Tillie, Gertrude, and Molly

 This piece has nothing to do with crime, but it certainly is related to writing. Or one specific writer.

Back in March came Purim and so my wife was fine-tuning her recipe for hamentaschen, the cookies that are traditional for the holiday. One of the texts she consulted was the Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook.  I knew a little about what led to the creation of that book but I wound up doing a deep dive, and here is what I brought to the surface.

Tillie Edelstein was born in New York City in 1899. Her father, a mediocre businessman, ran a hotel in the Catskills and part of Tillie's job was writing skits for the guests to perform.  She was required to create speaking parts for every child in attendance so one of her plays was "Snow White and the Twenty-Eight Dwarfs."

Tillie married Lewis Berg, an engineer, and when the factory in New Orleans where he worked burned down they returned to the city and Tillie started looking for a job.    Or rather, she decided to create one. 

In 1928 Gertrude Berg, as she now called herself,  managed to wangle an interview with the local CBS radio station and presented a script she had created about two sales clerks at a department store - a show about working women? Pretty radical.  Effie and Laura was cancelled after the first episode because one of the clerks decreed "Marriages are not made in heaven." 

A year later she sold another idea to the NBC station. The Rise of the Goldbergs was about a Jewish family in New York. Molly and Jake were immigrants with thick accents.  Their children were typical first-generation Americans.

Berg wrote the scripts, produced the show, and was reluctantly corralled to star as Molly.   She had one week to write the scripts for four 15-minute episodes.  She wrote them - and many of the thousands more that followed - in the Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library, because her own apartment was too noisy.  The series premiered in November, 1929, just after the stock market crash.

This was long before sophisticated methods of checking who was listening to what so no one knew at first whether the show was a hit or  flop.  But three weeks into the scheduled four-week run Berg got a sore throat and the show had to be dropped.  The station received over 100,000 letters of complaint - and remember, this show was running on one station, not yet a network. NBC promptly bought The Goldbergs, as it was renamed, for the whole season. 

The show ran, on radio, live stage, and then television (starting in 1948) for more than two decades. Fortunately for Berg she had kept ownership rights to the characters.  In the beginning The Goldbergs was sometimes funny, sometimes melodramatic.  (If a female character was to be written out she got married.  A male character got sick.  When an script called for an actor to cough he would ask Berg "How long have I got?")  By the time it reached TV it was definitely a sit-com.

The show was always recorded live, leading to some bizarre adventures.  During one TV episode two of the three cameras failed so the actors, on the fly, had to revise the story to take place in only one room.  Talk about improv skills. When one of Berg's TV scripts called for a baby elephant and the critter refused to get in an elevator, they had to rebuild the apartment set on the ground floor.

Berg was loved by her audience but some people described her as ruthless.  For example, Himan Brown helped her get in the door at NBC but she canned him after a year in favor of a more experienced actor. Brown, who became a legendary producer of radio drama, never forgave her.  She was also the defendant in the first ever intellectual property case involving radio - which she won.

Glenn D. Smith, in his biography of Berg asks the reasonable question: was she more ruthless than other producer/stars like Bob Hope or Groucho Marx -- or was she just the only one in a dress?

In 1950 Philip Loeb, who played her husband on TV, was accused of being a Communist and blacklisted.  Berg did her best to defend him but The Goldbergs was cancelled.  Four years later Loeb committed suicide.

Berg's career continued in a diminished state.  She appeared in summer stock and on Broadway but, not surprisingly, was only invited to play Jewish women, usually mothers.   She died in 1966.

Oh, remember that cookbook?  That's how I got into this mess.  Because Molly was a great cook a lot of fans had requested her recipes.  The book was published in 1955 and Gertrude Berg was listed as co-author with Myra Waldo.  Waldo did the recipes because Berg was no cook.

And finally there is a sort of mystery in her autobiography which I invite you to solve.  Around 1940 the Berg family moved to Bedford, Connecticut.  She wrote about  a mystery writer who used to visit them there:

According to the writer, nothing in the whole world was right and life seemed to be a losing battle, from childhood on it was a downhill fight that we were all in except himself.  He was above the crowd, a lonely observer, born too soon or too late or something.

The writer was a short man, a little too stout, and every time he "drove by" the house it was in a different car with a different woman.  The cars he borrowed from friends, who, it seemed couldn't say not to him.  The women he borrowed also. They, too, couldn't say no, but they were all of  a pattern.   They were disappointed modern-dancer types who wanted to study with Martha Graham but never quite made the grade.

We are also told that this author didn't like Shakespeare.  "For Othello he gives Shakespeare A for effort."

Eventually a "husband who didn't agree with the writer's views on sharing the wealth (car and wife) manhandled him one night and the writer left New York for the coast."

So there is my final question for you: Who was this mysterious mystery writer? Gertrude Berg, who told so many thousands of stories, does not reveal the end of that one.

