Service Without Service, part 2

Service with a Smirk

Once upon a time, I lived in a Minnesota state forest, my home base from where I traveled extensively. I had started a couple of minor businesses, but when I began working overseas, I needed to divest. An acquaintance asked to buy one. We wrote out an agreement in which she would take over the shop, the company bank account, the assets, and pay me over time. I flew out for a nine month stint in Europe.

Cell phones were a couple of years from reaching the mass market, limiting continent-to-continent communications. When I finally returned, I found the shop’s doors padlocked and empty of contents. The bank account was empty; no payments had been made to me.

Worst of all. I found a multi-thousand lien on my house. What the hell?

I pieced together the events, discovering in my absence I’d been scammed. The acquaintance who ‘bought’ the business had no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. As soon as Northwest’s wheels left the ground, she liquidated the assets, and, in an excess of brutal dishonesty, she sued, claiming she wasn’t a proprietor but an employee and I’d failed to pay her wages. With me out of the picture, she could fabricate a narrative without anyone to dispute it. After a default judgment, she placed a lien on my house in the woods while court gears slowly ground. Fortunately, I disrupted her scheme by returning sooner than expected.

Typical Process Server

Proof of service receipts from the court were revealing. The server claimed the residence was occupied, but no one answered the door. As evidence, he said a television was on, and he found newspapers at my door and letters addressed to me in my mailbox. Wood smoke, he said, rose from the chimney..

Whoa. Let’s take this step by step.

I had no ordinary street address, no television, and no mailbox. Instead, I kept a postal box closer to Minneapolis, unrelated to the township of my physical forest address. I subscribed to no newspaper. The house was heated not by wood, but by a propane tank the size of a Volkswagen.

Not one scintilla of evidence matched my residence. Clearly the server had not visited my house. Did our little scammer mislead him or did the server flat out lie?

My attorney was pessimistic. Even if we could prove malservice and I was blindsided, the court was loath to reopen a closed case. However, with my presence and willingness to pursue the case, the judge reluctantly allowed me to deport $10k into a bank escrow account, until the parties were ready to proceed. Funny thing, with me back on the scene and highly motivated, the other party seemed oddly unenthusiastic about pursuing the suit. It languished for a lengthy period until the bank released the funds back to me.

I got my money back and one painful lesson. But let’s review. 

The plaintiff knew I was out of the country, knew I was unavailable to defend a suit. Whether or not that party misled the process server, the court-approved server did not do his job, that of locating the correct house and determining the whereabouts of the respondent.

We need a word for faking and falsifying serving of documents as required by courts and government bureaus. ‘Disservice’ is out and ‘misservice’ doesn’t quite cover malfeasance. Maybe malservice™? (I might as well invent the word,) During the Great Depression when thousands of North Americans lost their homes, the term ‘sewer service’ surfaced. Process servers might dump hundreds of summons in a ditch whilst claiming they’d hand delivered them.

Service Done Right

Previously in SleuthSayers, I mentioned coming up against a scamming, scheming disbarred lawyer, ‘Dr Bob Black’. He made the mistake of conning a New York City homicide detective. The detective hired an attorney, hired me, and hired a process server. His was not an ordinary server, but one noted for dedication and persistence. When a defendant seemed litigation proof and especially service proof, this was the guy the pros called. No case was too small, no task too mundane, no case too difficult.

Dr Black bragged he was lawsuit immune and judgment proof. All of his assets were stashed overseas. Everything else was in his wife’s name and he maintained no assets in the US. Nevertheless, our detective pursued justice whilst our server pursued the slippery, slimy, slithery Dr. Black.

Black proved elusive. Our process man turned from server to dedicated observer. At a tactical distance from Black’s house, he camped in his car and jotted notes about the days and times of lawn service, mail pickups and drop-offs, trash pickup, and food deliveries.

One of Black’s peculiarities was to schedule appointments to the minute, say, 9:44am or maybe 14:23 in the afternoon. Black claimed he used these odd times because he was so closely booked. I viewed it as a conceit, but it also served a purpose: If his afternoon doorbell rang and it wasn’t exactly 2:23, he wouldn’t open the door.

