Crimes Against Nature: Round Robin

As I said two weeks ago, I edited Crimes Against Nature: New Stories of Environmental Villainy, which Down and Out Books recently published.   I asked some of the contribu5tors to answer a few questions related to the book.  And here you go...

Give me five words about your story.

R.T. Lawton: Clandestine labs poison the environment.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Dead Bodies in Lake Mead

Janice Law: pollution, family, development, loss & revenge

Michael Bracken: Water is life. And death.

Mark Stevens: Exploiters of nature; delusional avenger.

Susan Breen: Over-tourism, volcanos, mother/daughter issues, Costa Rica and selfies

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: Wind energy on Native reservations.

Robert Lopresti: Recycling obsessions can be dangerous.

Josh Pachter: “bad neighbor,” revenge, poison, semi-autobiographical

Karen Harrington: Illegal dumping. A fight for life.

Sarah M. Chen: Influencers, beaches, responsibility, privilege, overtourism 

Barb Goffman: Comedy, neighbors, kitty-cat, marijuana, gardening

Gary Phillips: Influenced by the 1970s era, the Bronze Age of Comics. Specifically, the mystically charged Swamp Thing created by Len Wein (writer), and Bernie Wrightson (artist).

Crimes Against Nature uses mystery fiction to look at social (and scientific issues).  What is your favorite (or first-encountered) mystery novel or story that deals with social issues?

Sarah M. Chen: Because I recently read it and Wanda M. Morris is one of my favorite writers, the book that comes to mind is her latest, an atmospheric, taut thriller called What You Leave Behind. It’s set in the Gullah-Geechee community on the Georgia coast and deals with illegal land grabbing and the heirs property system that disproportionally affects Black and brown communities.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: First? Wow. Probably P.D. James, but which one, I have no idea.

Jon McGoran: Hard to remember what my first was, but when I was young, I went through an intense Carl Hiaasen phase, voraciously reading everything he wrote. I loved how he addressed environmental issues, while at the same time crafting these great crime stories, and never coming across as a scold, instead having great fun doing it.

S.J. Rozan: John Gregory Dunne, True Confessions.

Susan Breen: Walter Moseley’s novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, was the first time I understood racism in a visceral way. I wasn’t watching it from afar, but was there, with Easy Rawlins.

Robert Lopresti:  Some of Rex Stout's novels discussed social issues (A Right to Die, The Doorbell Rang, etc.) but when I first read them I was too young to absorb that.  In college I loved James McClure's The Steam Pig, which was about policing in South Africa under apartheid.

Janice Law: I can only mention some recent books, all of which dealt with child abuse in official custody of one sort or another: Fiona McPhillips's When We Were Silent, Rene Denfeld's Sleeping Giants and James McBride's, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: Even though she likely doesn’t think of it as a mystery novel, The Round House by Louise Erdrich is an amazing book that deals with criminal justice issues on Native lands. It’s a great read that also educates and illuminates. I highly recommend it, although she has so many other tremendous novels, so it’s hard to pick a favorite.

Gary Phillips: One of the first novels I recall dealing with a social issue, an environmental one at that and its implications was Ross Macdonald’s Sleeping Beauty. His fictional take on the real-life Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 as the backdrop to a Lew Archer, private eye tale.

Mark Stevens: The Wild Inside by Christine Carbo is one of my favorites.  

Name an author who has had the biggest impact on your short stories.

 Barb Goffman: Art Taylor. I learn something that helps my craft every time I read one of his stories.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch:   Stephen King

Jon McGoran:  I’ve always straddled mystery and scifi, but I think Elmore Leonard is the author whose style has most impacted me as a writer.

Susan Breen: My love of Agatha Christie inspired me to write mysteries, but Sue Grafton had a huge effect on how I think about the women who are usually my protagonists. She taught me that they could be bold, flawed and funny.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: I’ll always return to the stories of Flannery O’Connor, although my own work bears no resemblance to her amazing tales. For dialogue, I was heavily influenced by Raymond Carver, although I once had a well-known writer scream at me when I mentioned that I admired Carver’s stories. I still believe that Carver’s dialogue is some of the best out there—consistently expressive and surprising.

Gary Phillips: No one writer had the biggest impact but certainly short stories by Poe and Rod Serling – those Twilight Zone teleplays turned into short stories. And it’s only fair to note Walter Gibson, the pulp writer who essentially created the Shadow, turned those into prose.

Robert Lopresti: Can't stop at one: Stanley Ellin, John Collier, Jack Ritchie, Avram Davidson.

Sarah M. Chen: Patricia Abbott. One of my favorites of hers is from Betty Fedora, Issue One, a dark little gem called “Ten Things I Hate About My Wife."

Janice Law: This is difficult, because unlike most writers, I began with novels and only began writing and publishing short fiction after I had launched the Anna Peters series and a couple of history books. So, influences were the mystery writers I enjoyed: Dorothy L. Sayers, because she had Harriet Vane who was so much better than the usual female characters of the time; Eric Ambler, who was the god of suspense in my estimation, and Raymond Chandler for his irresistible style and mastery of atmosphere.

Karen Harrington: John Floyd, Stephen King, Barb Goffman and Ray Bradbury.

