Years
ago, I lived in the Berkshires out in western Massachusetts,
which was pretty much a stone’s throw from the New York state line. And we had occasion to go over there, once in
a while. It wasn’t totally an unknown
country. There was a Japanese restaurant
in Kinderhook, Martin Van Buren’s birthplace.
There was Steepletop, the Edna St. Vincent Millay writers colony, in Austerlitz And one time, when I went to drop someone off
at the train station in Hudson – you could catch the New York Central, and go
down to the city – somebody else told me, Oh, that’s where Legs Diamond was
shot. I thought to myself, Hmmm.
Things you store away, for later. As it turns
out, Legs wasn’t shot in Hudson; he was gunned down
in a drunken stupor at a rowhouse in Albany,
on Dove Street. Supposedly, it was a uniform patrol sergeant
named Fitzpatrick, who was afterwards named chief of police, in return for the
favor. Still, it stuck in my mind. New York gangsters, on the lam from the city, would cool
their heels upstate, until the heat died down.
They wouldn’t go far, just a short train ride out of town. If you kept your head down and your nose
clean, nobody was any the wiser.
Obviously, the mistake Legs made was to try and muscle in on the local
syndicate’s action, and they rubbed him out.
This
little nugget, stored away, was the basis for “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” my Mickey Counihan story in Murder, Neat.
The theme of the collection is that the stories take place in a bar. It sounds like the opening line of a joke,
which reminds me of something Mark Billingham once said. He got his start in stand-up and sketch
comedy, and he later remarked that open mic and thriller writing have a lot in
common. You only have a brief window to
establish yourself with the audience, for one.
And secondly, it’s about having an effective set-up, that winds you up
for a punchline. The punchline of a joke
most usually depends on the reversal of expectations, and so does developing a
cliff-hanger scene. You set a snare, to
invite the reader in, and then spring the trap on them.
One difference is that you could easily start
the scene with a hook, without knowing how to finish. The pope, a rabbi, and the Dalai Lama walk
into a strip club. What’s the kicker? Beats me, I don’t have a clue.
The way it works in practice, though, is that you have a little nugget, and it
bumps around in the corners, and picks up other little bits and pieces, and
pretty soon it’s turned into a bigger package altogether. You’ve got some ungainly mental figure, a
shape, like a dressmaker’s dummy, and you can hang a suit of clothes on
it.
Some of us outline, some of us are pantsers.
Meaning there are writers who block out the whole story arc in advance,
and then fill in the cracks, and there are writers who fly by the seat of their
pants. This isn’t to say we don’t take
advantage of lucky accident, or that there aren’t always unexpected moments. Those, in fact, are what you live for. But either way, you start with a name, or a
turn of phrase, an image, or simply how the weather was.
The
curious part, which borders on the magical – even if in practical terms it
amounts to stamina – is that when we’re done, both the story itself and the
process of getting it over the finish line seem inevitable, by which I mean
inevitable to the reader as well as
to the writer. We ask that the story be fully formed, woven by
the Fates, cast by the dice: of all possible worlds, this one alone is true.
Each
story makes a promise, and we'd like it to be kept.
An author, an author, and an author walk into a bar, along with twenty-one more of their colleagues. The bartender serves 'em all. In the process, he learns they all blog together.
"What do you write about," the barkeep asks.
"Murder," they reply in unison.
The bartender gives 'em a big smile and says, "Neat."
In case you haven't heard, today's the publication date for Murder, Neat, an anthology with twenty-four short stories all written by members of this blog. Every story lets the reader belly up to a bar and settle in for a good tale. Most of them take the reader to actual bars--regular, dive, college, even a gastropub--but we have restaurants and a winery in the mix too. We have stories set in the US as well as in other countries and on other continents. We have stories occurring in the current day and stories set long before you could kick back with a beer and root for your favorite team on a tavern's big screen. But what all the stories have in common is crime--and alcohol, of course.
I had the pleasure of editing this anthology--the first SleuthSayers anthology--with Michael Bracken. We had the honor of taking on this task when the man originally tapped to edit the book, our dear friend Paul D. Marks, handed over the reins after falling ill. Paul died in 2021. On this day, we raise a glass in remembrance of him, as well as two other fellow SleuthSlayers whom we lost too soon: Fran Rizer, who died in 2019, and Bonnie (B.K.) Stevens, who died in 2017.
