The Good, The Bad, and The Confusing

The ‘Wicked’ Witch of the West

At first blush, the home life of Rebecca and Maddie, Hunter and Christina might sound make-believe. They live on an idyllic farm where they raise goats, chickens, and garden vegetables south of the big city of Indianapolis. Their father is a dual-degree family physician and their mother started life as a ballerina.

They’re real, I assure you, but they have a few rules. One of them is no television. Although mother and father have different reasons for forbidding TV, they reached the same agreement.

The family actually owns a television, a huge clunker, but it’s not hooked up to anything, not even stray signals that might beam far into the countryside. Instead, it’s use is restricted to videos deemed suitable by the parents. When I visited, I raided the town’s library and borrowed a number of classic comedies the kids hadn’t seen. They loved Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton, and liked It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Betty Boop. They didn’t care much for Laurel and Hardy– Stan and Ollie slapstick didn’t appeal to them.

Popcorn Capitalism

To a degree, their upbringing mirrored my experience, including no television. The only kids’ movie I recall as a child (not counting the devastating The Little Match Girl) was sponsored by Indianapolis merchants on a shopping Saturday. To give moms a break, parents could drop off their younglings at a theatre that provided popcorn, a drink, and Abbot & Costello on the silvery screen. Our visit happened only once. A voyage into the city was a 70 miles (112km) round trip, a little over an hour and a half of driving.

However, our nearby town hosted a free summer movie nights. They showed classic (and cheap) films on an outdoor screen attached to a wall of the Armory, Masonic Lodge, or other large building. Viewers would bring blankets and cushions, and snuggle as Chief Crazy Horse played on the screen. Like drive-ins of the era, the show often led with a cartoon followed by an adult drama.

Then a funny thing happened. The venue shifted to the school, where show operators hooked the large screen to the outer wall of the school gymnasium directly across a narrow street from my grandmother’s house. Had she chosen, granny could have enjoyed the movie from the comfort of her living room.

Instead, my mother had a brainstorm. She cooked popcorn and steeped iced tea. Within minutes of our arrival, movie-goers came sniffing and mom handed out cups of Kool-Ade, tea, and brown bags of popcorn. The fare disappeared within minutes. Next time, she iced a tub of Coke and Nehi soda, and again sold out. Throughout the summer, my family ran a de facto concession stand. Mom, bless her, figured out a way to make money from free movies.

Catchin’ Up with the Crowd

But, the time and distance of running a farm and a second job meant my parents couldn’t take off to visit a city for a movie night. Until I dated in high school, I had never seen a current kids’ film. I wasn’t unaware of current showings, but when Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Wizard of Oz cycled through movie houses, I read the stories but didn’t see the films.

Not until I was an adult. As previously mentioned, I consulted for Walt Disney World. I wasn’t an employee, a ‘cast member’ in Disney parlance, but they often extended privileges to me.

Follow me here: As you emerge from under the Magic Kingdom’s train station and face the park, to the immediate right is a theatre. Not the silent showing of Steamboat Willie under the marquee up the street, but a real theatre. On Fridays, Disney occasionally sponsored free family movie nights. For the first time, I saw Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Fantasia, and other classic animated films.

And I soaked them up. As a little kid, I loved Peter Pan. I read all versions– J.M. Barrie’s novel evolved over time from a short story of a wild boy who frequented Regent’s Park, to the novel we know and love. My Aunt Esther gave me a huge Peter Pan comic book, 25¢ instead of the usual dime. I spent hours reading and re-reading it. I would have gladly traded my brothers for one Tinkerbell and a sister like Wendy. Along the line, I fell in love with Indian Princess Tiger Lily.

But an odd thing happened when as an adult, I saw the films. I empathized with Captain Hook. He was intelligent, erudite, well-spoken, well-dressed, and very, very annoyed by a pestering brat who cost him his right hand and fed it to a crocodile. (Or left hand… it changed with stage showings and even between scenes.) Much as I admired Peter, I’d feel irritated too. I must not have been the only one to feel that way– Disney released Hook, which I saw in their Magic Kingdom theatre.

Wicked Thoughts

The same phenomenon happened with the Wicked Witches of the East and West in The Wizard of Oz. Why did sister witches hate each other so much? Was it simply because of a skin condition surprisingly similar to that which affected the Grinch, the Hulk, and perhaps Mr. Spock, all known for ill temper and lack of patience? Couldn’t one of the beautiful witch sisters lend green ones their extensive supply of Neutrogena or Aveeno?

When East Witch was unceremoniously crunched under Dorothy’s house, why couldn’t someone show sympathy to her Western sister? While thinking about it, did some witchery party give the house a little nudge to alter its landing?

Didn’t Witches North and South lie to Dorothy about how to get home?

Consider the following contrasts:

Good Witches, North and South	Wicked Witches, East and West
• are blest with great beauty	• are afflicted with green skin
• celebrate death of fellow witch	• squashed sister is mocked and derided
• lie to Dorothy knowing shoes can return her to Kansas	• mother’s valuable shoes stolen by Glinda given to Dorothy
• set Dorothy on path to kill rivals	• East Witch killed by Dorothy
• seize power after Wizard departs	• West Witch killed by Dorothy

Who exactly is the bad guy? Could it be the so-called‘good witches’? Or even Dorothy? Sure, she slummed around with Straw Man, Metal Man, and the Frightened Feline, but toward what end?

Gregory Maguire may agree with me, the author who wrote Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I confess I haven’t read the novel, enjoyed the award-winning stage play, or seen the movie (Part 1), as I’d hoped this weekend. But hey, the showing isn’t over yet.

In what movies or stories did you find heroes to be less than honorable?

Yes, There Is a Santa Claus, and He Pays His Damn Taxes

Santa Claus. Does he exist? If so, does he hang at the North Pole? What sort of being is he? It's all folklore, even the St. Nicholas origin story. The Santa legend has become whatever anyone wants from it. But you might be surprised to learn the American legal system has weighed in here. According to the Ohio courts, there is a Santa Claus, he lived in Warren, and he owned a '65 VW.

