Blink Fiction

 

Some time ago, a non-writer friend asked me about the term flash fiction. Specifically, how long or short does it have to be? I gave her what I suppose is the most generally-accepted answer: 1000 words or less. Some say 1500, some say 500--but I know 1000 is the upper limit for the flash category of the Derringer Awards, given annually by the Short Mystery Fiction Society.

I also told her that stories of that length aren't only common--they're popular. Their brevity is the very reason many readers like them. Marketingwise, there are some publications, like Woman's World, that use only flash stories, and most magazines that publish "regular" short fiction will also consider them. I can remember when submission guidelines for even the big publications usually said "also publishes short shorts," which is what flash fiction was once called.

But what if stories are very, very short? One of my published stories--"Tourist Trap," which was probably more fun to write than any other I can remember--was 400 words. If you want to read that story (it takes about a minute and a half), it's posted here. And a place called Punk Noir published a story of mine called "Retirement Plan" a few months ago that was exactly 200 words, here. What, you might ask, are those called? Short-short-short stories? Blink stories?

If you really want blink fiction, consider the following. (I think I've written about this before, either here or at Criminal Brief.) Here's the background:

I once saw a submission call for what I thought was a cool fiction contest. They wanted 26-word stories, and every word in the story had to start with a different letter of the alphabet, in order. There was only one gimme: The letter X, thankfully, could be considered Ex. I should mention, here, that I usually hate contests, and I never enter them--but this one had no entry fee and was super intriguing, so why not? By way of practice, I wrote seven different alphabetized 26-worders, which I fully realize were not examples of fine literature. If you need proof of that, here are four of those seven attempts:

1. Alameda Books Corporation. Dear Editor: Findings gathered here include John Kennedy's lost manuscript. No other publishers quickly responded, so this unsubmitted volume will Xcite you. Zimmerman. 

2. All Balkan country doctors exhibit friendliness, generosity, helpful inclinations, jovial kindness, likability, modest nature. Oddly, physicians quite rarely seem to understand video work. Xample: Yuri Zhivago. 

3. A British chemist detected evidence featuring green horses, indigo jackasses, khaki-like mules, nags occasionally painted quirky red shades. Therefore, unbiased veterinarians will Xamine yellow Zebras.

4. A baboon cage, discovered empty. Facility gurus hired investigator JoNell Kendrix. "Lost monkeys," Nell observed. "Possible quick reasons: sabotage, theft, utter villainy. Who, Xactly? You, zookeeper!" 

You might've decided by now a baboon cage is where I belong--but I did warn you. Equally silly is the story I finally decided to submit to the contest--I titled it "Mission Ambushable." But--picture Professor Brown screaming "Great Scott!"--it actually won. The prize was a $30 Amazon gift card, which I used about thirty seconds after they gave it to me. For what it's worth, here's that story:

Assassin Bob Carter deftly eased forward, gun hidden in jacket, keeping low, making not one peep. Quietly Robert said, to unaware victim: "Welcome. Expected you." ZAP.

Okay, enough of that. I've given you examples of some very short stories, but . . . What? You want something even shorter? How about six words?

A few years ago I found out about a competition for six-word stories inspired by this famous little ditty: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. That was supposedly written by Hemingway, but Wikipedia says it first appeared in 1906, when Papa Ernest was seven years old, so don't believe everything you're told on the Internet. Nobody knows who came up with it. 

Long story short, I once again broke my no-contests rule. The six-worder I submitted was titled "Radio Silence":

Entering Bermuda Triangle. No problems whatsoev-- 

Alas, that masterpiece won nothing. I never even got a response from the contest people. I choose to believe that either (1) my submission fell behind the refrigerator or (2) they published my story someplace far away, to wide acclaim.

Here are a few other six-word stories, from Quirk Books. All of them are better than mine:

Ever early, he died too soon.

For sale: writer's notebook. Never opened.

Revolutions existed long before the wheel.

Clown nose broken. It's not funny.

And, to sum up this discussion of six-word stories, consider this one, which I did write:

Get real. These aren't really stories.

So. Here are my questions for you. What do you think of flash, and even subflash, fiction? Have you ever tried writing it? Any successes? (I recall my buddy Josh Pachter winning a Derringer for a flash story a couple of years ago.) Any interesting rejections? Do you think writing them is hard? Fun? A waste of time? Do you like to read very short stories? What do you think the upper flash limit, in word count, should be? Have you ever written a flash story and then turned it into something longer?

It occurs to me that there's been nothing flash about the length of this post--so I'll fix that right now.

See you next Saturday. 

  

Writers, Black Friday's on You!

Hello? Hello? Is anyone actually there?

As long as I am once again stuck posting on Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving that marks the start of the Christmas shopping season, I might as well take a bold, clickbaity tack and blame the commercialization of Christmas on short story writers.

Yes, fellow scribes, j’accuse!

In years past, I talked about how Christmas in America went from being a holiday marked by drunken hooliganism to one supposedly dedicated to blissful domesticity. The agent in that drama was Santa Claus, whose literary popularization in the 1820s allowed civic-minded adults to focus the holiday on children. That twist also forced young men to be responsible. They could no longer wander the streets on wintry days off; they had to earn and spend wisely if they were to produce presents for children (and eventually all their loved ones) on Christmas Day.

I am not making this up. It all comes from a fantastic book, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, by historian Stephen Nissenbaum. (A terrible title, but a wonderfully instructive book nonetheless.)

