Whodunit? Beats Me.

  

All of us who write and sell short stories know there are ups and downs, hills and valleys, boomtimes and dry spells. It's mostly been dry for me lately: I just don't publish as many stories, or as often, as I once did. One reason is that there are fewer short-story markets out there now. Especially markets for mystery stories, which is what I most enjoy writing.

Having said that, I must say that November has started out well. In the first four days of the month, I was fortunate enough to have three stories published--one in Black Cat Weekly, one in a food-themed anthology, and one in an anthology of stories from Strand Magazine. Those three stories have very little in common with each other, except for one thing. (I'll tell you that in a minute.)

The first story, published November 1 in Issue #218 of Black Cat Weekly, was "City Lights," a short, quirky, lighthearted tale about a retired Southern schoolteacher on vacation in New York City. She stops in to visit an old friend from her hometown and--in the process of three or four pages--manages to spot a financial scam and save her friend from falling for it. A simple and (I hope) fun little story.

The second story appeared on November 4 in the anthology Cooking Up Death (Camden Park Press), edited by Lyn Worthen. This story, "Chef's Surprise," features a restaurant owner who runs into a vengeful man from her past, one she knew in name only, and winds up fighting for her life during an otherwise calm Thanksgiving dinner date. Her only weapon is her quick mind, which--as we all know--is sometimes enough. It's a "framed" story, told later by the protagonist to a friend, and is probably more of a suspense/thriller/survival story than anything else.

The third one of these stories was also published November 4, in an anthology called Best of The Strand Magazine: 25 Years of Twists, Turns, and Tales by the Modern Masters of Mystery and Fiction (Blackstone Publishing), edited by Andrew Gulli and Lamia Gulli. I've not yet seen the book or read any of the other stories, but it should be a good one, featuring authors like James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, and so on. (How I squeezed in there is anybody's guess.) My story, "Foreverglow," first published in The Strand in 2018, is about a complicated department-store heist of a jewelry collection, told from the POV of one of the robbers.

Is there a point to all this bragging? Yes, believe it or not. I said earlier that these three mystery stories had one thing in common. That shared fact is that none of them is a whodunit. Not even close. There's no list of suspects in any of them, no detective or investigation, and the identity of the villain is never in doubt. And the really funny thing is, if I look back on all the so-called mystery stories I've published over the past thirty years, very few of them are traditional whodunits. Most of my stores are howdunits, whydunits, howcatchems, or howtheygotawaywithits. 

I think that's okay. I always find reassurance by going back to the definition that Otto Penzler refers to in the introductions to his annual best-of anthologies. He says (paraphrasing, here) that a mystery is any story that contains a crime, even it it's only a hint or implication of a crime. It does not have to be a whodunit. I Also, a mystery doesn't have to be a murder mystery. I suspect that more than half the stories I've written and sold have been about lesser crimes: robberies, burglaries, kidnappings, blackmail, fraud, etc., etc. 

Some crime-writer friends who don't accept that definition of Otto's have told me they always say they write crime/suspense fiction, not mystery fiction. If that makes them feel better, fine, but I say that's being too restrictive. As I've said, I write more thriller/suspense stories than traditional mystery stories, but just as the mystery section of the bookstore will always contain novels like The Silence of the Lambs and No Country for Old Men, we short-crime writers can always call ourselves mystery writers. It's fun to point out that even though Columbo will always be thought of as a TV mystery series, not one of its 69 episodes was a whodunit. The audience always knew, within the first ten minutes, who the bad guy was--and the fun was in finding out how he got caught. Same thing goes for the recent Poker Face series.

So, what do you think? If you're a crime writer, do you focus mostly on whodunits? Do you, like me, rarely write them? What if you're a reader? (And God knows, every one of us writers better be a reader.) Are whodunits more fun for you to read? If you don't write only whodunits, do you feel that you're stretching the definition a bit when you say you write mysteries? I've already confessed that I don't think so. If pressed, I would say whodunits are a subgenre.

But how should I know? It's all a mystery to me.

The Secret to Never Growing Old

My name is Anna Scotti, and I am delighted to present my inaugural blogpost for SleuthSayers (though I did guest post for Liz Zelvin in September). Coincidentally, I was given a debut date close to my birthday, and that got me thinking about characters' ages… and my own.