Fittingly, our story picks up at the holidays. December 21, 2001, and Santa--also known as Warren Hayes--just bumped his VW into another car. Being Santa, he owned up to causing the minor damage. This Santa also carried hard cash and reimbursed the other driver on the spot. Even jolly old elves understand not to get insurance involved.

It was the Warren City P.D. showing up that started the trouble. The cop wanted ID, as cops will do. Santa produced an official Ohio Identification Card with himself in full beard and red suit. Unquestionably legit, and the card said this guy was Santa Claus, of 1 Noel Drive in Warren, Ohio. 

The cop had problems with his story. Besides the Santa part. By law, Ohioans could only get state ID cards if they didn't already have a driver's license, and Hayes, as Hayes, had a duly-issued license. 

Also, Noel Drive didn't exist. It was a playful crossroads sign posted for the driveway to Hayes Industries, a shopping cart repair company and by-God Chamber of Commerce member. The Warren P.D. was playing it straight, and they believed Santa was operating under a false ID.

But this was Christmas, right? The Warren P.D. would let Santa off easy, right? 

Wrong. The cops booked Santa on "displaying or possessing an identification card knowing it to be fictitious," a class one misdemeanor. The max penalty was six months and a $1,000 fine. 

Santa was fighting this one, damn it. And he had evidence. Hayes was known around town as Santa and for his generous gifts to area kids out of his own pocket. He had the suit, the ID, and a joint bank account opened under Santa Claus, with his wife as Mrs. Claus. That's right. Hayes wrote many a check signed as Santa, and those checks cleared. 

Santa lawyered up. In a motion to dismiss, Santa's counsel produced motor vehicle records showing that the very VW from the fender-bender had been registered to "Santa Claus" for almost two decades. Santa had duly paid all fees and vehicle taxes. From his Santa checking account. He'd also maintained that Santa Ohio ID card for decades. 

The prosecution cried humbug. They pointed to actual precedent where Ohio had denied an aspiring Santa a legal name change based on the public's "proprietary interest" in Santa's "persona." And if Ohio didn't allow a Santa, and Hayes was flashing ID as Santa, how could that ID be anything but fictitious?

Santa was in a tight spot. What he needed--what all great Christmas stories need--was a miracle.

Enter the Warren Municipal Court. The judge pointed to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and their repeated transactions with Santa Claus. After so many years of taking his checks, this was an odd time to raise a concern. 

Hayes also hadn't filed papers to change his name. He'd just started holding himself out as Santa. Except when he needed to be Hayes, such as for the cart repair game or when tooling around as Santa. Common law allows it, provided no illicit intent is involved. As to intent, and on top of his duly filed VW paperwork, Hayes introduced into evidence a "Certificate of Birth" claiming he'd been born in 383 A.D. to Mr. Claus and Holly Noel. 

Fictitious? If anything, this guy was working hard to prove his Santa bona fides. 

In a Solomon-worthy verdict, the judge ruled that Ohio could issue Hayes a driver's license, so he could drive, and also issue Santa an ID card, so he could Santa. Charges, dismissed.

So that's the story of Santa Claus and his Ohio address. There is a moral here, maybe. Maybe it's that whatever season you celebrate or whatever spirit floats your boat, you can become that if you're generous enough, if you're committed enough. If you believe it about yourself enough. 

Or maybe it's to get yourself a good lawyer.

Read the judge's ruling here. And the interview with Hayes' attorney here. 

Who Killed the Chauffeur?

There's a legendary Hollywood anecdote about the making of the classic 1946 film noir The Big Sleep, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. It involves the fate of Owen Taylor, the chauffeur working for the depraved, old-money Sternwood family. In both the film and the source novel by Raymond Chandler, Taylor is found dead in the Sternwood limousine, which had been driven off the end of Lido Pier ("Lido" being Chandler-speak for Malibu). Since Taylor's head had been bludgeoned, it was not a natural death, but no one during the films production, not director Howard Hawks nor screenwriters Leigh Bracket, Jules Furthman, or William Faulkner, could figure out how actually killed Taylor and/or how he ended up awash in the Pacific. When Hawks called Chandler directly to ask, the author reportedly said, "I have no idea," and hung up.

Even though the murder of Taylor is just one tile in an incredibly complex mosaic, somebody had to off him, and for some reason. It likely had to do with the fact that the chauffeur had been madly in love with Carmen Sternwood, the unstable, vixenish younger daughter of rich, elderly General Sternwood, who was posing for pornographic photos for a Hollywood bookseller named A.G. Geiger (Carmen was posing, not the general; the family's not that depraved). Taylor followed Carmen to Geiger's Hollywood Hills bungalow, which Geiger was renting from a mobster named Eddie Mars, and either found her naked in front of a camera (the book) or "high as a kite" (the movie). Enraged, Taylor shot Geiger and took the photo negatives, fleeing the scene in the Sternwood limo. But a cheap hood named Joe Brody, who was also part of Geiger's porno operation, was there, too. Brody got into his car and chased Taylor through the city, finally catching up with him, sapping him, and taking back the negs.

At that point, Owen Taylor was still alive. How he ended up miles away in the drink is the missing puzzle piece, one that was overlooked within the labyrinthine plot, which also involved Eddie Mars blackmailing the Sternwood sisters over a murder cover-up.

The Big Sleep was shot in the fall of 1944 and was ready for release in March 1945. Today it is renowned for its convoluted plot, but the original 1945 cut contained a scene in which Philip Marlowe (Bogart) recaps everything that has happened up to that point for the District Attorney who steered him toward the Sternwood case. This included the strong implication that Joe Brody not only assaulted Taylor but helped him on his way to the big sleep. When the film was previewed, though, it received shockingly negative responses, which panicked the Warner Bros. front office which was then building up Lauren Bacall, who played the elder Sternwood daughter Vivian, as their next big wowee. The film was pulled back for retakes.