Americans had a huge hurdle to overcome to finally embrace Christmas. The nation’s earliest settlers, Puritans, banned the holiday. But by 1680, Professor Nissenbaum argues, their cultural impact had begun to wane in the colonies and in England as well. Slowly, printed materials such as almanacs began denoting December 25th as Christmas-Day once again. Hymnals began including Christmas hymns. By the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin prescribed what Nissenbaum calls “temperate mirth” (Nissenbaum’s italics, not mine or Franklin’s) for the season.

And when our historian studies the diaries of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, he finds that Mrs. Ballard often worked on Christmas. By the 1790s, if Mrs. Ballard did anything special at all to mark the holiday, she and her husband visited friends and family. She shopped for ingredients such as rum, sugar, ginger, allspice, and other fancy ingredients, and spent the run-up to the Christmas week baking cakes or pies. The implication was that good, honest, industrious folks did moderately festive things for Christmas. They might sip a cup of drink or eat a slice of mince meat pie. They’d sit in someone’s home and chat or sing. They didn’t extort money from their neighbors on a wanton parade of inebriated wassailing, as was the custom in big cities. They also didn’t buy presents for each other. That just was not part of the early U.S. Christmas tradition.

Mrs. Ballard—who was, remember, a midwife—did note that young people of her acquaintance did apparently go a-courting during this time of year. (Dutiful historian Nissenbaum notes that, statistically, babies in this era were often born in great numbers in September or October, indicating that Christmas-time was indeed busy for some people.)

The poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” became popular in the 1820s, and by the 1830s publishers in the U.S. major cities cranked out annual books intended to be purchased by adults to give to children. They had names like The Girl’s Own Book, or The American Girl’s Book, and were filled with stories, games, puzzles, poems, that promised to be absolutely wholesome and edifying for the child you loved. There were books for boys, too. In one of these books in the 1840s, Nissenbaum discovers a reprint of E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker,” which was first written in 1816.

The earliest advertisement for “Christmas Gifts” that Nissenbaum was able to find dated to 1806, in a Salem, Massachusetts, newspaper. Tellingly, the ad was placed by a bookseller. Eventually, adults also became recipients of the book-buying tradition. These books were more lavish, with gold-leaf paper edges, embossed covers, colored engravings, and “presentation plates”—a page at the front where the giver would inscribed the book to their loved one. Husbands and wives gifted each other these books; suitors presented them to young ladies who were the object of their affection.

Today, we would call these books anthologies, because they included a mix of stories and poems by different writers. Back then, they didn’t yet have names for such tomes. At first, these books—whether for adults or children—were called “Christmas Boxes,” co-opting the term Brits used for the tradition of Boxing Day. Eventually, these books and any other gift offered to a loved were dubbed Christmas presents. (Hence my italics in the previous paragraph.) 

And because tokens of love back then were typically jewelry and flowers, these hardcover volumes were often named after those things, suggesting that they were of equal value. Indeed, these were probably the most expensive books Americans of this time ever bought, aside from fancy family Bibles, which were also bought in profusion at Christmas.

Nissenbaum enumerates a long list of the annuals:

“Thus, for jewelry, there were the Amaranth, Amethyst, Brilliant, Coronet, Diadem, Gem, Gem of the Season, Jewel, Literary Gem, Lyric, Opal, Pearl, and Ruby. For flowers, there were Autumn Leaves, Bouquet, Christmas Blossoms, Dahlia, Dew-Drop, Evergreen, Floral Offering, Flowers of Loveliness, Garland, Hyacinth, Iris, Laurel Wreath, Lily, Lily of the Valley, Magnolia, May Flower, Moss-Rose, Primrose, Rose, Rose Bud, Violet, Winter-Bloom, Wintergreen, Woodbine, and Wreath.”

To carry the analogy to the present day, it would be as if readers in our genre looked forward to year-end anthologies such as Mr. Pachter’s Christmas annual, The Poinsettia, or Mr. Bracken’s Christmas Silver Bell.

Cover of the 1844 edition of The Opal.

I tracked down a 1848 copy of The Opal: A Pure Gift for the Holy Days. With nine engraved plates and gilt-decorated moroccan leather, this copy will sent you back $3,000 today, not because of the book’s scarcity, but because this particular copy was once owned and inscribed by FDR. The scanned copy I found online contains 42 different poems and stories, written by as many writers and poets.

During the colonial period in America, publishers in the colonies and across the pond shamelessly plagiarized works to fill their newspapers, almanacs, and magazines. But the 1820s and 1830s marked a shift, a time when editors began paying decent rates to writers for original work. For the first time in U.S. history, one could earn a living as a writer.

That said, the only two bylines I recognized in the 1848 Opal were those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the book’s editor, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, aka “The Mother of Thanksgiving.” And yes, as I began reading some of the pieces at random, my eyes began to bleed. Victorian prose is not my cup of tea.

Mrs. Hale, you might recall from one of my earlier posts, was once the most influential “editress” in the country. For Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had the highest circulation of any publication in the nation, she bought the work of countless writers, now famous or otherwise. Throughout the year, as she worked on her lady’s magazine, she also compiled stories destined for her Christmas edition. In May 1844, when she was buying for the 1845 edition, to be published in the fall of 1844, a writer wrote to say that he’d offered a story to one editor, N.P. Willis, who declined it, suggesting he send it to Mrs. Hale for her Christmas Opal.

Under these circumstances, I have thought it best to write you this letter, and to ask you if you could accept an article from me—or whether you would wish to see the one in question—or whether you could be so kind as to take it, unseen, upon Mr Willis’s testimony in its favor. It cannot be improper to state, that I make the latter request to save time, because I am as usual, exceedingly in need of a little money.
With high respect
Yr. Ob. St. Edgar A Poe

Those of you who write short stories really ought to try this gambit sometime.