Oh, and finally....

 

Quotes and other memories from Malice Domestic

I just returned from this year's Malice Domestic convention, where I had a lovely time celebrating my friends Marcia Talley, Donna Andrews,Gigi Pandian, and Les and Leslie Blatt, who were, respectively, the guest of honor, the lifetime achievement honoree, the toastmaster, and the co-fan guests of honor. (There also were two honorees with whom I have no personal connection. Lucy Worsley was honored as the Poirot Award recipient, and Dorothy Gilman was remembered--Malice's term for honoring a deceased mystery community member.)

While at the convention, I saw many friends, made some new ones, sat on one panel, moderated another, hosted a table at the banquet, won the Agatha Award for best short story of 2024 (for my whodunit "The Postman Always Flirts Twice," from Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy), received some other good news (for myself and for a fellow author), saw a character naming I donated to the charity auction go for $500, and listened to authors speak eloquently--and humorously--on panels. It was a great time, even if I did lose my retainer.

Here are some quotes from the panels. My apologies if I didn't get some of the wording exactly right.

"Motivation for a killer is so important. You have to set it up right away." -- Tina Kashian

Marcia Talley during guest
of honor speech

"Cozies are popular because they make people feel comfortable. Sure, people are killing each other, but they're doing it in a nice way." -- Marcia Talley

In response to a question about the best advice you ever received: "Find your community. As much as writing is a solo effort, you can't get through this alone. You need your people to help you when you get a bad review or a plot hole or ..." -- Sarah E. Burr. (Sarah didn't trail off in that last sentence, but I didn't get the end written down, hence the ellipsis.)

"A hate crime, such as a swastika painted on a synagogue, is dark, but when the whole town comes together to paint over the swastika and support the temple, that is the cozy treatment. That is how to use dark social issues in cozies." -- Kathleen Marple Kalb, who also writes as Nikki Knight

During a discussion about enjoying novels set during World War I and World War II, despite how horrific the wars were, Catriona McPherson made the following analogy: "You can be nostalgic for a time--like the lockdown--without being nostalgic about Covid. It's being nostalgic for the time spent with your family."

"Cozies are for optimistic readers. Bad things happen, but everything is right in the end. Noir is for pessimistic readers because the ending gives them what they expect from the world." -- Paula Munier

If you're interested in learning about Malice Domestic, which brings fans and authors together to celebrate the traditional mystery every April in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, click here. The website has not been updated yet for the 2026 convention, but it should be soon. I hope to see you there next year, when the honorees will be:

Guest of Honor Annette Dashofy

Lifetime Achievement Honoree Jacqueline Winspear

Toastmaster Ellen Byron

Poirot Award Honoree Jim Huang

Malice Remembers Margaret Maron

Fan Guest of Honor Billy Aguiar

Opera Does It With Music

Genre fiction readers know all about plots that are tortuous and bloody. Whole genres, horror and Gothic, are devoted to terrifying the reader. On the more sedate end of the spectrum, probing the minds of serial killers and describing torture with loving precision easily become hot crime fiction trends. Readers don't mind suspending disbelief in order to admire the cannibal Hannibal Lecter who escapes prison hidden in the skin of a flayed victim in Silence of the Lambs (a book I wished I could unread) or love Dexter, the serial killer with a moral compass (first appearing in the 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter), a character any expert forensic psychologist can tell you doesn't exist and never will.

Today, good little mystery writers try hard not to plug too many coincidences into their plots. Some subgenres put limits about how over the top the atrocities will go. The revered authors of classic literature didn't worry about that. Take Sophocles, the greatest of the playwrights of ancient Greece. In Oedipus Rex, the protagonist's parents give their baby up for adoption to avoid a prophecy that he'll kill his father and marry his mother. He meets a stranger at the crossroads, quarrels with him, and kills him. Guess who? He meets a widow twice his age and marries her. Guess who? For over-the-top twistiness and gore, take Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus is the most extreme example. The Roman general Titus captures the Queen of the Goths and her three sons in war and executes one of her sons. In revenge, they rape his daughter. After a lot of reciprocal accusations of murder, killing of sons, and cutting off of hands and heads, Titus bakes the remains of the Queen's sons in a pie and serves it to her at a feast.

The plots of soap opera on modern TV are so labyrinthine and unlikely that the term itself is used to describe any sequence of events that is so excessively dramatic and complex that it beggars belief. It has become so natural to think of any melodramatic story, real or imagined, as "soap opera" that my adorable husband used the term when I read him the synopsis of Il Trovatore, the opera I was about to see at the Metropolitan Opera. I live only twenty blocks from Lincoln Center and was able to accept the last-minute invitation to the Met by a friend with front row orchestra seats whose husband couldn't make it. Giuseppe Verdi's music makes Il Trovatore one of the gems of grand opera. The story, on the other hand, epitomizes the reason soap opera was named for opera, not the other way around: a theatrical presentation with a story as ridiculous as any opera's, with the added benefit of advertising soap.