Mark Stevens: Patricia Highsmith

Which environmental issue is having the most direct effect on you now?

Karen Harrington: I don't know if it's a direct effect, but when I did research on illegal dumping of car oil and other car liquids, I discovered that it is alarmingly prolific. That's disturbing. There are companies that are weighing the cost of getting caught versus the damage to the environment and taking the gamble. This is from large companies to the small auto parts stores we see across the country. (And interestingly, in my research I found the attached photo describing the 1963 Popular Science method of disposing of used engine oil. What?! This practice was commonly accepted and thought to have no impact on the soil. Really shows that science is rarely settled and must continually learn and reevaluate what we think we know.)

Gary Phillips: Given I live in a seemingly now continuous wildfire state, no particular season for them as in the past, global warming is pretty dang real to me.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: The wildfires in Colorado seem to be getting worse every year, which is really distressing. I’m now living in New York for the first time since 2013, and I still have strong memories of Hurricane Sandy and the misery caused by that storm.

Mark Stevens: Everything climate change -- dwindling water supplies, threat of forest fires, impact on agriculture.

S.J. Rozan: Global warming, which encompasses all others

Susan Breen: Climate change is the environmental issue having the most direct effect on me because it is influencing where and how I live.

August 2023

Robert Lopresti: Most summers now we have days when the air is so full of wildfire smoke that it is considered dangerous to be outside.

Jon McGoran: I think climate change is having the greatest impact on most of us, both the direct effects of it that we’re already feeling, the (inadequate) measures we’re taking to combat it, and the fear and anxiety of what is to come, but I also wonder if nanoplastics and microplastics will end up being even more damaging to us.

Janice Law:  I very much hope to be gone myself before the warbler migration fails. Living in the Northeast, we have escaped some of the most immediate effects of climate change but it is becoming clear that every civilization, including ours, is dependent on the natural world and on favorable climate conditions. We have been slow to learn this as well as careless about our pollution and exploitation of the natural world.

Sarah M. Chen: I live close to the beach so am aware of the alarming rise in sickened and abandoned marine mammals, like whales and sea lion pups. This is due to a number of things like rising ocean temperatures which increases toxin levels and pups being forced to dive deeper and further for food.     

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: The warming of the planet, since I live in Las Vegas.

Themed mystery anthologies seem to be growing in popularity. Any thoughts on that trend?

Gary Phillips: Having edited or co-edited a number of themed anthologies, South Central Noir, The Cocaine Chronicles to name two, I think if you can hook the potential reader on the subject matter, they like diving in and out of a given short story. They’re not getting exhausted if you’ve tried to turn the idea into a novel, maybe having to pad the story.

Sarah M. Chen:  They're fun and I'm all for it!

Kristine Kathryn Rusch:  I think the more mystery stories the better.

Susan Breen: Anthologies force writers to get out of their regular routines. It’s a challenge to try something new and my suspicion is that because of that, the stories will have a jolt of energy to them.

Mark Stevens: I think once the whole idea of building short story collections on rock bands took off, well, there's no shortage of material.  Waiting for the first collection based on  songs by The Velvet Underground.

Karen Harrington: I think readers and writers enjoy seeing how different minds approach the same topic. I know I do.

 S.J. Rozan: Themed anthologies make total sense -- they allow readers to watch a wide variety of writers exploring topics they're interested in.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: Yes, I love the trend, and I’ll note that I’m editing one of these myself:  Native Noir, due out sometime in 2025 from Akashic Books. In that volume, some of the greatest Indigenous authors currently writing agreed to try their hand at a noir story, broadly defined. I hope to see more of the music-based anthologies, and I’m still salty that I didn’t know about the two Steely Dan books. Their songs are perfect, of course, for crime tales, and I’m hoping someone will put together another one (and please contact me if you do!)

Robert Lopresti: I love the fact that you can give twenty authors the same assignment and get twenty wildly different, but all fascinating responses.

Janice Law: I think it is a sensible attempt to create a new home for short fiction, which has been evicted from the newspapers and magazines that used to pay well for short stories.

 None of the authors in this book chose to write historical stories. Are there any environmental issues/events in history you think are particularly intriguing?

Gary Phillips: Interesting question. I suppose if I were to give it some thought, how the growth of the Industrial Revolution polluting the skies in England, damaging peoples’ lungs irreparably, comes to mind.

Robert Lopresti: The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was so polluted it caught fire 14 times. Publicity from the 1969 blaze lit a fuse (sorry) that started the modern environmental movement.

Sarah M. Chen: I watched a documentary on the Chernobyl disaster and found it horrifying and fascinating. I knew very little about it despite being a kid when it happened.

Susan Breen: I’m a great fan of Charles Dickens and have always been fascinated and appalled by what living conditions were like in London during Victorian times, even for the wealthy. Joseph Bazalgette’s construction of the sewer system has got to be one of the greatest environmental triumphs ever. Now that I think about it, I can come up with various murderous scenarios. Maybe I should have…

Barb Goffman: All of these historical events could be put to good use in a crime story...
        Oil spills - Exxon-Valdez, BP, etc.
        Toxic chemical dumping - Love Canal
        Water contamination - Woburn, MA, and Flint, MI
        Nuclear plant meltdown - Three Mile Island, though given recent news, Three Mile Island could also factor into a contemporary story.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch:   I've been fascinated for a long time by the Little Ice Age, as well as the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, causing more than 90,000 people to die, and inspiring one of the coldest (and darkest) summers on record in 1816, which led to lots of literary mayhem (like Frankenstein, Dracula, and some Lord Byron poetry).