Hi. Remember me, the penurious writer? Will you buy a story someone else rejected sight unseen because I need a little casheesh?

This becomes all the more hilarious when you consider that the story Mr. Poe offered Mrs. Hale was in fact “The Oblong Box.” Good editors then and now hew closely to some sort of theme when selecting their stories. Mrs. Hale would later tell readers of the 1845 Opal that she choose stories that “all harmonize in one deep holy sentiment of Christian love.”

Gee—I suppose we cannot fault her for choosing not to include a seafaring tale of a dead-wife-in-a-wooden-crate in her pure gift for the holy days.

Pure and holy: the title page of the 1845 Opal.

But she did dangle a carrot before Mr. Poe, who had written a snoozer of a travel essay (“The Elk”) for the 1844 Opal. He jumped on it:

New-York. May 31rst 44.
My Dear Madam,
I hasten to reply to your kind and very satisfactory letter, and to say that, if you will be so good as to keep open for me the ten pages of which you speak, I will forward you, in 2 or 3 days, an article which will about occupy that space, and which I will endeavour to adapt to the character of “The Opal.” The price you mention—50 cts per page—will be amply sufficient; and I am exceedingly anxious to be ranked in your list of contributors.
Should you see Mr Godey very soon, will you oblige me by saying that I will write him in a few days, and forward him a package?
With sincere respect.
Yr Ob. St
Edgar A Poe

At the time he accepted her $5 payment, which amounts to about $210 in 2024, his most famous stories (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug,” etc.) were all behind him, and he was a well-known lecturer, poet, and critic. It was also five years before his death.

The “Christmas” article he submitted, and which Mrs. Hale did publish, was a ruminative essay about art, its creators, and personal growth entitled “A Chapter of Suggestions.” As one modern writer says, it’s an article filled with “profound sh*t” that discusses, among other things, why artists tend to drink heavily, and why creators are never appreciated for the genius they inject into the world. As for Mr. Godey, Mrs. Hale’s Philadelphia publisher, I cannot imagine what Mr. Poe was sending in that package. 

COPY BOY: Mr. Godey, sir? You have a package from Mr. Poe in New York. It’s..um… leaking.

History reveals that Mrs. Hale was just crazy enough to print “The Oblong Box,” his horror/detective tale, in the September 1844 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which did not at all scare the bloomers off hundreds of thousands of American women living in remote areas of the country with taciturn husbands and poor night-time lighting.

So you see, Christmas shopping would not be what it is without the contributions of us short story scribes. From Christmas annuals, it was a hop, skip, and a jump to expensive kicks, Gameboys, the sports car with a giant bow parked in the driveway, piles of shredded gift wrap, and gluttonous feasting in the company of family members we detest. If you give an American a great short story, in three decades or thirty, they will crave Burberry scarves and winter trips to Turks and Caicos. It’s inevitable.

And when it all became too much, Professor Nissenbaum says, everything we complain about today—the crass commercialization and materialism, the fatigue, the unflagging sense of obligation—was also expressed by a writer in a Christmas short story entitled “Christmas; or, the Good Fairy.” In that piece, a harried female character muses:

“Oh dear! Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody! Dear me, it’s so tedious! Everybody has got everything that can be thought of… 

There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.”

The writer of those words was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she expressed them in a story published in 1850, not long before Americans heard of her bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Christmas shopping is a horror, and short story writers helped make it so.

The Oblong Box card
from the Poe Tarot Card Deck.

* * * 

Happy Thanksgiving to readers who are celebrating it this week.

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ah, Thanksgiving time!  Time to give thanks for so many things...

I'm thankful for my husband of 46 years...  We're beginning to think our relationship might last. 

I'm thankful for all our children, godchildren, and dear, dear, dear friends, both here in South Dakota and all around the country, who are the great delights of our lives.  

PRO TIP:  Friendship [and books] will get you through times of no money [or any other crisis] better than money will get you through times of no friends [or books].  

I'm thankful for this crazy patchwork quilt of a country, with all of its variety of accents, faces, backgrounds, predilections, hobbies, obsessions, cuisines... all of it.  Any country that can provide samosas, pierogis, empanadas, tiropitas, pasties, and dumplings (steamed, fried, or baked) from every nationality is my place to live, but then I have never had enough stuffed packets of dough in my life.  I would hate to live in a country where everyone looked, sounded, believed, and acted alike.  

I am thankful for a warm house with central heating, working plumbing, and a solid roof in this, our first killer cold snap of the year.  Winter has come late to South Dakota, which means we all got spoiled rotten and seemed to think it would never happen...  And I'm so thankful that we don't have to twist hay to use as fuel.  Read Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter - nothing, I repeat, NOTHING is romantic about winter in the days before central heating.  

A log cabin in Minnesota in 1890, 

courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society (Wikipedia)

And I'm especially thankful that we don't have to burn coal.  

As I've written before, we did, back in the first house we ever bought in Bristol, TN. It was a dilapidated old place with closets made out of linoleum and few other amenities. As it turned out, there also wasn't a lick of insulation, but that's normal with "Southern" houses,  even if you are living in the Appalachian mountains.  To all those who say, "Well, winter's not too long and it all melts off soon", my response is "ALTITUDE COUNTS!!!!"  

And it came with an old coal furnace.  Well, we couldn't afford both a down payment and a new furnace, so we just laughed and said we'd find out what life was like in the 19th century, and we did. It sucked.  

