Bottom of the Glass

Several of the Sleuth Sayer bloggers have written about the agony of receiving rejection slips from editors, agents and/or publishers, so now I guess it's my turn to stand up and say, "Hi, my name is R.T. Lawton and I am a writer." And then, after the polite applause that's usually received at these types of meetings in church basements or wherever, I guess I'll have to tell my story. That's the way these things work.

"Well, lately I've received four straight rejections, with personal hand-written notes from the column editor at Woman's World magazine. In the past, this has been one of my bread and butter markets. One of the rejections even credited me for having an original idea which hadn't been submitted to her before....but the story still wasn't quite right for her. Damn.

At this point, I saw two possibilities. One, I was slipping. Nah, that couldn't be. And two, the solution I preferred to accept, was that my friend and fellow blogger, John Floyd, had cornered the market with his engaging series characters. Darn you John, your excellent writing is making for some hard competition for the rest of us. Keep on going though, as I may learn something yet.

So here I am looking at the bottom of the glass. But since those of us who have spent time on the edge, one way or another, usually have a strange sense of humor from operating on the darker side of life, I like to put a little something back in the glass by remembering my most favorite rejection. You see, I am probably one of the few writers who has been rejected by a jail. It went something like this.

When I was vice-prez of the Black Hills Writers Group, a stranger showed up at one of our monthly meetings. This in itself wasn't odd, because we often had some newcomer sitting in for a meeting or more. However, this newcomer said he was the editor of a newspaper for one of the more infamous biker campgrounds at the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and he was looking for biker stories to purchase for his rag. He didn't know me, but I knew him professionally and it wasn't from the writing side of my profession.

Since I'd had stories published in Easyriders and Outlaw Biker under some of my undercover aliases, I figured I had a good shot at this, a mere campground newspaper. I wrote up a story, submitted it under an alias with a return address to an undercover post office box and awaited the results. Several days later, I received an envelope  from the Pennington County Jail with a rejection  and the request that in the future I not send anything consisting of more than four pages.

While I knew that the editor was on probation for violating the state drug laws, I had no idea that he subsequently violated his probation and got put back inside. At which point, this same editor had all his mail forwarded to the country jail, to include my manuscript. Thus, sad to say, I was promptly rejected by the jail officials who read all incoming mail for prisoners. My manuscript never saw print in the public venue.

Therefore on occasions such as today, I still raise my partially filled glass and toast the fallen editor who never knew my true identity. God bless the idiot. In later years I would ride my Harley out to the infamous biker campground during the rally and watch this same editor as he MC'ed the Miss Bear Butte (Bare Butt) Contest in his white suit, white bowler hat, white spats, white shoes and white cane. You had to be there to appreciate it.

Sometimes, just the memory of this rejection keeps me laughing. To me, it's an inspiration, but then I've led a rather odd life and tend to see the world in a different perspective than most folk.

So, it's on my mind that you should lighten up when you get rejected. Just keep on writing and submitting. Sometimes you have absolutely no control over what happens to your stories. You're a writer though, just go get 'em.

The $3500 Shirt - A History Lesson in Economics

One of the great advantages of being a historian is that you don't get your knickers in as much of a twist over how bad things are today. If you think this year is bad, try 1347, when the Black Death covered most of Europe, one-third of the world had died, and (to add insult to injury) there was also (in Europe) the little matter of the Hundred Years' War and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (where the pope had moved to Avignon, France, and basically the Church was being transformed into a subsidiary of the French regime). Things are looking up already, aren't they?

Another thing is economics. Everyone complains about taxes, prices, and how expensive it is to live any more. I'm not going to go into taxes - that way lies madness. But I can tell you that living has never been cheaper. We live in a country awash in stuff - food, clothing, appliances, machines, cheap crap from China - but it's never enough. $4 t-shirts? Please. We want five for $10, and even then, can we get them on sale? And yet, compared to a world where everything is made by hand - we're talking barely 200 years ago - everything is cheap and plentiful, and we are appallingly ungrateful.

