Bouchercon takeaways: being a successful panelist

Like some of you reading this, I recently attended this year's Bouchercon, which is touted as the world's largest mystery convention. It's held in a different city each year. This year, approximately 1,700 crime/mystery readers and writers converged in San Diego, where--among other things--we participated in and attended panels devoted to crime fiction. 

I like panels. I like learning new things and finding new-to-me authors whose books I'm excited to read. I probably attend more panels on average than many other people do at conventions like this. Some people actually leave the convention hotel to tour the city! Me, wherever we go, I attend the panels. This is partly a byproduct of having been the program chair of Malice Domestic from 2008 - 2014. If you live and breathe panels for as long as I did, you get attached and you like going to ones that sound good. Of course, I became program chair because I loved going to panels and thought I could do a good job at creating and scheduling them, so I guess this is a chicken-or-the-egg situation. But I digress.

Bouchercon started on Wednesday afternoon this year instead of the usual Thursday morning. The extra half day of panels really made a difference. It made the convention seemed less rushed. It enabled more authors to be on panels. It gave attendees more chance to see panels on topics they were especially interested in because there often was more than one panel on a similar topic. For instance, this year they had several panels devoted to short stories, to which I say: two thumbs up.

This is all a lead-up to say that I attended a lot of panels at Bouchercon, and I noted some problems occurring in panel after panel after panel. The biggest one: too many panelists far too often do not speak into the microphone. That makes it difficult for people in the audience to hear you or hear you clearly. So, for future reference, here are my handy dandy tips for being a successful panelist:

• 
  Speak into the microphone. Either move the microphone so it is CLOSE to your lips or EVERY TIME you speak lean forward so it's close to your lips. If the mic is sitting in the middle of the table and you're sitting with good posture, chances are your mic is a foot away. That's too far. It will not pick up what you're saying well. Pretend the mic is your high school crush. Get up close and personal. A couple of inches between mouth and mic is about right.
  
  
• Speak to the audience. Look to the front. When you do that, you have a much better chance of speaking into the microphone. I can't tell you how many times panelists turned their head, talking to their panel moderator or fellow panelists when answering a question. When they did that, their lips were not near their mic. I understand the inclination to want to look at the person you're responding to, but this is not a conversation between two friends. Think of the moderator as a stand-in for the audience. Look at the moderator if you like when the question is posed, but then look to the audience when you answer. They're the ones who chose this panel to hear what you have to say. Make it easy for them.

• 

  Image by rawpixel.com

• If you're considering standing your book up on the table during the panel so audience members can see it, make sure it is not a hindrance to the audience seeing your face. If a book is a short mass market paperback, it probably won't block you. If it's a hardback, it very well might. And if you set your book on a little holder, the chances are even greater you'll be blocked by your book. So, before the panel starts, set your book up and have a friend sit in various spots in the audience and let you know if you're visible. If your book is blocking you from any spots in the audience, then I would hold it up while you are being introduced and then set it down. You might think you don't care if the audience can see you, that you want your book to be seen. But as an audience member, I beg to differ. It can be hard to connect with an author if I'm annoyed that I can't see them, no matter what they say or how charming they are. Think of the audience as your annoying relative who brushed your hair from your eyes when you were a kid. Bubby, we want to see your face.

• When an audience member asks a question, repeat it before answering it. This is a moderator responsibility, but sometimes questions are posed directly to a particular panelist, and the panelist will jump in to answer. If you do, try to remember to restate the question first (speaking into the mic) so everyone in the audience can hear it. I know it can be easy to forget to do this. I'm guilty of it myself. All we can do is try our best to remember.

• The best panels I attend often have conversations between the panelists. Rather than having a question posed and each panelist answer it down the line, saying their piece and waiting quietly until the next question is posed, see if you have something to add to what other panelists say. Engage in conversation.You'll probably end up with more interesting and less canned answers. (But don't talk too much. If you are talking twice as long or twice as often as anyone else, it will be noticed by the audience members and not in a good way.)
  

  

  Thanks to photographer
  John Thomas Bychowski.

  
  

I hope to see (and hear) you at Bouchercon next fall in Nashville (and Malice Domestic next spring in North Bethesda, Maryland, as usual). 

And before I go, a little BSP: I was delighted to win the Anthony Award for Best Short Story of 2022 at Bouchercon for "Beauty and the Beyotch," originally published in issue 29 of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. Thanks to the magazine's editor, Carla Coupe, who helped make the story better.