For one thing, the coal wasn't delivered in relatively small lumps that you could shovel straight into the furnace.  Oh, no, it came in giant lumps, 2-3 feet wide that came down the coal chute straight into our basement, sending up clouds of black dust that, after decades, is probably still on the basement walls.  Every night my husband came home from work and (wearing kerchiefs on his head and face) smashed those lumps of coal by picking them up and throwing them on each other and/or the floor.  More clouds of black dust.  Then he'd throw some of it on the fire, and that would see us for about 3-4 hours.  Before we went to bed, he'd throw more of it on the fire.  Early in the morning, I'd get up and, carefully dressing myself in my oldest, dirtiest hard work clothes, rekindle the fire and throw coal on it.  I'd come back from work at lunchtime and put on more coal.  And after work, the coal furnace came first...  

And an old coal furnace without a blower means that the heat gently rises... which meant the house was always cold.  I remember that Thanksgiving we had a killer cold snap.  The furnace was providing just enough warmth so we didn't have icicles coming off of our noses, but that was about it.  So we set up a couple of kerosene heaters to try and get the temperature higher, enough so we didn't have to wear hats and gloves and scarves indoors.  I remember trying to levitate on top of them in an attempt to feel warm...  I failed, but I believe I invented some new yoga poses in the process.  

The house also came with a coal fireplace (i.e., a very shallow fireplace that is not very good for burning logs), so one night I had the bright idea to kindle a coal fire in it and maybe get warm.    

It worked.  Sort of.  It was smelly and sooty, just like the furnace (how on earth did any Victorians manage to not get lung cancer in a world of coal fires?).  And the Victorian home was never clean:  coal is dirty to handle and the sooty particles that come out of the vents or in the fireplace smoke stick to everything. You can't just dust it off, or even wipe it off - that oily smut requires scrubbing. It is the reason spring housecleaning used to be mandatory, and required fun things like lye soap and arms like a brickbuilder.

Come spring, we cleaned.  Oh, how we cleaned.  

And we cheerfully went into debt for a brand new gas furnace that had a blower and all new ducts, because all the old ducts were full of black smut.  Luxury!  Warmth!  Luxury!  

Ahhhh....  

And I'm thankful for the memories...  And so thankful we don't have to do them again.

May you all have a Happy Thanksgiving, with warmth and food and no coal!!!  

Robicheaux in Heat

Clete Purcel is of course a literary landmark, in that he reflects the hero’s weaknesses as well as his strengths.  As a trope, the Lone Ranger has Tonto, and the sidekick is a mechanism – sometimes comic relief, sometimes standing in for the reader, sometimes an atavistic force.  To take one example, I like Elvis Cole, but I adore Joe Pike.  Joe does stuff Elvis couldn’t bring himself to.  I like to cite the exchange in one of Robert Parker’s novels.  Spenser tells Hawk, the difference between us is that I’ve got rules.  Hawk lets a beat go by, and says, I got rules, I just got fewer than you do.  (Fewer, maybe, but Hawk’s rules are inflexible.)  Clete Purcel, in James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books, is more than a convention, and a lot less comforting.

“Clete’s most dangerous adversary lived in his own breast.”  (The Glass Rainbow)

Dave Robicheaux has many flaws; disloyalty isn’t one of them.  The same may be said of Clete.  Clete is often to be found pulling Dave’s chestnuts out of the fire, even while Dave is doing his best to rescue Clete from his own worst impulses.  The dynamic is like two drowning men trying to save each other, the struggle may pull them both under.  Dave, an alcoholic in recovery, can be passive-aggressive, and can’t help himself, although he recognizes his behavior as damaged.  Clete’s in recovery from a lifetime of poor choices, and keeps making them, not hoping the results will turn out differently, but wanting them to be the same. 

The word you might think we’re looking for, here, is enabling.  One of the curiosities of the Robicheaux series is that Dave, an honest man with a good heart, can so consistently fail to protect himself from his own vulnerabilities.  But the deeper point is that Dave’s relationship with Clete isn’t a quid pro quo, there isn’t any one hand washing the other.  The two men aren’t codependent – which is therapeutic language – they’re in love.  Their trust in one another is unconditional.  Facing predators, it’s a primal, animal survival instinct.

This is a meta sort of comment, following on the above, about trusting your instincts.  I’ve read most of the Dave Robicheaux books, and I noticed something consciously, as a writer, this time around.  James Lee Burke doesn’t get in his own way; if fury, or emotion, threatens to overwhelm the narrative, he leans into it, he doesn’t hedge his bets, or second-guess the demonic.  He lets it roll, and the effect is startling.  It doesn’t break through the wall, it’s still in character, you’re hearing Dave’s voice, but it’s unfiltered, or uncalculated, it’s Dave in the raw.  He appears to be in flames. 

As it happens, just as I suddenly became aware of this, in the second act of The Glass Rainbow, Burke proceeded to jump the shark, or so it seemed.  He reels it in, but it was a little disconcerting.  I was ready to follow wherever it led, and where it was leading was over a cliff.

Didn’t happen.  The lesson I took from it from is, yeah, when the demon tempts you, surrender.  If you dare nothing, nothing will come of it.  Burke, at his best, runs hot.  Which can be scary.  Is he going to pull his own chestnuts out of the fire?  And it’s even scarier when it’s you doing it.  Strike a match.  Light the fuse. 

Thanksgiving Stuff

 Happy Drinksgiving Eve. 