For millennia, people have searched for a cream, elixir, recipe, spell, or fountain that will grant eternal youth. Literary characters from Peter Pan to Dorian Grey have grappled with the wish to be forever young. Jay-Z, Alphaville, and Bob Dylan sang about it. One of the best kids' books ever written, Tuck Everlasting, deals with a family's discovery of a spring that grants immortality. Snow White's stepmother and Death Becomes Her's Madeline and Helen tried for eternal youth, too.

Few of these tales end happily, but if these pitiable literary figures only knew! The real secret to slow aging is to be the main character of a series that takes place over years, or even decades.

Nancy Drew is a dewy 18 in all of her 175 eponymous adventures, except when she occasionally, inexplicably, becomes 16. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple didn't start young, but aged erratically – and sometimes backward – from their initial late-middle age inceptions.

Sherlock Holmes is in his late twenties – perhaps even early thirties – in A Study in Scarlet, and is sixty in His Last Bow, which takes place in 1914, and finds him already retired to the English countryside to keep bees.

All 58 stories and four novels Doyle wrote about the sleuth take place during that span, which means Holmes is living – and aging – at a different pace from the rest of us. Kinsey Millhone is 32 in A is for Alibi, but just 38 in Y is for Yesterday, although Sue Grafton's series was written over a span of thirty-five years. This kind of sliding timescale, or floating timeline, isn't at all uncommon in fiction. You can probably think of examples of your own.

Mid-thirties may be a sweet spot for female protagonists to linger. When I created my "librarian-on-the-run" character in That Which We Call Patience (Ellery Queen, 2019) I had no idea I'd be writing a series. I made Audrey Smith – who is eventually known as Cam Baker, Sonia Sutton, Dana Kane, Lori Yarborough, and by a handful of other monikers over the course of her fourteen-story saga – "thirty-something," and she'd already been on the run in witness protection for a few years as the story opens.

The age just seemed right to me – I wanted her to be young enough to be fit, active and still fairly naive, someone who could step into an entry-level job without raising eyebrows. But she also had to be old enough to be well-educated and to have a bit of experience under her belt (she's working on a PhD when her life is interrupted by witnessing a crime).

In the fifth story of what became the series, The Longest Pleasure, Lori says she's thirty-two, and in It's Not Even Past, the sixth story, she's thirty-four. When Lori finally comes out of WITSEC, in Traveller from an Antique Land, she says she's thirty-eight, and that she's been on the run for eight or nine years. That would mean she went under in her late twenties, which fits the timeline established in Patience. So the ages add up, sort of, except that there are gaps between stories that must surely equal months or years, and references to other adventures not yet chronicled… and all together, they add up to far more than nine years on the run unless our girl is stumbling over a random corpse every five or six months.

Readers who get hooked on a series know when we're pulling a fast one with a character's age. But what Coleridge identified as a "willing suspension of disbelief" works in our favor as writers of fiction. If a character is engaging enough, and stories are good enough, to compel readers to demand more, time can be manipulated to serve us.

The trick is to make everything else believable. Lori may age at a third the normal rate, and she discovers corpses with alarming frequency, but she is in other regards perfectly ordinary. She's attractive but not a knock-out. She's smart but can be fooled. She drinks Earl Grey Tea, drives a beat-up Honda CRV, enjoys a trashy beach-read, and behaves recklessly – even inappropriately - with more than one man over the course of her adventures. In other words, she's very much like a real person, warts and all. And that's how we pull off the magic trick. Don't ask your readers to believe a dozen strange things – just ask them to believe one. Then make everything else absolutely plausible- even commonplace.

So, yes, if readers keep asking for librarian stories, Lori will eventually grow old – just not at the same, sometimes distressing, rate as her creator. 

Anna Scotti's librarian-on-the-run collection, It's Not Even Past, went out of print when Down&Out Books folded in October. She is hoping a white knight publisher will swoop in soon, but in the meantime, if you'd like to order a copy, go to annakscotti.com. Watch for the next "librarian" installment, When Bright Angels Beckon, early next year. Anna's short fiction appears frequently in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Black Cat Weekly, and her poetry can be found in The New Yorker and other literary magazines.  She's also a young adult author - Big and Bad was awarded the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People in 2021.