What Is A Hack

The answer, like the answer to so many questions, depends on how old you are. If you were born before the Flood, or even before the War (what Flood? what War? see what I mean?), a hack is a New York taxi cab. If you're a Boomer, a hack is an uninspired writer, for example, a journalist, who churns out derivative or formulaic drivel without inspiration, passion, or creativity. If you're a millennial, it's an illegal but brilliant incursion into the best guarded secrets of cyberspace. If you're Gen Z, apparently, a "hack" can be anything.

Because I was born before the Flood (okay, before the start of the Baby Boom), I remember the old game "coffeepot," in which you replaced any chosen word in a sentence with "coffeepot" and the other players had to guess from context what you were talking about. I also read Alice in Wonderland, in which Humpty Dumpty says, "There's glory for you!" He explains to Alice that when he says it, glory means, "there's a nice knock-down argument for you," because "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean."

If I thought that Gen Z were emulating Humpty Dumpty, I'd have no quarrel with them.

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "Which is to be master---that's all...They've a temper, some of them---particularly, verbs, they're the proudest---adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs---however, I can manage the whole lot!"

I doubt the Gen Zers who use "hack" to coffeepot language can explain what Humpty Dumpty means. I've seen a video of an "omelet hack" displayed on the wall of my local subway station. An article in the Harvard Crimson, of all places, referred to another online article about "life hacks every student should know" that led to articles on such important coffeepots as "hacks for DIY manicures, hacks to survive delays at the airport, and even hacks for what to do when you just can’t finish those last three pieces of sushi." Remember real language, when we used such terms as "life skills" and "recipes?" And when you didn't send your kids to Harvard to figure out what to do with the last three pieces of sushi? Oy gevalt.

If these kids think Chatbot is going to let them relax while they let it write their term papers and emails and still take over the world with their Harvard degrees and sublime sense of entitlement, they're deluding themselves. They're clearing the field for Chatbot and the more sophisticated AI that's sure to follow it to take over the world. And AI doesn't drink the water or breathe the air, so don't expect its goals to be the same as ours. It's not there yet by any means. I was reassured to see on a giant bus shelter a digital poster that claimed, "Montrealers are non-stop festivals!" It was lousy copywriting, and I understood why when I read the fine print: "AI-generated review of Montréal, based on thousands of visitor comments." AI will learn. Will human kids? Not if they lose the skills to hack language before time coffeepots out. There's glory for you!

Toby or not Toby...

If you thought we were finished with weird English, I'm back with an even more… erm… entertaining take. You can blame the usual suspects, ABA and Sharon, who pass on interesting articles.

Aaron Alon is a musicologist, composer, song writer, script writer, director, filmmaker, professor, and humorist. Shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, he assembled a video about making English consistent, a huge task. This is the result.

 

 

 

 

© respective copyright holder

 

I particularly like the Hamlet reading, don't you? But wait, there's more.  Alon wasn't done.

Following comments and critiques, he came up with a supplemental video in which he, well, sings a classic. Here you go.

 

 

 

 

© respective copyright holder

 

What did you think? Aaron said he might consider a video about making constants consistent. I'm still figure out, "I tot I taw a puddy-tat."

Okay, I promise no more weird English slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For at least a week.

The Scene of the Crime

Pachter in the Begijnhof.

The Scene of the Crime 

by Josh Pachter  

As readers of this blog may remember, I have been selling short fiction to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other places since the late Sixties. This September, fifty-five years after my first appearance in EQMM, I finally had a novel come out. It’s called Dutch Threat, and it is set in Amsterdam—where my first wife and I lived from 1976 through 1982. 

During those years, I worked as an editor for Excerpta Medica, which published medical textbooks and conference proceedings in English. Their offices were located on the Keizersgracht (“Emperor’s Canal”), one of the Dutch capital’s main ring canals, a short walk from one of my favorite places in the world: the Begijnhof. More often than not, I’d spend my lunch break in this oasis of calm in the middle of the bustling city, and when I sat down to write my first novel I decided to set most of the action there. 

Het Houten Huys.

In fact, the Begijnhof is an ideal location for one particular subgenre of the traditional crime story: the closed-community mystery. 

Just in case anyone here is unfamiliar with the term, a “closed-community” (or, as it is also sometimes called, “closed-circle”) mystery is one that takes place in a location which, by its own nature or due to external circumstances, can only be accessed by a specific and limited group of people—which means that any crime occurring there can only have been committed by one of the people who had access to the scene. 

Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel, for example—originally published as Ten Little N-Words and later retitled And Then There Were None—takes place on a small island off England’s Devon coast. There are ten people on the island, and one by one they begin to fall victim to a murderer. Since no one else is on the island, the murderer must be one of the ever-decreasing number of survivors. In the 1965 film version—titled Ten Little Indians—the island is replaced by a snowbound mansion. Either way, it’s a closed-community mystery. 

