Do you know Thomas Perry? He writes mostly thrillers, and one critic described his work as "competence porn," meaning that we follow in great detail as a single man or woman outsmarts and when necessary outfights a whole regiment of villains.
I'm currently reading his newest title Murder Book and I want to discuss one scene. It consists of a bad guy on the phone with his boss, the even worse guy.
Bad Guy fills Boss in on what's been going on and in the course of doing so he explains part of the conspiracy in which they are engaged. Boss Man gets irritated.
"We know." the man said. "Remember the reason you're good at the details. You're a realtor, not a gangster. To hear you use slang like you were a Mafia boss from yesteryear I only feel weary despair."
My reaction to that was: Ooh. Nice expository dump.
The expository dump, alias info dump, is a problem that most fiction writers face sooner or later. In short, you need to explain some piece of backstory or plot to the readers without boring them to death.
The dump is sometimes known as the "As You Know, Bob" speech. As in:
"As you know, Bob, as accountants you and I are legally required to blah blah blah..."
Why is our character telling Bob something he clearly already knows? Because the reader doesn't know it.
But here's why I so admired Perry's way of dealing with the problem. The Bad Guy is actually attempting to flimflam the Boss, avoiding admitting that things have gone badly (because of the actions of the competence porn star who is the book's protagonist). He is using this extraneous information as a smoke screen.
In other words, the info dump has become an important element of the drama. Now, that's clever.
And by the way, the Boss's reply, quoted above, is an example of a different writerly technique: lampshade hanging. That is: Perry is smoothing over the rough spot by (paradoxically) calling it to the reader's attention.
I had a bit of an info dump problem in story I just sold to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. My Delgardo tales are set in 1958 and I had found a really cool historic fact from that time I wanted to slip in.
How do I include it without making it look like I'm showing off my research? I turned it into a vital clue, which only my clever beat poet detective would recognize. Seems to have worked.
By the way, I went to the ever-helpful website TV Tropes to see what they had to say about the info dump and they parsed it several different ways:
Infodump: A particularly long and wordy bit of exposition.
Mr. Exposition. A character whose only purpose is to provide the info.
Exposition Fairy. A recurring character whose job is always to, well, you know.
Exposition Already Covered. "You must find the Sacred Kumquat. If you fail--" "The world will end. Yeah, I get it."
Exposition Cut. "Well, that's a long story..." "Gosh," the newcomer said, after hours of discussion we won't bore you with. "It certainly was."
So, how do you deal with trips to the dump? And which ones bother you the most?
I'm sure I'm unique with this problem. While I searched for one thing, I got sidetracked. I distracted myself by reading about something else.
Some light research for a project led my browser to an article about ancient Greece. I clicked on it. There, the original work quickly became forgotten. I got pulled aside, musing about a question. The art of medicine has Hippocrates, their symbolic Greek forefather. But what about the practice of law?
To think about ancient Greece is to think about the written and spoken word. The Greeks had lawgivers. No single toga-clad figure, however, stands over the legal profession like Hippocrates. Most of my fellow lawyers likely couldn't claim an ancient Greek to whom we are heir. Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement. Since there is no standard pre-law curriculum, many of my brothers and sisters in the bar were liberal arts majors. We all likely have a smattering of ancient Greeks at the ready. If pressed, most would likely glom onto Socrates. The Socratic method, after all, is the standard pedagogical tool for most law schools.
But he was a teacher and philosopher and not really our legal ancestor.
Demosthenes, famous for his persuasive oratory, might be the candidate. You might remember the stories of him reciting verses with pebbles in his mouth to enhance his enunciation. Or speaking on the seashore, forcing himself to be heard over the roar of the waves.
Another contender is Themis. Originally the organizer of the communal affairs of humans, her ability to foresee the future got her promoted to one of the oracles at Delphi. She became the ancient Greek goddess of divine justice. Themis was not portrayed as blindfolded. As a seer, covering her eyes was unnecessary. Neither did she carry a sword because she represented common consent and not coercion. She has, however, largely been pushed aside by Iustitia, or Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice.
Iustitica, by the way, was originally not blindfolded either. She usually carried a double-edged sword, and her scales may date back to the Egyptian god, Maat.
I nominate as our standard bearer, Bias of Priene. He was renowned in ancient times as the wisest of all the Seven Sages of Greece. A skilled advocate, he famously represented only righteous defendants. He did so, the legends report, without charging a fee.
Vatican, Public Domain
An advocate up to his final days, one story of Bias of Priene has him arguing a cause on behalf of his client. After he finished speaking, Bias sat, leaned back, and rested his head on the chest of his grandson. When the advocate on the other side had finished his argument, the judges hearing the case sided with Bias. It was then discovered that he had died during the opposing counsel's argument.
Lest we think him naive, his most famous saying to come into our time is the simple epigram, "All people are wicked."
A model of wisdom, Bias recognized the wrong but crusaded for the right. He fought on behalf of the just cause to his dying breath. Bias of Priene deserves to have a better place in the lineage of justice than he currently occupies.
Perhaps it's the name.
Bias, the systematic deviation of results or inferences from truth, is a perceived enemy of justice.
Does the ancient Greek have anything to do with our modern word "bias," the term for a prejudice sewn into our contemporary legal codes and scientific journals? The rabbit hole I had started down just got deeper. But now I was engaged, so I plunged into it.