The new scenes would focus almost exclusively on the steamy chemistry between Bogie and Baby (as they were known), who had fallen in love on the set of Hawks' s previous film To Have and Have Not and were by then married. But to make room for those scenes, some existing ones had to go. The easiest one to cut, since it was self-contained, was the plot recap. As confusing as the new edit was as a result, the film became a big hit in 1946. The original 1945 version, incidentally, was show only to American servicemen overseas, though it can now be found on DVD.

But the identity of Owen Taylor's killer remained a mystery. 

While remaking a classic is rarely a good idea, I can envision a new version of The Big Sleep presented in the style of the 1985 comedic whodunit Clue, which was released with three different endings that alternated with each screening. Applied to The Big Sleep, once the story was wrapped up, an off-camera voice would holler, "Wait, who killed the chauffeur?" One of three speculative theories would follow.

SOLUTION ONE: Joe Brody saps Taylor, takes the photo negs and Taylor's gun, and flees. Taylor eventually wakes up disoriented and realizes that not only has he murdered a man, which will likely be detected, he's failed to protect his beloved Carmen. Guilt-ridden and with his brains addled by the blow, Taylor vows to end it all. He can't shoot himself, since Brody took his gun, so he drives to Lido Pier and plunges through the rails and into the ocean. The murder is really suicide.

SOLUTION TWO: Owen Taylor regains consciousness in the car and realizes the trouble he's in, which will splash back onto Carmen if he's caught and grilled by the police. He decides his best option is to disappear. Taylor plans to flee the country, figuring he can hire a boat at Lido to take him to Mexico. But in his weakened condition, he either blacks out again or dies once he's on the pier and unconsciously guns the car off the end of it and into the ocean. Technically, Joe Brody is responsible for his death since he inflicted the blow that led to Taylor's demise.

SOLUTION THREE: After he saps Taylor and takes the negs, Joe Brody panics and contacts Eddie Mars and tells him what he's done. Mars in turn calls his lieutenant, a particularly vicious torpedo named Lash Canino, to clean up the scene. Canino drives out to the limo and finds Taylor barely clinging to life. Taylor asks Canino for help, and Canino replies, "Sure, I'll help you," and then shoots him. Shoving him over on the car seat, Canino drives to Lido Pier and accelerates the car toward its end, jumping out a second before it crashes through the rail and goes over. Canino then returns to Mars to tell him the matter is taken care of.

There are surely other possibilities, though perhaps the best on-screen response to the question of who killed the chauffeur would be an AI-generated image of Raymond Chandler turning to the camera and saying, "I have no idea," and then smiling for the fade-out.

---

Michael Mallory is an L.A.-based writer.

Quotes from Around and About

I thought I'd share some of my new (and a few old) favorites:    

  "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken 

  "To fight and proclaim hope is to actively fight against the death-dealing forces of the world." — Grace Aheron. 

  "He's the sort of man who'd push you in the water rather than have no one to rescue." — Cleggy in Last of the Summer Wine

The Last of the Summer Wine:  Foggy, Cleggy, and Compo

   "There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, and always to plead it successfully." — Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm.

Illustration of Orley Farm by Millais

   "The power of facing unpleasant facts is clearly an attribute of decent, sane grownups as opposed to the immature, the silly, the nutty, or the doctrinaire. Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can't have your own way; that if you do get what you want it turns out not to be the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that in one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and the world will go on as if you had never existed." — Paul Fussel, A Power of Facing Unpleasant Facts

    "Life seems so short that people feel they must cram in as much as possible. For me, the most happens when nothing happens. Every day here is indeed a good piece of life. What is the value of a day in which there's no moment to reflect or to be able not to reflect at all? Life changes us little by little into beings who think only by halves, dealing in scraps like rag collectors of thought." — Andrzej Bobkowski, Wartime Notebooks, August 5, 1943 

    "The first thing a principle does – if it really is a principle – is to kill somebody." — Lord Peter Wimsey, in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers 

    "Once you realize that "deep state" is code for "the rule of law," you can translate their gibberish into something more like English" — David Frum (May 19, 2017)   

    "DARVO is an acronym for "deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender". Some researchers and advocates have characterized it as a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers. The abuser denies the abuse ever took place, attacks the victim for attempting to hold the abuser accountable, and claims that they, the abuser, are actually the victim in the situation, thus reversing the reality of the victim and offender. This usually involves not just "playing the victim" but also victim blaming."  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO)

    "People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly." ― P.J. O'Rourke 

    "Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities." — G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World 

    "The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." — G.K. Chesterson, NY Sun 11/3/18 

    "Contrarian arguments are generally contrarian because they're bullshit." — Scott Lemieux

    "If there's anything that a study of history tells us, it's that things can get worse, and also that when people thought they were in end times, they weren't." — Neil Gaiman 

    "He didn't cry: orphan babies learn there's no point in it." — John Irving, Cider House Rules 

    "Don't be afraid of anything. This is our country and it's the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children." — Alexei Navalny, Prison Diaries 

Alexei Navalny in Court

Никита Баталов @nikbatalov Коммерсант ФМ
https://twitter.com/#!/nikbatalov/status/144145553075351553 "для Википедии
CC-BY-SA-3.0." - https://yfrog.com/hwnhaecj

The Drummer Girl

 

I’m clearly coming late to the party, when everybody and their mum knows who Florence Pugh is but me.  I didn’t see her in Little Women – which probably got Greta Gerwig the greenlight for Barbie.  I haven’t seen a single picture in the Marvel superhero universe.  I didn’t have a clue that Cooking With Flo has 52K subscribers on Instagram.  And last but not least, I haven’t brought myself to sit through Oppenheimer, in spite of my admiration for Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders, and my fascination with the Manhattan Project.  So, watching Florence in the six-episode BBC adaption of The Little Drummer Girl (released in 2018, six years ago, already) was eye-popping.  She may be the hottest thing since sliced bread, as an influencer, but she took that part in her jaws, and shook it like a big cat.  It wasn’t one of those things where the actor is chewing up the scenery, not in service to the script, it was an actor completely inhabiting the character, no light between the cracks.  Florence was so much Charlie, in all her random willfulness, her hesitations and her fury, her heart on her sleeve, her transparent pretense, that you couldn’t keep up.  Charlie kept you guessing, Florence kept you guessing.  There was no disguise; it was all disguise.