You may be wondering who this "we" is. Who are the authors with stories in the book? Let me direct your attention to this nifty graphic created by friend Gabriel Valjan, which lists not only the authors but their story titles in the order they appear in the book. I've read all of these stories multiple times, and I'm pleased to say they're all perfect for settling down by a fire, with a drink in your hand and the book in your lap.
Before I go, I'll share a little about my story, "Never Have I Ever." It's March 1989. Tamara and five college friends are at their go-to Thursday night bar, deep in their cups, playing their favorite drinking game, Never Have I Ever. Even as the secrets fly, Tamara has some she'll never share. Because she's obsessed. Because she's haunted. Because she has a plan.
Murder, Neat is coming out today, February 13th, in trade paperback and ebook from the fine folks at Level Best Books. Here's a link to buy the Kindle book (the only option available as I type this, but the book should be out in trade paperback too when you read this). To everyone who picks up a copy, we raise a glass in your honor too. Cheers!
Novels, short stories and poetry may
be the last bastions of solitary writerly pursuits.With the exception of the rare co-author
team, most fiction writers labor in isolation, islands unto themselves.In other creative fields employing writers,
notably film and TV, and advertising, creativity is a team sport.Playwrights usually start out on their own,
but in the course of production, others are likely to stick their hands in the
cookie jar. The playwright still gets all the credit, but she knows that others
had their say.
I’ve written alone and as part of a
team and each has its charms.This may
be self-evident.When working alone, all
you have is yourself, and you can write what you want.No one is over your shoulder, no one is
scowling at one of your ideas (except your editor, who usually comes in at the
end of the game).It’s you alone, all by
yourself, the god of your world, immune from interruption or censure.It’s what I also love about fine woodworking
and single-handed sailing.
But few places on earth are more fun
and exhilarating than a writers room.In
advertising, we usually worked in teams of two – a copywriter and an art
director, where our specialization would dissolve at the conceptual stage and
each would throw in ideas for art or copy without restriction.I might have a half-baked notion that my
partner would slice into a fine part and add something interesting.I’d take this fledgling thought and add
something else, and it would go from there.Before we knew it, something workable would emerge, and when the
creative director came into the room, we’d have something to show for the time
spent.
When writing alone, all the talk is
inside your head.In a writers room, the
talk is usually about anything other than the thing you’re supposed to be
working on.If this was recorded, most
strict administrators would fire us for wasting precious business time on
nonsense.But we knew we were actually
circling the idea, finding context, getting to the destination via a circuitous
route.That’s because we were always
thinking about the task at hand, and any nutrition from the conversation went
directly into the conceptual efforts.Ideas beget ideas.Talk gives
birth to lines of thinking that spew out concepts.This is how it works.
Advertising might not be the noblest
of pursuits, but it’s not that easy to do well, and when it all comes together,
the adrenalin flows just as strongly as when you compose a satisfying piece of fiction (though some
would argue advertising and fiction are not that different from one another).
In his book The Innovators, Walter
Isaacson maintains that the most important common element of all history-making
digital advances was collaboration.He
makes his case vividly and convincingly.Though he also cites iterations as key components.One idea building on another.You could apply this to fiction.Where would the modern detective novel be
without Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade?What constitutes inspiration versus simply cribbing from an earlier
work?
Discerning readers know the difference. They can spot a derivation, which can be rewarding, and just as easily condemn a book as derivative. I once wrote a book that was heavily influenced by the first chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses, which my editor mentioned to a Joyce scholar he knew. The scholar was offended, telling the editor that my work had nothing to do with Joyce. Okay, but I knew how I felt when I was working on that book, the same way I felt reading about Stephen Dedalus. In the quiet of my private mind, I told the Joycean snob to stick it where the self-importance doesn't shine.
I think it’s fair to say that an
iteration, at its most benign, is a form of collaboration.Musicians will tell you at least half of
popular music is based on the traditional 12-bar blues - tonic, sub-dominant,
dominant - format (Steve Liskow, please weigh in).That doesn’t mean so many priceless songs are
illegitimate.
Often
when confronted with two equally appealing alternatives, I vote for both.Working alone is the best, except when
working in a team.I wouldn’t have it
any other way.