Il Trovatore, the Troubador, is the leader of the rebel forces in a 15th-century Spanish civil war. He and his principal opponent, the Count, are both in love with the same lady. The Count seeks a gypsy woman, called a witch because she looks like "a hag" (ie old and poorly dressed) and can shift shapes (the villagers saw an owl—they're a superstitious lot). Her mother "bewitched" the Count's infant brother, so they burned her at the stake. The daughter got even by throwing the baby into the fire. It turns out that the rebel leader is the son of the gypsy witch (the daughter). Of course, the lady loves him, not the Count. Four acts later, it turns out that the Troubador is actually the Count's baby brother. The gypsy woman threw the wrong baby into the fire. Oops. The lady offers herself to the Count as the price of freeing her lover. He nobly refuses, but it's too late. She's taken a slow-acting poison. The Count finds out the enemy he's imprisoned is his brother. But it's too late. He's already beheaded him. Curtain.

The music is glorious. But don't you love mysteries? We ask the reader to suspend disbelief so little compared to opera. A coincidence here, an act of heroism there. A logical conclusion.

Joe's Jukebox

Fans of contemporary short mystery fiction know that, over the last decade or so, there have been literally dozens of anthologies collecting crime fiction inspired by songs– usually those of a single artist or band, but sometimes a genre or specific era of music. In her column earlier this month, my fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman discussed her contribution to one of the most recent, IN TOO DEEP: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF GENESIS, edited by Adam Meyer (fair disclosure: I also have a story in this book). She shared a piece of valuable advice from another SleuthSayer, John Floyd, on how to write a story inspired by a song: not to get bogged down trying to work in every detail, but to find a piece of it to build on.

These musical anthologies started coming out at roughly the same time that I started publishing stories, and I've written for quite a few of them, so I thought I'd offer some of my own thoughts on the subject, in a scattered kind of way.

By way of credentials, I've written stories, for current or upcoming anthologies, based on songs by (deep breath) Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, The Ramones, Pink Floyd, The Allman Brothers, Waylon Jennings, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Aerosmith, Dexys Midnight Runners, Lyle Lovett, Genesis, Timbuk3, and Elton John– plus, just to round things out, numbers from the musicals Grease, Do I Hear a Waltz?, and Spring Awakening. There's also an orphan to mention here: a story I quite liked based on a Eurythmics song, for a project that ended up being cancelled. I hope that one eventually sees the light of day somewhere.

The first inspired-by-music story I wrote was in response to Sandra Murphy's call for stories for PEACE, LOVE, AND CRIME: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE SIXTIES. Figuring that Sandy would be swamped by stories inspired by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Beach Boys, I used a favorite song by a different artist, one I hoped nobody else would light on: Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman." I guess writers aren't supposed to say things like this, but the resulting story, "Mercy," remains one of my personal favorites. It's a little unusual in that the lyrics do inspire specific scenes, but the record itself is also an object within the story. The central character is a young woman, Lila, whose brother is killed in Vietnam, after which their abusive father destroys his treasured record collection. The 45 of Orbison's song is the only survivor, and the story concerns what Lila is willing to do to preserve it and find her own freedom.

Most of my musical yarns take an approach much closer to what John advised Barb to do: find a few details in the song to hang a story on. Over time I've combined this with another way of thinking about the task at hand; instead of writing a story inspired by the song, I ask myself what series of events might have inspired someone to write the song. I'm not entirely sure why this seems to work for me, but it does.

As Barb noted, there can be special challenges in using a song that already has a fairly coherent narrative plot. Michael Bracken was kind enough to invite me to write the title story for his anthology JANIE'S GOT A GUN: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE MUSIC OF AEROSMITH. That song already has an explicit story embedded within it (and fleshed out in the music video, which helped to make the song a monster hit) about a girl who shoots her abusive father. I didn't want to simply retell the story, but it seemed silly to pretend it wasn't there, so I decided to make my version a kind of sequel, in which we find out what happens afterwards.

On the other end of the spectrum, many of the songs of the Grateful Dead are little more than collections of trippy images and seeming free association, allowing plenty of room for play. When I wrote a story inspired by their "The Music Never Stopped," for Josh Pachter's collection FRIEND OF THE DEVIL: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD, I chose five or six of the most vivid lines and tried to weave them (or rather references to them, as, for legal reasons, these stories generally cannot quote lyrics directly) into a story about a couple of drug dealers drawn into an act of violence at, appropriately enough, a concert.

I find writing these musical stories to be enormously fun and satisfying, and I hope I get to do a lot more of them. They offer inspiration, but also constraint: you have to evoke the original song clearly enough to amuse and engage its fans (but without making use of actual lyrics!) and at the same time craft a story strong enough to satisfy readers who might not know the song at all. Some of the best art, I think, resides precisely at this intersection of boundless freedom and rigid guidelines.