Let's talk clothing. When the Industrial Revolution began, it started with factories making cloth. Why? Because clothing used to be frighteningly expensive. Back in my teaching days I gave a standard lecture, which is about to follow, on the $3,500 shirt, or why peasants owned so little clothing. Here's the way it worked:

NOTE:  As of 4/6/16 I have updated the mathematics of this here at this blog post.  It's still astounding.

See this guy below, lying asleep under the tree? And the guys still working in the field?  They're all wearing a standard medieval shirt. It has a yoke, a bit of smocking and gathering around the neck, armholes, and the wrists would be banded, so they could tie or button them close.

Oh, and in the middle ages, it would be expected that all of the inside sleeves would be finished. This was all done by hand. A practiced seamstress could probably sew it in 7 hours. But that's not all that would go into the making. There's the cloth. A shirt like this would take about 5 yards of cloth, and it would be a fine weave: the Knoxville Museum of Art estimates two inches an hour. So 4(yards)*36(inches)/2 = 72 hours. (I'm a weaver - or at least I used to be - so this sounds accurate to me.) Okay, so hand weaving and hand sewing would take 79 hours. Now the estimate for spinning has always been complex, so stick with me for a minute: Yardage of thread for 4 yards of cloth, one yard wide (although old looms often only wove about 24" wide cloth), and requires 25 threads per inch, so:

25 threads * 36" wide = 900 threads, which each needs to be (4 yards + 1 yards for tie-up = 5 yards long), so 900 * 5 = 4,500 yards of thread for the warp. And you'd need about the same for a weft, or a total of about 9,000 yards of thread for one shirt.

9,000 yards would take a while to spin. At a Dark Ages recreation site, they figured out a good spinner could do 4 yards in an hour, so that would be 2,250 hours to make the thread for the weaving.  Now, A lot of modern spinners disagree with this figure, saying they can spin much faster than that.  So let's say they're right.  And we'll say that the spinner is in a hurry to make this thread because the shirt's for her or someone she knows (all spinners were female in medieval times), so we'll say she worked her tail off and did it in 500 hours.

So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25.
And that's just a standard shirt.
And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving. Or making the thread for the sewing.
And you'd still need pants (tights or breeches) or a skirt, a bodice or vest, a jacket or cloak, stockings, and, if at all possible, but a rare luxury, shoes.

NOTE (1/30/15) - Please see a further commentary on this piece at:  Is Time Money or is Money Time?

NOTE: Back in the pre-industrial days, the making of thread, cloth, and clothing ate up all the time that a woman wasn't spending cooking and cleaning and raising the children. That's why single women were called "spinsters" - spinning thread was their primary job. "I somehow or somewhere got the idea," wrote Lucy Larcom in the 18th century, "when I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind." Ellen Rollins: "The moaning of the big [spinning] wheel was the saddest sound of my childhood. It was like a low wail from out of the lengthened monotony of the spinner's life." (Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, p. 26)

Anyway, with clothing that expensive and hard to make, every item was something you wore until it literally disintegrated. Even in 1800, a farm woman would be lucky to own three dresses - one for best and the other two for daily living. Heck, my mother, in 1930, went to college with that exact number of dresses to her name... This is why old clothing is rare: even the wealthy passed their old clothes on to the next generation or the poorer classes. The poor wore theirs until it could be worn no more, and then it was cut down for their children, and then used for rags of all kinds, and then, finally, sold to the rag and bone man who would transport it off to be made into (among other things) paper.

And speaking of paper, that was another thing that had to be invented for our society to exist: cheap paper. Good rag paper (made literally with expensive cloth rag) was always pricey, just not as pricey as parchment which was goat, sheep, or calf skin. (This is why medieval manuscripts were so few and why they were often kept chained up for fear of theft. It took at least a whole herd of animals to make the Book of Kells, for example. On the other hand, well-kept parchment can last thousands of years.) In fact, paper remained expensive long after clothing got cheaper, because it took a long time to figure out how to make paper out of nothing but wood pulp, without all that expensive rag content. It wasn't until the production of wood pulp paper was perfected in the mid-1800's that books (schoolbooks, fiction, non-fiction), magazines, and newspapers became available to the general public. Including pulp fiction - the first was Argosy Magazine in 1896 - a genre that was named for the cheapest of cheap fiber paper that it was published on. And without that pulp paper, where would our entire genre be?