There have been many articles discussing the difference between men and women but this one is all about differences in chromosomes - men have XY chromosomes and women are XX people. This Y chromosome has become increasingly used in innovative ways to catch criminals, even in cold cases decades old.
Many of us inherit our father’s surname and men, specifically, also inherit their father’s Y chromosome and their father, in turn, usually gets both from their father who in turn - you get the point - Y and surnames generally go together. As I wrote about previously, we now have a massive data base of DNA from various ancestry sites, voluntarily submitted by millions, and this can be used to connect surnames and DNA.
Does this all fall apart if the murderer is a woman? It does and it doesn’t. Although women do not have a Y chromosome, women transfer mitochondrial DNA from mother to offspring. The male mitochondrial DNA is, except in very rare cases, eliminated, providing a clear way to trace maternal inheritance. This maternal inheritance allows ancestry sites to trace our maternal ancestors. However, women historically have taken their husband’s name and this makes it difficult to use surnames with the same confidence as we do with males.
Recently, a cold case was solved by using Y chromosomes and surnames, finally giving the family closure after almost fifty years.
In 1975, a sixteen-year-old Montreal teenager, Sharron Prior, went to meet friends at a Pizzeria. On the way she was abducted by Franklin Romine, who brutally beat, raped and then killed Sharron. Despite having DNA from Romaine’s shirt at the murder scene, for almost fifty years law enforcement was unable to identify the murderer.
In 1974, a man named Franklin Romine had broken into a house and raped a woman in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Two months later, he was released on a $2,500 bond, fled to Canada, brutally murdered Sharron Prior and, a few months later was captured by Canadian border officials, extradited back to West Virginia and was sentenced to five to ten years in prison for sexual assault in the Parkersburg case. He returned to Canada where he died in 1982 and his body was buried in West Virginia.
In 2023, this difficult murder was solved using Romine’s Y chromosome’s connection with his last name. In this case, the Y chromosome found at the murder site was connected with the surname ‘Romine’ found on ancestry sites of voluntarily submitted DNA and, it was ascertained that Franklin Romine lived in Montreal at the time of the murder. Although he was dead by this time, he still had two living brothers and both provided a DNA sample that showed a strong match. On the basis of this evidence, the body of Franklin Romine was exhumed and his DNA proved to be an exact match for the DNA found at the crime scene.
Although the cold case is solved, no charges will be laid because Franklin Romine is dead. For the family of Sharron Prior, this matters: “You may never have come back to our house or Congregation Street that weekend but you have never left our hearts and you never will," Sharron's sister Moreen said."We love you Sharron, now may you truly rest in peace.”
As 2023 wrapped up, I had this sinking feeling I hadn't watched many crime movies lately. It was late December. A guy likes to tally up the year. I did better than feared, though the count was heavily weighted to traditional rewatches like The Maltese Falcon and Clue.
FOMO set in, and I started Googling around for recent crime movies. As will happen, I fell into internet rabbit holes and wound up checking out films from years past. Movie after movie elbowed back into my short attention span. Here with rewatch and supplemental research are five from back yonder that pretty much slipped my mind.
Disclaimer: My filter was crime comedies over a decade old and that slipped my mind, not what's up there with The Sting. These are varying shades of good fun, though, and all worth a first or second watch.
In Bruges (2008)
This artful, darker-than-dark comedy earned its share of attention.Colin Farrell won most of that attention as the hitman main character hiding in Bruges and haunted by accidentally killing a kid. This was Farrell's turn toward Serious Acting, and fate brought him writer/director Martin McDonagh and a role worth treading the boards. Still, Ralph Fiennes is gold in everything he does. He was a perfect choice for M, he was magnificent in The Grand Budapest Hotel (one hell of a crime movie), and he was the best character here, a crime boss unshakably convinced that violence should stay among criminals. The comedy is there but so bleak that sometimes it hits as drama. This is a complex film, powerful and aware of itself, but worth taking in if you're ready for a challenge. Bonus watch joy if you've been to Bruges. I've climbed that tower--twice.
Grosse Point Blank (1997)
Continuing on with hitman comedies...