I learned online that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is known as Drinksgiving. Alcohol sales spike as people bolster themselves to spend the holiday with loved ones. Family bonds may be especially strained this Thanksgiving with the recent political turmoil. Many may want to toss back a bourbon or three before hanging out with Uncle Bob or Second Cousin Sue. That can lead to trouble. I can say with some experience that the need for criminal magistrates would fall precipitously without the job-sustaining combination of family and alcohol.

But if risking jail is not how you choose to spend your holiday, I offer a few Thanksgiving-adjacent reads. These books are from the back of the shelf; nothing is a recent publication. Nonetheless, I hope you'll find them better than incarceration. If the thought of family scares you, sequester yourself away and only read about violence. 

I've identified these books as Thanksgiving-adjacent. They are all set around the holiday, although Thanksgiving is not necessarily central to the story. 

The Wolfe Widow by Victoria Abbott

The annual dinner of the Wolfe Pack is also nearly upon us (December 7th). As mentioned in earlier blogs, several Sleuths have received the Black Orchid Novella Award at this yearly gathering of Nero Wolfe fans. This cozy, The Wolfe Widow sits at the intersection of Thanksgiving and Nero Wolfe.  

In late November, Jordan Bingham knows she has much for which to be grateful. Although she works for a reclusive curmudgeon, Jordan has a suite of rooms and regularly eats delicious meals prepared by her boss's cook. She also gets the opportunity to work with a fantastic collection of rare crime fiction, including first-edition Rex Stout's books. 

Then, she gets fired. 

Who is the mysterious woman who has hijacked her employer? Displaced Jordan must find the answer. 

I'm forever grateful to the Wolfe Pack and am drawn to any work that regularly references Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. 

Thankless in Death by J.D. Robb

This is the thirty-seventh book in the series. The author has her formula down. Police Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her husband live in a future New York City. They prepare for a Thanksgiving celebration, during which they will host his large Irish family. Eve is still working on her definition of family, and this holiday may overexposure her. 

Unlike other "In Death" books, the reader knows the murderer's identity early in the story. In this cat-and-mouse procedural, we watch Eve balance her life and relationships while seeking to find the killer amid a rising body count.

Jumping into a series at book thirty-seven is challenging, like beginning a television serial in Season Five. Depending on how long you need to stay cloistered from your family, you may want to start with book one. 

Trap for Fools by Amanda Cross

On the Sunday following Thanksgiving, a professor's body is found on the pavement below his open office window. The police suspect suicide. The university administration knows that many people may have wanted the professor dead. Naturally, they ask a literature professor to investigate. (We can only assume that this university didn't offer a degree in criminal justice.) The title is a reference to a line in a Rudyard Kipling poem. You'll find other quotations throughout the book.

The first book in this series was published in 1964. Although the books are dated, I've always liked the Amanda Cross series. The literary drops make me feel smarter. 

Wicked Autumn by G.M. Malliet 

The setting is a fall festival in Nether Monkslip, England. This book may strain the definition of Thanksgiving-adjacent. The English, after all, have their own name for Thanksgiving. They call it Thursday. 

On the other hand, unlike some of the other books listed, this story centers on an autumnal celebration. The sleuth, Max Tudor, the village's Anglican vicar, investigates the death of the festival's organizer. Although her demise appears accidental, the priest has a host of possible suspects. The priest, by the way, is a former MI-5 agent. Presumably, all the literature professors and rare book assistants were busy solving the other murders on this list. 

This book is only a decade old, so it's a fresh title on this list. The author dropped some funny lines into the text, and when I laughed, the dust on the spine went everywhere. 

Maybe you can recommend some more recent choices. If not, swing by the local secondhand bookshop on your drive home from the liquor store and search for these titles. Happy Drinksgiving, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday, y'all. 

Until next time. 

Breaking into Showbiz 5

 

This is our fifth installment of this game.   The rules are simple.

Below you will find ten characters familiar from popular culture.  Your job is to decide where they originated.  For example: Zorro began life in a short story by Johnston McCulley (1919).

The white box shows the possible answers.  Solutions are at the bottom of the page.

George Bailey.

Don Juan.

MacBeth.

Tweedledee.

 

Tony Manero.

Morgul the Friendly Drelb.

Inspector Clouseau.

Sach Jones.

John McClane.

Boilerplate.

Got your votes in?  Okay, here we go...

George Bailey. Short story.  George Bailey is, of course, the hero of the movie  It's A Wonderful life.  Few people know that he originated in a story by Philip Van Doren Stern called "The Greatest Gift" (1943). Stern couldn't find a publisher for his tale so he had 200 copies printed and sent out as holiday gifts, and a Hollywood producer got his hands on one.  The movie (1946) was nominated for five Oscars and is consistently listed as one of the best American movies.

Don Juan. Play. The man whose name is synonymous with seduction was invented by a priest. Tirso de Molina  lived most of his life in Spain and claimed to have written over 300 plays but he is famous for The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, which introduced the rogue.  DJ has since appeared in a play by Moilere, an opera by Mozart, a poem by Lord Byron, and a movie starring Errol Flynn. 

Macbeth. Real life.   Macbethad mac Findláech was  king of Scotland from 1040 to 1057. He replaced King Duncan, not by treacherously killing him in his sleep, but by winning a battle in which Duncan died.  Shakespeare made him a villain, at least partly because his enemy Banquo was thought to be an ancestor of the current King James.  Oh, have you ever wondered what Lady Macbeth's name was? In  real life she was Gruoch ingen Boite. No wonder Bill the Bard just called her Lady.

Tweedledee. Poem or Nursery Rhyme?  Mr. Dee and his companion Dum received their familiar shape and other characteristics in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (and Tenniel's illustrations) but their origin story is older and murkier than that.