S.J. Rozan:  1. The Great Flood of 1927 along the Mississippi.  2. Boston's 1919 Molasses Flood

Mark Stevens: Like, a zillion. My mind goes to all the ways mankind has plumbed nature or depended on nature for resources.  Early days of mining.  Or drilling for oil.  I'm fascinated by the idea that gigantic supertankers are ferrying oil around the globe. When was the first? Who dreamed that up? Seventy-seven million barrels of oil are moving around the globe every day.  At what cost? At what risk?  

Janice Law: We have a couple of big ones just in our own national history: the near extermination of the buffalo, the loss of the passenger pigeons, and what is proving to be the very foolish attempt to create "fur deserts" in the west. The loss of the beaver had impacted water storage in these dry areas just as the huge reduction in buffalo has had an impact on soil conservation etc on the prairies.

The trouble with these events, and with many environmental issues, is that they don't necessarily fit well with the demands of short mystery fiction, which are surprising like the old classical unities: one time, one place, one action, and that additional requirement that also goes back to the ancient Greeks: a beginning  in the middle of the action.

Is That a New Anthology in Your Pocket?

GREENBERG

Martin H. Greenberg edited or co-edited 1,298 anthologies across multiple genres, the first published in 1974. Between then and his death in 2011, he produced an average of 35 anthologies per year or one anthology every 1.45 weeks.

Releases November 8, 2024.

For his work, Greenberg received an Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America, a Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement from The Horror Writers Association, and a Solstice Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Greenberg didn’t produce all these anthologies alone. He often had co-editors, including such luminaries as Isaac Asimov and Ed Gorman. Along the way, he founded Tekno Books, a book packager that also produced novels. Denise Dietz, John Helfers, and Denise Little were, at various times, part of the Tekno Books team. Likely, there were other team members.

Clearly, Greenberg had help.

ELWOOD

Roger Elwood, who passed away in 2007, edited or co-edited at least 67 anthologies (some sources claim he edited as many as 80), the first published in 1964. Working primarily within the science fiction/fantasy genres, he produced 55 anthologies in the six-year period beginning in 1972. In 1974 alone, he produced 23 anthologies, or one every 2.2 weeks. Like Greenberg, Elwood didn’t limit his editing to anthologies. He also edited books and magazines, and he wrote both fiction and non-fiction.

There’s no indication he had staff to assist him.

LEGACY

Released October 14, 2024.

Greenberg’s death left a hole in the anthology marketplace, and no anthologist working today (or none that I’m aware of) produces the same volume of anthologies and works as broadly across genres and for as many publishers the way he did.

Elwood, on the other hand, seems to have left a bad taste in the science fiction writing community, with rumors of shoddy workmanship, poor treatment of writers, and unhappy publishers.

GOLDEN AGE

In “Is That a New Derringer in Your Pocket?”, Joseph S. Walker’s October 27, 2024, SleuthSayers post, he notes this about anthologies: “I’ve heard more than a few writers suggesting that we’re living in a golden age for the form.”

I suspect this belief comes more from younger and newer writers who didn’t experience the years when anthologies were released at a breakneck pace, when editors such as Greenberg, Elwood, and others were at their peak productivity. On the other hand, as Walker further noted, this belief in an anthology golden age may be more “due to a decline in the number of magazine markets,” which means anthologies now appear to represent a larger share of the available marketplace for fiction.

Either way, anthologies have long been important to the writing community, and writers desiring publication should spend as much time seeking anthology opportunities as magazine opportunities.

But will any of today’s anthology editors have such an outsize impact on the field—good or bad—the way Greenberg and Elwood did?

Only time will tell.

* * *

The last quarter of 2024 is filled with news:

“Stinkwater Lake” appears in Crimes Against Nature (Down & Out Books), edited by Robert Lopresti, released October 7.

“Barbed Wire Bison” appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November/December.

Scattered, Smothered, Covered & Chunked (Down & Out Books) which I co-edited with Stacy Woodson, released October 14 and includes my story “Windfall.”

Janie’s Got a Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Aerosmith (Misti Media) releases November 8.

Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, vol. 5 (Down & Out Books) releases December 2.

The Uses of Mystery: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

The discovery of a body in 1979. What is a more classic mystery opening than a stray and unexpected corpse? Followed up, in this case, by a police visit to an old man who looks very much like the prime suspect? Category police drama anyone?

 

In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has some other ideas. The passage about the discovery summarizes events that were genuinely mysterious to most of those involved back when the deceased was dropped in an abandoned well at Chicken Hill, a hardscrabble section of Pottstown, PA.

In 1932, Chicken Hill was home to the newer inhabitants of an increasingly industrialized town. Blacks fleeing the Jim Crow South and east European Jews fleeing pogroms scratch out mostly marginal lives with one eye on the unwelcoming forces of law and order. 