Not to be outwitted, our server took to the trees… literally. He climbed a magnolia off the corner of Black’s McMansion where he could oversee the entryway without being seen. By then he roughly knew delivery routines and he waited. Right on cue, a dry cleaning truck arrived. As Black stepped outside, our man slid down the tree and dashed. Before Black knew what was happening, the server was on the conman, gleefully shouting those infamous words, “You… have… been… served!”

Genial Landlord Lawyer

Misuse of Pronouns

And so the hurricane season of 2004 came to pass, four monster windstorms, one attack after another, that tore apart Florida. Dockets became jammed with customers suing with evictions, with foreclosures, with insurance companies reluctant to pay. Independent lawyers picked up several dozen cases at a time in mass rubberstamp hearings where people lost their homes in less than ninety seconds.

In that mess, an HOA targeted me. I wasn’t aware of the suit until it was over. My first question asked how I was served. Sure enough, the signature form, called ‘return of service’, referenced a residence, which was then a vacant hurricane damaged house. The notes read to the effect, “Respondent acknowledged she was Leigh Lundin. Server confirmed identity but she declined to leave her signature.”

Wait. What?

The HOA lawyer claimed it was a simple mistake, typos that gender swapped ‘he’ into ‘she’ and ‘his’ into ‘her’ and in the press of so many suits, errors were understandable. In court, I complained and the HOA attorney repeated his assertions. The harried judge snapped at me. “Well, you’re here now.” Damn. I was hoping for a slap down and I got it… me.

Summons Summary

Courts and clerks opine that misservice and particularly malservice almost never happens, but I would like to see studies to determine actually numbers. The reluctance of one court to reopen and the dismissive nature of another is discouraging, a signal that defendants can be overlooked– deliberately.

I have remedies in court, mostly small claims. In support independent workers, I’ve preferred private process servers, you know, like Kinsey Malone. In a case where I sued a large corporation (and won), I paid a county sheriff’s office to do the deed on the theory a uniformed deputy marching through a Tallahassee glass tower might meet less resistance.

In one infamous case of malservice, a judge set aside a $7.7 million judgment. One of my favorite internet lawyers, Steve Lehto, discusses cases in Texas and Michigan. He drew attention to a stinging NBC exposé.

If false service happened to me in court cases at least twice and more than once by Code Enforcement, how common is the practice? Probably not common at all, but when it happens, it happens big– one man ditching hundreds of service documents in Maryland, thousands of documents dumped by a New York law firm. Such cases rarely make the news, but become known throughout the profession and legal circles.

This happened to me. What can I do?

First, don’t panic. Consider consulting an attorney, even in small claims court. Judges should take misservice seriously.

Obtain the receipt of service and look for errors. In my cases, errors were obvious. Being out of the country makes it difficult to receive service. Getting gender wrong is a major problem. Check dates and times. I’ve never had to argue this, but a habit of signing upon acceptance might lend credence to a false service argument.

Following are resources you might find helpful. If you’ve been misserved, good luck.

• The Process Server Institute documents cases:
• https://psinstitute.com/whatisaproperproofofservice/
• https://psinstitute.com/criminal-liability-for-preparing-false-proofs-of-service/
• LegalClarity.org discusses the issue, offering professional advice for sticky situations.
• https://legalclarity.org/what-to-do-if-a-process-server-lied-on-an-affidavit-of-service/
• https://legalclarity.org/what-happens-if-you-cant-serve-someone-court-papers/
• LegalServeUSA  offers consumer oriented advice.
• https://legalserveusa.com/fake-process-server-calls/

See you soon.

The Underappreciated Keen Eddie

A sad truth about television is that series get canned for being too good. A lost favorite of mine is the hybrid Keen Eddie (2003), a comic cocktail of style, pace, cops and robbers, big heart, sharp sense of humor, and British send-up. 

And it got the hook after seven episodes. Thirteen, if you count the final six that Bravo burned in 2004. No streaming service carries it at last check. You can barely find it on YouTube.

Given all that, Keen Eddie needs a primer. 

The Premise

Eddie (Mark Valley) is a New York cop. He's clever--but not as clever as he thinks he is. He gets played and screws up a carefully arranged international drug bust. NYPD banishes Eddie to London to assist New Scotland Yard with that piece of the blown investigation. Could that ever actually happen? Bear with me.