John Byrom wrote a poem in 1725:

Some say, compar'd to Bononcini

That Mynheer Handel's but a Ninny

Others aver, that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle

Strange all this Difference should be

'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!

And that is apparently the oldest written reference to the two T's so some have claimed Byrom originated them.  To which I reply: Pfui.  It makes no sense for the poet to have invented these names and thrown them into his poem at random.  Surely he was assuming that his audience was already familiar with this nursery rhyme, although it didn't appear in print until 1805:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

    Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

    Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

    As black as a tar-barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

    They quite forgot their quarrel

Of course, this is the poem Carroll based his characters on.

Tony Manero. Article or Short Story? Ah,yes. Cool white suits. Disco dance moves. John Travolta.  Some of you may remember that Saturday Night Fever was inspired by an article in New York Magazine by Nik Cohn titled "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night." Twenty years later Cohn admitted that he made the whole thing up.  He did attempt to go to a disco but a drunk threw up on his leg so he gave up on research.  So Tony Manero was a figment of the Brit's imagination.

Morgul the Friendly Drelb. Television. Anyone too young to collect Social Security probably thinks I made this up.  I didn't.  Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In premiered on January 22, 1968 and was one of the defining TV shows of the sixties.  That first episode included a sketch about a pink Bigfoot-like creature named, well, you already guessed. The bit wasn't funny and he never reappeared. But at the beginning of every episode  the golden-throated announcer Gary Owen read off the list of cast members and it ended with "and Morgul the Friendly Drelb!"

Inspector Clouseau. Movies. No surprise here.  The incompetent French cop was played by Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther and four sequels.  But the story is a bit more complicated.  The second flick, A Shot in the Dark, was based on a play which did not include Clouseau.  In later movies he was portrayed by Alan Arkin, Roger Moore (in a cameo), and Steve Martin.

Sach Jones. Movies. Horace DeBussy "Sach" Jones was a character in the almost fifty Bowery Boys movies, played by Huntz Hall. Growing up I watched one on TV almost every Saturday morning.  As the short movies got sillier goofy Sach became a major player.  I looked this up after seeing the movie Dead End (1937), starring Humphrey Bogart.  In that movie and the original play, Hall played a juvenile delinquent and the "Dead End Kids," led by Hall and Leo Gorcey spun off into several movie series before ending up as the way-past-their-sale-date delinquents in the Bowery Boys.  One little oddity: In 1943 Hall starred as "Dilbert," a dangerously incompetent naval pilot in the training film "Don't Kill Your Friends." 

John McClane. Novel.  We all know McClane from the Die Hard movies, but he is based on Detective Joe Leland in Roderick Thorp's novel Nothing Lasts Forever, about terrorists taking over a skyscraper.  Oddly enough this is not Leland's first sojourn to popcorn-land.  Frank Sinatra's The Detective was based on Thorp's first novel about him.  So arguably Sinatra and Bruce Willis played the same guy.

https://tinyurl.com/3td9e635

Boilerplate. Website. Boilerplate was a robot first revealed in 1893, who participated in an Antarctic expedition, the Spanish-American War, and the Boxer Rebellion.  Of course, none of that is true.  It was created by Paul Guinan in 2000 for a website, using remarkably realistic looking historical photos of Boilerplate with Teddy Roosevelt, etc.

But here's where it gets weird. In 2005 actor Chris Elliott wrote a comic historical novel called The Shroud of the Thwacker, using Boilerplate as a character. He gave Guinan no credit. Was this plagiarism? Not intentionally. But surely Elliott didn't think the robot was real?

No, he said.  He thought it was a Victorian hoax. Happily Gaulin and Elliott reached an agreement out of court.

Well, that's enough. Until next time, may all your Drelbs be friendly.

Don't Speak

For a brief period in my life, I got somewhat serious about playing chess.  I bought and studied books on the game, joined a local club, and even played in a few tournaments.  I never got great--it could be argued, with some justification, that I never even got good.  But I got better than I was when I started, and I enjoyed the process tremendously.  Eventually, I came to a point where I felt like I had to focus my time and energy on either chess or writing, and for me the choice was an easy one.  

While I don't study chess rigorously any longer, I still play the game recreationally, and it influences the way I see and think about the world in some respects.  For example: every move in a game of chess has a gain and a cost.  Move your knight to a new square, and you've gained an attack on enemy pieces that were previously safe.  On the other hand, you've endangered pieces or squares your knight was defending.  This may seem like a rather obvious observation, but it's a useful way of thinking about choices.  What am I going to gain, and what do I have the potential to lose?

A friend who coached me in the game--and who happens to be one of the top-ranked players in the state--told me something when I was starting out that has stuck with me as a particularly valuable lesson: "You're going to lose a thousand games before you win one that means anything."  Anybody can luck into a win if your opponent makes a blunder or simply isn't paying attention, but a win like that isn't significant.  It's a fluke.  The only way to truly get better at the game, and to win games that feel significant, is to play people better than you are and get your brains kicked in, time after time after time.  Failure is built into the process.

This has fairly obvious parallels with writing.  We tell beginning writers that they can expect to get drawers full of rejections (or rather, these days, email folders full of rejections) before they get an acceptance.  Every successful writer I've ever talked with recalls the months and years of toiling away without ever seeing their name in print.  As in chess, it's learning from failure that makes this experience essential.  If you're serious about the craft, you use rejections to figure out what works and what doesn't.  You build on your strengths, and find ways to minimize your weaknesses.  (If you're not serious about the craft, like one member of a long-ago writing group convinced she was the next Toni Morrison, you threaten to sue the editors who had the temerity to reject your divinely inspired prose, never mind that it jumps between first and third person twenty-seven times for no reason.)