Grosse Point Blank has a hitman going to his ten-year high school reunion. Jon Cusack stars in what, at first glance, feels like a vehicle outside his wheelhouse. "Ex-CIA assassin-turned-sociopath-freelance" isn't Cusack's, but suddenly he's doing it just fine. There's a sometimes-darkness to his acting that he calls on here for comic impact. In a movie about remembrances, this one is better than you might remember. Minnie Driver nails it as the girl he stood up at senior prom. Now, a failed marriage later she's a DJ querying her indie audience and reunion arrivals about whether he's worth another try. Her father, it turns out, is Cusack's contract. It's a concept comedy but with genuine wit and something to offer.
Midnight Run (1988)
Okay, this one I had forgotten about. My bad, because it's a buddy comedy done well. Yes, Midnight Run leans into genre. There are mobsters, there's a dirty accountant, there's extended train action, but there's also real feeling and real chemistry. Robert De Niro, having made his bones at dramatic powerhouse, wanted to try his hand at comedy. Big was the movie he angled for, but Midnight Run is what he landed. The idea was to pair him with Bruce Willis or Robin Williams, but Charles Grodin was the choice after his acting sparks with De Niro at audition. A hard choice, apparently. Paramount backed out of the movie over Grodin's casting. Their mistake. Light comedy is Grodin's thing, but I can't think another film that gave him this much deeper to do. The result is chemistry indeed and a relentlessly entertaining ride.
Heartbreakers (2001)
Con movies have a special place in my heart. The longer or deeper the con, the better. Con stories are psychological studies, and while Heartbreakers is too broad a comedy to explore the psyche in depth, an old soul works beneath the caper shenanigans. Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt are a mom-daughter team fleecing would-be husbands of mini-wealth. It's time for Palm Beach and a whale, Gene Hackman's chain-smoking Big Tobacco CEO, and the con refuses to lay straight. Part of the problem is Ray Liotta as a past mark who can't let things go. Boil away the easy jokes and the period Florida excess, and what's left is prospective lovers jousting in the marriage game toward an all's-well ending. Shakespeare? No. Funny and at times charming? Yes. It's light fun when light fun can be healing. Shakespeare made a few of these comedies, you know.
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
I'm a major admirer of the Coen brothers. I've watched the hell out of The Big Lebowski, and maybe that's not even their best crime comedy. True Grit might be, if you call it a comedy. Or Fargo is their best, or O Brother, Where Art Thou, or I could keep going. Intolerable Cruelty never tops anyone's list. Mine, either. But Intolerable Cruelty is good conniving fun, with a tone unique for the Coens. The brothers didn't start out to make this movie. They were hired as script doctors after the project had bounced around Hollywood. It kept bouncing even then until it landed back with the Coens. George Clooney is his syllable-perfect as the divorce attorney extraordinaire engaged in a battle of wits with Catherine Zeta Jones' professional wife. The stakes rise comically out of control in a tale about love's travails and its rare moments of grace.
A recent SleuthSayers posting by Barb Goffman about good first lines, drew me back to my previous postings (and others) about opening lines. Since I've said enough about the importance of opening lines, I thought I'd share the opening lines of my recently published books and short stories, opening lines which worked for me.
NOVELS:
HARDSCRABBLE PRIVATE EYE (Jun 2022)
I DROP THE uncut gemstone back into the leather bag with the others and tell her, “Emeralds. Every one.”
NEW ORLEANS HEAT (Mar 2023)
The body hung from the low branch of a live oak in the Bayou Sauvage swamp about thirty yards from Chef Menteur Road. Detective Jacques Dugas swatted a mosquito on his neck and studied the scene before drawing a quick diagram with a pencil in his small leather-bound notebook.
SMOOTH (Sep 2023)
THE BURGLAR CROSSED the warehouse like a cat, with purposeful, careful steps, keeping his low-beam flashlight pointed to the floor in front of him.
SHORT STORIES:
The First Annual Atchafalaya Coyote Hunt: or, Is There a Sleuth in The House
Black Cat Mystery Magazine Issue 11, Mar 2022
I always wanted to be a sleuth. Pfft! As if.
The Obsidian Knife
The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories, Mango Press, Jul 2022
Damn car wouldn’t start.
Blue Moon Over Burgundy
Black is the Night, Maxim's Jakubowski's Cornell Woolrich Antho, Titan Books, Oct 2022
Tom steps into the dark bedroom and waits just inside the door for his eyes to adjust
The Other French Detective
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 67, Nos 11 & 12, November/December 2022
“Ah, here is our French detective now,” Captain Joe Rathlee called out from his office door as Detective Jacques Dugas came into the Detective Bureau.