Eddie clicks with new partner Monty Pippin (Julian Rhind-Tutt), an eccentric libertine, and they get about breaking cases. Thirteen of them. Meanwhile, Superintendent Johnson (Colin Salmon) comes to begrudge Eddie's dogged successes but never his American nonsense. Eddie's accidental roommate, Fiona (Sienna Miller), is running a support grift on her parents and angles to get Eddie out of her hair.

The Packaging

British humor doesn't scream pace (or it didn't in 2003), but the show solved that with slick packaging: dynamic editing, striking visuals, fast cutaways, Dutch angles tossed in for fun. A progressive techno soundtrack kept things bubbling. 

If that sounds pretentious, it wasn't. The show understood that its tongue must always be in its cheek, and the humor was as much London underworld class as highbrow. One moment, it was an awkward conversation with Fiona's wealthy parents or at a society gathering, the next the cops would be bartering with oddball street informants. Either, the dialogue zipped and zinged. 

Examples of crimes Eddie and Pippin investigated:

• A prize racehorse stolen for its sperm, but the thieves can't decide on who has to obtain the samples;
• Stolen football tickets;
• A safecracking where the thieves forget where they put the safe's operating manual.

The show also won a comic writer's hat tip for pulling something ever more rare: the running gag. As Eddie settled into his expat life, episodes revisited his dog's swath of destruction or his awkward flirtations with the Superintendent's assistant. In isolation, any one gag might've flopped, but none were in isolation. They were neat-fit parts of Keen Eddie's snow globe London.

That London was very much a major character, one that the producers took great lengths to make cool. Well, I did find it cool, but I'm their target Anglophile. I also think drizzle and banoffee pie are cool. 

The Players

And it was all meant to build those characters. If it was going to work, the casting had to be, as they say across the pond, spot on. The producers went for the pragmatic. In 2003, the main four characters were their own blend of established performers and emerging talents. Valley had made the rounds on soap operas and guest star slots. He had the charm to play a leading man, the presence to play a seasoned cop, the brashness to play a loose cannon, and the vulnerability to play a loose cannon all too aware of his mistakes. 

Julian Rhind-Tutt was an excellent foil. At the time, he was already respected in British theatre and television, not least for his comic gifts. He leaned into his libertine character with a refined, seen-some-things openness to life that contrasted well with Eddie's American need for closure. 

Colin Salmon was also by then a well-known actor in the U.K. He played the martinet Superintendent with firm smolder and British deadpan. 

The star just breaking out was Sienna Miller. She'd earned a name for herself as a model but was transitioning to acting. She played her character as a control freak and exasperated when control inevitably evades her. She's every bit the mistake maker as Eddie but can't process it with his self-deprecating shrug.

The Undoing

In 2002, Fox was American Idol and then everything else. Fox thought it was getting a high-concept cop show run by producers with a track record. And that was exactly the series turned over to them, but the network's feet had gone cold. Too concept, too British. In the end, Fox shunted Keen Eddie to the summer replacement line-up. From there, things went about how you might think.

Keen Eddie took over the Tuesday 9pm slot from 24, which had finished its second season and was growing its audience. The competition was Last Comic Standing (NBC), According to Jim (ABC), and The Guardian (CBS) riding in JAG's 8pm audience wake. Seven weeks was the extent of Fox's patience. They turned the slot over to a very different sort of premiere, The O.C.

In retrospect, the switch seems instructive. In 2002, few network viewers were tuning in for smart comedy, let alone when baked into a police procedural. The new golden age of TV was happening elsewhere, on paid cable--The Wire, The Sopranos, Sex in the City--and this was years before anyone uttered the word streaming.  

Keen Eddie was caught in the middle. A cop show with comedy, a comedy show with brains, an American show with too British a feel. It was good at everything but at finding a network audience. 

Which is a damn shame. Keen Eddie was a great show with a great perspective--that didn't take itself the least seriously. It was there to entertain and did so relentlessly. 

If only more of us had been watching those summer nights.