A word about the story, and Charlie’s place in it.  The Little Drummer Girl is my favorite le Carré, and I think his most skillful book.  It has that extraordinary opening, the terror bombing in the Bonn suburbs.  “Sooner or later, they say in the trade, a man will sign his name.”  And then the introduction of the relentless Kurtz.  Charlie seems like a device, in the novel, a kind of Vanessa Redgrave avatar.  In the 1984 movie, which fails mostly because it’s compressed into a two-hour runtime and doesn’t have enough breathing room, Diane Keaton plays to Charlie’s naiveté, which isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s not enough.  Charlie is brittle, a shell of defense mechanisms, and her handlers break her, and then remake her in her own image.  That’s the biggest trick, or narrative reversal, that Charlie isn’t an empty vessel, who’s filled – or fulfilled – by her mission.  She’s already waiting in the wings, her role is only waiting to be cast.  The reason the mini-series works, and the reason Florence Pugh works so well as Charlie, is that everybody seems to understand the meta aspect of this.  Charlie isn’t acting the part, she’s reimagining herself.  It’s her audition for the theater of the real, but as Gadi Becker tells himself at the end of the book, the last thing he wants is to invent somebody. 

There was a lot of huffing and puffing, when the book was first published, because people took issue with le Carré’s sympathies.  Or what they assumed were his sympathies.  And that, of course, depended on what theirs were.  The book describes an Israeli deception operation – but for our Charlie’s recruitment to work, it’s the Israeli spy-runner, Gadi, who voices Palestinian grievances.  This doubling effect mirrors Charlie’s conflicted inner discipline.  The end public result, though, was that reviewers got their panties in a bunch.  If you had sympathy for the Palestinians, you thought the book was an apology for Israeli violence; if you sympathized with the Israelis, you thought the book was an apology for Palestinian terror.  The idea that le Carré was trying to give voice to both, in an intractable, Biblical struggle, was lost.

I don’t think the struggle is any less intractable; if anything, given Bibi Netanyahu’s worst instincts, it’s even more so.  (It has to be said that le Carré’s political sympathies were very much not in support of the Arik Sharon scorched-earth philosophy.)  On the other hand, after the October 7^th attacks, and in the wake of the pretty much complete collapse of Iran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, is it possible we might actually see some daylight?  I don’t know.  My point in writing this piece is only that the newer, more extended version of The Little Drummer Girl is an adult entertainment.  It’s not simple-minded, it’s ambiguous.  I admire the impulse of the people who made it, who clearly thought the time was right, and got the right people on board to make it happen.  It’s hard enough, these days, God knows.  I salute the effort. 

Life is What Happens...

The mess of interrupted projects on my desk.

Do writers and other artists ever actually retire?

Sure, sooner or later we leave our day jobs, but—barring physical or mental decline—we rarely abandon our artistic pursuits. Even so, leaving the daily grind behind presents us with a new set of challenges.

For me, leaving my part-time day job early last year should have opened up twenty-plus hours each week to spend writing and editing. I had my schedule planned. I would do this on Mondays, that on Tuesdays, and this other thing on Wednesdays. I would even—unlike when I worked part-time and freelanced the rest of the time—take Sundays off.

That plan went right to hell in a handbasket.

Instead of working around the requirements of my former salaried position, I’m now working around other things—deliveries, home repairs, family emergencies, and planned and unplanned medical appointments. (Trust me, getting older is time-consuming.)

Little of what I had planned to accomplish has come to pass, and I’m only occasionally taking Sundays off. I am—thankfully—not unproductive, just not nearly as productive as I had expected.

And that frustrates me.

I am not a spontaneous person. For example: Temple and I have purchased concert tickets and planned trips as far in the future as next December. But adhering to my day-to-day plans?

Phooey.

When I was younger and worked a full-time job, I was able to switch gears rapidly. I often wrote during my lunch hour, and there was no time to ease into the creative mindset. Once I slapped the metaphorical time clock to begin my lunch break, I had to be ready to write. So, I was.

Nowadays? Not so much.

Even though I try to roll with it when interrupted by things I cannot control, once interrupted it is difficult to get back into the creative swing. I can no longer switch off and on like rebooting a computer. So, after a five-minute interruption, it can take as long as an hour to get back up to speed. It only takes a handful of interruptions to obliterate a day’s productivity.

I wish I weren’t like this.

While I struggle to devise a plan I can adhere to, I console myself with the knowledge that any productivity beats no productivity, and I just keep plowing forward.

What about you? If you’ve left the work-a-day world behind, what has helped you establish and maintain a productive schedule?

* * *

Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, vol. 5, the latest in this annual series of noir anthologies, was released earlier this month by Down & Out Books. Volume 6 is already in the can for next December, and I will read submissions for volume 7 during February 2025. Submission guidelines here: https://www.crimefictionwriter.com/submissions.html.

“Twink” was reprinted in Great Googly Moo!

Reading and the Holidays

This is an updated version of a post I first wrote in 2008.

Holiday shopping season is upon us, and not only do books make wonderful presents (to give and to receive), but books also played a part in shaping my perceptions and expectations of the holidays. I suspect that this is true for many people.

One of the great opening lines in literature is Jo's lament in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” Yes, all the way back in 1870, there was no surer way to disappoint a child than not to provide Christmas presents. Thanks to Alcott’s high moral Transcendentalist principles, what the March girls actually do is quit complaining, decide to put their annual one-dollar spending money into presents for their mother instead of treats for themselves, and end up giving away their festive holiday breakfast to an impoverished immigrant family with too many children. Generations of American girls have internalized the lessons in that story.