A Jelly of Intrigue
Edgar and Shamus Go Golden Anthology,Down & Out Books, Dec 5, 2022
A woman trying not to look beautiful stepped into my office a little after nine a.m.
Of Average Intelligence
Black Cat Weekly #85 April 15, 2023
“No offense, Officer Kintyre. But I’m smarter than you.”
When Baby Cows Go Bad
Mystery Magazine, June 2023 Issue
“Baby cows attacked me,” says the student sitting on the other side of my desk
A Pretty Slick Guy
Black Cat Weekly #92 June 3, 2023
Billy found the trunk release button and popped open the trunk
A Dirty, Dimly-lit Place
Black Cat Mystery Weekly #103, August 20, 2023
The woman sat at the last table near the side door where the dull lights in the cantina could not reach her and even the moonlight outside was blocked by the leaves of the banana trees.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 68, Nos 9 &10, September/October 2023
A shadow beyond the smoky glass portion of my office door had me fold my newspaper and pull my feet off the desk before the door opened and a heavy-set man stepped in, looked around the big office
The Split Man
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 68, Nos 11&12, November/December 2023
The body lay in two pieces, neatly sliced at the waist, the top portion face down, the bottom portion turned upward.
Governor Kristi Noem was back in the news last week with her trip to the Texas border, her promise to stand tall with Gov. Abbott, to personally provide more razor wire to put in the Rio Grande and to send more National Guard Troops to the Border. Meanwhile, South Dakota has not been reimbursed the $1.3 million in taxpayer dollars that Noem spent on the last deployment, and she has just admitted that she never expected to be, so suck it up, taxpayers! She's only doing it for our own good!
And she gave a speech to the South Dakota Legislature on the warzone at the border and how, here in South Dakota, the Bandido's "sub-gang" The Ghost Dancers are selling drugs all over the Rez:
“Murders are being committed by cartel members on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and in Rapid City, and a gang called the Ghost Dancers are affiliated with these cartels,” Noem said. “They have been successful in recruiting tribal members to join their criminal activity.” (SOURCE)
Many of us in South Dakota went into a Symphony in F-Major over this and other statements, and we're not getting over it for a while. Let me explain:
THE GHOST DANCE
First of all, a little history on the Ghost Dance. It's a religious ceremony, a literal dance, begun in the 1880s by Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka (renamed Jack Wilson), who said that dancing it would "reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, end American Westward expansion, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples throughout the region." It spread throughout the Native American communities of the West, and was - and is - very strong here in the Dakotas, among the Lakota people. (BTW, it even caught the interest of the Mormons, who had a tendency to believe in and listen to Native American prophets. One of the things that were used in the Ghost Dance, besides the Dance itself, was a Ghost Shirt that some believe to have been adapted from the Mormon temple garment.)
The Lakota interpretation of Wakova's vision derived from their traditional idea of a "renewed Earth" in which "all evil is washed away". This Lakota interpretation included the removal of all European Americans from their lands:
They told the people they could dance a new world into being. There would be landslides, earthquakes, and big winds. Hills would pile up on each other. The earth would roll up like a carpet with all the white man's ugly things – the stinking new animals, sheep and pigs, the fences, the telegraph poles, the mines and factories. Underneath would be the wonderful old-new world as it had been before the white fat-takers came. ...The white men will be rolled up, disappear, go back to their own continent. - Lame Deer
Anyway, back in 1890 the US Government (warning, "spoiler" alert) broke a treaty with the Lakota by confiscating the Great Sioux Reservation and dividing it into 5 smaller reservations. They were making room for white homesteaders from the eastern United States; in addition, its purpose was to "break up tribal relationships" and "conform Indians to the white man's ways, peaceably if they will, or forcibly if they must". No more Native customs, language, clothing, or food - despite the fact that if you try to farm down around, say, the Pine Ridge Reservation, you are trying to farm a semi-desert. Hunting, yes. Farming? No...