If you're determined, and lucky, you'll eventually reach the stage where you're getting acceptances on a regular basis.  Once you reach that stage, how do you keep growing?  What's the writing equivalent of continuing to challenge players better than you?

You find ways to challenge yourself.

I love writing dialogue.  It's one of the most fun parts of writing crime fiction, maybe in part because most of the writers I came up idolizing (Robert B. Parker, Donald Westlake, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Rex Stout, etc.) were themselves masters of the craft.  I don't pretend to be on their level, but I like to think I have a certain ability to turn a memorable line or convey information through dialogue in a painless way.

(On reflection, it's interesting that there's such a strong connection between crime writing and dialogue, going all the way back to "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."  Are there science fiction or horror writers who are especially admired for the ways their characters speak?)

So last month I set myself a challenge to do something I'd never done before: write a story without dialogue.  In the attempt, I drifted into using a collective narrative voice, something else I hadn't done before.  The story is structured as a shared flashback, using description and narration, but no dialogue, to revisit a tragedy that happened to a group of people decades earlier.

The thing is, I failed.  Near the end of the story, the villain has two lines of spoken dialogue.  I wrestled with this for a couple of days, but in the end I just felt like I needed to "hear" that voice, almost as a counterpoint to the way the rest of the story is structured.  A better writer probably could have found a way to stick to the original mission, but then a better writer probably wouldn't need to set themselves such hoops to jump through.

Is the story successful?  I like it, but in this game that doesn't count for much.  We'll see what the editor thinks.  Either way, I feel like I learned something, simply by forcing myself to frame a story in a way I never had before.  It's something I'll try again, though not immediately.

Have you written stories without dialogue, or set yourself similar challenges?  What did you learn by doing so?

Murder and Mayhem, Canadian Style! The 13th Letter

with Lisa de Nikolits

Some readers here might know that we Canadians burned down The White House during the War of 1812. Now, I'm pretty sure we won't do that again, but I mention this to support my premise that while sporting a somewhat quirky sense of humour, we Canucks can be rather fiendish. My friend and colleague Lisa de Nikolits is here to introduce proof to that.

When I was asked to contribute to The 13^th Letter, something spooky happened. Gina Gallo and her wacky cousin Nico, who had been impatiently waiting for their next appearance in The Goddaughter series, decided to horn in and take over. So in my case, this post title could also be "When Novel Characters Go Short Story."

Lisa de Nicolits

Take it away, Lisa!

Thank you Mel!

My printed copy of The 13^th Letter landed in my hot little hands just over a week ago at our fabulous launch at the Sleuth of Baker Street, and I can't wait to read the stories again in print. One of my favourite treats is to snuggle up on the sofa with a lovely paperback. The fragrance of ink and paper, the rustle of turning pages, and the feel of holding a book really makes stories come alive for me. All the troubles of the world fall away as I get caught up in the magic of someone else's imagination.

Authors are magicians, movie directors, make-up artists, hustlers, wrestlers, casting directors, comedians, satirists, historians, spies and sociologists. We dabble in horror, cozy, literary fiction and police procedurals. We follow the trails of fraud and fantasy with wry irony, hardboiled noir and side-splitting comedy. We tap into jealousy, rage, fear, envy, obsession, lust and greed, but there's also true love, a dash of kindness, and a satisfying sense of justice.

And that's what make an anthology by the Mesdames and Messieurs of Mayhem so very special. Because our promise to you, Dear Reader, is to deliver all of the above, in each of our anthologies.

Founded by Donna Carrick and Madeleine Harris-Callway in 2013, our collective goes from strength to strength. The 13^th Letter is our sixth anthology. "M" is the 13^th letter of the alphabet (and also our lucky number!) We used "M" to stand for mayhem, maple syrup, mischief, mystery, Marilyn Monroe, murder, and of course, moolah, but we've also come up with all kinds of other creative ways to work with thirteen messages and letters.

Instead of giving you a synopsis of each story, we thought we'd give you a taste of the fun to come, with a few one-liners to showcase the variety and creativity. Enjoy!

The Midnight Boat to Palermo by Rosemary Aubert (to whom our anthology is dedicated.)

The unforgettable story about a sugar factory in Palermo where no one is permitted to taste the sweet wares, and how a deadly family secret finally comes to light.

The Lifted Letter by J.E. Barnard

An ancient, illuminated letter M goes missing from a bootlegger's library, and only Gloria Gamm, Girl Gumshoe, can get it back before there's a bloodshed.

M is for Memory by M.H. Callway

Memory is an unreliable trickster, as the hero of The Boy in the Picture learns when she find a mysterious photograph.

M is for Moolah by Melodie Campbell

Someone has trashed great-uncle Tony's crappy house in The Hammer, and who but family could know he still worked as a bookie, stashing moolah in all the wrong places?

If You Should Fall by Donna Carrick

M is for maple syrup in this uniquely Canadian thriller, as sugarbush tapper Marlene MacDougal scrambles for her life, proving that justice can be both swift and sweet.

The Curse Scroll by Cheryl Freedman

Half-ogre/half-human private investigator Goslin and her partner Marlow, a bipedal, talking, fedora-wearing ferret, are tasked by Goslin's fairy godmother to find the hidden scroll cursing Goslin's cousin, the king of Carcassone, with impotence.

In a Cold Country by Lisa de Nikolits (a sonnet of sorts!)