And the Begijnhof is a classic closed community. Originally established during the Middle Ages—we don’t know exactly when, but it is first mentioned in print in 1389—it is a ring of forty-six gabled brick townhouses (and one of the only two wooden houses remaining in central Amsterdam) built around a central courtyard to house beguines, who were religious women who chose to live in a communal setting without taking vows or fully separating themselves from the world outside. The complex also includes a large off-limits grassy area (known as the “bleaching green” because the beguines laid their laundry there to dry and be whitened by the sun, and now off limits because some of the beguines were buried there), a lovely Dutch church that’s much larger on the inside than seems possible from the outside and—of all things—the English Reformed Church, which holds services in English and sometimes hosts free concerts of religious and secular music. 

The bleaching green.

The last beguine died at the age of eighty-four in 1971, but even today the Begijnhof’s one hundred and five residents are all women, mostly elderly, and the waiting list for a space is years long. 

Originally, there was only one entrance to the complex, though a second was added in 1574 and a third in 1725. Although two of the three access points are open during the day and the courtyard is much more heavily touristed today than it was when I worked nearby, all three doors are locked at night—so a nighttime murder would have to have been committed either by one of the residents or by someone in possession of a key. 

In my book, American graduate student Jack Farmer is sent to The Netherlands to do historical research in the Begijnhof and is granted special permission to move into Het Houten Huys (“The Wooden House”) for the two weeks of his stay. He finds himself—if you’ll forgive an old-fashioned word—smitten with Jet Schilders, the young nurse who checks in regularly on several of the elderly residents … and when one of them is murdered and Jet turns out to be a suspect, Jack teams up with her to investigate the killing and clear her name. 

There are a number of major characters in the book, and one of them is the Begijnhof itself. One of my goals in writing Dutch Threat—in addition to providing a perplexing whodunit with some twists and turns and a satisfying resolution—was to present a compelling portrait of one of my favorite places in the world. If the next time you visit Amsterdam you put the Begijnhof on your must-see list, I’ll feel that I’ve accomplished at least that part of what I set out to accomplish! 

Dutch Threat is available directly from the publisher, Genius Book Publishing, at this link, and also from the usual clicks-and-mortar booksellers.

 

As You First Hope

Again, another inspiration from a SleuthSayer's column – Chris Knopf's What could go wrong? (28 August 2023).

Chris said, "A better way to describe my projects is a series of screwups and miscalculations, strung together by intermittent moments of good luck, and relentless revision."

About the same for me. And I am drawn to a writer I've always admired and what she said:

"Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped."

                                                                                                            – Lilliam Hellman

Lillian Hellman, 1939

Born in New Orleans, Lillian Hellman is a revered playwright, fiction writer, screenwriter and memoirist, best known for The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, Toys in the Attic, The Children's Hour, The Autumn Garden and her long relationship with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, as well as her political activism. Like Hammett, she was blacklisted during the communist witch hunt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

This New Orleans writer, like many of my writer friends, acknowledges Hellman's statement is spot on.

While most of my story stories stick to an outline (often little more than a sketchy idea), my novels have never. Even my early books, which I composed after putting together detailed outlines, did not end up the way they were intended.

These days, I don't use an outline with my novels. I create the characters, figure what time period and setting, come up with a starting point and what I think will be the end scenes and let the characters find their way to the end. I follow along and write what they say and do. There are surprises along the way, and new characters change from bad guys to good guys.

Smooth, my latest novel published on September 5th, is a good example. New Orleans Private Eye Lucien Caye is up front with wife Alizeé, daughter Jeannie and the usual supporting cast of NOPD detectives and neighbors in the lower French Quarter. I laid out the cases he works in the book and watched him work.

Yes, his character evolves as the series moves forward. Songwriter Alizeé also works as a lingerie model and part-time private eye with Lucien. The book gives a view of this private eye's homelife as much as his gumshoe work. It's a kick to write and ends up close to where it was intended, but it did not come out as I first imagined.

That's all for now.

www.oneildenoux.com

The Sincerest Form of Flattery? Part 1

 “There’s a nice little girl,” I told myself out loud in the car, “for a guy that’s interested in a nice little girl.” Nobody said anything. “But I’m not,” I said.

*    *    *    *    *

“She’s a nice girl. Not my type.”

“You don’t like them nice?” He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand.

“I like smooth, shiny girls, hard boiled and loaded with sin.”

“They take you to the cleaners,” he said indifferently.

“Sure. Where else have I ever been?”