It will be interesting to see how long the current fad for these collections will last. It might seem like there have been so many of them that the trend must be nearer its end than its beginning, but on the other hand there is a long list of artists who haven't yet had inspired-by anthologies (note: it's entirely possible that some of the folks I'm about to name have inspired books I'm not aware of; if so, please let me know). Off the top of my head, I'd love to see (and contribute to!) collections based on Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, U2, Madonna, REM, The Rolling Stones, Kinky Friedman, Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls, Aimee Mann, Taylor Swift, or John Prine.

I also can't help but notice that the vast majority of these anthologies (again, at least the ones I'm aware of) focus on white musicians. Maybe the single most glaring omission from the list of honored artists, given the sheer volume of his output and the incredible depth and richness of his lyrics, is Prince. Or how about a collection inspired by the hits of Motown? The blues giants of Chess Records? There are great stories just waiting to be written for "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" or "Mannish Boy."

I also can't be the only one who'd love to see crime writers taking on a comic musician. Bring on DARE TO BE STUPID: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF WEIRD AL! Bring on Spike Jonze and Spinal Tap! Bring on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem! And save me a slot on the table of contents!

Can you picture that?

What acts do you hope to see honored with one of these volumes? And if you've written for some of them, how do you approach the songs?

Killing People is What I Do (well, in my fictional world...) More humour...

 "Why would you ever want to write about murder?" asked the horrified relative, on the launch of my 18th book. "Why not write a nice little romance?"

As I start the round of promotional tours for The Silent Film Star Murders, I quickly add another relative to the hit list for my next novel (you would be shocked how often that happens.)  It occurs to me that there were many reasons to write about murder.

1.  It's the challenge of creating the clever puzzle.  Plotting a mystery is like playing a chess game. You always have to think  several moves ahead. Your reader is begging you to challenge them, and is working to beat you to the end, meaning guess the killer before your detective does.

2.  It's plot driven.  Murder mysteries start with action - a murder.  Yes, characterization is important, and particularly motivation. But murder is by nature an action, and thus something happens in the books you are writing.  And quite often, it happens again and again. 

3.  It's important.  This is murder, after all.  We're not talking about a simple threat or theft. A lot is at stake.  Murder is the final act, the worst that can happen. The end of it all.

4.  It's a place to put your darkest fantasies.  There are a few people I've wanted to off in my life. (Forgive the vernacular - I'm Italian, after all.) They did me wrong. And while I do have a wee reputation for recklessness, I value my freedom more. So what I can't do in reality, I get a kick out of doing in fantasy.

5.  Finally, it's fun.  This is the part I don't say in mixed company (meaning non-writers and relatives.) I can't explain exactly why it's fun - you have to trust me on this part. But plotting to do away with annoying characters in highly original ways...well, I'm smiling just thinking about it.

 Of course, I can understand where some of the relative angst comes from.  In my 4th book, A Purse to Die For, a gathering of relatives for a funeral results in the death of one or two. It was entirely accidental, that use of relatives. Honest.  I wasn't thinking of anyone in particular.

How about you?  Do you find writing about murder fun? (are we allowed to say that?)

The Silent Film Star Murders contains no deaths of relatives! (After all, they weren't born yet in 1928.) 

Now available at all the usual suspects, in all formats!  On Amazon:

 

 

 

2.   

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4. 

The Lawyer Who Saved Lennon

I was such a musical illiterate back in the day that I was routinely mocked in high school when a friend discovered that I could not name the four Beatles. One morning late in 1980, this same classmate spotted me in the halls and held up three fingers. “You only have to remember three now,” he said morbidly.

John Lennon had died the previous night.

Left to my own devices forty-one years later, I probably would not have sought out a nonfiction book entitled Lennon, the Mobster & the Lawyer (Devault-Graves Books, 2021) if I hadn’t met the author at a book event last fall.

It was the same weekend that Hurricane Helene bore down on our region in Appalachia. At the time of the storm, I was at a book event in Charleston when I overheard a gentleman named Jay Bergen tell a group of writers and hosts how he had come late in life to write his one and only John Lennon story, and how, when the book was done and published, he donated five banker boxes of legal documents in his possession to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Because of my hearing issues, my brain sometimes has to replay for me what my ears have heard. Oh shoot, I said to myself later, this guy was John Lennon’s lawyer!

It’s a riveting story whose prelude began in 1970, when Lennon was sued by record producer Morris Levy over alleged similarities between Lennon’s song, “Come Together,” and Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.”