Two of the more fortunate inhabitants are Moshe and and Chona Ludlow. He runs the local theater and has found considerable success booking Black as well as Yiddish musicians. She runs the grocery store that, with its generous credit, functions as a life line in the current hard times and gives her rapport with locals in the Black community, especially Nate and Addie Timblin.

The Timblins' struggle to keep a young, deaf relative out of the notorious orphan home enlists both Ludlows and provides a spine for the dramatic events of the novel. But even the genuinely gripping main plot line is only the armature for McBride's detailed portrait of the community, bursting with fully realized and fascinating characters. 

 

Many are engaged in some dubious hustle, as Chicken Hill copes not only with poverty but with a lack of basic services. Even a water supply is tricky; health care is a dangerous gamble, and decent jobs are basically beyond the grasp of even competent people like the Timblins.

 

The 1920's and 30's saw a resurgence of the Klan, widespread anti-Semitism, and a deep suspicion of immigrants. This was true in the north as well as the south. The Depression only deepened those social ills and a fear amounting to hatred of those on the margins.  

 

Success, or even survival, in Chicken Hill takes sharp wits, a sense of community, and a great deal of ingenuity, social, political and mechanical. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a portrait of a community under stress: intelligent, but under educated and full of odd customs, superstitions, and rituals. 

 

Is there a mystery in there, too? Certainly, with two bona fide villains, a contract killing, a fatal assault, and some high risk schemes involving the brotherhood of railroad workers. There is plenty going on but the novel takes some familiar mystery conventions and tropes and works them into a bigger picture. 

This gives National Book Award winner McBride time to expand his characterizations and atmosphere, to indulge in some flights of fancy, and even to harken unto the supernatural. Some mystery fans may prefer a more streamlined plot. But I think most will be charmed by how some favorite devices are employed in this beautifully written and very accessible novel.

###

Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

 

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books.

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available

Is That a New Derringer in Your Pocket?

The Short Mystery Fiction Society was formed in 1996, and presented the first Derringer Awards, recognizing excellence in short mystery fiction, in 1998.  Not surprisingly, the awards have changed in many ways over almost thirty years, and they're about to do so again.  

Taking a look at Derringer history is illuminating.  Over the last few months, the Society's current Assistant Derringer Coordinator, Mark Schuster, has put together something long overdue: a database of all the nominees and winners over the lifetime of the awards.  Thanks to his outstanding work, we've been reminded of some awards presented in the early years--Best First Short Story and Best Puzzle Story, for example--that have fallen by the wayside.

  

There have also been shifts in the categories which have stuck around.  The initial definition of flash stories was 200-400 words.  For several years the three main categories were flash (up to 1,200 words), short (1,201-10,000 words) and novella (10,001-25,000 words).  By 2004, there were categories with the awkward labels short short, mid-length short, and long short.  

It seems to have been about 2010 when the categories settled into the four competitive Derringer categories used today: flash (up to 1,000 words), short story (1,001-4,000), long story (4,001-8,000), and novelette (8,000-20,000 [the upper limit has changed a few times]).  In addition, the society presents an annual Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement in Short Mystery Fiction, and selects one deceased writer to enter the short mystery Hall of Fame.

Earlier this year, the Society voted to add a new Derringer award for the first time in many years: Best Anthology.  This idea originated with Josh Pachter, himself a Golden Derringer recipient, one of the best writers in the field today, and, not incidentally, the editor of many a fine anthology (including an upcoming anthology of Derringer-winning stories celebrating the 30th year of the Society).

Making changes to an institution like the Derringers shouldn't be done lightly, but the time is ripe for an award recognizing that anthologies have become more and more important in recent years.  I've heard more than a few writers suggesting that we're living in a golden age for the form, in fact.  

In part this may be, unfortunately, due to a decline in the number of magazine markets open to short crime fiction.  To be sure, there are still some fantastic traditional magazine markets out there, and there's an undeniable thrill to selling a story to Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock.  There are also great online periodicals, like Tough.  The recent demise of Mystery Magazine (formerly Mystery Weekly), though, was only the most recent of many such losses.  Even if a magazine still exists, finding it can be a challenge.  I live in a fairly large town with a big university, but when I recently had a story published in The Saturday Evening Post, I couldn't locate a single store in my community that actually carries it.

For writers in our field looking to get their work in front of readers, then, anthologies have become increasingly important.  Many of them come from smaller publishers, run by people passionate about fiction: Down & Out Books, Misti Media, Level Best Books, others I'm sure I'm not thinking of right now.

About two thirds of my own stories have been published in anthologies.  For writers, these markets have a lot to offer.  They usually have entertaining, inventive themes, encouraging experimentation.  They offer the chance to work with highly skilled and engaged editors (I know my own work has benefitted tremendously from working with anthology editors like Josh, Barb Goffman, and Michael Bracken).  They have the potential to reach new readers who might otherwise never encounter our work.  They're likely to remain available for several years, long after a magazine publication has faded away.  

Most of all, they're just plain fun, as much for writers as for readers.  I sometimes feel I should be writing more for magazine markets, but at any given time there are anthologies open for submission on topics I just can't resist.  This year alone, I've published stories in anthologies themed around sports, one-hit wonders, fairy tales, the solar eclipse, sex and classical music, 21st century noir, and the songs of Aerosmith and the Grateful Dead.  Could one of those books take home the first Derringer for Best Anthology?  Stay tuned!