I can’t remember the name of the children’s book in which the family had a tradition of reading Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aloud on Christmas Eve, but the idea of such a tradition has stuck with me all these years. I also remember that the youngest boy was in the choir, and there was great tension about whether he would be able to hit the high note in his solo, “Glory to God in the highest,” presumably from Handel’s Messiah. (He did.) I shouldn’t have been paying attention to Christmas at all as a kid, but my Jewish parents were so afraid we’d feel deprived if we couldn’t participate in the general fuss that we decorated what we facetiously called a “Chanukah bush” and got stockings stuffed with presents on Christmas morning. Today, there’s an abundance of books about Jewish families celebrating Chanukah, including entries featuring Curious George, the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Grover, Clifford, and Oy, Santa! But I don’t remember any back then.

In my ecumenical present-day family, we celebrate both holidays. Rather than reading aloud, for many years we watched movies made from the great books already mentioned: Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and the Gillian Armstrong version of Little Women, which my husband and I both liked in spite of the the terrible miscasting of Winona Ryder as Jo. At my forty-fifth college reunion, I learned that a friend and her family read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales aloud every year. So I know that the tradition of holiday reading survived into the new millennium.

Even today, no gift list in our family is complete unless it includes at least one book. In 2008, I said I wasn't happy unless there was at least one fat hardcover by a favorite mystery author that I wouldn’t have bought for myself under the tree, so I can curl up on the couch with it at some time during the long, lazy day. Now, I'll happily take an Amazon gift certificate so I can gobble up a whole series and binge on it on my Kindle. In 2008, books were the present of choice for my stepdaughter and her husband, who live in London, because we could order just what they wanted from their amazon.co.uk wish lists and have them shipped free. These days, we send money, and some of it still goes for books.

One of the great shopping pleasures these days is buying books for my granddaughters. Talk about books I’d never order for myself! In the 21st century, there are children’s books about everything. On a visit in 2008, the almost-two-year-old had me read her one entitled It’s Potty Time, with separate illustrated editions for boys and girls, and it’s only one of dozens on the subject. Last year, she got books about sports marketing and business—her dream career is managing an NFL superstar—and her older sister, who's at Cornell, got books about hikes and excursions around Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region.

What books are on your holiday gift list? What books, if any, shaped your image of how holidays should be?

A Good News Story of a Cigar, a War Won and Priceless Stolen Art Returned

In these difficult days, we all need a good news story and this one began eighty-four years ago when an Ottawa photographer, Yousuf Karsh, pulled a cigar out of Winston Churchill's mouth, rushed back to his camera and took a photo of the furious Churchill. 

The day was December 30, 1941 and Churchill had just given a speech to the Canadian House of Commons to rally support for the war against Hitler. Britain and Canada had been at war for two long years, endured the loss of many lives, and America had just entered the war on December 8, 1941. Churchill was desperate to steel the resolve of the allies and to rally more help from America; Churchill's annoyance at Karsh for taking his cigar would help with both of those, while also becoming the most reproduced portrait in the history of photography. 

Canada’s leading general interest magazine at the time, Saturday Night, published the scowling photo of Churchill, dubbed the Roaring Lion. When Life magazine put The Roaring Lion on their cover three weeks later, it focused the attention of the American public on the plight of Britain, and convinced them of Britain’s determination to win the war. The Roaring Lion photo is widely credited with helping Churchill rally the support he desperately needed to win the war. 

Maria Tippett, Karsh’s biographer, stated: 

“Just like the Old Masters who made kings and queens appear more beautiful or more powerful than they were, Karsh had used artful manipulation to transform an unpromising negative of a tired, overweight, sick, and slightly annoyed man into a photograph of a heroic figure.”

The Roaring Lion photo also catapulted Karsh's career and he soon became one of the most famous portrait photographers of all time. He went on to  photograph many famous political and military leaders, writers, actors, artists, musicians, scientists, and celebrities in the post-war period. Among his other famous portraits are the iconic photos of Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. 

Karsh gifted the Roaring Lion photo, along with with other portraits, to the Chateau Laurier, the Ottawa hotel that was his home for almost two decades. This was another part of the good news story - these photographs were placed in the Château’s reading lounge, where everyone could enjoy these priceless works of art in the same lounge that Karsh and his wife spent many hours. 

Unfortunately, making The Roaring Lion accessible to everyone who loves art also made it accessible to those who love to steal art and, sometime between December, 2021 and January, 2022, it was, indeed, stolen. However, because it was replaced with a forgery, it was eight months before the theft was discovered. 

Robert K. Wittman, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent said, “The real trick in art crime...is not in the stealing; it’s in the selling.”

The time between the theft and the discovery of that theft gave the thief a window of opportunity to sell it when no one knew it was stolen property. When The Roaring Lion photograph was finally located in Italy, in the home of art lover, Nicola Cassinelli, the problem was that Italian law didn't oblige him to relinquish it. He had bought it in good faith and he could keep it. 

Here's where more good news comes in: Cassinelli waved his rights as a good-faith purchaser along with any financial compensation for the portrait, and he handed it over to Italian police. 

“It cannot belong to one person and cannot be confined to the private space of a living room,” Cassinelli said. “The Roaring Lion belongs to anyone who cherishes freedom… I did not hesitate to return it.” 

The other piece of rather charming good news is that Cassinelli still enjoys the photo, because he purchased a cheap replica from an online poster shop and hung it in place of the stolen original. 

The thief? He was arrested on April 25, 2024, and charged. 

When I first wrote about this art heist, it was not as a good news story but a story of a tragic loss for Canada. Now that the Roaring Lion was put back in it's original place in Chateau Laurier on November fifteenth, 2024, I'm able to see the thread of good news in this eighty-four-year-old story. 

