

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Dice the onion and bell pepper into 1-inch dice and sauté in 1 tablespoon of olive oil, salt and pepper for 15 minutes, until tender. Remove onion and bell pepper and set aside in a mixing bowl. Brown turkey. In a small bowl, mix 2 teaspoons each of paprika, chili powder, onion powder and garlic powder. Add half of the mixture to the turkey while browning. Reserve the other half of the mixture to sprinkle over the tots prior to baking. When finished, add the turkey in with the sautéed onion and bell pepper. Add black olives, sweet corn, chilies, taco sauce, 2 cups of cheese, and sour cream. Stir mixture until combined. Pour into a baking dish and sprinkle the remaining 2 cups of cheese on top. Add tots on top of the mixture and more cheese. Sprinkle spice mixture on top of tots. Bake in a 400-degree oven for 45 minutes or until tots are crispy and golden brown. After removing from the oven, sprinkle with shredded lettuce, green onions and diced tomato. Serve with sour cream, hot sauce, avocado, cilantro or your favorite taco topping.

NOTE that all the seasonings are "mild" or "medium".  Ain't no jalapenos in this hotdish. You want hot sauce? Cilantro? Avocado? Put 'em on top!

Anyway, that's the Church Basement Ladies way!

You can see the whole musical on YouTube, too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IEFkHAsOZs

Recharging Your Batteries

"Every other writer's process is sort of vaguely scary and appalling." - Daryl Gregory.

Since I retired a few years ago I have fallen into a new pattern for writing and I decided to share it with you.  Mostly I am inviting you to compare and contrast in the comments.

I have been writing short stories exclusively for the last few years.  I write slow (or is that slowly?) and a first draft takes me weeks to months.  I write every day and on most days I will also do some editing of different stories.  (Most of mine go through roughly ten drafts.)

But I found that when I finished that first draft I was reluctant to start on another story.  (I usually have another one ready to go - and boy, am I using up my supply on parentheses today.)

So here's what I figured out.  The day after I finish a first draft I switch to doing only editing for a week.  And after a few days this really bugs me.  Instead of being reluctant I soon find I am dying to get onto the next story.  

When the week is over my engines are roaring to go.  And that's a good thing.

Speaking of engines, your mileage may vary.  How does your work process go?

Mixing Crime and Coming-of-Age Stories

I have never set out to write a coming-of-age story. When plotting, I usually don't think in such broad terms. I focus on the trees--who my characters are and what I want to happen in the tale. Only later, after I finish a story or near its end, do I realize what my forest looks like. And what a lot of my forests have looked like in recent years--to belabor the idiom--are coming-of-age stories.

I didn't major in English in college, so forgive me if I mess up this definition. A coming-of-age story is one in which the main character matures from childhood to adulthood (emotionally, not necessarily in age) because of a journey or perilous situation the character lives through. Because crime/mystery tales often involve perilous situations, they are tailor-made for stories in which children, teenagers, and young adults grow.

The character development in these stories doesn't have to be positive. The stories don't have to end with the good guys living happily ever after. But the journey or perilous situation should cause the main character to see things differently by the end, to be a different person.

It was only recently that I realized how many coming-of-age stories I have written. In order of publication:

• "Truth and Consequences" is about a teenager determined to find out where her father goes each Saturday. The answer breaks her heart. This story was originally published in the anthology Mystery Times Ten, republished in my collection, Don't Get Mad, Get Even.
  
• 
  "Ulterior Motives" is about a teenager who volunteers for a political campaign. There's a mystery in this small town, and a secret, and a teenage girl at the middle of it all who doesn't think the adults around her understand much--which maybe they don't. This story was published in the anthology Ride 2.
  
• "Evil Little Girl" tells the tale of a bullied girl at sleepaway camp and what happens when her figurative cries for help fail. This story originally appeared in Don't Get Mad, Get Even.
• "Alex's Choice" is about a twelve-year-old’s quest to stop a family tragedy long after it happened and the unexpected hard choices the child faces. This story was published in the crime, time-travel anthology I edited, Crime Travel.
• "Second Chance" is a story about identical twins forced into foster care, who find each other again several years later, at age eighteen. The older brother--by eight minutes--had always known it was his job to protect his little brother, but now, the enemy he faces is someone he never expected. This story was published in the anthology Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir.
• "Wishful Thinking" is a ghost story with four tweens who creep into an old abandoned house, searching for a million dollars of stolen money. They don't believe in ghosts when they go inside, but maybe they should. This story originally appeared in issue 6 of Black Cat Weekly. It also can be
  
  purchased as an individual story.
  
• "Beauty and the Beyotch" is a tale about three girls told from two perspectives about one thing--their struggle to make their deepest desires come true. What happens when those dreams collide? This story was published in issue 29 of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine.
• "For Bailey" is about a town with a pending vote to ban consumer fireworks and the teenager determined to have the vote pass, for all the scared animals and people. She comes up with a plan, but she doesn't foresee the consequences. This story was published in the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote Volume 3: The Color of My Vote.
• "Real Courage" has four point-of-view characters, three of them teenagers. The story opens in the 1980s with a teenage girl facing ostracism. It moves on to her son in the 2010s. After promising his dying mom he would always stand up for the awkward girl who lives next door, he finds himself in a situation no one could have anticipated. This is a story about people making bad choices with the best intentions. It was published in issue 14 of Black Cat Mystery Magazine.
• 
  "Teenage Dirtbag" tells the story of a teenage guy infatuated with a girl who already has a boyfriend--a boyfriend who doesn't treat her--or anyone--with respect. The infatuated guy comes up with a plan to rectify that. This story was published in the anthology (I Just) Died In Your Arms: Crime Fiction Inspired by One-Hit Wonders, Volume 1.
• "Never Have I Ever" is about a college student playing her favorite secrets-sharing drinking game with her friends. But she has secrets she’ll never share--because she's obsessed. Because she's haunted. Because she has a plan. This story was published in the anthology Murder, Neat.
  

Eleven stories. Maybe I should put them together in a collection with a new one or two. After all, it sure seems I have a predilection for this type of tale. If you haven't read "Real Courage," it is available on my website. The story is a current finalist for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, and it was a finalist for the Agatha Award earlier this year. You can find it by clicking here.

If you have any favorite coming-of-age crime/mystery stories, I would love to hear about them in the comments. My friend and fellow SleuthSayer Art Taylor certainly has a few great ones.