(Above clip from the movie, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee")
So the Lakota started doing the Ghost Dance, and that scared the hell out of the US government. The local BIA agent claimed that Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader, was the real leader of the movement. A former agent, Valentine McGillicuddy, God bless her, saw nothing extraordinary in the dances and ridiculed the panic that seemed to have overcome the agencies, saying:
"The coming of the troops has frightened the Indians. If the Seventh-Day Adventists prepare the ascension robes for the Second Coming of the Savior, the United States Army is not put in motion to prevent them. Why should not the Indians have the same privilege? If the troops remain, trouble is sure to come." Wikipedia
Of course nobody listened to her, and thousands of additional U.S. Army troops were deployed to the reservation. On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was arrested for failing to stop his people from practicing the Ghost Dance. One of of Sitting Bull's men, Catch the Bear, fired at Lieutenant "Bull Head", striking his right side. He instantly wheeled and shot Sitting Bull, hitting him in the left side, between the tenth and eleventh ribs; this exchange resulted in deaths on both sides, including that of Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull
This was almost immediately followed by the Massacre at Wounded Knee (December 28, 1890), where 153 Lakota, mostly women and children, were murdered in cold, cold, cold blood. Twenty US soldiers were awarded Medals of Honor for their brave deeds, which were never rescinded.
Mass grave burial of the dead after Wounded Knee. (Wikipedia)
The Ghost Dance movement went underground, but never died. During the Wounded Knee Incident of 1973, Leonard Crow Dog, spiritual leader of the the American Indian Movement (AIM), brought back the Ghost Dance, saying:
"My great-grandfather's spirit gave me a vision to do this. The vision told me to revive this ceremony at the place where Chief Big Foot's ghost dancers, three hundred men, women, and children, had been massacred by the army, shot to pieces by cannons, old people, babies." (Wikipedia)
And, after building a sweat lodge and doing a purification ritual, they did.
So, when Governor Noem claimed that the Ghost Dancers are part of the Bandidos motorcycle gang... it infuriated a lot of people, and not just the Oglala Sioux Tribe.
Although we might as well start with the Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out's announcement:
“Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you [Governor Noem] are hereby Banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!"
Star Comes Out said he took deep offense at her reference, saying the Ghost Dance is one of the Oglala Sioux’s “most sacred ceremonies,” and “was used with blatant disrespect and is insulting to our Oyate.” (AP News)
This is the second time Ms. Noem has been banned from the Rez. The first time was in 2019, when Gov. Noem introduced bills and signed them into a law that basically criminalized the Lakota fervent opposition and peaceful protests to the Keystone XL Pipeline on tribal land, calling it "riot boosting", punishable by prison sentences of 5-25 years.
And none of us will forget the beginning of Covid, when there were no vaccines and contagion rates were high, especially on the reservations, among the elderly. (The Lakota cherish their elders.) In March of 2020, the Cheyenne River Reservation tribal leaders established masked checkpoints on all the roads leading in and out of the reservation to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and barred some drivers from passing through or stopping on the reservation. Noem said the checkpoints on state and federal highways were illegal because they were interfering with interstate commerce. (BTW, a lot of the "interstate commerce" was nearby white ranchers wanting to go hunting on tribal lands and/or take a shortcut to their own grazing land.) Anyway, the lawsuit failed, but eventually, in 2021, when the vaccines came out, the Reservation finally opened the checkpoints (AP). The Rez never banned her, but they sure don't like her...
Trivia fact(s) of the day: South Dakota has 9 reservations, covering 5 million acres. Pine Ridge and Rosebud are the largest. Flandreau, the smallest, has the big Casino and is the most prosperous. They're all important to South Dakota.
Also,
As Wonkette's Gary Legum wrote: "You have to hand it to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who over the weekend found herself banned from the Oglala Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation for the second time in five years. She has now been banished from more Native land than the 7th Cavalry."
Meanwhile, Governor Noem has accused the Tribal President "of politicizing the issue".
Honey, respect has to work both ways.
That's it from South Dakota, where we talk like Mayberry and act like Goodfellas. And sometimes we just BS all over the place.
*****
Meanwhile, if you're in the mood for a good read, check out Josh Pachter's Paranoia Blues. Nominated for Best Anthony Award for an Anthology, with GREAT stories, including my own "Cool Papa Bell". Available at Amazon!
And both my own "A Time to Mourn" and John Floyd's "Wanted" are in the latest issue of Crimeucopia: Say It Again, also available at Amazon.