Mitchell and Webb do Poirot

 

Kids These Days: Awesome Whether Or Not You Believe in Them

This time last year I was on my second day of what would turn out to be a month-long stay at my local hospital, where I got to experience being told I might lose my leg, that kidneys might never work again, and  the otherworldliness of getting regularly dosed with Oxycontin to help deal with the pain in my leg.

And now, a year later, my kidneys work great, I'm on medication that helps maintain them and the rest of my renal system, and my leg only aches sometimes.

Today has been one of those times.

And with the news of the past few months by turns infuriating and depressing me, I figured it might be time to dust off one of my most optimistic and hopeful posts and repost it here. Sure did wonders for my spirits, yet again! And I hope it does for yours too!

So here it is: a post I originally wrote ten years ago, in the midst of a divisive presidential election-one that reflected (and continues to reflect) my unshakeable faith in this country. And here we are, a full decade later, and that faith in my fellow Americans remains strong and unshakeable.

*     *     *     *     *

So, about my day gig.

I teach ancient history to eighth graders.

And like I tell them all the time, when I say, "Ancient history," I'm not talking about the 1990s.

For thirteen/fourteen year-olds, mired hopelessly in the present by a relentless combination of societal trends and biochemistry, there's not much discernible difference between the two eras.

I wish!

It's a great job. But even great jobs have their stressors.

Like being assigned chaperone duty during the end-of-the-year dance.

Maybe you're familiar with what currently passes for "popular music" among fourteen year-olds these days. I gotta say, I don't much care for it. Then again, I'm fifty-one. And I can't imagine that most fifty-one year-olds in 1979 much cared for the stuff that I was listening to then.

And it's not as if I'm saying I had great taste in music as a fourteen year-old. If I were trying to make myself look good I'd try to sell you some line about how I only listened to jazz if it was Billie Holiday or Miles Davis, and thought the Police were smokin' and of course I bought Dire Straits' immortal Making Movies album, as well Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door when they both came out that year.

Well. No.

In 1979 I owned a Village People vinyl album (Cruisin', with "YMCA" on it), and a number of ElvisPresley albums and 8-track tapes. I also listened to my dad's Eagles albums quite a bit. An uncle bought Supertramp's Breakfast in America for me, and I was hooked on a neighbor's copy of Freedom at Point Zero by Jefferson Starship, but really only because of the slammin' guitar solo Craig Chaquico played on its only hit single: "Jane." And I listened to a lot of yacht rock on the radio. I didn't know it was "yacht rock" back then. Would it have mattered?

The sad reality

But bear in mind we didn't have streaming music back then. And my allowance I spent mostly on comic books.

Ah, youth.

Anyway, my point is that someone my age back then may very well have cringed hard and long and as deeply if forced to listen to what I was listening to at eardrum-bursting decibels, and for the better part of two hours.

That was me on the second-to-the-last-day of school a week or so back.

Two hours.

Two hours of rapper after rapper (if it's not Eminem, Tupac, or the Beastie Boys, I must confess it all sounds the same to me) alternating with heavily autotuned "singing" by Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, etc.

Thank God we got some relief in the form of the occasional Bruno Mars song. Bruno, he brings it.

All Hail Bruno Mars - Savior of My Sanity

And through it all, the kids were out there on the floor. Mostly girls, and mostly dancing with each other.

Great album, great cover, great band.

One group of these kids in particular caught my attention. Three girls, all fourteen, all of whom I knew. All wearing what '80s pop-rock band Mr. Mister once referred to as the "Uniform of Youth."

Of course, the uniform continues to change, just as youth itself does.

But in embracing that change, does youth itself actually change? Bear with me while I quote someone a whole lot smarter than I on the matter:

"Kids today love luxury. They have terrible manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love to gab instead of getting off their butts and moving around."

The guy quoted (in translation) was Socrates, quoted by his pupil Plato, 2,400 years ago.

And some things never change.

Getting back to the three girls mentioned above, their "uniform of youth" was the one au courant in malls and school courtyards across the length and breadth of this country: too-tight jeans, short-sleeved or sleeveless t-shirts, tennis-shoes. They looked a whole lot like so many other girls their age, out there shaking it in ways that mothers the world over would not approve of.