The real-life inspiration for the fictional Hesh Rabkin character on The Sopranos, Levy had a longstanding habit of attaching himself as a songwriter to the copyrights of his performers’ songs, thus ensuring for himself a forever share of their royalties. An associate of the Genovese crime family, he was a violent individual who had once beaten a cop so badly that the officer lost an eye. Levy filed frivolous lawsuits to bully people into paying him cash or to extract otherwise juicy commitments.

Predictably, the two parties settled out of court, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs that Levy owned the rights to on Lennon’s next album. Lennon, by then a solo artist, was such a star that Levy was sure to be adequately compensated by whatever royalties flowed his way.

Except, the production of that next album bogged down. The record, which Lennon intended to be a collection of oldies that he’d long admired, became a “problem” project. For one thing, its producer, the legendary Phil Spector, flaked and absconded with the master tapes. Lennon moved on to another album, Walls and Bridges, which became his fourth solo release when it arrived in stores September 1974. Assuming Lennon had reneged on their agreement, Levy threatened to sue. Lennon mollified the manipulative hothead by informing him that twenty-eight boxes of the oldies tapes had been finally recovered. Listening to them again, Lennon felt some of the songs were salvageable but a lot would need to be re-recorded. He assured Levy that the oldies album would be released…soon.

Levy grew increasingly impatient for his expected payday. Since the two men lived in New York City, Levy kept insinuating himself into Lennon’s life, badgering him to visit Levy’s nightclub, inviting Lennon to Disney World in Florida so their families could hang out, and to his horse farm in upstate New York, where Lennon and his fellow musicians rehearsed.

Every time they met, Levy tried to persuade Lennon to let him release the album. Lennon always brushed him off. Lennon had an exclusive deal with EMI stretching back to his days with the Beatles. The firm alone decided how his music was marketed. Levy knew this, but was ever the noodge.

Lennon did not regard Levy as a friend, but he found it hard to say no. So when Levy asked if he could hear some of the recordings Lennon had made of “his” songs, Lennon sent over a rough cut, reel-to-reel tape of the entire album—sixteen songs in all—hoping to get Levy off his back.

With the tape in hand, Levy must have realized that every creative person he’d ever bilked was small potatoes compared to Lennon and the artistic firmament he had at his disposal. “I’m gonna put it out!” Levy shouted in his office in front of witnesses. “I’ve got a shot! I’ve got a shot!”

In 1975, Levy announced to the world that his (s)crappy record company would release Lennon’s new album, which Levy called Roots and which he planned to market via cheesy television ads. Of course Capitol Records/EMI filed an injunction. In a pair of lawsuits, Levy sued Lennon, EMI, and Capitol Records, claiming Lennon had breached a verbal agreement permitting Levy to release the album. He claimed damages of $42 million, a laughable figure designed to rattle his opponents and force them to capitulate to a high-dollar settlement.

Enter Mr. Bergen, whose job it is to save John Lennon’s musical reputation, stop the bootleg album in its tracks, and keep John from having to pay millions to settle.

When he enters the story, Mr. Bergen is a young but seasoned litigator. The lawyer and the musician are both in their thirties and conflicted fathers who long to make amends with the children from their previous marriages.

Consisting as it does of court transcripts, legal maneuvers, and scenes of the two men roaming Manhattan in between depositions and court appearances, the book shouldn’t work but does. As they walk the streets, visit New York landmarks Lennon has never visited, eat lunch in dives and legendary restaurants alike, they form an unlikely but charming bond. Lennon comes to life as a decent fellow who always has time to sign autographs for fans as long as they agree not to bug him when he’s eating or tail him everywhere he goes.

Summoned to Lennon’s Dakota apartment on the West Side, Mr. Bergen is grilled by Yoko Ono, who, while noshing on caviar, stresses that they must keep the settlement figure down. She and everyone else assumes that Lennon will have to pay; they just want to keep him from paying big. Admittedly, Lennon’s case suffers from some glaring inconsistencies. If Lennon didn’t like and trust Levy, why did he spend so much time with him? Why did he and his musicians rehearse at Levy’s farm? If Lennon didn’t want Levy to release the album, why did he give Levy a tape of the entire record?

Mr. Bergen may well be a suit (that’s him in the dark, pinstriped suit in the 1976 Bob Gruen photo shown on this page) but he’s got the soul of a rock ’n’ roller. The moment he heard the Penguins sing “Earth Angel” on the radio back in high school, he fell in love with the form. When Elvis made a rare east coast appearance in 1957, young Mr. Bergen ordered two mail-order tickets from the venue—only $3.50 each!—but could not find a single college classmate at Fordham who wanted to make the long bus trip to Philly to see the pre-glitter King’s performance in a cavernous but half-populated ice hockey arena. Lennon, who idolized Elvis, demands a beat-by-beat recounting of Jay’s experience, which his lawyer is happy to provide. In short, Jay loves rock ’n’ roll. Chiselers like Levy sicken him. And if he can help it, his client will not pay a freaking dime.