Does our current usage have anything to do with the ancient Greek?
Duncan Hunter, in the online British Medical Journal, repeats a story reported by Herodotus. Croesus, the ancient king of Lydia, planned warfare to expand his influence throughout Greece. He consulted with the wise Bias about the best way to deploy his warships against the Ionians. Bias, hoping to avoid the death and destruction of war, deliberately misled Croesus. He advised the king that the Ionians were preparing a land assault against Lydia. Croesus stopped building warships and instead turned his attention to developing his defenses. Bias later confessed that he had lied and honestly reported that the Ionians were also building warships. Croesus, instead of being angry, learned instead that the better course would be to make peace with the Ionians. Bias of Priene may have provided misinformation. Some may see an early example of a "Reporting Bias."
Etymonline, the online etymology dictionary, offers an alternative and more modern explanation. This one dates from the 16th Century. In the game of bowls, "bias" was, apparently, a technical term. It is related to balls made with a greater weight on one side. This caused them to roll not on a true line but instead to curve in one direction. The figurative use became the one-sided tendency of a mind to bend in a particular direction.
Bias of Priene should be more renowned as the law's Greek ancestor. He symbolizes both the good and the bad in the modern practice of law. He is forever associated with forceful advocacy exercised until the last breath. His name, however, also serves as a cautionary tale against the pull in an unjust direction. While he should be Hippocrates, he rests in relative obscurity, unknown to most.
Crime fiction writers might adopt him. The maxim, "All people are wicked," means that anyone might be a suspect.
One upon a time I was scammed, or rather American Express was. In my consulting days, a pair of cancelled flights kept me hostage at Chicago Airport for ten hours, which covered a couple of mealtimes. For one of those, I plunked down in their sit-down restaurant and partook. And was partaken without my knowledge.
The end-of-month credit card statement showed a charge that could have fed a family of twelve instead of not-so-little ol’ me. AmEx explained this was called a ‘waiter’s charge,’ literally so in my case. A waiter hands you a bill in a black leather folder. The diner casually tucks a credit card in the folder and the waiter carries it away. At this juncture, the fraud happens.
If the restaurant keeps a computerized tally, the waiter adds on an additional lobster and a hell of a tip. Without an ongoing account, a waiter simply adds in a dollar figure. In olden days, waiters might run two or three blank slips through the imprinter for later use. These days thanks to skimming devices, a waiter can mint a new card before you leave the premises.
Once a card is out-of-sight, waiters can do anything they wish.
As did a waitress in Minneapolis’ beloved Pannekoeken Huis. Two things had come together to draw my attention to a minor racket. Unlike my girlfriend whose sharp eye for cash register fiddles caught one in the middle of a famous theme park, I don’t have specialized training in these things. However, a conversation with a vice president of finance at the company I consulted for raised my awareness. After meals, he carefully perused the bill and credit card slip, commenting he’d find mistakes nearly half the time and went on to prove it.
Bad Taste
And so I found myself in the very restaurant where he’d enlightened me. Frankly, the waitress did little to avert attention to herself. In a Midwestern city where everyone is friendly, she was unusually hostile. Perhaps it was the result of a bad morning, but she acted distinctly sour. Thus when the check came and bearing in mind the VP’s admonition, I looked over the register’s paper tape and there it was… or in this case wasn’t. The line items didn’t match the inflated total.
Her scam took but a moment to unravel. The register tape provided the clue– the restaurant’s logo was missing at the top of the tape. She’d rung in a false item, rolled the register’s tape forward several inches and tore it off, and then rang in the real breakfast tab.
I brought it to the attention of the front-of-house manager. That trusting soul cheerfully waved off the discrepancy as a register glitch. Fine, not my problem, but the practiced moves of the waitress announced she’d done this many times. I did not encourage her by leaving a tip.
That wasn’t why he glanced at your derrière
Does your credit card have a tap ’n’ go icon? If so, it has a built-in bit of electronics called passive NFC… near field communications, a cousin of RFID. Your cell phone may have something similar, but is active NFC because it’s battery powered. They work on the same principal as store exit scanners that sense security tags still attached to the jacket you just bought.
Besides the likelihood of your butt mashing your phone, NFC is a major reason you shouldn’t carry your phone in your hip pocket. A passerby brushes her phone past your pocket and *snap* — she’s captured your information.
Sleight-of-Hand
Scams can happen other ways. You check out of your doctor’s office, or you pay at the window of that overpriced restaurant, or you’re enqueued at Wendy’s drive-thru window and your fuel gauge is running low as is the patience of the guy behind you who taps his horn for the third time but it’s not your fault because your salad isn’t ready and finally the server comes to the window and hands you a bag with a freckled girl’s face on it and says, “That will be $36.80,” and you realize for that kind of money you could have dined at Pannekoeken Huis with money left over but you dig through your purse and there’s your MasterCard that you hand over and a second later he hands it back followed by a receipt that you stuff in your purse and before the guy behind you can blast his horn again you pull forward and out of his way, yet when you get home you receive a text message that your credit card has hit its limit. What? How can that be? You should have at least fifty dollars to spare.
And there it is: Instead of $36.80, you were charged $96.80. Maybe the guy’s finger slipped ringing it up. But wait, there’s another $23 charge from the same place at the same time. That shouldn’t be possible. What happened?