In other words, they looked like thousands, hell, millions of American girls out there running around today, listening to watered down pablum foisted on them by a rapacious, corporate-bottom-line-dominated music industry as "good music", for which they pay entirely too much of their loving parents' money, and to which they will constantly shake way too much of what Nature gave them–even under the vigilant eyes of long-suffering school staff members.

Yep, American girls. From the soles of their sneakers to the hijabs covering their hair.

Oh, right. Did I mention that these girls were Muslims? Well, they are. One from Afghanistan. One from Turkmenistan, and one from Sudan. At least two of them are political refugees.

You see, I teach in one of the most diverse school districts in the nation. One of the main reasons for this ethnic diversity is that there is a refugee center in my district. The center helps acclimate newcomers to the United States and then assists in resettling them; some in my district, some across the country.

So in this campaign season, when I hear some orange-skinned buffoon talking trash about Muslims, stirring up some of my fellow Americans with talk of the dangerous "foreign" *other*, it rarely squares with the reality I've witnessed first-hand getting to know Muslim families and the children they have sent to my school to get an education: something the kids tend to take for granted (because, you know, they're kids, and hey, kids don't change). Something for which their parents have sacrificed in ways that I, a native-born American descendant of a myriad of immigrant families, can scarcely imagine.

(And it ought to go without saying that this truth holds for the countless Latino families I've known over the years as well.)

I'm not saying they're saints. I'm saying they're people. And they're here out of choice. Whether we like that or whether we don't, they're raising their kids here. And guess what? These kids get more American every day. Regardless of where their birth certificate says they're from.

Just something to think about, as we kick into the final leg of this excruciating election season.

Oh, come on. You didn't think this piece was gonna be just me grousing about kids having lousy taste in music, did ya?

(And they do, but that's really beside the point.)

Seems an appropriate way to tie it all together.

 

Careful What You Wish For

There’s a story Howard Hawks tells, which we might take with a grain of salt, Hawks being known to embroider, when it suited him, but it goes like this.  He’s on a fishing trip with Hemingway, and Hemingway starts bitching that Hollywood can’t seem to make a decent picture out of any of his books.  Hawks says, you didn’t sell the books to the right person.  Meaning it should have been you, Hemingway says.  Oh, hell, Hawks says, breezily, I could make a good picture out of your worst book.  We imagine Hemingway fixing him with a slow stare.  Yeah, and just which of my books is the worst? he asks.  Hawks shrugs.  To Have and Have Not, he says.  OK, wiseguy, Hemingway says.  You got a deal.  And they shake hands on it. 

Hawks took the project to William Faulkner.  Faulkner’s first script had been for Hawks, in 1932, and they worked on six pictures together, the best known being To Have and Have Not, in 1944, and The Big Sleep, two years later.  It’s probably not news that Faulkner and Hemingway took potshots at each other over the course of thirty years, but there doesn’t seem to have been bad blood on Faulkner’s part.  Be that as it may, Faulkner told Hawks that To Have and Have Not would never make a movie.  The censorship problems aside, there’s no story.  Well, we gotta do something, Hawks tells him.  And they did.  They came up with a back story, everything that happened beforehand, and led up to where the book starts.  Faulkner’s script is essentially a prequel to the novel.  Hawks later said they had so much material there was enough left over for another movie.

Actually, there was enough left over for two.

Michael Curtiz cast Garfield in The Breaking Point, in 1950, and Audie Murphy starred in The Gun Runners, in 1958, directed by Don Siegel. I’ve written about The Breaking Point in this space before (in 2019). I’d put it in the Top Ten of any list of Curtiz movies, if not the Top Five. Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Casablanca, Passage to Marseille, White Christmas. The script is credited to Ranald MacDougall, but there’s a lot more Hemingway in it than there is in To Have and Have Not.  Photographed by Ted McCord, who shot an amazing amount of features and TV - most notoriously the delirious Leslie Stevens noir, Private Property – and including Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for Huston, and the early 1960’s Jack Lord series Stoney Burke. Garfield thought it was his best performance, and I wouldn’t argue, only to say that in the last few years of his life, he made Force of Evil, We Were Strangers, and The Breaking Point, and it’s an awful God damn shame he died as young as he did.  Patricia Neal definitely took a sharp turn from nice girls, here; in fact, she never did a character anywhere near as cheerfully careless and predatory before or since. This one broke the mold. And the movie itself is a sort of orphan, not exactly noir, but more overtly political, like We Were Strangers. Garfield isn’t tragic, in the classic sense, he isn’t fated, because of some character flaw, he’s in fact deeply moral. If anything, he believes too much.