In a scene that made me laugh, Mr. Bergen decides he will fly to Los Angeles and Detroit to interview the session musicians who witnessed Lennon’s interactions with Levy. Seeking to blend in, Mr. Bergen decides to leave his suits at home and dress casually. What sort of attire will put rock musicians at ease? We watch as he hilariously buys his first pair of cowboy boots, western-style shirts with snap buttons, and a crisp pair of black jeans that he washes a few times to break in. (It’s an aesthetic that will become Mr. Bergen’s sartorial preference later in life.)

Author publicity photo by Paul Mehaffey

Mr. Bergen’s key courtroom strategy is to get Lennon to recount exactly how he creates a song, records it, and polishes it before releasing it to the world. On the witness stand, Lennon’s creative process unfolds, and we (and the court) grasp that the rough cut tapes Lennon shared with Levy were never intended to be released. Doing so would have been like us writers allowing a digest magazine to publish the first draft of one of our short stories.

After the Lennon case, Mr. Bergen’s professional and personal life shifted. He built a lucrative practice representing rock stars, baseball teams, and even George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees. In time Mr. Bergen loosened up, let his hair down (literally and figuratively), remarried for a third time, and retired to our mutual corner of the southeast, where neighbors and local writers motivated him get his story down on paper. His book is a fine addition to his Nashville publisher’s long-running Great Music Book series.

In December 1980, like the rest of the world, Mr. Bergen was devastated to learn of the murder of his friend at age 40. These days Jay Bergen tells audiences that he is haunted by the fact that he missed seeing Lennon five days before his passing. John was in the same recording studio where Mr. Bergen was visiting a client, but Yoko was being weird, and Mr. Bergen did not permit himself the liberty to knock on a few of those studio doors to say hello (and goodbye).

Had he lived, Lennon might well have written books or granted interviews that shed even more light on his creative process. But since he was taken from us far too soon, we are lucky to catch a glimpse of that artistry in this story. We are lucky too that Mr. Bergen, now in his eighties, is around to help us imagine it all.

* * *

You can inspect some artifacts in Mr. Bergen’s Lennon archives here.

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

Crime Scene Comix Case 2025-04-031, Drive Thru

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

Cover Up

Here’s an oddment.  Cover Up, released in 1949.  William Bendix, Dennis O’Keefe, Barbara Britton, Art Baker.  Directed by Alfred E. Green, whose career goes back to the silents; first picture of note is the pre-Code Stanwyck, Baby Face; did biopics of Jolson, Jackie Robinson, and Eddie Cantor.  Original screen story by O’Keefe, under a pseudonym.  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo, who also shot D.O.A., Stalag 17, and Kiss Me Deadly, before going on to Judgment at Nuremberg, and an Oscar for Ship of Fools.  The razor-sharp black-and-white in Cover Up is the best thing about it.  The picture is less than the sum of its parts – not incoherent, but lukewarm – and you can wonder why I was curious about it in the first place.

For openers, Bendix.  He gets top billing, although he plays second banana to O’Keefe.  Bendix did a lot of lovable saps, the best-known being The Life of Riley, but he did solid work for Hitchcock, in Lifeboat, with Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, and as Babe Ruth.  You could do worse, though, than to check him out in The Dark Corner, a nifty little noir where he plays very much against type.  Dark Corner has two serious weaknesses, Clifton Webb doing the same character he did in Laura, a year or so before, and Mark Stevens, who’s a Godawful stiff, as the hero.  It has two serious strengths, Lucille Ball, as the private eye’s Girl Friday, who gets him out of the frame, and Bendix, who has the part that used to go to Raymond Burr, before Perry Mason.  Bendix plays the muscle with alarming menace, thick-tongued, and his eyelids shuttered.  His body English is top-heavy, but he has a predator’s grace.  He’s sly, like many stupid people, and gets what he deserves, in the end, spoiler alert. 

Secondly, we’ve got Dennis O’Keefe.  You either know or you don’t.  O’Keefe did a lot of amiable and undemanding B’s, but in 1947 and ‘48 he made two pictures back-to-back with Anthony Mann, T-Men and Raw Deal.  Raw Deal is probably the best part O’Keefe ever got, and it features Claire Trevor, along with both John Ireland and Raymond Burr as the bad guys.  T-Men, though, is the one that really holds your attention.  Undercover cops, infiltrating the mob.  Alfred Ryder, almost invariably a yellowbelly and a slime, in over a hundred features and TV episodes, here gets to play the stand-up guy, who goes down without ratting out his partner to the mob torpedoes.  Charles McGraw, who once in a blue moon got to crack a smile or even be the hero (in Narrow Margin), is the torpedo in this picture, and one of the chilliest psychopaths in the Anthony Mann stable, which is going some.  O’Keefe, at the end, coming after McGraw, is past the point of no return, and clearly off the leash.  He heaves himself up the gangplank, in a fury, and you can feel his physical force.  It isn’t a shock cut, or a sudden scare, or some camera trick.  The camera’s steady.  He’s coming at you, and you shrink back.  His forward movement is that implacable.  You can’t help it.  Raw Deal and T-Men were both shot by the great cinematographer John Alton.