Humans are a Puzzlement...

"Never say you know the last word about any human heart"

— Henry James

And as for the human mind… Of course, this is what makes communicating with each other so difficult, whether in person or in writing. And not only do we not know what's going on inside of someone else, we don't even know ourselves, and I'm not talking about repressions or neuroses. I'm talking about how the way we're built literally shuts us off from things about ourselves that are perfectly obvious to everyone else.

We don't know what we really look like. For one thing, all we ever see of ourselves is in a mirror.

(NOTE: This is a plot point in Agatha Christie's Funerals Are Fatal.) And when we do see ourselves in a photograph or a video, we're often shocked, shocked, shocked at what we see! Not to mention how we often carry around an image of ourselves from some time in our past. For example: I hit my current magnificent height of 5'5" when I was in grade school, and one of my best friends did too. We towered over everyone around us. And ever since, I've seen myself as tall. So it came as a shock, back in the late 1990s, to hear someone describe me to someone else as "kinda short". Kinda short? KINDA SHORT??? And then I realized that I had to look up at almost everyone around me. Damn. Still getting over that one.

We don't know what we really sound like. We hear everything we say from our own little skull's castle of flesh and bone and various fluids. Now I have always known that I have a very deep voice for a female (an alto or a baritone, not sure which, but I have been told that it's "sultry") because in grade school I often got cast as a boy in the school plays. I also have an odd combination of a Southern California and Kentucky drawl. (BTW, I can do a dead-on impression of Mitch McConnell.) I never heard a recording of myself until I was in almost 20, and I realized that I sound sarcastic even when I'm saying "So, how's it going?" Sultry and sarcastic: sounds like the subtitle on my future detective's card.

We don't know what we're feeling, and we don't know what to do with whatever we're feeling. Seriously. Ask any toddler, teenager, parent, or boss who is having a complete and utter meltdown. If they can breathe long enough to talk.

Kat Dennings doing a GREAT teenage girl freakout in The 40-Year-Old Virgin

I know I did a lot of Alternatives to Violence Project workshops up at the pen where the inmates couldn't handle most negative emotions, and rather than face boredom, sadness, frustration, anxiety, or fear, they would explode into anger. And of course, you can't just say, "oh, gee, I'm angry" and calm down. As many inmates - and others - told me, "You know how it is. You get disrespected, you gotta react. You can't let anything go, because then somebody's gonna f*** with you, and it's only gonna get worse." BTW, sadness often led to isolating, cutting and/or attempts (or success) at suicide.

Now that might sound like adolescent behavior, but studies have shown that a large number of people are first arrested as juveniles, with over two-thirds of those in state prisons having a first arrest before age 19, and 38% before age 16. So where and how are they supposed to grow up?

But then, I don't think humans do a very good job of teaching emotions. (Lately I don't think much of our skills at teaching reading, writing, history, science, civics, and arithmetic, either, but that's for another blogpost.) You want to see some real unbridled, spit-flecked meltdown rages? – go online, where the ubiquitous Usernames, Gamertags, etc. go after others the way Jack the Ripper went after his victims on the foggy streets of Whitechapel.

We don't know how to share any of this with others, because... We think they see, feel, hear, know what we see, feel, hear, and know, and oh how wrong that is.

Here's an example. I used to teach a community ed writing class back in the Reagan years. And the first thing I started with was talking about words, and what people see when they hear or read a word. So I told them, write down the first image or emotion or memory that comes in your head when I write a word on the board. And the first word was always "Apple".

Answers: red, yellow, green, Apple Music, Apple computers, 1980 Apple IPO, apple tree, apple scent, apple pie, sliced apple, whole apple… all of those were among the answers given.

So, every time we write what we think is a very obvious, simple description... it's not. We know what we see in our mind when read / hear it, but we have no idea what's firing off in other people's minds when they read / hear it. It's a wonder anyone understands anything. But then I'm the person who found the first five chapters of Moby Dick hilarious.