If you'd like to nominate an anthology, or stories for the other Derringer categories, you must be a member of the Society by the end of this calendar year.  Membership is free, and offers you the chance to rub virtual elbows with many of the leading writers in the field, along with readers, editors, publishers, and various others invested in short mystery stories.  In the interest of full disclosure, I am the current President of the Society--but I'd be telling you to join even if that wasn't the case.

So what are some of your favorite recent anthologies?  

As a writer, what draws you to certain anthology calls?  

As a reader, what are you looking for in an anthology?  Familiar authors?  The editor?  The topic?

     

Can We Be SANE Without Writing?

 

Recently, I reached an age where I admit to being in my 60s. 

This milestone has got me thinking about what it means to be a working author at a time when all your friends are retired. (Husband as well, the poop.)

For instance, today Mike is golfing.  I - in contrast - am sitting at my computer taking a break from three solid hours of going through publisher edits, working to a deadline of Friday.  This includes several hours yesterday, the day before and the day before that.  

My neck hurts.  I'm not sure I'll be able to get out of this chair without help. And as I look wistfully out the window at lake Ontario on this glorious day, I can't help wondering if I'm doing the right thing.  There are only so many hours left to live.

 

1000 HOURS A BOOK

It takes me a year to write a historical mystery, from the original first draft, the endless research, to the final edited version.  1000 hours for each book, I estimate.  

My 18th book will be published in March.  My 19th (the work in progress) will be a year after that. My 70th short story will be published this November. 

Even ignoring the short stories, that's 20,000 hours of writing for 19 published books. (The first didn't get published, to my immense relief.  Even I thought the protagonist was a whiny nincompoop.)

I have writer friends (the best of the bunch) and non-writer friends (incredibly patient and tolerant) who seem to have more brains than I do.  So I ventured this question out loud to them:

WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME WHY I'M STILL DOING THIS?

Bless them all. Here are the two best answers I got:

YOU HAVE A PUBLISHER, NINNY!

For so many of my writing students, getting a publisher is the Holy Grail.  And indeed, I thought so too, as I shlepped my work around twenty years ago. 

Having a publisher means your work is still getting read, and is making the publisher money.  They let you go if it isn't. 

I'm under contract for two more books, but it does make me wonder what comes after that.  And this leaves the ultimate question: do we quit writing novels on our own terms, while they are still being sought, or do we wait until a publisher no longer wants them?

 

WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU DO?

At first I burst out laughing, when Thom said this to me. My friend and writing colleague Thom Bennett is blessed with wisdom and good nature.  He also deals in tough love.  I listen when he talks.

He tells me this:  "What else would you do with that time you spend writing? I know women your age who have nothing to do but go to lunch. They spend hours lining up people to have lunch with every day, desperate to keep their calendars full.  Is that who you want to be?"

I like lunch.  But I have to admit, he made me think.  If you had a full time job in your middle years, and kids at home, you probably didn't have time to develop many hobbies outside of work.  My hobby was writing, of course.  Which is why we are having this soul searching today.

To which I add my own question:  

CAN I BE SANE WITHOUT WRITING?

I honestly don't know.  Can you?

I've been writing since I was eight. I earned my first award when I was a high school senior (a City of Toronto children's book award.)  

I can't imagine my life without days full of writing.  In fact, it scares the hell out of me.  

At the same time, I worry that - on my death bed - I will regret having spent so much of my final decade/s alone in my office at a keyboard.

How about you? Any advice? Do you ever question whether spending your 60s and upward years writing is the right thing to do?

 

Melodie Campbell has been called the "Queen of Comedy" by The Toronto Sun.  Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine called her "The Canadian literary heir to Donald Westlake." You can get her books on Amazon, and all the usual suspects.

 

 

  

Elizabethan Noir

MGM

My current read is The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's seminal play about greed and revenge. The play is often criticized for its anti-Semitic tone and rightfully so. The characters' main beef with ruthless money lender Skylock is he's a Jew. And yet, Will seems to be giving Elizabethan England a well-deserved punch in the eye for it. After all, this is where the line, "Tickle us, do we not laugh; prick us, do we not bleed? Wrong us, shall we not revenge?" (And I cannot not hear that in Christopher Plummer's voice.) It's Shakespeare's way of saying, "Well, if you treat me like a monster, don't be surprised if I become one."

But Shylock is by no means a hero. The prejudice against him fuels his rage, but at only five scenes in, I've only seen him in one. That's actually a brilliant piece of writing. (Well, it is Shakespeare. Even his duds are impressive. Except Edward III, and he was likely the script doctor on that one. "Why didn't I give this to Marlowe to fix. Joan of Kent? Zounds!") Shylock is such a presence that he shifts the center of gravity in every scene he's in. I'm just reading this, not watching Plummer or Patrick Stewart or Al Pacino play him, and he immediately grabs one's attention, a malevolence rivaling Shakespeare's Richard III in the play of the same name. 