So, what is it with Cover Up?  It just doesn’t have any tension.  You keep wanting it to go somewhere, like it’s the Little Picture That Could, and the air keeps going out of its tires.  O’Keefe comes to town, he’s an insurance investigator, he’s going to file a report on a suicide.  He meets cute with Barbara Britton.  They’re a little old for their characters, but believable, and kinda sweet.  He checks in with the local sheriff, Bendix, and begins to smell a rat.  The guy shot himself, but the gun’s gone missing.  Bendix affects unconcern.  O’Keefe pokes around.  The town clams up.  It doesn’t take long for O’Keefe to figure out it’s murder, staged as a suicide.  Bendix, no fool he, already knows.  The question is, why is Bendix covering it up, or is he in fact the killer?  But mostly, O’Keefe is sticking around because he’s moony over Barbara.  Her dad, the local banker, turns out to be a suspect.  O’Keefe, however, is half-hearted about all this.  Oh, and it’s Christmas.  You can tell because they keep playing the opening bars of carols on the soundtrack.  Then, the only real suspect, the saintly retired doctor you never actually get to see, dies off-screen of a convenient heart attack.  The best moment in the movie, coming up.  Barbara finds the missing gun, at her dad’s, and goes to plant it, at the doctor’s.  O’Keefe shows up.  She hides.  He finds the gun.  Over his shoulder, you can see her reflection in a framed picture on the wall.  He sits at the dead doctor’s desk, and you realize at the same time he does, that the dead doc was left-handed.  Of course, so was the murderer.

Yadda-yadda-yadda. It isn’t Bendix, and it isn’t the dad.  O’Keefe and Barb realize the only obstacles to their happiness are their own cold feet, the stage door closes as Dancer and Prancer lift off.  Inoffensive.  It’s a pretty poem, but you can’t call it Homer.  In other words, it’s not noir enough.  O’Keefe pretends to be hard-boiled, but come on, he’s soft on the girl.  Bendix tries on some ambiguity, but too much Dutch uncle, not enough sinister.  The dad, with his rosy cheeks and white hair, is he cooking the books at the bank?  Not.  You want the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden.  I expected a little less sugar, and a little more bite.  The snake never shows up.

Author, Author

 I'm making a nontraditional distinction between "writer" and "author."

When I last blogged three weeks ago, I celebrated the release of my debut novel, The Devil’s Kitchen. Since then, I've been writing very little. Instead, I've been busily forcing myself on audiences to talk about the book. It's been exhilarating. The process has left me thinking about the terms “writer” and “author.”

While acknowledging that the words are often treated as synonyms, dictionaries and the web distinguish the two. The line they draw gets squiggly. Most sources suggest that the key distinction lies with publication. All authors are writers, but only those writers who put their work into the public realm are authors. Using this definition, we might quarrel about the meaning of publication. 

Other definitions reserve the title of author exclusively for those who have published books. Sorry, short story crafters, a writer is all we can ever be.

A different definition focused on intention. It's an internal/external distinction. Writers are scribes who create content for others. Journalists and ghostwriters are perhaps the foremost examples. Authors, on the other hand, are internally driven. They create for themselves and the satisfaction they derive from the creative process. This one seemed a tad pompous. 

I'm sidestepping the debate. The last few weeks have left me thinking about another way to define the words. It’s a solo/social distinction.

As a writer, I sit alone at my keyboard. Sometimes, the dogs join me, but that's about it. I type. I edit. Occasionally, I talk to myself. "Writer" emphasizes the introverted side of my soul. The craft is a solitary activity. Remembering an admonition from Joyce Carol Oates that “constant interruptions are the destruction of imagination,” I block off time when I won’t be disturbed.

“Author,” conversely, is the public face of my writing. It’s me talking about my work in the hope that someone will give The Devil’s Kitchen a try. It's me, standing in a bookstore, giving a public reading, or sitting alongside mystery lovers at a book club talking about the characters’ paths. It's me attending conferences and signing books.

"Author" is my narrow, extroverted, social side. He is the promotional arm of book writing.

Just as there are guides for writers that propose effective ways to develop plot twists or characters, there are also a variety of resources offering advice on how to  inhabit the "author" persona. As a novice, I delved into a few of them and learned everything I needed to know.

The pen—The expert community strongly recommended gel ink as the best pen for book signing events. Rubber grips, with their ergonomic benefits, also received high marks.