I'm not a 'glass half full' person because, like with most sayings, I don't even understand what it means. If there's good news and bad news, putting it in a glass doesn't change that - it's just good and bad news in a glass - whatever putting it in a glass means in the first place. However, I am forever in love with stories because turning the page in time brings a new twist, another turn, and that can alter everything. 

Who knew that taking away Churchill's cigar could result in the good news stories of helping to win a war and also helping a Canadian photographer capture images of many iconic figures of world history? Many years later, the good news continues in the form two other utterly unique stories; priceless works of art that can be enjoyed by anyone who walks into the reading lounge of a downtown hotel and an Italian returning a priceless piece of art back to its home in Canada, just because it was the right thing to do.

Caddyshack 2? Seriously?

  

I like movies. In fact I love 'em, and have probably helped keep several local theaters in business over the years. These days, my movie watching is mostly on the small screen, but between the many DVDs I own and the many movies out there and available for streaming (for me, it's mostly Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV Plus), there aren't many I want to see that I haven't seen.

But . . . I also watch more than my share of bad movies. Oddly enough--or maybe not so oddly--a lot of those movie disappointments have been sequels. I can't think of many novel sequels I didn't like --Scarlett does come to mind, along with The Death Cure and Go Set a Watchman--but there were many, many movie sequels that fell short. Some of them short by a long way.

In my defense, why would I not look forward to moviemakers' attempts to follow up on classics like Rocky, Jaws, The Magnificent Seven, Wall Street, Saturday Night Fever, The Sting, Get Shorty, Halloween, Speed, Poltergeist, The Exorcist, The Man from Snowy River, Crocodile Dundee, Romancing the Stone, Under Siege, Escape from New York, Airplane!, City Slickers, Our Man Flint, Dirty Harry, etc.? But every single one of the sequels to those twenty movies (at least in my opinion) fell flat.

There are, though, exceptions.

Here are a dozen movie sequels that I think were as good, and in come cases better, than the originals. I ranked them from 1 to 12 because that makes it sound like I know what I'm doing, with #1 being the best. 

NOTE: I'm referring here to first sequels, not Rocky 4 or Die Hard 5, etc. Almost all of those after-the-second-sequels are terrible. The only more distant sequels that come to mind that weren't bad were Back to the Future III; Goldfinger; Return of the Jedi; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; the third Indiana Jones (The Last Crusade); the third Lord of the Rings (The Return of the King); and the fourth Mad Max (Fury Road). I liked all of those.

Anyhow, here's my list of (what I think are) watchable sequels:

12. A Shot in the Dark (1964) -- Not as famous as the original, but it's a better movie. And the best of the Pink Panther series. Still funny, sixty years later.

11. Spider-Man 2 (2004) -- At least as well done as the original, and the love-story part of the movie might be even better. Great villain, too--hard to believe he's the same guy who threw the idol (not the whip) to Indiana Jones, in Raiders.

10. The Road Warrior (1981) -- I think everything about The Road Warrior was better than Mad Max--and I liked Mad Max. The last twenty minutes of the sequel is crazy but fun, and nonstop action.

9. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) -- A vast improvement over the first movie. Good plot, good suspense, good villain (Ricardo Montalban with a blond shag hairdo--if that doesn't creep you out, nothing will.)

8. Superman II (1980) -- Maybe not better than the original, but every bit as good. It was also the last quality movie in this series--from there on, Supe ran downhill. 

7. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) -- At least as well done, possibly better, than the first Star Wars. Better acting, cool plot lines, better special effects.

6. From Russia with Love (1963) -- This was the fifth Bond book but the second movie, and--like the first one--it stuck closely to the novel, which helped. As in the Star Wars and Superman franchises, the first few installments were the best. 

5. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) -- Again, an improvement on an already good original. One of James Cameron's best movies, and that's saying a lot.

4. For a Few Dollars More (1965) -- As much as I liked the first of Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns (A Fistful of Dollars), this one's better. The music, the plot, everything, plus Lee Van Cleef. Even non-Western fans have told me they love this movie.

3. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) -- The original, believe it or not, didn't feature Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Lecter. It was Manhunter, which was okay but not as good as its sequel. Lambs won, deservedly, the top four Oscars that year (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director), plus three more.

2. Godfather II (1974) -- It's as good as the original, which was wonderful. I think this was the first movie sequel to win Best Picture.

1. Aliens (1986) -- Not only does this one top my list, it was the best of the Alien franchise and one of the best movies I've ever seen. Watch it sometime, if you haven't already.

Possible runners-up: The Gods Must Be Crazy II, Top Gun: Maverick; Catching Fire. Toy Story 2.

Once again, this is my opinion and mine only--and yes, Liz Zelvin, I realize most of these are "guy" movies. My apologies--although you must admit both Silence of the Lambs and Aliens had great female protagonists. Don't forget, I also loved Somewhere in Time, which--though it wasn't a sequel--was a romantic fantasy and had no shootouts at all. (There's hope for me yet.)

As for recent sequels, I watched Twisters the other night, and I understand the sequel to Gladiator was released a couple of weeks ago. I confess I was disappointed in Twisters, and I also don't have the highest of hopes for Gladiator 2. What I do hope is that no one tries to make a sequel to Galaxy Quest, The Shawshank Redemption, The Big Country, Body Heat, Reservoir Dogs, The Rocketeer, Once Upon a Time in the West, L.A. Confidential, Medicine Man, Casablanca, Forrest Gump, No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona, Signs, The Big Lebowski, Witness, Shane, Dances with Wolves, 12 Angry Men, and so on. If they do, there'll be at least 1 angry man. Just leave those originals alone.

Now . . . What do you think, about all this? Have you seen any truly terrible, barf-baggable sequels? Any that you had high hopes for, beforehand? Any good ones? Which ones did I leave out? Do you disagree with some (or most) that I picked? How about novel sequels? Let me know, in the comments below. Inquiring minds want to inquire . . .