       

George Jetson, to the white courtesy phone

Last week I demonstrated my new webcam with a tune, but I didn't actually purchase it to fill your lives with the glories of music.  I had an ulterior motive, which I shall now reveal.

There is a group of folk  music fans in New Jersey called the Folk Project, and they have retreats twice a year where people go to a camp and play music together.  Good times.

Well, recently they added a new feature to these weekends: a book club. The coordinator chooses a book related to folk music and you can guess the rest.

A few months ago the title was announced for the spring retreat: SUCH A KILLING CRIME, a mystery set in Greenwich Village during the great folk music scare of 1963. 

One member of the Folk Project is Lori Falco, and she and I have been friends since we met while waiting for a bus on the first day of high school. quite a few years ago.  Lori asked the coordinator: "Do you know the author of that book used to be a member of the Folk Project?"

The coordinator had not known that.  But I was promptly invited to come to the retreat for the discussion.  That wasn't possible but I got a webcam and a skype account and made a virtual appearance.

It was a lot of fun.  Oh, the usual technical hiccups (no matter how long Lori and I spent prepping before the show started).  Interested people asking good questions.  My favorite: "What was it like putting words in Phil Ochs' mouth?"

My answer: not as scary as putting words in the mouth of Tom Paxton.  After all, Tom is still alive.  Therefore I was extremely careful to make him a sympathetic character.  (Even though he offered to be the murderer.  And he graciously gave me the following blurb:  "Spooky. If I'd have known he was watching us so carefully, I would have been MUCH  better."

Well, I had a good time and I would like the chance to chat with ALL the folk music book clubs in the world.  Unfortunately, I suspect I just did.

On a related note, Kearney Street Books informed me this week that SUCH A KILLING CRIME is now available on Kindle, for those who don't care to read their books, uh, acoustically.  

Not the future anyone was expecting in 1963, huh?

The Death of Laura Foster

Today's article will interest both followers of American music and true crime, an investigation into the hanging of a folk figure, Tom Dooley, as researched and written by a descendent of parties involved.

John Fletcher and I began corresponding following an investigative article I wrote about Tom Dooley titled (with a nod to Twin Peaks), "Who Killed Laura Foster?" He was just beginning his research, which has become a new book, The True Story of Tom Dooley, published by History Press. It's a must for those interested in this legend.

Today, John shares the genealogy with us. Follow along with this tale from yesteryear…

Leigh Lundin

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John Edward Fletcher

The Death of Laura Foster

by John Edward Fletcher

The Legend of Tom Dooley is an enduring mystery in western North Carolina even a century and a half after the incident occurred. Why is that the case? In part, the 1959 ballad hit by the Kingston Trio, “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley,” has helped to keep the story alive.

However, an examination of the existing records of the case raise many questions. For example, the original arrest record names Thomas Dula, Ann Pauline Dula, Granville Dula, and Ann Pauline Melton as the suspects in the disappearance of Laura Foster. The Court records, in contrast, name Thomas Dula and Ann Melton as the defendants and name Lotty Foster, Pauline Foster, and several others as material witnesses for the Prosecution. Who were these individuals and what was their relationship to the Murder of Laura Foster?

The murder Indictment charged only Tom Dula with Laura Foster’s murder, but it also indicted Ann Melton as an accessory before and after the fact. The “after the fact” charge was later dropped from Ann Melton’s charges, and her trial was separated from Tom Dula’s trial. This separation was made because if Tom were not guilty of the murder, then there could be no valid charge against Ann Melton. But, who were the other two suspects, Ann Pauline Dula and Granville Dula; and, what was their involvement in the murder of Laura Foster? Furthermore, who were the witnesses, Lotty foster and Pauline (or “Perline”) Foster in the local vernacular?