                 - Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

The above nearly sums up one half of the secondary conflict for detective Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s 1942 classic, Farewell, My Lovely. For all his protestations about what he does and doesn’t want in a woman, he is clearly as equally drawn to “nice girl” Anne Riordan as he is to “smooth, shiny” and “loaded with sin” Helen Grayle.

And the novel derives as much of its power from the tension this Devil’s Triangle generates as it does from the primary, more action-oriented conflict. Chandler, a writer of considerable skill, fed the tension expertly, and Marlowe gets jerked back and forth for pages at a time as a result.

Many crime fiction aficionados consider Farewell, My Lovely Chandler’s best work. Personally I can’t pick a clear favorite from among his novels (although I certainly have a least favorite: the slight and underwhelming Playback, written toward the end of Chandler’s life). But I do think Farewell, My Lovely is damned good.

And one of my reasons for this opinion is the character of Anne Riordan. In many ways she is the opposite of the classic hard boiled femme fatale: accomplished in her own right: an investigative reporter following the moral example of an incorruptible cop father. Anne Riordan proves a match for Marlowe in so many ways, and is both a delight to encounter, and impossible for the reader to ignore.

So imagine my delight when I heard that the latest Marlowe novel commissioned by the Chandler estate would feature a returned Anne Riordan, this time running her own detective agency, and set to both compete with and cooperate with Marlowe once again.

I am, of course, talking about Scottish author Denise Mina’s new novel, The Second Murderer: the first Marlowe novel commissioned by the Chandler estate to be written by a woman. This book comes in the footsteps of such previous post-Chandler novels as Robert B. Parker’s execrable Perchance to Dream, Benjamin Black’s solid if unspectacular The Black-Eyed Blonde, Lawrence Osborne’s interesting-yet-ponderous Only to Sleep (an over-the-hill Marlowe limping around 1980s Mexico), and most recently Joe Ide’s The Goodbye Coast, an attempt at a “modern update” of Marlowe, which Washington Post literary critic Maureen Corrigan neatly summed up thusly:

“Unfortunately, apart from its moody, Chandler-esque title and a main character called Philip Marlowe, ‘The Goodbye Coast’ has as much connection to Chandler’s novels as Rome, N.Y., has to Rome.”

Each of these efforts, as noted above, was commissioned by the Chandler estate, and each was written by a man, with uneven results. So, of course it’s high time the estate sought out the talents of a woman to take on this task.

And for my money, Mina’s novel is far and away the best of the lot. And it’s not at all close.

Which is saying something, because Mina’s Marlowe, although hardly a carbon copy of the original, really does a fine job of taking up the same spiritual space as Chandler’s iconic character. No mean feat.

Lots more to say on this topic, will have to pick it back up next time.

See you in two weeks!

The Prigozhin Effect

 

Yevgeny Prigozhin didn’t fall out of a window; he fell out of the sky.  In a terrifying nosedive, from 28,000 feet.  I hope he had just enough time left to know who ordered it.  And just for shuffles and grins, they took out Dmitri Utkin too, the guy who gave Wagner its name, after his callsign.  Few people, inside Russia or out, are in any doubt that Putin pulled the trigger.  The Kremlin issued a denial, but that’s what plausible deniability is all about, a smooth lie and a sly wink.  The point of the exercise is its utter shamelessness. 

Putin eulogized his onetime best bud as “a man of difficult fate,” which is an interesting locution.  If a literal translation, we might put a different construction on it, someone who sailed under a troubled star.  They went back a ways together, to Leningrad in the late 1990’s, the Boris Yeltsin years, when the oligarchs were raking in cash, over and under the table, and the siloviki – current and former members of the defense and security apparat – had both feet in the trough along with them.  This is what’s come to be known as gangster capitalism, and Vladimir Putin is now the capo di tutti capi.

Wagner Group certainly had its uses.  Murder for hire in Syria and central Africa, leveraging gold, oil, and diamond concessions.  It generated high yield at low risk, even as they normalized war crimes, terror a common instrument, but Wagner wasn’t a state actor, at least on paper.

What seems to be happening now is that they’re being brought under discipline, specifically the central military intelligence chain of command.  There’s of course a lot of intentional confusion about Progizhin’s death and who authorized it, but reliable indicators suggest the job was assigned to Gen. Andrei Averyanov’s special purpose unit inside GRU.  This is the crew that went after defector Sergei Skripal in the UK, with a nerve agent, five years ago.  They’ve never been known for subtlety.  And as luck would have it, Gen. Averyanov has reportedly now been given command of Wagner’s Africa mission.

On a different front, in what we can consider the Russian asymmetrical war effort, Prigozhin was also the founding partner of the Internet Research Agency, the Leningrad troll farm best known in the U.S. for social media influence operations to promote Trump for president.  IRA is supposedly being dismantled in the wake of the Prigozhin mutiny, but we can be sure its assets will be repurposed. 