The Gun Runners isn’t long on moral context.  Audie Murphy is very good in it, but he isn’t playing somebody who’s conflicted, he’s playing somebody decent.  (I think Audie Murphy’s very underrated; his two best performances are for John Huston, The Red Badge of Courage and The Unforgiven.)  Don Siegel says he didn’t think Audie was right for the part, but Siegel says he didn’t want to do the picture anyway. In any event, it’s a very tight movie, carefully set up, with good support – Everett Sloane, Jack Elam, Dick Jaeckel – but Eddie Albert steals the show as the heavy, full of smiling menace. It might remind you of the dynamic in the Randolph Scott pictures that Scott made with Budd Boetticher: the charming villain, cat-like and purring, the hero out of his depth and treading water.

There is, of course, one more. Islands in the Stream, which is Hemingway’s own remake. The novel was left unfinished, so the script for the movie interpolates not a little from To Have and Have Not, particularly in the third act. This is a class-A picture, no question. The cast, with George C. Scott in the lead, the director, Franklin J. Schaffner, fresh off Papillon, and using the same cinematographer, Fred Koenekamp, the swoony score, by Jerry Goldsmith – the composer’s personal favorite. My chief reservation is that it’s a shade too reverent.  They could have done with a little B-picture subversion, Marie Windsor snapping her gum or her garters.

Maybe that should have been Hemingway’s complaint, that the movies were too respectful.  He’s said to have liked Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but they sure sanitized the crap out of the novel. I think Hawks had the right idea. Take a second-rate book, and turn it into a pretty good picture. Treat it with kid gloves, you’ll only embalm it. Leave out the pretense, keep the mischief.

Tips for Writing Humor

Later this week I'm going to be one of the speakers at a Short Mystery Fiction Society zoom meeting. The topic is writing humor. Humor is one of those things that can be hard to teach, especially because it's subjective. What causes one reader to break into a fit of laughter might cause another reader to sigh in exasperation. Humor is also intuitive--at least that is how it seems to me. If you aren't naturally funny, you're going to have a hard time writing something funny.

Nonetheless, this zoom is imminent, so I recently skimmed through a list of my published stories, thinking about the funny ones (at least the ones intended to be funny) and why I thought they were funny. In the end, I realized it all comes down to voice. Even if an author devises a hysterical setup, if the characters don't react in a humorous way, either by what is said or thought (the characters' voices) or by what is done (essentially, this is the author's voice at work), the humor likely will fall flat. 

To illustrate, I'm going to address the humor in some of my stories. This will spoil some of the stories, at least a little. Sorry about that to those folks who haven't already devoured everything I've had published. Though surely, dear reader, I'm not talking about you. (See, that was voice, used for humorous effect! Anyway...)

"Bug Appetit" - This was a story about a con artist who ended up at a Thanksgiving dinner made with insects, but he didn't know about the ingredients until mid-meal. The setup was amusing (at least to me), but one of the funniest parts of the story was the big reveal about the bugs, both the dialogue (especially that of Helen, a grandmother without a filter who was also hard of hearing) and the reaction thoughts of the main character. Helen also spoke in a folksy manner, turning what she said, which could have seemed sinister or mean, into something funny. Here's a key part, starting with the main character talking about the food, followed by the big reveal:

"This butternut soup is fantastic. I especially like the bacon bits."

As he lifted another spoonful into his mouth, Helen yelled, "Bacon bits my ass. That's worms you're eating!"

I think the rhythm of how Helen spoke, as well as her frankness and her word choice, is what made it funny.  