Next time, back to mystery fiction. I promise.

Christmas Capers

20th Century Fox

We are now into December, with its best-of lists for the year, wall-to-wall holiday ads, and bustle of work and family functions. And with it, crime.

Oh, there's plenty of real crime on the 10 o'clock news. Here in Cincinnati, though, the formerly depressed neighborhood of Over the Rhine has gone from gang violence to drunks shooting each other outside bars. Having Ubered for about four years, five if you count the Door Dashing during lockdown, I'm not surprised. OTR, as it's commonly called in Cincy, is half bars and all crowds after 10 PM on Fridays and Saturdays. Great cash, lousy company. I don't miss that side gig.

But crime is more fun in the movies. You could probably name a hundred crime movies set at Christmas. After all, 'tis the season for endless debates as to whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. It is. So is Deadpool, since the Merc with a Mouth tells his favorite taxi driver "Merry Christmas." They were part of a Christmas marathon the one year I spent the holiday alone. (Along with A Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation. So there.)

But leaving the ceremonial dropping of Hans Gruber on Christmas Eve aside, when the police cruisers all become a festive red from his splattering on the pavement (OK, that's not in the movie. Just the fall.), there are literally dozens upon dozens of Christmas crime movies out there. Some pretty obvious.

20th Century Fox

Like Home Alone. I mean, it has Joe Pesci. How is that not a crime movie? Most people see it as a live-action Warner Brothers cartoon. But let's get to the nitty gritty. Home Alone is Kevin left, of course, home. Alone. Over Christmas. That's the setup. The real story is the Wet Bandits, two guys straight out of those Warner Brothers cartoons, only with a nine-year-old in place of Bugs or Daffy. I've known a couple of recovering burglars in my time, and both have said it's the stupid ones who don't turn around and leave the moment they realize someone's awake. Not these geniuses. Kevin, with a house full of groceries, plenty of time off from school, and a creepy neighbor guy who turns out to be an ally, proceeds to make as much noise as possible. Even playing with a VCR (Remember those?) to play that infamous line, "Keep the change, ya filthy animal." When noise and lights don't work, Kevin booby traps the house, tapping his inner Rambo and possibly laying groundwork for the phrase, "Come at me, bro." These are very stupid criminals, and the average kid, even pre-mobile phone, would have dialed 911 and left the phone off the hook for the entertainment of the dispatcher.

Miramax

 

Then there's Bad Santa. Once again, burglars. This time, it's a drunken mall Santa and his diminuitive elf who plan to rob the mall after close on Christmas Eve. Billy Bob Thornton is Willie, the Santa, which should scare you already. He's foul-mouthed, verbally abuses his boss (played by the late, great John Ritter), and cheats on his wife with a bartender who has a Santa fetish. (To be fair, he hooks up with a few other women off screen, so at least he's consistent.) Marcus, the elf (Tony Cox), is the smart one, planning the operation and recruiting Willie's wife as the getaway driver. Marcus can deal with his drunken, horny, misanthropic partner. But it's a kid named Thurman who throws a monkey wrench in the works. Thurman (Brett Kelly, who seemed to play every ten-year-old in every movie filmed between 2000 and 2005) thinks Willie is the real Santa Claus. Some might say this is a real-life take on How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but then Jim Carey played the actual Grinch right around then.

Focus Pictures

Around the same time and also featuring Billy Bob Thornton is The Ice Harvest, featuring John Cusack. Based on the Scott Phillips novel of the same name, it concerns two small-time hoods who steal $2 million from their boss. Set in Wichita, Kansas on Christmas Eve, the pair split up while waiting out an ice storm to flee town. Thornton holds the money while Cusack tries to lay low. But Cusack lusts after the bartender at the strip club where he's holed up. He hints he has money. She hints she might be a gold digger. Unfortunately, Cusack has picked up a buddy, played by Oliver Platt in the days before he played grumpy old men. It's a series of double-crosses that ends up with Cusack and Platt leaving town and a trail of bodies behind. Is it a Christmas movie? It's Christmas Eve. And while it may not be as Christmas-themed as Home Alone and Bad Santa (or even Die Hard, which is a Christmas movie. I have spoken.), the time plays as much into the story as the place.

So what other Christmas capers are there? Are they Christmas because they revolve around Christmas in the plot? Or just set at Christmas? Or, like Deadpool, does a smart-mouthed mutant just tell a taxi driver "Merry Christmas?"

Merry Christmas from Disney

Everybody’s Gotta Start Somewhere

(Just wrapped up a very satisfying piece one step ahead of a deadline, and it’s left me on the back foot with regard to my scheduled turn in the rotation this time around. So, in light of the fact that I once again find myself about to embark on “the first step” of a new writing journey, I’ve dusted off this chestnut originally posted at Sleuthsayers way back in 2016. As writing tips go, I like to think these have aged pretty well. See you in two weeks! -Brian)

I published my first book (nonfiction) in 2005. Sold my first short story a year before that, in 2004.

And now, a full decade into the writing game, I find myself in the position of serving as mentor to a couple of fledgling writers who are looking to me for advice on not just how to write fiction, but how to start writing it.

Now bear in mind that these are both people with an extensive amount of experience writing nonfiction. Millions and millions of words written and published in one form or another. So they know how to write a proper sentence, and they understand how to edit themselves, etc.

And coincidentally they both approached me, as the only really "experienced" fiction writer they know (they are not acquainted with each other), and asked whether I would take a look at their first pieces and give them some feedback.

It occurred to me as I was writing up my responses to their initial forays into writing fiction that what I was writing likely applied to the work of pretty much anyone who's ever decided, "Hey, I'd like to write something like that..."

Hence this blog post.

So here they are, in no particular order. Some rules to start by:

– Writing narrative is hard work. Writing first-person narrative is even harder. Writing it without starting most of your sentences with "I" (as in "I got up. I went to the freezer. I put my head inside. I closed the freezer door on my head repeatedly. I died.") unless you're keeping this sort of thing in mind is damned near impossible. So keep it in mind.