In other words, although the Wagner coup attempt was widely heralded by Kremlin-watchers as seismic, an exposure of Putin’s fatal weaknesses, it seems more like a fart in the bathtub.  Nothing much has really changed.  “Death is our business,” Wagner’s recruiting pitch went, “and business is good.”  Is it ever. 

Putin’s murderous war in Ukraine grinds on, and Russia’s weakness makes it even more dangerous, like a wounded animal in a trap.  The disinformation campaigns are being redoubled (with China slipstreaming alongside), and God help us, we’ve got Trump taking up all the air in the room, again.  If anything, Putin is stronger than he was before Prigozhin’s mutiny.  No amount of wishful thinking can make this go away. 

A Day for Nothing

Yesterday, September 11th, marked the 22nd anniversary of the attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and the nation. Commentary about Patriot's Day might better come from those who were called to serve on that day or in the conflicts that followed. I spent the day as a prosecutor in Texas. A while back, in a different forum, I wrote about my 9/11. I'm offering a quiet reflection from the middle swath of America. 

In 2001, my children were toddlers. Tuesday morning was spent with the television turned off, if there was news, we didn't hear it. The many and varied tasks associated with getting us out the door and our children prepared for the day consumed our attention. The tasks of our everyday activities kept the outside world at bay. 

Betty and I were in the car, mere blocks from the Criminal Justice Center when her father called. A plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He had little additional news, just the first glimpse of an unfolding tragedy. We had just parked and made it to our office when the South Tower was struck. 

Around the DA's office, televisions, radios, and computers focused on learning additional news. What we heard was catastrophic and getting worse. 

On September 11th, 2001, I was the chief prosecutor in the 372nd Judicial District Court. We had defendants summoned for trial. Jurors had been called. The court's docket had been prepared weeks in advance. Justice was waiting, but no one was capable of working. After a time, Judge Wisch, the presiding judge of the 372nd, brought the jurors into court. He explained as best he could where America stood. Then, he dismissed the panel. "Pray," he told the prospective jurors. "Pray for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Pray for the first responders of New York City. Pray for our country." 

The rest of the day was hollow. At another time, I worked in the office on the day that the elected district attorney succumbed to cancer. Although sad and signaling a change that affected the professional life of every employee, cancer was something we understood. We did what we needed to do. 9/11 was an event beyond our ken. We have a national hymn about alabaster cities undimmed by human tears. No meaningful work was done. Instead, we gathered in small, silent groups and traded rumors. Fort Worth is the corporate home of American Airlines. Everyone knew someone who worked for the airline. We worried for our neighbors. We all knew someone living in Manhattan. We worried for our far-flung friends. Everyone knew someone serving in the military. We worried about their future. 

That night, Betty and I kept the television off so as not to upset the boys. We made calls seeking news from our friends and neighbors. We gathered at a hastily arranged church service to add corporate prayer to the many individual entreaties for the dead and injured. In the days that followed, we donated blood and contributed to the Red Cross. We bought a share of American Airlines stock. We read and talked about how to answer a four-year-old boy's question, "Why did those men crash the planes into that building?" 

Church services and donated money and pints of blood, we stood in America's heartland and tried in our ways to recompense for the broken planes, broken buildings, broken bodies, and broken hearts. 

My clearest memory, however, of a fitting memorial to 9/11 occurred several weeks later. By then, here in the heartland, life had largely resumed. New York's recovery had become a topic of the evening news. We were back in the 372nd, prosecuting criminal cases. The defendant up in the dock, coincidentally that week, was named Mohammed Koran. He was charged with sexual assault. Had we culled through our case lists, we might never have found a name more likely to push Islamophobic buttons. On the morning of the trial, his attorney, Matt King, approached the bench and asked that a continuance be granted. He had no reason he could articulate except that a postponement was "in the interest of justice." 

Justice, however, has multiple sides. Sexual assault victims need to get past the trial so that they can resume their lives. The victim had done nothing to provoke any prejudice against the defendant. She deserved the trial for which she had waited. We should, as her advocates, press the court to go forward. 

In the end, the prosecution stood mute and allowed Judge Wisch to decide. He considered the "t'ain't fair" argument of the defense. (T'ain't is the local double-apostrophed word meaning "that is not"). Ultimately, he sided with the Defense. In the end, Judge Wisch was right. 

The nation had broken planes, broken buildings, broken bodies, and broken hearts. What the case reminded me, however, was that our institutions and our foundational principles remained intact. Our system of due process for all remained. We did not surrender to xenophobia, scapegoating, or misplaced revenge. To my mind, the court presented America at its best.  By doing nothing. 