A search of census records from 1850 to 1870 reveals a curious result. Lotty Foster, Ann Melton’s mother, turns up as Carlotta “Lotty” Triplett in some records, but as Lotty Foster in other records. Her daughter, Anne, turns up as Angeline Pauline Triplett in some records, but as Ann or Anne Foster in other records. The other Dulas, mentioned in the arrest warrant, turn up as the children of Tom Dula’s uncle Bennett J. Dula II. That is, Ann Pauline Dula, age 16 and her brother, Granville Dula, age 13 appear in the 1860 Census. They are Tom Dula’s first cousins as their father is Thomas P. Dula’s (Tom’s father) brother. The question naturally arises, “Why are they never mentioned again in court records?

A second unknown is the mysterious person, Pauline (“Perline”) Foster who is not found in census or other records. She is identified in the court records only as a young woman from Watauga County who is a distant relative of Ann Melton. She reportedly came to Wilkes County to visit her (unidentified) grandfather and to see the local doctor to be treated for a venereal disease that she had contracted in Watauga County. Looking for local work to pay for her medical treatments, she was hired by the James Meltons to work for them during the summer of 1866 while receiving medical treatments for her disease. The Meltons were not aware that she was undergoing treatments when they hired her.

The court records show that Tom Dula’s cousins, Ann Pauline Dula and Granville Dula had nothing to do with the Laura Foster murder, and the person who was arrested with Ann Pauline Melton was actually Pauline Foster, not Pauline Dula, but why Granville Dula was arrested has not been explained. Possibly, he was a suitor of Laura Foster’s at the time of her disappearance.

Laura had many suitors, and was known locally to have “round heels,” meaning she was easily moved onto her backside by her suitors. Three of the persons named in the arrest warrant were arrested, but provided alibis for the time that Laura disappeared, thus were released as “not guilty”. The central question remains, “Who is this Perline Foster and how is she involved in the murder case?”

A search of Watauga County records turns up two census records in the years 1850 and 1870.

In 1850, a Levi F. Foster, age 25, is found with a daughter Anna age 4. In the 1870 census, the same family is found but is missing the daughter Anna. However, living next door to Levi is a John Scott with wife Anna P. Scott, who is possibly the missing daughter Ann Pauline Foster, age about 26. If ‘Perline’ Foster is a distant relative of Ann Foster Melton, then the connection must be through her Foster father. That means that the relationship of Levi Leander Foster must be traced to Ann Foster Melton’s Foster family. Levi Foster does not appear in the 1860 census of Watauga County; however, a careful search of the 1860s tri-county censuses for the first names, turns up a Levi F. Dula with exactly the same family members as Levi Foster’s family in the 1850 census of Watauga County. Living next door is the family of John ‘Jack’ Dula of Kings Creek, Caldwell County, NC.

To make a very long genealogical story short, Levi Foster turns out to be the illegitimate son of John ‘Jack’ Dula with a daughter of Robert Foster and Mary Allison, also residents of King’s Creek in Caldwell County. Robert Foster was the brother of Thomas Bell Foster of Wilkes County and he was the father of Wilson Foster, Laura Foster’s father, and Carlotta Foster, Ann Foster Melton’s mother. That explains Pauline Foster’s relationship with Ann Melton.

In fact, Pauline turns out to be the fourth cousin of both Ann Melton and Laura Foster. Also, Laura Foster is the first cousin of Ann Foster Melton. John “Jack” Dula is the grandfather that Pauline Foster is visiting there in Caldwell County, and also makes her a second cousin of the defendant, Thomas Dula.