I just want to make a weird little observation about that group of
characters Earl Emerson once eloquently described as the Sociopathic
Sidekicks (SS). These are the men (I don't know of any female versions)
who assist the hero (often a private eye) by being more vicious and
less ethical than he is.
Let's say there is a villain who keeps
hiring thugs to kill our hero but whenever he is warned off promises to
stop. Then he does it again. Hero Dude, with his firm code of ethics,
can't kill the bad guy if the bad guy is promising not to be a threat.
So the sidekick, untroubled by such ethical dilemmas, solves the
problem with a well-placed bullet.
That exact scenario played out in a
novel by Robert Parker, with the hero being Spenser and the sidekick
being HAWK, who had made his first appearance in the novel Promised Land
(1977). Hawk is the earliest example of an SS I am aware of.
In
1987 Robert Crais introduced private eye Elvis Cole in The Monkey's
Raincoat. And faithfully at the P.I.'s side was ex-Marine, ex-cop, Joe
PIKE.
Then Walter Mosley introduced MOUSE in Devil in a Blue Dress
(1990). He is Easy Rawlins' best friend, but so violent he even scares
Easy.
I'm not sure in which of his novels about private eye
Thomas Black the aforementioned Earl Emerson introduced SNAKE, but it
was no later than The Portland Laugher (1994). This guy varies from the
others I mention here because he seems more like a parody of the
stereotype. Instead of helping Thomas out of trouble Snake's assistance
usually makes things worse and he ends up needing to be rescued..
I
bring all this up because I am reading S.A. Cosby's first novel (and if
you haven't discovered Cosby, my word, jump on the train, the guy is
brilliant.) In My Darkest Prayer, Nathan Wayfinder gets help from a
gunhappy pal named (wait for it) SKUNK.
So there's my question.
Why are so many sociopathic sidekicks known (and in many cases only
known) by monosyllabic animal names?
As I mentioned in my last blog, the end of January marked the last day of my service as a magistrate judge. When I cleared out my desk, I found a smattering of paper scraps. On these, I had jotted down the typos and misheards from police reports that I'd been asked to review. Sadly, this is likely the last of these blogs. I've been cut off from the taproot.
As always, I hope these tiny written missteps brighten your day. Also, as you think about crafting characters, I hope they remind you that police officers, like everyone else, sometimes make inconsequential mistakes. Police errors are not always substantial, case-turning blunders of constitutional proportions. They're not necessarily mean-spirited or corrupt. Sometimes, they're just typos.
I found the defendant engaging in a fistic encounter.
Creative Commons
To be fair to the officer, "fistic" is a word. He wasn't wrong in his usage. The arrestee was hitting another person. The OED states that "fistic" is an adjective "related to boxing." The OED also reports, however, that its high water mark for usage was approximately 1900. Clearly, the officer channeled his inner Damon Runyon or Grantland Rice. Or, he may have reached for grandiose prose when a more common phrase would have worked better.
And now, another typic encounter.
At home, my husband's girlfriend pointed a gun at me.
Again, not a typo. Remember this sentence the next time you're challenged to tell a story in ten words or less. Plot, setting, conflict, and theme all set out in a single line. I'll let the rest of the story unfold in your mind.
I arrived at the scene and exited my vehicle. The defendant then attempted to flea from the police.
Although it is always possible that the officer encountered a character ripped from the script of an upcoming Marvel movie or, for those with a literary bent, a John Dunne poem, this one is likely a typo. I do, however, really like the imagery that jumps to mind.
On January 15th, while I was performing my duties as a Texas Peach Officer...
Fresh, quality produce is important to us in this state. Our Agricultural Department works hard to keep it safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I hope you'll raise your glass to those hard-working men and women the next time you're having a bellini.
This officer, however, was not employed by the Ag. Department. She was one of our rank-and-file peace officers who called in a report before getting back out on the streets. Voice-to-text heard something different than intended.
I prepared a search warrant affidavit and presented it to the Honorable Judge [X]. After reviewing the warrant, he singed it.
I know that on your bucket list of Broadway shows, slightly behind Hamilton, Wicked, and Hadestown, you've got Search Warrant: The Musical. Once you see it, you'll come away humming the tune to "Probable Cause" and that slightly bawdy earworm, "Cavity Search."