Until next time. 

Blessed be the copy editors, for they save our bacon.

I count among my greatest natural skills the ability to misspell, hack up syntax and transpose letters, words and sometimes whole sentences and paragraphs.  I’m not only very good at injecting these viruses into my prose, I can disguise them from all but the most discerning copy editor.  I also have a considerable knack for getting dates mixed up and scrambling places, directions and physical descriptions.  These things are generally categorized as continuity problems.  I create continuity catastrophes. 

(In the film production business, continuity people are second only to the director and DP on a film set. Since movies and TV shows are usually shot out of chronological order, someone has to corral the orderly march of events. “Stop the action! George’s tie needs to be cinched up. Meryl’s hair is sticking out of the bonnet again.”)

It's a mental problem. Which is why I’m utterly devoted to, and dependent on, copy editors. These are not proofreaders, who have their own value, but editorial professionals who bridge the terrain between proofreading and developmental editing.  The really good ones are worth their weight in gold.

They not only repair spelling, grammar and syntactical errors, they make sure the lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is near the right town, the blonde side character is blonde through the whole book, that a guy born in 1975 doesn’t knock off a bank in 1986, that an interstate goes through and not around a city, the French name for a particular delicacy is common in Paris but not in Montreal, and so on.

It’s astounding to me how many things I can get wrong, and how talented copy editors are at putting things to right. The bad guys speed away in an old Buick in chapter two, and by chapter ten they’re in an Oldsmobile. A character born on the South Side of Chicago is later reborn in Memphis, Tennessee. Don’t even talk to me about except or accept, heel or heal, peak or peek, then or than – and the worst, by far – affect or effect.

I just talked to a writer who said she had typo blindness. She can read the same page a hundred times and not see the mistake sitting right there on the page, and the copy editor will swoop right in and fix the problem.  I totally get this, and I think it’s your brain telling you everything is fine after you’ve looked at the work a few times, or a few million. You actually see the mistake as correct, and no subsequent review will make it otherwise. 

The skillful copy editor is also mindful of your writing style, and is respectful of your creative choices, knowing the difference between a colloquialism and a gaffe. They tend to pose potential corrections as questions, not mandates. There’s nothing worse than a copy editor who’s a grammar tyrant. A school marm who insists on classical style and usage. I once had one of these people remove all my contractions, entirely eliminate passive voice and slang, and fill out sentence fragments, even in the dialogue. They’re worse than having no copy editor at all.

I did not appreciate it. No, I did not.

I write a series and have written two trilogies, where it’s invaluable for the copy editor to know your characters and the world they inhabit, to check for deviations from prior works. These observations don’t always result in simple corrections. More often, they provide a path to a better product. I’ve found with revisions, one good thing often leads to another. It sometimes makes me wonder if I kept revising the book would it continue getting better. But then again, you have to eventually let it go. Put the pen down, accept what you got.

Or is it, what you have?

Grift, Misinformation and the Long Arm of the Law

We often hear about the long arm of the law, suggesting that the justice system has far-reaching power. There is one place that the justice system doesn’t appear to be reaching: grifters who put people’s lives at risk.

These ‘influencers’ spread misinformation about snake oil cures for everything from diabetes to cancer. People die. No one pays the price. 


So, we’re learning that lying and killing people with lies isn’t a punishable crime. 

Mystery readers like myself have an innate need for justice to done. We want the arm of the law to be long enough to reach those who harm people, particularly if they kill them.

We’ve seen the rise of anti-vaccine misinformation reach so far into people’s psyche that not only are they eschewing COVID vaccines but also all vaccines - children are now dying of vaccine preventable disease like measles. For goodness sake, the news recently cited pet owners who are refusing vaccines, including rabies, for their pets because of autism fears.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has focused on the educational aspects and points out that, using various methods, 850,000 YouTube videos with harmful or misleading COVID-19 misinformation videos have been removed. However, this is a drop in an ever filling bucket. 

The WHO has joined various organizations asking for legal polices to stop misinformation but stop at outlining these policies - because it’s complicated. 

Legislators in various countries have made many attempts to rein in dangerous misinformation through regulation of tech giants. There have been suggestions of legal interventions that, “criminalize the dissemination of medical fake news”  The latter is so fraught with definitional problems that it’s not a good option, but certainly speaks to the increasing concern about putting people’s lives at risk.

So indulge me while I spitball some legal ideas with no legal training at all but with a strong sense of ‘what the heck can we do’? 

What if we start very small? What if there were some cases where people were harmed and they then sue? A few of those might make a dent in the growing rise of grifters. Nothing like fear and case law to stop wrong doing. 