In 1860, the Levi Foster family are using the surname of Dula, his father’s name and Ann Pauline Foster is actually known locally as Ann Pauline Dula. That is why Wilson Foster named Ann Pauline Foster as Ann Pauline Dula in the arrest warrant. That was the name he knew her by when they were living near him in the 1860s. By 1866, her family had moved back to Watauga County, but she returned to Wilkes for medical treatments. These relations also explain why Perline knew and was fond of Tom Dula; she was his second cousin, and probably knew both him and Laura Foster well from the time she lived near them while growing up in Caldwell County.

That brings us back to “Lotty” Foster, aka Carlotta Foster Triplett. The 1860 records list her as Lotty Triplett, with her three children, Pinkney Andrew Triplett, Angleine Pauline Triplett, and Thomas Triplett. Why are they listed with the Triplett name if all her children were illegitimate as other authors have written? A detailed genealogical search of the Thomas Bell Foster family lists the first name of her husband as ‘Francis’, but no last name is given. One easily then surmises that his surname must have been Francis Triplett.

Who was Francis Triplett? A detailed search of period records does not reveal anyone by that name. However, there is a clue in Carlotta Triplett’s census records from 1850. She is living in the household Of James and Nancey Brookshire Brown, who are in their 70s. Why is she living with them? It turns out the Browns have two daughters, Nancey Brown and Adeline Minerva Brown. The first daughter, Nancey, was married to a Martin Triplett in 1820. The second daughter, Adeline, was married to Bennet J. Dula II, and they were the parents of Ann Pauline Dula and Granville Dula.

Martin Triplett was divorced from Nancey Brown by 1822, but they had two children, a daughter Irene and a son. After the divorce, the son remained with his father and a stepmother Mary Winifred Hall, the daughter of Thomas Hall and Judith Dula. The daughter remained with her mother after the divorce. The son, Francis Triplett, married Carlotta Foster about 1839-40 and he fathered, at least, the first three of Carlotta’s children. By 1850, Francis is absent from their household, and Carlotta with her three children, are living with her mother-in-law’s parents. In other words, her children’s great-grandparents.

What happened to Francis is unknown. One might speculate that he left for the 1849 Gold Rush and may not have returned. Sometime after that, about 1859, Carlotta Foster Triplett changed her and her children’s surname to Foster, her maiden name. Exactly why she did this is unknown, but it must have had something to do with her husband’s disappearance. Thus, we now know why Lottie Foster, Pauline Foster, and Ann Foster Melton each had two different surnames. Carlotta’s children, at least the first three, were not illegitimate as is popularly believed, and Ann Pauline Dula who was named in Wilson Foster’s arrest warrant was actually Levi Foster’s daughter, Ann Pauline Foster.

Perline Foster, the principal Witness for the Prosecution, may not have been of high moral character, but her objective during the summer of 1866 was to be cured of her venereal disease so she could complete her marriage bond with her fiancé, John Scott. For that reason, she was not a paramour of Tom Dula, who was her second cousin, and was not a romantic rival with Ann Melton and Laura Foster and others for Tom’s romantic attentions. She did not transmit her disease to Tom Dula, who in turn, passed it on to Ann Melton. That disease transmission became the primary motive for the murder of Laura Foster. The evidence is that Laura was, in fact, the source of Tom’s infection.

Pauline Foster may have slanted her testimony during the trials to protect Tom Dula and to implicate Ann Melton. Pauline certainly had no love for Ann Melton who had treated her quite badly during the summer of 1866. However, others testified that her testimony was very consistent during both Tom Dula’s trials. She implicated Tom and Ann Melton in the events leading up to the disappearance of Laura Foster and to the subsequent discovery of her burial site. Her testimony coupled with the other circumstantial evidence clearly defined Tom Dula as the likely murderer and that Ann Melton was fully engaged in its planning and the instigation of Tom Dula to commit the murder.

Tom’s final heroic act was to take sole responsibility for the murder of Laura Foster and to absolve Ann Melton from her involvement. Because of his final written confession, the Wilkes County Jury had little choice, but to set her free.

Angeline Pauline Triplett Foster Melton lived another seven years after her final trial. She bore a second daughter, Ida V. Melton, in 1871 with her husband James Melton. She died a very painful death in about 1875 from internal injuries received in a buggy accident. Justice was apparently finally served.