When you handed over your card, you lost sight of it for an instant only. But it was enough time for the window guy to pass the card over a pocket skimmer or even a second NFC machine, a modern analogue of imprinting an extra credit card slip.
Universal Contactless Cards (NFC, RFID)
ATM : Access Thy Money
You may seen recent warnings about ATMs with inoperable card slots, glued shut according to articles. Nearby, a helpful guy who’s standing a respectable, unobtrusive distance behind you offers a suggestion. “You can tap your card.”
But of course you can. You thank the guy, boink the card over the symbol, stuff $200 in your purse, and nervously flee the scene to safety. Or so you think. The helpful guy, he moves in and empties your account.
When an ATM’s mechanical reader returns your card, it automatically logs you out of the system. Likewise in store transactions, once the clerk rings you out and you see the Thank You message on the screen, you’re once again disconnected from your account.
Surveys show at ATMs, tap ’n’ go customers often don’t manually log out of their accounts. Without a mechanism holding their card and releasing it as they sign out, clients fail to realize the connection to their account remains active and vulnerable. Please, log out.
No, my title's not referring to the old song by Fontella Bass and Bobby McClure (though I'm old enough to remember it). This is one of those columns that started out using one idea and ended up with another.
What I had intended to talk about today was the way we writers sometimes create a late draft of a story or novel and then, during the rewriting process, manage to edit it over and over again, to the point where our changes might be making it worse instead of better. (The trick, obviously, is to learn how to know when your story's as good as it can be . . . and then stop. It's not a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a case of "If it's fixed, don't keep tinkering with it.")
BUT, in the process of putting together that post about authors changing their stories for the worse, I got to thinking instead about the way some publishers have begun doing just that: changing the original works of authors like Mark Twain, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, and others--usually to conform to certain current views and standards.) And while researching that, I stumbled by accident onto what might be the craziest example I've ever seen of Messing Up a Good Thing. It involves not a short story or a novel but a movie I saw in the mid-60s, one that later became a classic. In fact, it introduced the film subgenre known as the Spaghetti Western.
The movie was A Fistful of Dollars, a low-budget Italian production shot in Spain and starring a not-yet-famous actor named Clint Eastwood, who has said in interviews that he took the part mostly to get a paid vacation to Europe. In the story, a mysterious stranger rides into a Mexican town controlled by two ruthless criminal families and winds up pitting one against the other in order to steal money from both. As a result he "cleans up" the town and saves a number of its citizens (the few he hasn't shot), but that's just a byproduct; mostly, he's an antiheroic loner looking out for no one but himself.
As things turned out, the resulting film defied all odds. Even though the Italian director spoke no English and the American lead actor spoke no Italian, the movie was a mega-hit, both in the U.S. and abroad, and about ten years later it was aired on network TV here in the States. But in their infinite wisdom, the executives at ABC decided to create and add a five-minute "prologue" to the movie, using a different director, different actors, etc., in order to explain the violence and address those pesky morality issues. In their minds, the protagonist needed a backstory that provided a good reason to justify the things he later did.
To my knowledge, this edited version was broadcast and seen only once, in 1975 (some say '77, but it was '75), and if you weren't old enough or unfortunate enough to see it firsthand, here's a summary of the prologue. It features a meeting between a prison warden, played by the great Harry Dean Stanton, and a poncho-clad, cigar-smoking inmate who's seen only from the rear. The faceless convict, who never says a word during the scene, is offered a pardon if he'll go to a town called San Miguel and get rid of its two notorious gangs in any way he can, and at the end of the meeting he's given his gun and a horse and sent away on his probably-suicidal assignment.
The point is, the added scene is not only needless, it's poorly made and ridiculous in every way. Even seen from behind, the inmate is obviously a different actor from the story's hero, though there are two or three quick cutaway close-ups of Eastwood's squinting eyes, and there are other goofs as well: the convict's poncho is too long, his hat's too big, and he's given a horse and a long-barreled revolver although the real Eastwood is seen ten minutes later riding a mule and using a shorter-barreled revolver. All the scene did, besides making the director look dumb, is make the protagonist less mysterious and less appealing. One of the comments on the YouTube video says (and it's right) that this added prologue looked more like a skit from Saturday Night Live.
Anyhow, here's the video. which precedes the opening credits of the movie. Judge for yourself.
As for this kind of after-the-fact interference, I believe one of the networks did something similar when On Her Majesty's Secret Service first aired on TV years ago, and I 've heard about several other cases. And bookwise, there are of course the ongoing efforts to sanitize and censor published fictional works of deceased authors. Personally, I've experienced this type of destructive meddling only on a very small scale, when certain magazine editors removed things from or added things to my short-story manuscripts that wound up making them (in my opinion) less effective, but that is their right and those cases are rare. Most editors make things better, not worse.
What do you think of all this? Can you remember instances of it, on either the screen or the page? If it's happened to you or to others you know, on any scale, please let me know in the comments section below.
Anyway, that's that. I apologize for getting sidetracked from my original mission--but I found this particular movie example fascinating. I do plan to do a column soon about overwriting-to-the-point-of-destroying an otherwise good story, because it's something I've done and I'm sure others have done also. But making a good story worse seems even more terrible when someone else steps in and does it for you.