Here’s a sample grift and my fantasy. The grift is real, you can find it here.

Now, this may seem like a small problem compared to many other forms of misinformation and certainly, the reach of this is much smaller. But starting small makes it easier.

This woman claims to cure eyesight, so what if someone was ‘cured’ and then got into an accident driving? What if they sued her for damages? 

One small victory against grift might start a snowball effect. It’s a simple grift - eyesight cure - and a simple test - either eyesight is better or it’s not. I’m a fan of starting simple. 

It also is the extension of existing laws protecting people. If a doctor gives medical advice or therapy in the form of pills etc. and a patent is harmed, that doctor not only risks the loss of their medical license, but also jail time. So why not extend this to all medical therapies? 

While I’m spitballing and fantasizing, here’s another one: drugs for every disease need to follow rigorous testing guidelines. What is stopping legislators from demanding this from all ‘cures’ for all diseases? Then the grifters could be held legally liable for damages or even sued for putting their ‘cures’ in the public domain. This simple levelling of the playing field for all cures is fair, understandable by the public and simply extends existing laws around medical interventions. legal and regulatory measures.

I know this seems simple – nay, simplistic – but there may be a place for simple, clear solutions that start small, alongside looking at large scale changes to social media content. There is less support for stopping misinformation when it is an abstract concept and just the word ‘information’ gives an opening for demands for freedom of speech. To be clear, medical intervention is not covered under free speech protection, nor are drug manufactures able to claim free speech regarding the claims they make for their drugs. This also fits a justice model we are familiar with: if someone causes harm or death to another by any means, they are criminally responsible. This is one small way that the long arm of the law can extend its reach. 

Good For the Soul (RIP to a Storyteller)

America has been so over-celebritized for so long that it's daily news that some star passed away. For me, these trigger a brief thought of condolences for their family. We've all gone through loss. Some celebrity deaths hit me if I've connected with their work. A rare few get gut-punch deep. Prince was that way. He left this rock much too young. Nanci Griffith, John Prine. Jimmy Buffett was another hard hit.

I'm not a Parrothead. I never saw Buffett in concert. Should have. Didn't. I only own one of his full albums, but I've had it forever. 

If you were a Louisville East End kid in my day, you had Buffett's Songs You Know By Heart. By social necessity, if no other reason. If any party lasted long enough, this CD got played. It just did, no matter that the songs were already a decade old then. 

It worked as party music, but somehow, in a way no kid would yet understand, you connected with this Gulf and Western sound. Here was Buffett going on about Caribbean islands and open seas while we stared at a brown river too dodgy for swimming. Shrimp boil? We fried cod, thank you very much. It got flown in. And yet we cracked beers and listened along as if that surf pounded at our feet. 

Maybe you're a Parrothead, maybe not. It's a safe bet you know a few, and you know they're never outgrowing it. I play Buffett when the mood is right, or the latitude. It's done by iTunes in these too-modern days. I understand why he connects with so many, now. It's more than his embrace of a joyful noise. Buffett was a storyteller of high order. 

A sailor wants a cheeseburger. He's between ports and eating sunflower seeds, and that cheeseburger craving has a hold of him. We never hear that he gets that next burger, though we're rooting along the quest. Another guy flies to the tropics to sort out his life. He and a chum get drunk on rum, and he grows to accept the good and bad as it comes. A musician stuck in the snowy north is stuck with his band getting drunk on boat drinks. All he wants is out, out, out, anywhere warm. Or two guys rob a gas station for $15, a can of STP, some cashews, and a Japanese TV ("We're wanted men / we'll strike again / but first let's have a beer"). They're busted at a Krystal.

I love stories like this. Big-hearted, well-constructed, full of adventure, evoking a sense of place and something larger at work in our world. Buffett sang a lot about time and timelessness and how ordinary folks fill that up. No one has done troubadour like Buffett, often hilarious ("Why Don't We Get Drunk" and "My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don't Love Jesus"), often touching ("He Went to Paris" and "A Pirate Looks at Forty"). Sometimes it was just pure turn of phrase ("If the Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me"). Small wonder he was also a heck of a writer. His 1980s short story collection is beach read gold (it is back in print, FYI).

Buffett played dive bars and knew drugs and drug smugglers. Hell, his sound was too genuine for Nashville. Music City might've known how to package him if he'd settled on a mainstream warbler style or even a bad boy image. Buffettism refuses the choice. In a Buffett song, and in all of us, there blends a little good and a little bad, someone looking backward and a little forward but dealing in the now. Making the best of it. As "Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit" puts it: Drive-in / Guzzle gin / Commit a little mortal sin / It's good for the soul.