But we know Shakespeare for two types of plays: Histories and comedies. His comedies are hit or miss, and I admit, I don't really connect with those very much. They are probably best seen performed rather than read. The histories, more often than not, are what grab my attention. But Shakespeare wrote in a transitional period, moving from poems to prose, from the epic to the everyday. Had Shakespeare lived two centuries later, might he have adapted Tom Jones (current Audible listen), complete with all the bawdiness he held back on in the days of Elizabeth and King James I? (Yeah. The Bible guy. Who clearly never read it. That's a rant for a different forum.)

Henry V and Julius Caesar and Richard III, however, are epic figures, heroes and villains (and sometimes both) who operate on Olympian levels. But what of The Merchant of Venice? It's the titular merchant, Antonio, who takes out a loan for his friend, Bassanio, then defaults on it. The penalty is, legally, "a pound of flesh." 

Wait a minute. You take out a loan and, instead of debtors prison or the lender taking all your stuff, as usually happens, he gets a literal piece of you? That sounds a lot like...

A loan shark. Now, I've known an actual loan shark, as in he worked for one of the Five Families back in the day. You hear stories of leg-breaking, but more often, an actual loan shark would prefer breaking things and intimidation. Your broken leg impedes your ability to earn the vig. However, Shylock is, to put it mildly, a bit of a jerk. There's animosity between Shylock and Antonio, and it goes beyond the prejudice Shakespeare saddles his characters with. Shylock hates Antonio's guts, and helping himself to a pound of those guts drives that home. Antonio knows this and takes the loan intending to pay it back and rub Shylock's nose in it. Antonio is not a nice guy, nor is he Shakespeare's standard hero. Like Shylock, he's ruthless.

So, does that mean The Merchant of Venice is noir?

In some ways. Typically, in noir, the protagonist is screwed and comes either to a bad end or winds up diminished. (If Shylock had his way, Antonio would be diminished by a pound.) But the First Folio listed Merchant as a comedy. Why? Because the fair Portia and her friend Nerissa pose as lawyers and con Shylock in a move worthy of Tom Cruise in the movie version of The Firm. (I still like that better than what Grisham wrote, if only for the look on Paul Sorvino's face when he realizes the kid he came to whack just outmaneuvered his own law firm.) So the comedy aspect, in terms of the classical definition of a comedy, fits. 

But this is really, really dark. Antonio's scheme to put one over on Shylock backfires. We already know Shylock is a vengeful, angry man. So while his methods are abhorrent, you have to recall the old Chris Rock line, "I'm not saying I approve, but I understand!" Kind of like watching a Hannibal Lector movie and wonder when he'll just eat some annoying character. (They were legion in Hannibal.)

But Antonio is the arrogant rich man. Shylock is the ruthless money lender. The mob even named the slang for loan shark after him. Head-to-head, it's almost an episode of Penguin or Tulsa King.

Furious Fisticuffs: Fact, Fiction & the Line in Between

 How is it nearly Halloween?

Hey, and Happy Nearly November! 

Last time we met, I gave you some thoughts on writing realistic fight scenes. And for this go-round I promised to talk about the weirdest fights I had ever broken up. So without further ado, here a few quick honorable mentions:

Just like one of these.

The Cocktail Napkin

Back in college, I once helped break up a fight between two brothers (yes, they were both drunk). They were coming to blows over a cocktail napkin.

That's it. Cocktail napkin. Nothing more. No phone number written on it. No directions for a hook-up. No crudely drawn map to a gold mine.

A cocktail napkin.

No subtext or hidden meaning here, either. Except for the fact that these two loved to scrap at a level that might Oasis's Gallagher brothers blush.

The Solvent

This one hearkens back to my time spent in the Navy.

I helped break up a fight on the mess decks (where the ship's crew ate meals) between a couple of guys who worked in Engineering. One of them accused the other one of stealing solvent from the supply locker in his engineering station (he was responsible for keeping track of and order more supplies). These guys duked it out right there in the middle of mid rats ("midnight rations": a meal prepared for watchstanders either coming off of or going on watch at midnight.).

Just like this one.

Both guys got written up and likely would have lost rank and pay and been restricted to the ship had tragedy not struck.

As it turned out, the guy accused of stealing solvent was in fact guilty of stealing solvent. Apparently unaware of how dangerous the fumes given off by this substance could be in an enclosed space, he stored it in his locker, which was right beneath his bunk (a "rack" in Navy parlance. And that type of locker? Appropriately enough, in this instance: a "coffin locker."). The guy liked to use solvent to get the combined oil and grease off his hands after a day's work.

And it killed him. The fumes from the solvent asphyxiated him in his sleep.

(I used this incident as the germ of an idea for my short story "Show Biz Kids," featured in the crime fiction anthology Die Behind the Wheel.)

Unsurprisingly, the charges against the other fellow were dropped after the autopsy confirmed cause of death. 

Sooooo....solvent.

The above are two of the weirdest ones, now let me tell you about the three most violent ones I helped break up. All of them took place at a school where I was working as a teacher. Two of them at the middle school where I currently teach, and one at a high school where I worked over two decades ago. First up: middle school.

The Language Barrier

Ever seen a human reenactment of the story of the Mouse that Roared?

I have.

A student of mine, always in trouble, always smiling, never letting anything get to him, picked a fight with a newly arrived Pacific Islander who spoke nearly no English and stood literally head and shoulders above him.