There was a little girl
from a land far away
not a very nice little girl
she always got her way

and now that little girl
is so, so alone
in a cold country
like a dog without a bone

old dog, old dog
one day I’ll make you pay
you won’t see me coming
but you can't get out of the way

(The 13^th line concludes with a location, date and time for the deadly meet-up.)

27 by Blair Keetch

The body of a prestigious entrepreneur is found in a warehouse in the middle of the night, leading to more suspects than there are letters in the alphabet. Can a clue scrawled in blood point to the killer?

One Helluva Lady by Rosemary McCracken

"When two Toronto police officers took chairs across from my desk, I wondered what trouble I was in." Pat Tierney returns in this riveting tale of murder.

Where are you, Marilyn? by Sylvia Multarsh Warsh

In 1962, plain teenager Sophie moves next door to glamorous Marsha and tried to help her find her mother, a Marilyn Monroe Lookalike, who abandoned her family years earlier, hoping to be discovered in Hollywood.

Scamming Granny by Lynne Murphy

This clever title can be interpreted two ways. Charlotte is almost the victim of a 'granny scammer' but her friend decide to rally round and try to defeat his nasty scheme.

A Hollywood Tale by Ed Piwowarczyk

In Hollywood in the 1930s, a gossip columnist becomes entangled in the murders of a film producer and two young actresses.

On Moon Mountain by Lorna Poplak

On the mountain, in the moonlight, a vengeful bully prepares to push an unconscious enemy over a cliff. Can the unexpected appearance of an eyewitness prevent him from carrying out this dastardly crime?

Murder and Marilla by Madona Skaff

The Bell Tolls Once Again is the third installment of the continuing adventures of ex-conman, Lennie, who solves murders...with the help of the victim. This time it's murder on board the ghost ship, Marilla.

Cardiopulmonary Arrest by Melissa Yi

Do you want to know how you're going to die? For Rainier Hetherington, M stands for a machine that will predict his manner of death, as an inheritance from his ghastly father.

CHRISTMAS IS COMING!

Where to buy the book: https://tinyurl.com/w9h7vhp2 and amazon.ca and amazon.com for print copies.

For more information about us: visit https://mesdamesofmayhem.com

There's a documentary about us which reveals our deepest and darkest secrets: https://gem.cbc.ca/the-mesdames-of-mayhem/s01e01

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Henry VanderSpek is the photographer of the group photo. He was also the official photographer of the documentary, The Mesdames of Mayhem, by director Cat Mills and producer, Felicity Justrabo.

Taboos

Back at the end of the 20th century, I received a rejection letter from a magazine that had started to publish my short stories. I was assured that it was a good piece (it later appeared in 1998's The Best American Mystery Stories) but they declined to publish it because their readers did not like this sort of thing.

"This sort of thing" was about a small girl and her mother, undocumented Irish immigrants. They are very much under the thumb of their "protector," their landlord and the proprietor of the restaurant where the mother works, who uses his power to extort sex from the mother. The events in the story are precipitated when he turns his attention to her small daughter. 

There was nothing graphic in "Secrets" but the sexual abuse of children was taboo in some publishing quarters. And, as we now know, such abuse had long been a forbidden topic elsewhere. The Me Too Movement was not so much the start, as the culmination, of a series of scandals involving schools for Native Americans, Junior Hockey players, elite female gymnasts, and religious institutions of nearly every persuasion.

Nowhere has the breaking of this taboo been more significant than in Ireland if recent Irish journalism, films, novels, and short stories are any indication. The title of Fiona McPhillips new novel, When We Were Silent, says it all. Secrecy, a culture of sexual shame, and the immense power and prestige of the Catholic Church conspired for centuries to hide the sins of the powerful and, instead, to punish their victims.

That's very much the deal in When We Were Silent which presents two story lines. Now- when Lou (Louise) Manson is a successful teacher living with her daughter, Katie, and her wife, Alex, and Then, when Lou was repeating her level six year at tony Highfield School, where as a poor girl she is definitely an outsider.

 Lou at 17 is tough and clever, a good student and a gifted athlete. Besides her poverty and her lack of a posh accent, she has two other distinguishing features, both well hidden from the powers that be. She is attracted to women and she has a secret agenda: getting the goods on the swimming coach whom she believes ruined her best friend's life.

McPhillips is very good on the inner lives of adolescent girls and on their passionate friendships and rivalries. In general, the girls' characterizations are superior to those of the Highfield adults who are vividly one dimensional and even to the adult Lou, who is perhaps necessarily less dynamic than her reckless early self.  

Also good is McPhillips account of Highfield School which is very nearly a character itself. Of course, exclusive private schools and colleges, the more isolated the better, have long been a favorite of mystery writers. Their inbred cultures, their sense of social and intellectual superiority, and their distasteful entitlement not only inspire thoughts of homicide but provide a good deal of satisfaction when institution and/or perpetrators are brought down to earth.

So is it with When We Were Silent – but not for a long time. McPhillips novel reflects the changes over the last 30 years that were essential before teachers, parents, authorities, church officials would listen to children and before same sex relationships ceased to be considered a damnable catastrophe. 

When the situation that ended in near disaster for Lou at 18 is replicated with another accusation of sexual misconduct and another coach, Lou and her friends find themselves with big decisions: to remain silent and become complicit or to speak out and reawaken old wounds and old dangers. The contemporary section both opens and closes the novel as McPhillips skillfully presents the costs of silence – in both the past and the present of her characters' lives.

This is a mystery writer to watch.

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 at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

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

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11