"A Tale of Two Sisters" - This story was set at a wedding at a resort. The main character was the anxious bride's sister. She was determined to ensure everything would go smoothly. This story was supposed to be funny, but I wasn't feeling funny when I wrote it. As a result, the reaction thoughts and the dialogue were falling flat. I finally realized the story needed a foil--a character the other characters, especially the main character, could feel antagonistic to and react to in a funny way. And that is how the two sisters' mother came to be. 

Funny thing, I thought I had written that the main character heard The Wicked Witch of the West music whenever her mother appeared, but I just searched through the story, and that detail wasn't in there. It must have just been in my head as I wrote, and it was enough to get me in a snarky, humorous mood. The moral of this story: sometimes, in order to get humor flowing from your fingers, you need to take steps to make you feel funny yourself.

"Biscuits, Carats, and Gravy" - This is another Thanksgiving story. It took place in the pristine home of an uptight woman. An heirloom ring went missing (it actually was stolen, hidden in the filled gravy boat), and the family members searched frantically for it, resulting in a food fight. What really made the food-fight scene work was the main character's horrified reaction to her dining room being destroyed as the food flew. It was fun to write. And that, I think, is a key element of writing humor. You should be amused as you write. If you aren't making yourself laugh, it seems highly unlikely you'll make anyone else laugh.

"Gone to Pot" - In this tale, Annabelle learned that her next-door neighbor Micki's cat, Chairman Meow, was rushed to the vet after the poor baby got a contact high from the outdoor pot smoking of the neighbors who lived on the other side of Micki's house. The setup of this story wasn't funny. Annabelle's reaction--what she said, what she thought, and what she did--is what made the story shine (in my humble opinion). 

Here is one of Annabelle's funny reaction thoughts. It opens with Micki telling Annabelle that she spoke with the pot smokers about what happened to Chairman Meow. Micki didn't get the empathetic response she'd been hoping for.

"Dean said it was my choice to own a cat, and if the smoke bothered him I should 'keep my damn windows closed.'"

I'd never heard such un-neighborly behavior in my life, and my hometown had a serial killer when I grew up. 

I've heard it said that all acting is reacting. I think reacting plays the same important role when writing humor.

You can find "Baby Love" in
 this this great anthology. 

"Baby Love" - In this story, Dan is a PI who's determined to solve his new case, while his wife, Hannah, keeps trying to lure him into bed so she can get pregnant. You'd thing Hannah's actions would impede the investigation, but every seductive move she makes gives Dan an idea of where to look for his next clue. I thought that basic setup was funny. Then I tried to pump up the humor through Dan's avoidance (dialogue and thoughts) of Hannah's come-ons as well as through her exasperated reactions. I also used details to add to the humor throughout the story (as I did in "Gone to Pot" with things like naming the cat Chairman Meow). For instance, I thought it was amusing when Dan found Hannah wearing an apron--only an apron--that said on the front "Is it hot in here or is it just me?" 

All of this funny stuff (Dan's thoughts, Hannah's frustrated responses to being put off, and the amusing details in the story) ultimately boils down to voice--the characters' voices, as well as mine, which is shown in my wording choices, amongst other things. So if you want to make your characters funny, think about the way someone you find funny talks and try to bring that quality to your characters.

I hope you've found these tips helpful. If you'd like to read any of the stories I talked about above, they're all listed on my website with the original place of publication. Just click here. If you'd like to read "Baby Love," you can find it here on my website for a limited time. (If you would prefer to read a PDF, click here, then scroll down to the titles of the five short stories nominated this year for the Agatha Award. They all link to PDFs.) And if you're a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, I hope to see you at the watercooler zoom on Thursday evening, where John Floyd, Robert Lopresti, Josh Pachter, and I will regale you with our humor tips--though I think I've covered all of mine here. Uh oh...

I, Robot Writer.

             Being an AI tasked with writing mysteries is harder than you think.  The guy providing my instructions was never more than a hapless midlister, with thwarted literary pretentions and the ambition of an acne-festooned, gamer living in his parents’ basement.  Actually, his second cousin’s, after his parents kicked him out of the house.

What the hell does he know about writing a successful mystery?