Incidentally related, perhaps:
While frisking the lung area, I found a firearm.
The "lunge area" is the space in a motor vehicle immediately surrounding the driver or passenger. It is the zone from which a suspect might quickly grab a firearm or weapon. Clearing the lunge area is an integral part of officer safety.
Searching the lung area for a firearm, however, probably required a great deal of singing before the judge granted the legal authority to go that deeply into the body.
And with that, my scrap pile has been emptied.
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In conclusion, I will note that it is not just officers who occasionally risk misinterpretation. A word of caution: When you're writing thank-you notes to well-wishers on the occasion of your retirement, be careful with your cursive. If you are a tad sloppy with your handwriting, the sentence:
"It has been an honor to work with you."
Might easily look like the sentence,
It has been an horror to work with you."
And that changes the meaning of the sentiment entirely. Trust me on this one.
For some writers, collaboration is a fact of life; for others, it's a rare gift. I’m in the second category. I’m awestruck at the harmonious working relationship of writing duos who turn out seamless works, whether they’re bestselling series like the historical mysteries of Charles Todd and his mother Caroline (the other half of author Charles Todd until her death in 2021) or one-offs like the Edgar-nominated short story "Blind-Sided" (2021) by SleuthSayer Michael Bracken and James A. Hearn.
I've participated in a number of musical collaborations, starting in high school, when a friend and I achieved fame for presenting our parody of Hamlet to the tune of folksong "Putting on the Style," with guitars, in numerous English classes. For years afterwards, when I met someone who'd attended my very large high school, they'd say, "Ohh, you're the one who wrote "Hamlet!"
In the noughties, as Brits call the first decade of the present century, I took part in several songwriting workshops led by legendary singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore, whose work defies classification, though he's received a couple of Grammy nominations in the contemporary folk category. Jimmie and the other members of his original band, the Flatlanders, hail from Lubbock, Texas, along with Buddy Holly and Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks. In a long career, he's learned a lot about creative collaboration. In his workshops, he makes songwriters work in groups. He believes the creative group process mirrors the process in the individual writer's head. As he put it, the dialogue in one case and the monologue in the other both go, "That's brilliant! No, that's stupid!" In my case, since I didn't get to pick the people, the group process ended in tears a few times. But I think he's right about how the process works.
Between 2010 and 2012, I had the great joy of collaborating with my friend Ray Korona on an album of songs that I'd written over the course of half a century. It's called Outrageous Older Woman. I produced the album, Ray co-produced and acted as sound engineer, and we collected a tremendously gifted array of backup singers and musicians to create an album of my music that sounded the way I'd heard it only in my wildest dreams. We spent many, many hours in Ray's basement recording studio in New Jersey, and every hour was a happy one. Ten years after Ray's untimely death from cancer, I still cherish a moment when we got exactly the sound we wanted for a solo passage from a fingerstyle guitarist (think Chet Atkins or Ricky Skaggs) after auditioning four different musicians for the descriptor "a git-tar picker who had lightning in his hands" in a song about a country music band. Ray and I exchanged a look of delight and perfect satisfaction that still warms my heart when I remember it. There's nothing like that "Got it!" moment in a good collaboration.
I've never collaborated on a pure writing project, as opposed to lyrics. Like the late Parnell Hall, I would have sold out and said yes to big bestseller Stuart Woods, if I’d gotten the call, or to James Patterson, like everyone else. Bestsellers aside, I’d do my best if invited to collaborate with a writer I respect and trust on a publishable project. But no one’s ever asked. I've had a handful of brilliant editors and quite a few bad ones, and I tend to trust my own judgment over that of most other writers. I hate writing by committee, and while I may dream occasionally of the perfect writing partner, I'm unlikely to encounter one.
My most recent collaboration was with fellow SleuthSayer and multi-talented writer, graphic artist, tech wiz, etc, my friend Leigh Lundin. After reading my post on my adventures checking out my DNA, Leigh had the bright idea of creating a cartoon that riffed on them. He thought it up and did all the work. I got to critique both the artwork ("My complexion isn't green." "Can you make the angry woman thinner?") and the text ("It's funnier if you mention the DNA." "No hyphen in storyteller.") as Leigh patiently produced one version after another. We were both busy with other projects, so it took more than a year, but we finally achieved our "Got it!" moment. Here's the result:
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