We don't know why we do at least some of the things we do. Because we assume that how we were raised, the food we ate, the way it was cooked, the way the clothes hung in the closet, the way the laundry was done, the way the garden (if any) was planted, the way we dressed to go out (if we went out), that was what was normal. And then you meet people who don't live the way you did... Obviously, they're doing it wrong. Or maybe you finally meet the people who are doing it right, but don't know how to imitate them.

We don't know why we're attracted to certain things, from the colors we prefer in our house (I've always been a big fan of cobalt blue) to people with a certain hair/eye color. Or why certain things repel us. I don't and can't wear jewelry, and never have, because back when my mother first put a little necklace on me (I mean, after all, I was a girl, and girls are supposed to love and wear jewelry), I smelled the most terrible smell... And it happened every time she tried to bejewel me. I have no idea why, and I don't WANT to know why. There's a nightmare there, and I don't want to have it.

We don't know why we annoy other people; nor why we are annoyed by someone else. And that we don't usually analyze. Obviously, they're jerks. See Robert Browning's

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

I	II
Gr-r- r – there go, my heart’s abhorrence! Water your damned flower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God’s blood, would not mine kill you! What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? Oh, that rose has prior claims – Needs its leaden vase filled brimming? Hell dry you up with its flames!	At the meal we sit together; Salve tibi! I must hear Wise talk of the kind of weather, Sort of season, time of year: Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt; What’s the Latin name for “parsley”? What’s the Greek name for “swine’s snout”?

To hear the whole poem, listen here:

Don't you wonder why our narrator is so infuriated with / about Brother Lawrence?

We are so strange, and we know so little, about ourselves and others - and that right there is the biggest set up for any mystery, any at all. That's being human.

"Hello, Bookstore"

 

My pal Matt Tannenbaum is about to celebrate 50 years as a bookseller.  He made his bones at the Gotham Book Mart, working for the legendary Frances Steloff.  “Always bring the customer with you back to the shelf when he or she asks for a book which you don’t think you have in stock.  Especially if you know you don’t have it.  Your customer is bound to see something else along the way.”  Frances was enormously grateful for having been led into a trade she so cherished, and Matt clearly is, as well.  He once remarked that when you’re young, you’re unlikely to recognize a life-changing event, because you haven’t lived enough of a life to realize it’s going to change.  But that first day Matt walked into the Gotham, he set his life on a different path. 

                                   Matt Tannenbaum - Photo Credit: Bill Shein/Berkshire Argus

It’s enormously satisfying to see somebody imagine a thing, and make it happen.  Matt moved to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, and bought his own bookstore, on Housatonic St., in Lenox.  He and the store have been an enduring resource since, for both readers and writers.  Matt is very much a bookman, in the sense of loving everything about them, the texts, the smell, the history.  He’s achieved something not everybody gets, which is to make a vocation from his ardor.  This is a guy who breathes the written word.  And as a kind of grace note, in 2022, during COVID, a filmmaker named A.B. Zax made a documentary called Hello, Bookstore, which is in fact how Matt answers the phone.  I can’t recommend this movie enough.  It’s hugely charming, and a terrific surprise.  I was prepared to like it, of course, because it’s somebody I love and respect, but there’s always your dread going in – like a high school production of Oklahoma – that it’s going to be amateurish and squirmy, and you have to trust me on this one, squirmy it ain’t.  It’s without pretense, and I hope I don’t doom your interest by calling it heart-warming.