The mouse in this instance picked his fight by sucker punching the big man in the back of his head (apparently the big guy had pushed a lady friend of the brave mouse in the hall, and he could not let that pass).

Needless to say, this enraged the Pacific Islander giant, and he turned on the mouse. I and two other teachers (both male) got between the two combatants before blood could be shed, and I grabbed the mouse and pulled him into a classroom, locking out the enraged islander before he could get his hands on the smaller kid.

Thank God the door I locked was two-inch thick solid oak.

The entire school went into lock-down while this modern-day South Seas Hercules took out his rage on the lockers in the hallway (the dents he put in the top of one row are still there). Eventually the police arrived and sorted things out. No charges filed, but....phew....

A Tale of Two Amazons

Now, I am six feet tall and not at all a small person. But when two 14 year-old lady athletes took a beef that started at basketball practice to the hall outside of my classroom and I went charging in to try and stop it, I felt tiny. And weak.

Both of these young women were physical specimens: taller than my six feet, strong and athletic, and they were waling on each other. Let me take a moment also to let the uninitiated in on a salient fact of life: the most violent fights tend to be between women.

There are lots of theories about why this is, and I'm not interested in advancing one of my own. I am just going to say that my own experience bears it out.

None moreso than during this fight. I got between them first and immediately regretted that move, as I quickly got bounced off a locker as if I were a rubber ball.

Other teachers stepped in (female and male) and helped quell the battle royale. I will say that one of my fondest memories from my teaching career is of when one of the girls said to me, "Let me go, Teach! I don't want to hurt you! I like you!" (I did not have a hold of her. I was simply interposing my body between her and the other young woman. As were about six of my colleagues).

It's Always the Quiet Ones

This final example comes from a brief stint I did teaching high school English at a school in a neighboring district. 

It was passing period and I was standing outside of my classroom (it was my third year of teaching) greeting students, and several kids ran up and breathlessly told me about a fight involving a couple of girls in the hall around the corner. One of the names I recognized as a small, quiet, fairly shy Latina student of mine. So I went tearing down the hall trying to keep this kid from getting hurt.

I needn't have worried.

I turned the corner to see another girl (Pacific Islander and strong) standing, bent at the waist over the first girl, with her long hair hanging down nearly to the floor, and shaking rhythmically, as if at the footfalls of a giant.

As it turns out the quiet girl knew how to brawl. Flat on her back, she had gotten a deep solid grip on the other girl's hair at the nape of her neck, and was holding her in place while repeatedly punching her in the face.

I only discovered this when I attempted to pull the taller girl off of the one of the floor (a move I have not attempted since, as the memory of the sore back I nursed for weeks after has turned out to be very instructive.).

I never saw the taller girl after we broke that fight up.

The quiet one tracked me down and invited me to her wedding years later.

And I went! A great time! Her father and I laughed and laughed over that fight. 

Last I heard this young lady was a mother of three and teaching middle school math. And boy do I pity the student who gets on her bad side.

And on that uplifting note, that's it for me this go-round.

Tune in next time to hear about "Firing Bob" and why every writer ought to do it.

See you in two weeks!

The Long Goodbye

 

Jackie Winspear’s new book, The Comfort of Ghosts, is her eighteenth Maisie Dobbs mystery, and the last.  You wonder why, and the author says she imagined a narrative arc to the series, as well as the storyline in each novel, and she felt that she’d closed the circle.

I say, God bless.  I’ll miss Maisie, as will huge numbers of other readers, but there comes a time.  I’d rather make the choice myself.  All too often, you don’t get to.  I’m still sorry Philip Kerr died, when there were many more Bernie Gunther stories to come; and Bruce Alexander stood us up, before his blind 18^th-century magistrate, Sir John Fielding, was ready to step down from the bench – what will happen to young Jeremy, ever on the prowl for that sinful Turkish brew, haunting Lloyd’s for both the coffee buzz and the maritime gossip?

The other side of the ledger, we have Conan Doyle famously trying to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, and Agatha Christie wanting to rid herself of the “insufferable” Hercule Poirot, but market demand kept them going.  Speaking of, Tom Clancy shuffled off this mortal coil eleven years ago, but he keeps manufacturing product. 

I’m not a huge fan of publishers profiting off dead guys, although Ace Atkins has done a good job with Robert B. Parker’s legacy (plus the blessing of Parker’s widow Joan). Ace gets Spenser’s rhythm right.  You can’t say the same about Parker himself, and Raymond Chandler.  Poodle Springs isn’t a bad book, on its own; it is, however, dreadful as Chandler.  Parker clearly admires the master – Spenser, Marlowe, get it? – but he doesn’t have Chandler’s lapidary and Byzantine habit of mind, or Chandler’s precise and mischievous ear for language (to wit, “a couple of streamlined demi-virgins went by caroling and waving,” from The Long Goodbye).  I happen to be a big fan of Islands in the Stream, too, if only the first fifty pages or so, which I’m actually confident Hemingway himself wrote. 

I know this sounds mean-spirited, but the most specific thing about any writer is voice.  This is usually different from story to story, sometimes inviting and intimate, sometimes chilly, or arm’s length.  Homely and domestic can open out into the epic.  Larry McMurtry and Jim Harrison are very unalike, but Lonesome Dove and Legends of the Fall share an almost Arthurian scale of delivery.  On the other hand, A Narrow Grave, McMurtry’s essays, would seem to have nothing in common with Letters to Yesenin, Harrison’s poetry.  Two writers who are utter strangers to each other. 