Beginners

Many years ago when I was a high school student, I innocently remarked to my art teacher that I would like to be an artist. I’ve always remembered his response: “Learn to be a painter then hope.”

No doubt today he would be pilloried for discouraging young creativity, but, of course, he was entirely correct. Art and that illusive thing, creativity, emerge out of craft and not out of thin air.

For this reason, and because I was largely self taught in both writing and painting, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of ‘creative’ writing courses. Twenty years plus teaching college students also convinced me that we go about teaching writing almost entirely backwards, emphasizing academic and research-oriented writing, which few people will ever do once they leave the ivy halls, and teaching the sort of professional writing most will do in business and journalism as an upper level speciality.

So what do my reservations about college writing courses have to do with mystery writing? Just this. If you are trying to write mysteries or their big cousins, thrillers, or their more distant relatives the romance or fantasy, first learn the basic functional professional writing style and then learn the formats of your chosen genre.

Sure, we all like to think our writing is stylish and that on good days we could channel Raymond Chandler or Fred Vargas or Kate Atkinson. But lets face it. Most genre writing relies on clean, straight-forward prose with fast moving verbs and only a judicious sprinkle of eye-catching adjectives.

It’s no secret that many highly successful genre writers move over from journalism or other professional writing where they learned to write clearly, grammatically cleanly, and concisely. They also learned something else which I spent almost two decades teaching humanities majors desperate for some practical advice: how to discover a writing format, how to analyze it, and how to copy it.

I realize the ‘C’ word is out of favor, but whether you are learning to construct a press release – always my publishing class’s first exercise – or the cliff-hanging save the world type thriller, you’ve got to master the form. Ideas are great, style is wonderful, but both need a container, and that container is the format, the form that readers expect.

Of course, it is a lot easier to teach someone how to write a press release – who, where, what, why, when, in the first graph, a couple of the now obligatory quotes, a brief elaboration of facts, plus contact info– than it is to write a novel or even a short story. But as with learning languages, learn one and the second is easier. In the case of writing, easier because the beginner is already looking for structure and has taken the first steps by learning to analyze one form.

And how is this done? Read, read, read, but read actively. That is, begin to pay attention not just to the story, in this case, but to how it was done, what the various ingredients are – action, dialogue, exposition– and in what proportions.

If one does that consistently, soon one realizes that there are only so many patterns. In our genre, these include the chase, the woman in jeopardy, the step-by-step investigation, the revenge plot, the caper, the sure thing gone wrong, and my own favorite, the so called ‘biter bit,’ where a bad guy is ‘hoist on his own petard’ as Shakespeare, that master of many genres, so aptly put it.

Unlike a lot of writers, I started first on novels and came to short stories later, but the process was still the same. In my case, I destroyed cheap paperbacks of several favorite writers – Eric Ambler, Raymond Chandler, and Dorothy Sayers, to be exact – by underlining dialogue, exposition and action in various colors, giving me a visual representation of the structures and making me read the novels ultra carefully.

Was this self education successful? Modestly. I am not a gifted plotter and, yes, structure is still a difficulty for me. Someone with a greater talent for plot structure, even if a less skillful writer, would do as well or probably better. But one plays the hand one is dealt.

One cannot acquire more talent or better ideas. But one can become a skillful enough writer to convey the ideas one does have and good enough at developing the structure of stories and novels to put them in.

The Digital Detective, Banking part 1

Banking on Naïveté

Readers and writers may be aware of many internet ploys attributed to Nigerians and occasionally Russians. One of the first I saw came in an eMail and read something like:

Hello, my name is Renaldo. I’m a Ukraine artist and I sell my works all over the world. Some customers want to pay by cheque or money order, which is expensive and difficult to cash here. I will pay you 10% if you can cash cheques and wire me 90%. Please?

Consider three possibilities:

1. It’s barely possible although unlikely the request is legitimate.
2. It’s a money laundering scheme.
3. It’s an outright scam to grab your money.