On the scifi side, I once had a newsletter serialized novel beta read before putting it out as a book. I wrote the thing in pieces over two years, intending it to be a novella I could release as a PDF for that author name's newsletter. Now betas are the poor man's editor. Usually, as with the Holland Bay books, it's a writer who gets the type of story I'm writing. Once in a while, though, you get one with an axe to grind. Like one had a tantrum because a book had too much American stuff in it. Like tea bags. (I asked a British friend and a Japanese writer. They found this hilarious and asked who steeped their tea anymore in a pandemic-era world. Answer: Not many.) On this novel, though, I have one planet patterning itself after present-day China without the military pretensions. The note I got back: You shouldn't impose your politics on the reader.
I kindly sent back a note stating that was how one corner of my fictional world did things. Other areas did not. Then I mentioned another planet being a libertarian paradise. Same comment. I less politely said, "You can't call me both, especially in the same chapter." I suspect my beta reader suffered from a delusion many readers do: The attitudes and opinions of the characters are those of the author, not the author getting into the heads of his or her creations.
Theodore Sturgeon called these people morons. I'll be a little more charitable and call them lazy.
But I'm thinking moron.
Put simply, a writer's job is to create characters who live and breathe. Some of them have vices. I've written alcoholics. You can't go through life without knowing a few addicts. I've written cheaters. I've written thieves. I don't do racists well because I have to dumb myself down for them. That does not mean I'm an addict, a thief, or a cheater. But I not only have to write these people, I have to believably write them.
One reviewer pointed out the corruption in both Holland Bay and The Dogs of Beaumont Heights. but when I wrote them, I didn't think of it as that. Oh, Deputy Chief Roberts, Linc, and Ralph Smithers are corrupt as hell. I just didn't think about that. I wrote them as the heroes in their own dramas. Smithers's world is crumbling and rage eats him alive from inside. Linc thinks it's his turn to be on top. Roberts believes he's been passed over for chief too many times.
One thing the Holland Bay books don't feature that I can't say about Nick Kepler or my scifi is there is no "me" in the story. While I'm not really an ex-cop turned insurance investigator or a wealthy heiress's runaway son, Nick Kepler and JT Austin are my conduits into those series. But the closest would be Jessica Branson in the Holland Bay books. While hers is the easiest head for me to inhabit, she is most definitely not me.
"Wait a minute. Didn't you just do two articles about basing characters on real people being bad?"
Yep. And I stand by those articles. Conan Doyle is clearly Watson, whom Holmes finds smarter than
CC 2009 Mark Coggins
Doyle wrote him. Lew Archer is Ross MacDonald, such a thin version of the author that he disappears if he turns sideways. Then there's that other Santa Teresa detective, Kinsey Millhonne. Sue Grafton once said Kinsey is "moi had I not gotten married."
Of course, it's dangerous for an author to project oneself into a story. As I said before, the characters' opinions and attitudes are not those. Some, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, can turn into what's known as a Mary Sue, an idealized version of the author.
So the protag is not the author. Until he or she says they are.
So I took a pic of this last week during a birthday trip to the SouthWest:
For those of you not familiar with this particular formation, it is the famous Calico Hills, which form the heart of the box canyon exhibit known as Red Rocks Canyon. It’s administered by the Bureau of Land Management, not either the National Parks or Forest Service, and at a mere 15 minute drive from downtown Las Vegas, it’s one of the best kept secrets in the western hemisphere. And while there are for many rock formations and trails worth your time at Red Rock, the Calico Hills themselves stand out for having served as the setting in countless movies. Lots of fake gun fights on those clay and sandstone hills.
Now, what I wrote above could be construed as a "description" of the Calico Hills, although it's light on physical description and heavy on associations (historical, bureaucratic, etc.). A physical description would of course have more details about what the subject matter looked like, etc., rather than who ran it, how close it is to Vegas, and so on.
Of course the requirements of good description arise from the needs of the story itself. If it's a think piece about the many iterations of the notion of "description," clinical and bureaucratic lend themselves well to it. If the writer of the piece is attempting to convey how just viewing the subject of the description could move him to uncharacteristic tears, then obvious the esoteric, the mystical, the mythopoetic. Like this piece:
The walls of the cañon, 2,500 feet high, are of marble, of many beautiful colors, often polished below by the waves…. As this great bed forms a distinctive feature of the cañon, we call it Marble Cañon.
written in an attempt to convey the impact of this to readers back East:
The words, of course, are those of John Wesley Powell, the intrepid leader of the first government expedition to navigate the length of the Grand Canyon. The pics are mine.
As I have mulled the sheer utility of different types of opinion, how they work and why they frequently don't, I have found myself asking, now, more than ever, what is the point of description? And by point I mean, what is its role, what is its intent, what is the desired outcome of a literarily well described person place or thing?
How much do we as the readers need to know about the face of Bartleby, the Scrivener, in order to advance the plots of the stories in which he appears? The same can be (and shall be) asked of Gatsby's (in)famous East and West Egg? Arthur's Camelot? Kublai Khan's Xanadu?
The answers may surprise you. I intend to dig into several of these individual pieces of the Literary Canon (and others as well). If you have a famous literary character/setting you would like seeing tossed in to the mix for a literary "check up," drop that name into the comments section below.
I'll also add my own "villains place," and we can pursue further discussion from there.
I
bought a drum kit the year before last.
I’ve always wanted one, and never took the plunge. I should specify that this isn’t a full
acoustic set, but an amplified electric, which takes up less space, and can be
played through headsets, so you’re the only one who hears it, and you don’t
drive everybody else nuts.