https://www.hello-bookstore.com/

I was on the phone with Matt, just the other day, and if I sample a piece of the conversation, it gives you an idea of how his mind works.  He mentioned that he’d struck up an acquaintanceship with Otto Penzler – another bookseller, of course – because of their shared enthusiasm for Charles McCarry.  (McCarry hailed from Pittsfield, MA, just up the road from Lenox, and he and Matt had gotten to be pals; Otto, as a publisher, had anthologized McCarry in several collections, Best American Mystery Stories among them.)  My own acquaintance with Otto is very slight, but I’ve been short-listed several times for BAMS, and the first time I got in was the year it was guest-edited by Donald Westlake.  I told Matt that I wrote Westlake a fanboy thank-you, and we had a desultory correspondence over the next half-dozen years, snail mail, because he didn’t do internet, and his letters were written on a manual, because he didn’t like electric typewriters, either.  He didn’t want something humming at him, he said.  I’m thinking Don punched those keys pretty hard, and he must have gone through a whole bunch of Smith-Coronas over time, because the e was always out of alignment, about a sixteenth of an inch above the line of type.  Matt laughed, and said something about technology, and how of course Westlake was allowed his idiosyncracies, and then he said, You realize there are no rough drafts anymore.  On a computer, you don’t mark up a hard copy, you just overwrite what you wrote before.  It took me a minute to think that through.  Word-processing is a huge convenience, and I, for one, like being liberated.  But the consequence is an actual loss.  What we gain in momentum, we lose by having no record of the process.  It’s a thoughtful insight. 

I’ve had a lot of eye-opening conversations with Matt.  He’s always been a very alert reader.  He was the one who pointed out the elegance of the last line of John Crowley’s Little, Big to me – a shared appreciation – but truth to tell, I’d missed it, first time around.  I think, too, that I would have turned a deaf ear to Lawrence Durrell, if not for Matt.  Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.  Patrick Leigh Fermor, maybe.  He can be very attuned to what a reader might not realize they’d been missing.  This is the natural magic of the bookshelf, one thing next to another. 

The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025

The mystery genre’s two best-of-year anthologies—Steph Cha’s The Best American Mystery and Suspense and Otto Penzler’s The Best Mystery Stories of the Year—provide readers with excellent examples of some of the best short mystery fiction published each year. If you write in the genre, you should regularly read both anthologies, not only for the enjoyment of reading some of the best short fiction our genre produces, but also to learn about the wide range of publications where the selected stories were originally published.

However, because the series editors and guest editors of both anthologies select stories from the entire panoply of crime fiction subgenres, some subgenres are unrepresented or underrepresented among their selections. Cozies, for example.

Though private eye stories are neither overlooked nor underrepresented in the two best-ofs, there are many more excellent private eye stories published each year than can be included in anthologies that attempt to cover the entire field. To remedy that situation, I’m now the series editor of The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year, and the inaugural volume, with multiple-award-winning private eye writer Matt Coyle as guest editor, releases soon.

As series editor, I read every private eye short story published in 2024 that I could find. Using the Private Eye Writers of America’s definition of private eye—“a private citizen (not a member of the military, federal agency, or civic or state police force) who is paid to investigate crimes. A Private Investigator can be a traditional private eye, a TV or newspaper reporter, an insurance investigator, an employee of an investigative service or agency (think Pinkertons) or similar character”—I eliminated stories that missed the mark. I then selected what I felt were the thirty best private eye short stories published in 2024.

Just like Cha and Penzler do with their guest editors, I sent my selections to Matt. He selected twenty stories for inclusion in the anthology, with the remaining ten being listed in the back as “Also Walking the Mean Streets.”

The twenty selected stories were written by Tom Andes, Pete Barnstrom, Robert J. Binney, Alec Cizak, Libby Cudmore, O’Neil De Noux, Luke Deckard, BV Lawson, Andrew McAleer, Ron Miller, Bruce W. Most, Marcia Muller, Twist Phelan, Neil S. Plakcy, William Dylan Powell, M.E. Proctor, Mark Thielman, Vicki Weisfeld, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, and Sam Wiebe.

Additionally, Matt wrote the introduction and Kevin Burton Smith, the driving force behind Thrilling Detective, wrote “The Private Eye Year in Review,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

Also Walking the Means Streets includes stories by Ann Aptaker, John M. Floyd, James A. Hearn, R.T. Lawton, Josh Pachter, Michele Bazan Reed, Gary Ross, Jeff Soloway, Bev Vincent, and Dave Zeltserman.

The selected stories and those listed as Also Walking the Mean Streets were originally published in a variety of anthologies, magazines, and websites, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, Cowboy Jamboree: A Case of Kink, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Janie’s Got a Gun, Jerry Jazz Musician, Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Midsummer Mysteries, Mystery Magazine, New York State of Crime: Murder New York Style, Private Dicks and Disco Balls, Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers, Starlite Pulp Review, Strand Magazine, The Amber Waves of Autumn, The Killing Rain, and Yellow Mama.