In the third outcome, the schemers arrange to have a number of checks sent, which you cash and forward the proceeds. Eventually you receive a large money order or draft drawn on a major bank. Your bank likes it, cashes it, and gives you the money, whereupon you forward 90%.

Two or three weeks later, your now angry banker calls you, demanding restitution for a bad money order. The forgery was so good, it not only fooled you, it fooled them, but by now the money’s in Asia or Africa and you’re stuck, having to repay your bank several thousand dollars.

This works in a similar way to an eBay / Craig’s List scam. You advertise an item for sale and the bid closes at $150. To your surprise, you receive a money order for $1500 followed by a panicky eMail, wherein the buyer claims their bank or post office made a typo and added an extra zero. Instead of returning the check, they say they trust your honesty and since they need the item you’re selling, they suggest you cash the money order and return the excess along with the item you sold.

All goes well until your bank belatedly discovers the money order is fraudulent. Not only is your precious item long gone, but you must repay your bank.

During the next few weeks, I’m going to write about bank and brokerage fraud.

How to Fly a Kite

Kiting was once a commonplace fraud where the perpetrator opens accounts in at least two separate banks, neither of which places a hold on checks. Indeed, kiting exploits the hold greedy banks place on checks, holds where they use your money for free. High-speed electronic banking and stiff penalties have made the crime less common now because many checks can be instantaneously verified.

Here is how traditional kiting works: Our perpetrator, whom we'll call James Whitcomb Wiley III of Beaver Meadows, Indiana (no relation to the real James Whitcomb Wiley III of Beaver Meadows, Indiana) establishes accounts at Frugal Savings & Loan and Penury Bank & Trust, with no money to speak of in either account. Still, our man Wiley wants $1000.

He goes to Frugal S&L and withdraws $1000, covering it with a simultaneous deposit of a check for $1000 drawn upon his Penury Bank account. He’s just kited his first check. An honest person would scurry over to Penury and deposit funds there before the flaky check arrives, but not Wiley.

Wiley intends to live in Beaver Meadows for a while, but his prospects of earning $1000 to reimburse Penury Bank remain elusive. So he writes a check drawn on Frugal S&L to deposit in Penury Bank– whereupon he kites his second check, and now Penury is waiting for Frugal's check to clear. Before the empty account can be discovered, he deposits a fresh but worthless Penury check into Frugal, and continues the cycle.

Theoretically, a diligent fraudster could continue this a long time. In times past, people have pulled it off for weeks, even months. However, such schemes are subject to human error and unforeseen events that eventually expose the kite and bring the party to a halt. Meanwhile, Mr. Wiley has probably moved on to another state, possibly opening an account with a check drawn upon Penury Bank & Trust.

A Bank's Back Office

At the bottom of your checks is a row of numbers and hyphens printed in a distinctive 'MICR' type style using special magnetic ink.

You’ll notice at least two groups of numbers. One group you’ll recognize as your account number. The group before it contains nine digits, which represents the bank’s routing number, unique to each institution. You may also find the check number and, after it’s returned from the bank, possibly the amount of the check, which it’s wise to verify.

Banks don’t require customers to use checks they provide, indeed, as the story ‘Swamped’ pointed out, you can write out a check on anything, even a paper napkin. Many people buy checks from a paper supplier, like those that advertise in the local ad sheets.

At the end of a business day, banks gather checks and deposits made during the day and checks received from federal clearing houses, which they feed through a MICR device. MICR (pronounced my’cur) stands for magnetic ink character recognition and the machine, a magnetic ink character reader, reads those numbers from checks and deposits slips into the computer.

Occasionally checks jam or the machine fails to read the numbers. An operator may glue a strip at the bottom or place the check in a glassine envelope and manually key the numbers with a MICR imprinter. If the clearing house sends a check to the wrong bank, it will be kicked out and sent back to be routed to the correct one. Experienced operators are used to this and handle flaws and flubs as a matter of course.