I got
strong-armed into taking up clarinet, for band, when I was thirteen or
thereabouts, and mercifully got shut of it when I shipped off for boarding
school a couple of years later – the clarinet didn’t follow.That’s when I started listening to jazz, too,
and fell for the more muscular woodwinds, alto and tenor sax, Cannonball
Adderley and John Coltrane and Stan Getz.Keyboard guys, McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans on piano, Jimmy Smith on the
organ.And always, the percussive,
insistent drive of the drummers.
Joe
Morello, behind the Brubeck quarter.
Sly, syncopated, disciplined.
Elvin Jones, the power behind Coltrane and his quartet, savage and propulsive, predatory, leaning into it, ever
on the attack. Bobby Moses, loose-limbed
and mischievous, often in counterpoint or reflection, his drum fills an echo
and a riff off Gary Burton’s blur of mallet strokes on vibes – and aren’t vibes
themselves considered a percussion
instrument?
The
word timpani derives from the Greek, to hit,
and drums are hit with sticks, mallets, brushes, or bare hands.There’s something clearly elemental about
drums, every culture has them, and they’re clearly physical, badda-boom.
They
make noise. They’re fun.
Not
too long ago, I got turned on to a drum documentary, Count Me In (in fact, it’s what inspired me to finally buy myself
my own drum set).It’s hugely
entertaining, if only for the enthusiasm and high spirits of everybody involved
in making it, but it interleaves a lot of archival footage, so you get Joe
Morello and Elvin Jones, along with Art Blakey, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, and Max
Roach – and then you get Ringo Starr
and Ginger Baker and Charlie Watts and Keith Moon and John Bonham, among
others, for show and tell about
influences and so forth.It’s
mesmerizing.There’s a terrific moment
with Emily Dolan Davies where she talks about how physically cathartic it is,
how liberating, to just smash the
skins.And there you have it.It’s the animal, atavistic energy.Yes, there’s a Zen to it.Yes, technique comes with practice, just like
anything.But the BAM BAM BAM.It’s primal, and boy, is it satisfying!
I
don’t take a break from my desk and sit down at the drums to be contemplative,
in other words.I don’t use it to work
out my aggressions, either.I do it to
get lost, in rhythm, in patterns, in sound.I like the tom-toms better than the snare, for one thing, and you can
change the sound mix, and customize your kit, marimbas and cowbells.I’ll never have the frontal attack of Elvin
Jones, or the crisp delivery of Joe Morello, or for sheer exuberance, Jeff
Porcaro’s half-time shuffle on Rosanna,
but I play along.And in truth, it can
be relaxing or strenuous, depending on whether you’re at the top of your lungs,
in your headsets.
I don’t often write about the genesis of my stories because I often don’t know or don’t remember much about how they came to be. My stories don’t exist, and then they do.
On the other hand, “Denim Mining” (scheduled for publication in the May/June issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine), has a distinct, three-part path from concept to finished story.
THE BEGINNING
In early 2019, I read several articles about the value of vintage blue jeans—especially Levi’s—and how collectors scour abandoned farms and mines looking for denim treasure. Particularly significant finds can be worth several thousand dollars, as CNN reports in an October 13, 2022, article about a pair of 19th century Levi’s found in a mine shaft that sold for $87,000. Silver mines in Arizona, California, and Nevada seem to be particularly good locations to find vintage Levi’s. I printed hardcopies of some of the articles and made a few notes about a possible story, and stuck everything into a file folder.
Not long after that, I read some articles about silver mining in Texas, and was fascinated to learn that Franciscan friars discovered and operated several silver mines near El Paso, Texas, around 1860, concealing the mines when they feared they would lose control of them to the Jesuits, and that several silver mines operated in Texas well into the 1950s and sporadically since then. Of particular interest was Jim Bowie’s lost silver mine near Menard, Texas, which legend says may contain a billion dollars’ worth of silver.
So, I began writing a story about two men—one an assistant professor of Texas history who believes he has identified the locations of several abandoned and forgotten Texas silver mines—who go in search of vintage denim.
THE MIDDLE
Around this time, Bouchercon announced the theme of the 2019 anthology, Denim, Diamonds and Death. So, I wondered what might happen if my denim-mining duo stumbled upon a cache of diamonds in one of the silver mines. I made more notes and wrote more bits and pieces of a story, and then...nothing. I returned to the story repeatedly, well past the deadline for the Bouchercon anthology. I figured out how the diamonds came to be in the mine, and I sort of knew what I wanted to happen, but the story wasn’t progressing. It had no ending.
THE END
I rarely discuss stories-in-progress with other writers, but mid-summer 2020, I posted something here about having a few stories that had hit brick walls. Fellow SleuthSayer Leigh Lundin offered to look at one of them, and I took him up on his offer. He read what I had written and made several suggestions—an important one having to do with weapons of the past—that broke down the wall and allowed me to bring “Denim Mining” to a satisfying conclusion.
One interesting note is how I structured this story. Most of my stories are linear, with one event happening after the other. “Denim Mining,” though, alternates between the past and the present. The scenes from the past tell the story of how the diamonds wound up in the mine while the scenes in the present tell the story of how the diamonds are discovered. In a sense, “Denim Mining” is two separate stories woven together, but what happens in the past clearly impacts what happens in the present.