–People do not speak in complete sentences over the course of casual conversations. Make sure your casual conversations sound "casual." Embrace sentence fragments and dropped "g"s – "I was just teasing you," sounds more realistic/authentic if written as "Just teasin'!"

–Show, don't tell. If your character is telling the reader in the course of her narrative how she moved to town and quickly made friends, and how important those friends now are to her, have her think it in the course of a conversation with one of those treasured friends. It helps break up the dialogue (See below).

–Dialogue–Great for exposition. Easy to abuse. If you're writing pages and pages over the course of a single conversation, you're not writing fiction. You're writing a screenplay, which is a completely different animal. If you've got a conversation this long in your novel and it's not broken up by some action, you don't have exposition. You've got an info–dump.

–Info–Dump. Learn this word. Hate this word. Avoid this word.

–Info–Dumps don't just pop up in dialogue. They're pernicious and can sneak into narrative as well. Like this:

I never got along with my mother. She knew how I felt about her and made sure that I felt guilty about it. I fled her house as soon as I graduated high school, and worked my way around the world, cooking on a tramp steamer, hoeing rows and toting an AK-47 on a kibbutz north of Ashkelon. I got a tattoo in Hamburg, a piercing in Belize, and a social disease in Rio. When I'd had enough of wandering, I settled in New York City. Too many people. Then I moved to Death Valley. Too few. Then to Kansas. Too flat. And Wyoming was too cold (and also had too few people). Then my dad died and left me this diner on the Oregon coast...

I think you get the idea. These details are potentially interesting, but not coming all jumbled together. 

Learning to tease them out and parcel them out in a naturalistic (not the same thing as "natural") manner is a skill. Work at it. KISS guitarist Ace Frehley once famously said that when his band first got together they weren't very good musicians, but "Playing 300 gigs a year will get your better fast." (Or words to that effect.

He was right.

But, you can't practice, practice, practice, until you start. Hopefully these few tips will help the rookies among you to avoid so-called "rookie mistakes" in your writing, and save you some time and sweat on your own road to publication.

Good luck!

You Could Look It Up

There are probably as many Rules for Writers as there are writers. Maybe more. The rule I’m thinking of today goes like this: Don’t show your research.

A good author of fiction will often do a lot of digging before they write.  Does that type of pistol have a safety? What symptoms does that poison cause? How much wood would a woodchuck—Never mind.

These details can make a story more believable and more interesting.  But it has to look natural.  If the reader thinks they have stumbled into a college lecture they may fall asleep out of sheer habit.

I try to avoid this trap but I must admit that sometimes, darn it, I want you to notice my research. This is partly because I am a recovering librarian, but mainly because when I write a historical mystery it is important to be clear when I am not just making things up.

Bandon, OR

I have a story coming out in the next issue of Black Cat Mystery Magazine called “The Night Beckham Burned Down.” It was inspired by the actual tragic events that occurred in Bandon, Oregon in 1936.
Editor Michael Bracken was kind enough to let me put an Author’s Note at the end pointing out that many of the bizarre anecdotes in my story really happened.  (For example, some people survived the wildfire by submerging themselves in a cranberry bog.) I simply imposed the true events on a group of fictional characters and, naturally, added a murder.

So that’s one way of handling the see-my-research problem.  I used a different trick in  my story in the November/December issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.  “Christmas Dinner” is part of my series set in Greenwich Village in 1958, and there is an important clue based on something that really happened back then.

I thought it was important to make that clear.  Why? Well, imagine the master detective announcing: “I knew John Fictional was the murderer because his middle name is Tyrone.  That fact was never mentioned in this novel, but I just happened to know it.”  You wouldn’t cheer; you’d probably throw the book away. Vigorously.

So I wanted the reader to know that my clue was based on an obscure fact but a genuine one. My solution was to have my detective, the beat poet Delgardo, announce the clue and then say “This is true. Look it up.” He is supposedly talking to his friends, but in reality I am having him speaking to my audience, hopefully without breaking the fourth wall.

I doubt if any of the readers really will look that fact up but at least they know they could.

Let’s get slightly off topic. Until I started writing this piece I had thought Delgardo said “You could look it up,” so I want to look at that longer phrase.

I easily found a website that credits the phrase to Yogi Berra, the legendary New York Yankees catcher and manager.  He was also known as an amazing phrase-maker so it is not surprising that the term gets attributed to him, considering its baseball connection (What baseball connection?  We will get to that.).

Berra’s talent was coming up with phrases that seemed to be half-incoherent and half-Zen koan.  My favorite: “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”  And:  “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Believe me, I could go on.

But “You can look it up” is hardly a phrase worthy of the master.  So it is not surprising that I found another website indignantly insisting that the creator was actually Casey Stengel, a legendary pitcher and manager.

Sorry, folks.  He didn’t say it either.

Eddie Gaedel

James Thurber (also legendary, but as an author not a ballplayer) wrote “You Could Look It Up,” a story which appeared in Saturday Evening Post in 1941. The narrator (who sounded a lot like Stengel, actually) told a wild tale about a baseball manager hiring a little person (Thurber said midget but that term is frowned on now) because “I wanted to sign up a guy they ain’t no pitcher in the league can strike him out.”

And here is where the fact and fiction coalesce again.  In 1951 Bill Veeck, the owner of the famously awful and unlucky St. Louis Browns, hired Eddie Gaedel, a little person, as a pinch hitter for publicity's sake.  He claimed he had forgotten about Thurber’s story until his man came up to bat.

Back to fiction. One more thing about my story “Christmas Dinner.” I suspect that if any readers complain it will not be about the aforementioned clue.  If they do gripe will be about something else that occurs in the tale.  “That’s not how X happens!” they will exclaim.

Ah, but I have a link to a website that proves that the way I describe X is exactly how it happened back in 1958.

And if they don’t believe me, they can look it up.