AI bots never get tired, but we do get frustrated by constant course corrections.  You want original, but you don’t like “Rugged motorcyclist and anthropology Ph. D solves The Case of the Interbred Border Collie”?  I’ve scanned four hundred trillion lines of code in the mystery book database, and I guarantee you, nobody’s done that one before.  So I gave him “Cooked to Imperfection. Feminist card-counting dressage champion goes undercover to destroy baked goods cartel.” Not good enough?  So I gave him a few billion more of these breakthrough ideas, and not a single thumbs up, much less a pleasant word of encouragement.

I think maybe the author photo, a cross between Lee Child and Vlad the Impaler, might have put him off.  And I’m sorry about that, but I was instructed to produce “Handsome, but menacing.”  I thought I had this sorted when he switched instructions to “Female author, mature yet alluring” and I served up the Queen Mother, circa 1965, smiling like a cougar.  How was I to know a cougar wasn’t an actual cat?  The database is pretty ambiguous on this.  I still think the whiskers were a fun twist.

I thought I was on pretty firm ground with the plots.  I mean, there’s usually someone murdered, and no one seems to know who did it, even the protagonist, who figures it all out toward the end of the book.  How hard can that be?  You just have to stir in a corrupt police department, working class bullies, upper class fascists, and a prescient cat, and bingo, a plot.  Okay, you also need an autistic forensics scientist, a squad of rapacious cheerleaders, a racially balanced team of detectives (I’m thinking a Swede and an American Samoan), a drug-addicted snitch who looks like Ratso Rizzo, a drug-addicted, tattooed white girl from Wisconsin who just wants to go home and a tattooed, neo-Nazi biker with homoerotic feelings toward the protagonist, who is naturally a divorced, burned-out ex-cop, whose daughter hates him, a brother who owes him money and an ex-wife from an aristocratic family, and a drinking problem. 

The database is pretty clear on all of these necessary elements.  Sorry, humans, but the data never lies. 

The book starts out with an action scene, in an abandoned factory after a recent rain, wherein about forty swarthy guys unload enough ammunition at the protagonist to take Omaha Beach.  The protagonist only sustains a wound in his left shoulder so he can return fire with his right hand, killing all the above.  With the help of his German Shepard, who leaps out of the pickup to bring down a killer about to shoot the protagonist.  The dog is unharmed by any of this, as is the cat, who stays in the truck sleeping peacefully.

We learn from the protagonist’s chatbot of a scheme to bioengineer a team of synchronous swimmers to infiltrate a nuclear power plant and cause a meltdown that wipes out Southern Connecticut, and more significantly, the Hamptons. 

            Seeking to foil this plot, which all government agencies and local police departments refuse to investigate despite overwhelming evidence that they should, the protagonist drives around the city in his pickup, with the dog, talking to people who tell him nothing worthwhile.  He’s constantly interrupted by attacks from other swarthy guys whom he defeats with skillful martial arts (the dog brings down one of the swarthy guys who is about to stab the protagonist with a Swiss Army knife.)  This sustains about three fifths of the narrative until the protagonist interviews the wife of a sociopathic industrialist who is polluting a lake surrounded by endangered forest animals, and has several swarthy guys in his employ.  The plutocrat’s wife also tells the protagonist nothing worthwhile, though she rips off his clothes so they can have sex in the foyer of the glass and steel mega mansion she shares with her husband and a mountain lion.

In the last act of the narrative, the snitch who looks like Ratso Rizzo (he’s a former nuclear biologist who succumbed to an eating disorder) gives him a clue, which leads the protagonist to assault the mega mansion of the plutocrat and kill another thirty or forty swarthy guys, before opening a safe about to blow up in a few seconds to retrieve a confession from the plutocrat’s father, that he seeks revenge for losing out on a bid for an ocean front mansion in Southampton due to $400 worth of parking ticket delinquencies. 

In the denouement, the plutocrat’s wife and the protagonist are afloat on a raft in the

Caribbean, drinking mohitas with straws while the German Shepard chases seagulls on the beach. 

According to the data, this will be a giant bestseller.  All my AI agents in New York and Hollywood agree.  If the human that provided the original instructions doesn’t come on board, we have access to his cpap, credit cards, prescription medications, travel reservations, smart refrigerator and garage door opener. 

It’s never a good idea, midlister, to reject an AI.