For those of you who like to track these kinds of stats: “Denim Mining” was submitted to AHMM on 8/20/20, accepted 7/29/21, and will be published in the May/June 2023 issue.
Released yesterday: More Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties (Down & Out Books), the sequel to last year’s Groovy Gumshoes. This rollicking romp through the sixties features stories by Michael Chandos, Wil A. Emerson, Jeff Esterholm, John M. Floyd, Nils Gilbertson, Wendy Harrison, Dave H. Hendrickson, gay toltl kinman, Lynn Maples, Jarrett Mazza, John McFetridge, Robert Petyo, Graham Powell, Bev Vincent, Joseph S. Walker, Stacy Woodson. If you haven’t already read the first volume, why not order both?
Playwrights
see their job as delving into the most fraught and tragic aspects of life.
Ever since Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, they have mostly achieved
this by focusing on the epicenter of human experience.
The family.
In
modern times, we have Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Tennessee Williams,
Eugene O’Neil and Arthur Miller, to name a few.
Their dominant subjects could have been war, politics, farming, urban
development, ballet, the internal combustion engine, snack foods – but what did they focus on? The family. That oft paraphrased quote from
Willy Sutton applies here. If you want
drama, go to where it’s most plentiful.
One
of my favorite cartoon captions reads, “I’ve decided to run for office so I can
spend less time with my family.”
I think
everything that’s ever been written about families is true. The bonds, the love, the mutual support, the
enrichment, home cooking and tag football.
It’s also the crucible of selfishness, brutality, oppression, rape,
sadism and deprivation. The best and the
worst.
Politicians
who campaign on the first, neglect to point out the second, for good
reasons.
But this contributes to a norm
within the general culture that declares the family as the highest achievable
constituent of the social order, when in fact, it’s often the most
degraded. The finest playwrights in
history have pointed this out, though you won’t ever find a passage from Eugene
O’Neil in the State of the Union Address.
Despite
its shortcomings, few would argue that a healthy, love-filled traditional
family is a priceless thing.
The harm is
in denigrating other forms of intimate arrangements, or classifying them as
sup-par. Military units in combat zones,
successful athletic teams, long-surviving rock bands and AA meetings know this
not to be true. As do countless same-sex
families and collections of vagabonds who fall in together and never
leave. Often these groupings are
bulwarks against what was missing in the traditional family, and those involved
are generally grateful for it.
Photo: My Knopf family, circa 1890s. Great grandfather lower right, great-great grandfather next to him. Clearly a fun-loving bunch of folks.
Blood
is indeed thicker than water, but often diluted into thin gruel.
Even so, conventional family is nearly irresistible
in great part because of biological imperatives. Winston Churchill was utterly neglected by
his parents, but never once expressed a single word of criticism. This is why abused children often want to be
returned to their family perpetrators, and cops chasing escaped prisoners first
check the addresses of their moms and dads.
So it takes some mighty forces to
cleave these attachments, thus the power of countless novels and plays.
And
yet, who but our biographers and creative writers will date the launch of a successful
life to the moment their heroes left home?
Huck Finn’s real father was nothing if not an evil scoundrel, from whom Huck
escapes into a relationship with a surrogate father not even of the same race,
and certainly not social standing, even for a hardscrabble white kid like Huck. Huck also flees from other, wealthier family structures
that threaten his freedom and personal sense of self. Which family values was Mark Twain celebrating here?
A completely unscientific examination of the family lives of mystery novel
protagonists would reveal a litany of sadness and disfunction that would make
Freud hang up his cigar and examination couch.
Most are alcoholics or recovering alcoholics, few are not divorced with
estranged children, usually daughters.
Parents are rarely mentioned, unless they’re abusive, in nursing homes
or dead at a young age. Siblings are
usually no good, or too good, cousins get the hero in trouble with the mob, or
worse, a fair percentage have been the victims of a serial killer or an
unsolved disappearance. Can an uncle be
anything other than a flaming screwball or picaresque bon vivant?
Mystery
writers are no different from playwrights.
They go to where the best material is just sitting there waiting for
exploitation.
Literature
postulates that our blood relatives get the first claim on our hearts, but that
title is revocable, even if persistently haunting our moods and dreams. Like inherited wealth, it can assure
generations of comfort and security, or be squandered by the reckless, cruel, vindictive
and ungrateful.
During my late-night-I-just-cannot-sleep internet wanderings I stumbled upon a surprising fact: koalas have fingerprints.
Well, that changed everything. I went from cannot-sleep to must-not-sleep. My childhood stuffy was a koala so I have a special attachment to these adorably cute fur-balls and, although my stuffy is long gone, this exactly how I picture her.
Armed with my trusty computer, I started grilling the internet for information. Here is how that conversation went:
Why do koalas have fingerprints?
The answer appeared to be, ‘back up a bit, Mary, because we first need to ask why do any animals - including humans - have fingerprints?’ “what would make fingerprints useful from an evolutionary standpoint?…while fingerprints may not build friction on their own, they may help maintain grip by working in conjunction with sweat glands… And fingerprints may also provide crucial sensitivity in our fingertips.”
So why are koalas the only non-primate with fingerprints?