Here I've built background for next week, where I'll reveal the Endless Kite.

Cozy vs Traditional: Not a fight to the death, but please don’t say they’re not different

by Elizabeth Zelvin

In certain mystery circles, you can’t mention the definition of a cozy without opening a can of worms. The discussion can get a little, er, heated, if not squirmy. And woe betide anyone who calls a book a cozy to the author’s face, if the author does not herself (or himself) define the work as a cozy.

I am really, truly not using the term “cozy” pejoratively. The dozen or so cozy writers I know well are as committed to their craft as any writers I know. They’re also more successful than most of us who started out at about the same time, ten years ago or thereabouts. They have multiple series contracts, enough readers to make the New York Times paperback bestseller lists, and have received a number of major awards and nominations. However, “cozy” nowadays is a tightly defined category that does not apply to all traditional mysteries or even all amateur-sleuth whodunits.

The present-day cozy is not merely any mystery that’s not hardboiled. It’s not just one with an amateur-sleuth protagonist and one or more murders that take place within a limited circle of people known to one another. It’s not merely one that eschews gratuitous violence, explicit sex, and four-letter words. The quintessential cozy is the kind published by Berkley Prime Crime, which actually breaks out the categories of Culinary, Hobbies, and Pet Lovers on its mystery list. The titles run to puns and word play on the series theme. In addition to the story, readers are offered recipes, patterns, or some kind of household tips. Typically, the amateur sleuth is a woman, but early in the series, she begins a romance with a man in law enforcement—the investigating detective, sheriff, or chief of police. If they are adversaries rather than lovers, that makes them no different than the hero and heroine of a romance novel, who will probably get together in spite of, if not because of, the flying sparks.

I don’t write cozies. I write traditional mysteries, and I admit that I prefer reading traditional mysteries. My mysteries are character driven, and I’ve taken on some challenging and even controversial themes. Cozy characters grow over the course of a series, and there’s certainly an arc in their relationships and changes in how they live their lives. They have issues to deal with that might include illness, death, divorce, family conflict, and financial insecurity. But in cozies, there has to be some kind of cap on how bad things get or how controversial the themes can be.

I’m not saying cozy writers are too fastidious. Whatever the limits are, I believe they’re set by publishers’ perceptions of what readers of this kind of mystery want to read. I think writers of traditional mysteries have permission to dig a little deeper. Nor is their language censored. I no longer need to go to the barricades over the right to use the F word, but lately I’ve noticed characters in Berkley cozies limiting their expletives to “gosh” and “darn,” which makes them unrealistic for the 21st century that I live in.

In my mystery series, my main theme is alcoholism and recovery. That means it’s inevitable that such issues as drug addiction, domestic violence, and sexual abuse and trauma come up now and then. I also write about Jewish characters. So far, the theme of anti-Semitism has come up only in my historical stories set in 1492, when the Inquisition was in flower. But at any time, a character might take me down that road, and I don’t want any roadblocks in the way.

I don’t consider Agatha Christie my literary progenitor. I claim descent (I hope not too presumptuously) from Dorothy L. Sayers, who revolutionized the detective story when she turned Lord Peter Wimsey from a flat to a rounded, feeling character in the middle of her series. Some of the themes in her later novels that I’d call passionate are the exploration of feminism in Gaudy Night and how deeply she takes us, at the end of Busman’s Honeymoon, into how traumatic it is for Lord Peter to feel responsible to sending someone to the gallows.

Another terrific exemplar of the traditional mystery is Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne series. Now there’s an amateur sleuth, a clergywoman, who takes up with a law enforcement guy. But there’s nothing cozy about the difficulties they have to overcome to be together—including his marriage, her ethics, and their guilty feelings even when the barriers are removed, not to mention her deployment to Iraq and the trauma that she and her fellow soldiers bring back with them. There’s tremendous passion in that relationship as well as in the way Spencer-Fleming handles the material, such as environmental issues, around which she weaves her mystery plots. And they’re not the kind of stories that leave the reader hoping for recipes.