So, keep your eyes open for the release of The Best Private Eye Stories of 2025, pick up a copy, and prepare yourself for a walk down the mean streets with some of today’s most interesting private eyes and their creators.

2026

SJ Rozan will be the guest editor for The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. If you had (or will have) a private eye short story published in 2025, follow the directions here to submit a copy of your published story.

And remember, if we don’t see your story, we can’t consider it.

* * *

“All I Ever Wanted” was published today in Dark Yonder 11.

“Home for the Holidays” was published in KissMet Quarterly: The Greatest Holiday Romance Stories Ever Written.

The Old Lady Shows her Mettle

Why is this book different from all other books?

If you're Jewish, you'll get the reference.

"This book" is my new poetry book, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle.

First, let me tell you my numbers. I'm 81 years old. I've been a writer since I was seven. My first book of poetry was published when I was 37. My first short story was published when I was 63. My first novel was published when I was 64. I've published three poetry books, seven novels, and more than 60 short stories. As a novelist, I've had and been dropped by three agents and five publishers. I've had novels in hardcover and poems in journals that folded before some of you were born.

So why is this book different?

1. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is the voice of a vanishing generation. My poems were published widely during the Second Wave of the women's movement. I was a New York Jewish feminist poet. My first book, I Am the Daughter, was about that political sensibility as well as being a young mother and my love life at the time. As I discovered when I looked for old poet friends to ask if they would consider blurbing the book, not many of us are left. In the late 1970s, a group of young mothers traded poetry critique on the Upper West Side. One of us went on to become revered, a household name, a Pulitzer winner. Her assistant wrote she sent best wishes but her health was too poor even to read emails. That's the way it goes when you're over 80.

2. I self-published The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle in print and e-book editions, after shopping it for a year. The poetry world is different from the mystery and crime fiction world I know, so I asked an old friend, a highly regarded award-winning poet, about reading fees. I was surprised when he didn't say he turned up his nose at them. "Not any more,"he said. So I did what I had to and got two offers. The catch was that the contracts were for print books. The publishers insisted on owning the electronic rights but did not intend to issue an e-book.

That made no sense. I turned the contracts down. In the end, I realized that I preferred to do it myself, have all the control, and get exactly what I wanted.

When I started out, it was shameful to self-publish a book. Today, it's one of many options. With poetry especially, the author does all the marketing—the hard part—in either case. Since the book came out a month ago, half its readers have chosen paperbacks, the other half e-books. So it seems I had the right idea about the need for both formats.

3. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is my only poetry book available in print as well as e-book form. Both I Am the Daughter (1981) and Gifts and Secrets (1999), my mid-life book, which was about my work as a therapist, being a mother, and the beginning of losses—the death of friends and eventually of my parents—were originally published before the digital world existed. But I re-issued them as e-books a few years ago, the rights having reverted, with a few editorial tweaks I'd been longing to make for forty years.

4. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is my "Jewish book" in a way that even the Mendoza Family Saga, my Jewish historical adventure series set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is not. For one thing, fiction, as we fiction writers like to say, is "telling lies." Poetry, at least for me, is always about the truth. "All my stories are true," I say at readings. Some of these poems tell stories about the emigration of my family from Hungary and what we then called the Ukraine to New York and what happened to those who stayed, those left behind, and any who got homesick and went back. Others, the most difficult to write, were my way of working through the divisive effect that political and environmental events from 2019 to the present have had on the world and various entities and institutions, including publishing, the American left, and the community of Jewish friends on whom I've depended all my life. All this and the rise of anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world have made me aware of and willing to declare my identity as a Jewish woman in a way that I never have before, certainly not in my poetry.

5. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle includes grandmother and granddaughter poems that are not about a grandma rocking or hugging the grandchildren or feeding them, cooking, or otherwise confined to the kitchen. While I was looking for places to submit my new poetry, I was horrified that I could find no current poetry by men and little by women portraying grandmothers outside traditional gender-based roles. As these poems attest, my granddaughters and I order in, go out, and talk about stuff that matters.