Probably not, though, if they meet in heaven.

There’s an originality to any writer.  We have the dictum, write the book only you can write, which can be taken in more than one way, but for the moment, let’s say it means, this book, at this moment, couldn’t be written this way, by anybody else.  Somebody else could write a story about a nurse, in a combat surgery, behind the trenches, in the Great War.  But only Jacqueline Winspear is going to use her character, Maisie, to speak to the trauma of Jackie’s own grandfather, still picking shrapnel fragments out of his scarred legs in his seventies.  The specificity is everything.  War is never over, a character in one of the Maisie books says, it lives on in the living, in the guilt of the survivors.  The arc of Maisie’s story, in eighteen books, is a map of grief, and the consequences of loss.  It has a shape, like something stuck in your throat.  Maisie can’t be imitated, because she’s invented herself out of a certain, particular piece of the past – I mean Maisie, as a character in her own story, is self-invented, and Maisie, the character that Jackie the writer has invented, can only have become this Maisie. 

Jackie Winspear says Maisie will always be taking up space in her head, even if she’s longer writing about her.  I’d suggest that’s because Maisie is partly a vehicle, like any character – your characters are a way into the story – but also because she’s taken on, over time, the burden of responsibility.  You might say it’s a necessary plot device, which it is; Maisie, though, has become necessary to the author.  Not an avatar, or a second self, but a physical metaphor, for the gravity of hope.  Maisie carries the weight.  Jackie has lightened her own heart, and ours.

Dialogue to Die For ... Again

Due to a medical issue, I am rerunning a column from 2017. If you love dialogue, it is worth reading--even if you read it seven years ago. After all, great dialogue is one thing that lures readers and viewers back over and over and over ...

Remember the TV show Name That Tune? The idea was to see how few notes of a song a person could hear and correctly name that tune. I don't know how well I'd do on that show, but if there were a Name That Movie show, I would clean up--assuming they asked about movies I've seen. Spoken dialogue, I've found, sticks with me. I adore snappy and heartfelt dialogue in books too, but for whatever reason, I don't retain it the way I do dialogue from movies and TV shows. (You'd think, then, that I would have good recall for dialogue from audio books, yet not so much.)

Anyway, I started thinking about ear memory the other day when I turned on the TV. I wasn't looking at the screen. All I heard was, "Always," and I knew it was the late Alan Rickman as Professor Severus Snape in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. (I might have seen that movie a few times.) That one word transported me back right to the exact scene in the movie. Rickman delivered it perfectly, revealing so much about Snape's character. Even now, recalling the scene breaks my heart a little all over again.

Alan Rickman

 

Of course, Rickman had help. His dialogue was written for him. Great dialogue depends on the team of great writers and great actors working together, as well as the folks who add the background music that adds drama or tugs at your heart. When done right, dialogue can be magical. I only need hear certain words or a sentence in the right voice, with the right rhythm, and I know the film. I'm transported in my mind right back to that scene.

Here are a few examples. They may not be the most well-known from each movie, but they certainly stand out:

"I want the truth!" "You can't handle the truth." Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men

"You can't kiss her!" Sally Field in Soapdish

"Why can't I write shit like this?" Whoopi Goldberg in Soapdish

"Shall we play a game?" Joshua (computer) in War Games (even a computer can make dialogue memorable)

More Alan Rickman

"There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?" Emma Thompson in Love Actually

"Oh jeez. I'm getting pulled over. Everybody just pretend to be normal." Greg Kinnear in Little Miss Sunshine

"I guess it comes down to a simple choice. Get busy living or get busy dying." Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption

 

"And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that?" Frances McDorman in Fargo

"You don't really know how much you can do until you stand up and decide to try." Kevin Kline in Dave

"Here's looking at you, kid." Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca

"A toast to my big brother, George, the richest man in town." Todd Karns in It's a Wonderful Life (It's interesting that one of the most memorable lines in the film is from a minor character.)

And even more Alan Rickman

"I'll have what she's having." Estelle Reiner in When Harry Met Sally (another minor character who steals the scene)

"By Grabthar's hammer, by the sons of Warvan, you shall be avenged." Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride


"You're going to the cemetery with your toothbrush. How Egyptian." Robin Williams in The Birdcage

"Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?" Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark

"It was like ... magic." Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle 

"I'm not crazy. I've just been in a very bad mood for forty years." Shirley MacLaine in Steel Magnolias

"But I don't want to be a pirate." Jerry Seinfeld in Seinfeld

"I'm not insane. My mother had me tested." Jim Parsons in The Big Bang Theory

Alas, not Alan Rickman
but still wonderful

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." Gordon Jump in WKRP in Cincinnati

Inspired to go watch a great movie or to try to write your own memorable dialogue? Great. But before you go, please share your favorite movie or TV show line(s) of dialogue. The lines that stick with you, that you remember sometimes out of nowhere. The words that transport you and make you smile. And if you know how to make dialogue on the page stand out in memory the way spoken dialogue does, please let me know. I'm open to any and all tips.