And what a soul. Even to casual fans, his loss comes as a mortal slap. Buffett was Peter Pan. Did we really expect him to grow old, even when he often sang about precisely that? And if his time came, ours will, too. Like a Buffett character, we're left bare and staring at the horizon and what's inevitable beyond. Until then, we're meant to fumble around and relish what time we're given. 

Buffett's signature way of taking fun seriously are why he still resonates after I've long put away other things of youth. His storytelling works anywhere, even Louisville, because we all dream of a perfect someplace else where the party goes on and on.

On Stephen King...

Photo by Shane Leonard

 As I type this, a copy of Holly, the latest Stephen King novel, sits in a TBR stack I keep in my living room. It's a few books down and obviously not the last King book I will read. I've read most of his canon in the order published, segregating the Bachman books at the end. But until You Like It Darker drops next year, I'll have read everything he's published with a few exceptions. Some of the screenplays, some uncollected short stories and novellas. I definitely never read The Plant because King put the kibosh on it when his ebook experiment (pre-Kindle) did not work. I also did not read his book about the Red Sox recent World Series run.

King is an odd choice to occupy his place in American literature. He's an unabashed horror writer who's recently shown a penchant for crime fiction. To his annoyance, some complain when he eschews the supernatural for crime, but the Bachman books show he's just as at home there. In fact, only two Bachman books, Thinner and The Regulators, are overtly supernatural. Rage and Road Work are out-and-out noir, while Blaze, an admitted trunk novel, takes its cues from Of Mice and Men. The Long Walk and The Running Man are both dystopian thrillers with one foot in noir and the other in science fiction. One wonders if this is what they watched on TV in Gilead in A Handmaid's Tale. 

Yet horror is King's wheelhouse. Horror is not supposed to produce classic novels. Yet The Stand, The Shining, It... All these are cultural touchstones. They might owe some spiritual strands to HP Lovecraft, but they're hardly Lovecraftian horror. (Well, It is basically Cthulhu in  a clown suit chewing scenery and inspiring Bill Skarsgard to channel Tim Curry. Bad example.) But horror is just a canvass for King to paint on. 

His real talent is making a fictional place seem real. Castle Rock, or rather Castle County, gets its first mention in Blaze, written before Carrie. You really believe there's an Overlook Hotel (or was), You expect George Bannerman or Alan Pangborn or Norris Ridgewick to answer your 911 call. And we just won't mention Salem's Lot or Derry. By the time of the Gwendy trilogy, Derry is actually more dangerous than the Lot. 

I always described King's horror as this. The guy next door who borrowed your mower is Satan. And he's not the problem. He's worried about the weird stuff going on across the street. But the horror takes a backseat to the characters and the story. Jack Torrance in The Stand is already headed over the edge. The ghosts and the isolation of the Overlook just give him a not-so-gentle shove. The Stand takes ordinary people and tosses them into the post-apocalyptic battle between good and evil. 

But perhaps his greatest monster is not Pennywise or Leland Gaunt or even Randall Flagg. It has to be Annie Wilkes, the obsessed fan of one writer's work who suddenly has him in her clutches. King actually imagined Annie offing poor Paul Sheldon and feeding him to her pig while she enjoyed his last novel lovingly bound in his skin. If you've read the book or watched the movie, it's almost a surprise that was not how it ended. Annie is that most dangerous creature: The one unaware of their own evil and convinced of the righteousness of their cause.

Next year will be sixty years since Carrie was published. Naturally, there are hits and misses. Cell is a huge misfire, a lightweight Stand that doubles as a rant against cell phones. The Dark Tower Series is uneven until King figures out what he wants it to do (and manages to plug it in to most of his canon.)

King himself has lamented that his best regarded work came early in his career. The Stand and Salem's Lot are cultural touchstones. But listening to my share of rockers, I'm not surprised. There's a certain quality that comes with a lack of inhibition and ignorance of the rules. King will tell a story in a long, rambling style. He'll go off on tangents, but the tangents are stories unto themselves. And the man has an eye and ear for character. In his brilliant nonfiction tome, On Writing, he relates the accident that nearly killed him and may have revitalized his passion for writing. In describing the man who hit him in his minivan, King says, "I was nearly killed by one of my own characters." Years later, as Roland crosses into our world from that of the Dark Tower series, both King and the late Bryan Smith, the driver, do become characters when another character literally comes out of the story to badger the author into finishing. (Methinks the later Dark Tower books were therapy as much as parts of a longer epic.)

 The next time I land in this space, I'll either be reading Holly, his latest, or have finished it. But next time, I want to look at King's alter-ego, Richard Bachman.