The Louvre Heist: The Somber Rubbing Shoulders With The Absurd

On October 19^th, the news of the Louvre Heist hit. Eight crown jewels were stolen from the room that,  since 1887, has housed what is left of the French crown jewels.. These jewels are symbols of the French state and the history of the country, described as priceless and irreplaceable. It was, like much of the news these days, upsetting to read about, until some of the details came out and then, it became a story juxtaposing the grave with the absurd.

The first hint of this came in the details of how the heist was committed; the four thieves used a ladder and  escaped on scooters after spending less than eight minutes robbing the Louvre. Let's face it, it looks like a few friends wanting to avoid the holiday rush and deciding to pick up a few gifts by robbing the national museum of France that is, by the way, the most visited museum in the world. The ladders and scooters are hardly the stuff of a carefully planned modern heist one would expect. Add to this the comment by Lynda Albertson, chief of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), an organisation that examines and tracks trends in museum security including theft and vandalism, saying the Louvre’s architecture was not built “to address modern security needs, rigorous conservation controls, or the massive crowds it now attracts.”

The problem with that statement is that there were no crowds at the time and ladders are hardly modern security threats. Yes, the internet was abuzz with questions because seriously,  at a minimum one should protect the world's most famous museums and its priceless and precious works from being accessed by a something as simple as a ladder. 

While about 100 high powered detectives investigated the jewelry robbery, the news focused on this man and the internet initially identified as one of the investigators, "This is, by all accounts, genuinely the detective tasked with cracking the Louvre heist. God I love the French," writer David Patrikarakos said. 

It was only later that it was clarified that this gentleman was not a fabulously dressed detective but, rather, a passerby who was at the right place, at the right time and exuded enough je ne sais quoi to capture the imagination of the world. 

Then, Cosmopolitan put out an article discussing the suspects, replete with photos,"It is so French of them to both be this hot," activist and actor Jameela Jamil said in response to the two mugshots, with someone else commenting: "Why do they look like Calvin Klein models?"

However, the article informed the panting hordes that, "Hot as they may be, however, the Louvre heist mugshot men don't actually have anything to do with the jewel heist – as we've discovered..."

Of course, one can't help but picture Parisians following these guys around Paris and not just for being hot. Ditto for the man initially identified as a detective. 

After the modern heist that didn't use modern tools, a detective who only looks like a detective but is not one and suspects who are just two random hot guys who didn't rob the Louvre, surely we should be done with the hilarious part of this sad story.

Yet, we are not.

Even the high tech security of the Louvre is hilarious. Did someone ask a small child to make up a password?  Apparently so because, "one of the museum’s key passwords was simply “LOUVRE.” To add the absurd onto the ridiculous, the French Culture Minister Rachida Dati decided to respond to this with the understatement of the year by finally admitting, “Security failures did indeed occur.”

There is so little news to chuckle about these days. Most of the news has us diving under the covers of our newly made beds, in hopes of ignoring the world for a few moments. Despite the gravity of the theft, for the first time in a long time I found myself enjoying reading the news to follow the unexpected and hilarious twists and turns. That said, this theft is a grave and serious matter. I will continue to follow the story in hopes that the crown jewels are found intact and returned soon. While not so secretly hoping for a new funny twist, most of all, I'm hoping a mystery writer somewhere is inspired by all this and is making this dapper gentleman  the main character of a brilliant new novel. I would buy that book in a heartbeat. 

And on it goes...

Today, November 9th on APNews:

 "When 15-year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux realized an Associated Press photo of him at the Louvre on the day of the crown jewels heist had drawn millions of views, his first instinct was not to rush online and unmask himself. 

Quite the opposite. A fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot who lives with his parents and grandfather in Rambouillet, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Paris, Pedro decided to play along with the world’s suspense.

Pedro began dressing this way less than a year ago, inspired by 20th-century history and black-and-white images of suited statesmen and fictional detectives. 

“I like to be chic,” he said. “I go to school like this.” 

 He loves Poirot — “very elegant” — and likes the idea that an unusual crime calls for someone who looks unusual. “When something unusual happens, you don’t imagine a normal detective,” he said. “You imagine someone different.”

Well played, Pedro. Well played.