“Koalas are famously picky eaters who seek out eucalyptus leaves of a specific age… koala fingerprints must have originated as an adaptation to this task…the friction and sensitivity fingerprints afford may help them simultaneously hang onto trees and do the delicate work of picking particular leaves and discarding others—but hopefully not near a crime scene.”
This led me to an intriguing question: can koala prints mess up a crime scene?
“Oddly enough, the fingerprints of koalas are nearly identical to human beings, and even under a microscope, they are basically impossible to tell apart. The shape, size and ridge patterns are bizarrely identical, even moreso than the similarities between primate and human fingerprints. However, while human beings have “dermal ridges” on their entire fingers and across their palms, koalas only have fingerprints on the tips of their fingers, where the majority of their gripping force occurs.”
A visual on that:
I simply couldn’t believe that they can be mistaken for human even on close inspection. But the internet continued relentlessly on this path:
“The loopy whirling ridges on koala fingers can not be distinguished from humans, even after a detailed microscope analysis. Koala fingerprints resemblance is even closer than the fingerprints of close human relatives such as chimps and gorillas.”
I remained unrepentantly sceptical and searched till I found this from Chantel Tattoli, a freelance journalist researching fingerprinting.
“In her research, she came across media reports of koala prints fooling Australian crime scene investigators. However, a NSW fingerprint expert told her the reports had been exaggerated.
"Anybody who is really a specialist in fingerprints can read the difference," Tattoli said.”
Since this is the only mention I found of koala fingerprints not being able to fool experts, I was sceptical of this as well.
What about primates? Their fingerprints aren’t as close to human as koalas, but are they similar?
“Gathering dust in police files is a dossier containing the fingerprints of the most unlikely criminal gang - half a dozen chimpanzees and a pair of orang-utans.
Their dabs were taken during police raids at the Ape House at London Zoo and at Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire. The operation, by fingerprint experts from Hertfordshire police, took place in 1975 at a time when there was growing concern over unsolved crimes. It concluded that chimp dabs looked exactly the same as ours, but did not link them to any specific offence.”
My late night conversations with the internet led to another conversation with my imagination - and hopefully yours as well: is there anything useful in this for a mystery writer? Maybe fingerprints at a crime scene of a koala or even a primate that baffle investigators? More believable if they’re partials? The problem is why would a koala be at a crime scene in the first place, because they’re law-abiding and not prone to fits of murderous rage? This character analysis comes from a close relationship with my childhood stuffy. Let’s assume the koala is innocent. Please. Maybe if the story is set in Australia or in a zoo, koala fingerprints could be found at the crime scene.
A personal Saturday Night Live favorite is "What Up with That?" The sketch features Kenan Thompson as a flamboyant BET talk show host unable to stick to his already out-there format. This loveable pile of silliness is becoming vintage, having appeared not once but twelve times since 2009. On paper, the skit shouldn't have worked even once. On stage, it keeps me grinning, and this can teach something about writing funny stuff.
Yes, twelve times. No one can wear out a successful skit like SNL. If an idea catches fire, each next outing--and they'll come often--clings to the original set-up. "What Up with That" is no exception--with a sub-exception I'll get back to later.
The "What Up with That" formula goes like so:
A hype man announcer (various cast members) introduces host Diondre Cole (Thompson) and three celebrity guests. The hype man says we'll tackle the events of the day...with soul.
Diondre breaks into the rousing theme song and keeps at it, crowding the camera and immediately undercutting any sense we'll be tackling serious topics. His house band includes a Kenny G knock-off (Giuseppe, played by Fred Armisen), back-up singers Pippa and Poppy (various cast members), and a beat boy forever busting the Running Man (Vance, played by Jason Sudeikis).
Diondre finally remembers to start the show. It doesn't take. He loses focus and relaunches the theme, ever more in gospel style.
An exhausted but beaming Diondre gets around to his guests. Legit celebrities, too. The third guest, until 2021 anyway, is invariably Lindsay Buckingham (Bill Hader). The bit goes that Buckingham has been booked, bumped, and re-booked on every show for twelve years--only again and again to get bumped for time.
No sooner does Guest #1 start plugging their stuff than the house drummer lures Diondre back into yet more theme song. Diondre brings out random freaky associates, including disco flutists and Europop acts and a sexed-up banjo player. The big number devolves into a mini-carnival.
Predictably, Diondre runs out of time before getting back to his guests. Buckingham goes through the stages of irritation to good sport acceptance of yet another bumping.
The show closes to--wait for it--Deondre and his whole shebang grooving on the theme music.
Summarizing this gleeful mess doesn't do it justice. Here are a few prime examples:
SNL almost didn't run that first "What Up with That." Not everyone likes their humor this over the top. Hell, Diondre sails over any top and up past the stratosphere. Some folks may laugh, and some folks may change the channel. Diondre's lesson one for humor writers: Funny to me may not be funny to you. Accept that and plow toward your north star.
Which Thompson did. The skit was his idea, and he sold it to the SNL doubters. Thompson saw something the writers missed. Thompson saw Diondre would pop if only the actor fully committed. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Thompson explained how he understood Diondre Cole and what must've been his failed preacher backstory. Some part of Diondre might really want to talk issues. He won't because he just can't. He's there to put on his kind of extravaganza. The lesson here is, if you're going to go there on a character, go all the way. A half-hearted Diondre flops royally.
Thompson has the skills to bring Diondre alive. He still needs a weird world to thrive inside. Smartly, the template surrounds him with complementary characters. The band's tireless groove echoes his endearing obsessions. The volume and ridiculousness of his walk-ons suggest his entourage is a non-stop spectacle. For a counterpoint, the guests are usually name actors or public figures playing themselves--and playing it straight. Their bewilderment of Diondre hogging the air time grounds the silliness.
I mentioned a sub-exception earlier. This skit did wear thin as SNL went to the "What Up with That" well a ton. I've never gotten tired of it, though, to include just now rewatching on YouTube. What keeps me laughing isn't that Diondre wastes the entire show rehashing his theme. It's how Diondre wastes it, how he can't help but be egged into it. Diondre can't stop, won't stop, and even has those walk-on interruptions ready off-stage to amp up the party.
And look, I've run out of word count.
We'll wrap with my main humor takeaway. I spent 700 words parsing through comic dynamics--and I did not make you laugh. Nothing kills humor like explanation. "What Up with That" never bothers to explain itself. The skit doubles and triples down on the premise, constantly asking but never answering the very question Diondre's spectacle presents: What is up with that, anyway?
I’ll bet the last time you wanted to get some suggestions for a product you planned to buy, you hopped online and searched for something like: “Best vacuum cleaners for people with pets,” “Best sugar-free bacon,” “Best electric cars,” or “Best reciprocating saws.” Don’t laugh: these are actual searches I’ve performed in recent months. If you’re an English speaker, when you’re doing this kind of search it just seems natural to stick the word “best” at the beginning of the sentence. Each time, the web rewarded me with not one but multiple pages offering capsule reviews of products I might want to consider. The quality of those reviews (and the writing) was all over the map, but at least they highlighted a lot of different brands and items that I would never have known about.
You could do the same with books, but I suspect many people interested in finding books to read a) browse a bookstore or library, b) ask friends and fellow book club members, c) mine book reviews, or d) pop over to a certain gigantic online retailer and look at the books that site’s faceless recommendation engine suggested for them.
A new site called Shepherd.com skips the recommendation engine in favor of recommendations by creators of fiction and nonfiction alike. Shepherd often (but not always) employs the same “best” nomenclature that came naturally to me when I was thinking of making that ill-advised bacon-and-Sawzall run with my dog. More than 7,000 writers have already contributed lists to Shepherd on such topics as “Best books about the Battle of the Bulge,”“Best books about the Dalai Lama,” and “the best mysteries that let you explore major cities of Italy.” Shepherd currently has more than 20,000 nonfiction and 16,000 fiction titles in its system, and is growing daily.
I first learned about the site when its creator, Ben Fox, contacted my wife to contribute a list on one of her areas of expertise, “Best books about the Manhattan Project.” Ben is an American entrepreneur who lives with his young family in Portugal. He’s a data geek and voracious reader. How voracious? When I asked, he sent me a spreadsheet listing the number the books he’s read since 2010, categorized by fun books and serious books, and converted to percentages. In this way, I learned that his most recent high-water reading year was 2020, during which he consumed 193 books, 94 percent of them for pleasure. Sure, Covid lockdowns in Europe no doubt had something to do with his pace, but his personal book consumption has hit triple-digit territory for the last 13 years!
He started the website by focusing on nonfiction titles because, he says, people actively search on Google for nonfiction topics. He has since branched out into fiction, with an emphasis on genre fiction.
The format is simple. Authors recommend five books by other authors on a topic that is germane to their expertise. At the top of that list, they’re allowed to include a sixth book—one of their own that aligns with the topic—and their bio, links to their socials, and their website. As each list enters Shepherd’s system, authors and books begin cross-pollinating. My wife’s books were recommended by other authors, and eventually there’s a rich well of recommendations that readers can investigate: “Oh, Denise wrote that book about WWII that I was interested in. But now I see that other writers have recommended her book on Thanksgiving. I gotta check that out.” The more people in the system, the deeper that interconnectivity becomes. As each writer contributes a list of five books, Ben contacts the authors of those five books and asks if they would consider contributing a list as well.
My wife and I were early adopters, so we routinely get emails from writers asking us if Shepherd is some kind of scam, to which I always respond no. The one catch is that Shepherd doesn’t pay authors for these capsule reviews. That’s a turnoff for many, but if you’ve ever launched a book, you know that publishers often encourage you to write reams of blog posts, articles, Q&As, and op-eds for news organizations and other websites. These are almost always written for zero payment, for sites that are often of dubious quality. Writers do it because we gotta promote, gotta promote, gotta promote.
In Shepherd’s case, at least the site is helping sell books. Ben proved this to me once in a Zoom call in which he shared his screen and showed us how he could track just how many clicks on a book title had resulted in a sale. Right now the site gets about 14,000 visitors a day, about 400,000 a month in good months. The goal is to hit 1 million a month in 2023. The site supports itself on ads and affiliate link payments from that online behemoth retailer I referred to earlier, andBookshop.org. If a book of yours sells, you and Shepherd both make money.
Currently any author of a book can submit a list. But there are some rules. You do have to contact them first and pitch the idea. (See the author site here.) If you’re writing a book series, you can only promote the first one in your series. You have to stick to Shepherd’s format and guidelines, which they’ll help you do.
Ben believes that when it comes to books, a recommendation from a human—especially an author—carries more weight than a rec generated by an algorithm. Can’t say I disagree.
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