The autograph—I found a surprising amount of advice about changing my signature for book signings. I was told that I needed enough swoosh to project style. I should strive for heightened legibility, yet with an economy of motion allowing for speed in a signing line. The blogosphere recommended practicing my signature. Too late, I’m afraid. I’ve been signing too much for too long. My default signature emerges unless I go slow and concentrate hard on my swooshy author script.

The reading—Here, things got controversial. Some sources recommended tabbing my book and reading directly from it. This approach flashes the cover to the audience and helps market. Other experts suggested printing the pages so an author can enlarge the font for easy reading. Printed pages in sleeves mean that the reader will not have to battle with a book's bound spine in a public forum. The debate raged.

Everyone agreed that authors practice their corporate reading and hone their style. Don't read as one normally would. Focus on enunciation and clarity over theatrics. Find your Goldilocks moment, the advice guides suggest—neither too long nor too short. Choose an excerpt with a stand-alone value that emotionally engages and reveals the essence of what the book is about. That asks a lot from a few short paragraphs.

The presence—Almost all the guides recommend that the author do something to ensure that the audience remembers the writer. Several suggested that authors consider coming in costume. I don’t have a National Park Service uniform, so I can’t dress like the main characters in my book. I still have my Boy Scout uniform in the back of the closet. The shirt is festooned with a variety of patches. Maybe that would work. I can promise that if I show up in my BSA shorts and neckerchief, I'd  give bookstore patrons something to talk about on the drive home. 

The recap: The guides I reviewed suggested that I change my pen, signature, voice, reading style, and clothes. Most, however, concluded by reminding me to be authentic.

I’m seizing on the last bit of advice. I’ll be attending Malice Domestic at the end of the week. I won’t be in costume. My signature will be the typical scrawl, and I will likely sound like I always have.

But I will remember to bring a gel ink pen. It proves I've learned something.

BSP: April has been a good month. In addition to the novel’s publication, the anthology Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun with my story "A Placid Purloin" was released on April 14^th. Trouble in Texas, an anthology from Sisters in Crime North Dallas, dropped on April 15th. It includes my story, “Doggone.” Michael Bracken edited both anthologies. He blogged about them last week. 

Until next time.

”Parents in Tech Want Their Kids to Go Into the Arts Instead.” — Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2025.

             The sub-head was:   “Hands-on jobs that demand creativity are seen as less vulnerable to artificial intelligence.” 

Before all us underpaid artists and writers start letting the Schadenfreude sneak in, our chosen path is still a chancy way to make a living, and always will be.  That is, if you put all your financial eggs in one basket.  I’ve always believed that picking between science and the arts, or business and the arts, is a false choice. 

There’s no law that says you can’t do it all.  I have friends from college who went all in on careers in music, or photography, or theatre, or dance.  Some of them made it, and though now elder statespeople in their fields, many of their names, and certainly their achievements, are recognizable.  You haven’t heard about the ones who failed, now dead, embittered, or wistfully resigned. 

 I’m sorry for them, but I have little sympathy for those who regarded their art as a higher calling, superior to anything one might do to just make a little money.  This is nonsense.  I believe that all honest work is equally honorable.  My son is a working artist who also helps run a sawmill.  He paints and pays his bills.  The art might be more enriching, but he loves wood and delights in the associations he’s developed inside the woodworking community.  He also knows how to run giant mill saws, shop tools, laser cutters. CAD/CAM and C&C machines, computers in the service of art and commerce. 

You want to give your grandkids good advice?  Just say “Man-machine interface.”

I’ve been entangled in the building trades my whole life, mostly as a designer and cabinetmaker, and you won’t find a more intelligent and engaging bunch of people in any profession.  None of them ever thought I shouldn’t be writing books.  One of them is in a band with a standing gig at a local bar.  Another is a carpenter and phi beta kappa graduate in English literature.  Do not challenge him on how to cope inside crown moldings or the rankings of the best books of 2024.

I have another carpenter friend who’s also sort of a career criminal who loves my books and shares them with his fellow inmates.  He wrote me once to say he’d convinced the prison librarian to stock my whole list. 

This might be the definition of a captive audience. 

       The standard advice by the self-important is to follow your passion.  Well, I’ve aways had a passion for regular meals, a decent place to live and a serviceable car.  You can achieve all this and still have plenty of time left to write novels, paint landscapes, play funky bass or imitate Sir Laurence Olivier at your community theater.  Or all the above.  (You could also watch a lot of sports and work on your handicap, but these are different ambitions not addressed in this essay.)

Since this is a project in alienating as many people as possible, I also have little sympathy for those who talk about writing a book, or learning guitar, or playing Lady Macbeth, but never get around to actually doing any of it, blaming their demanding job/kids/wife/husband/Pilates class.  The same rules of time apply.  There’s plenty of it in a day, or weekend, to pack a lot in if you really want to do it.  I suspect that many of these people have learned that it’s really hard to be good at anything in the arts.  That it takes tremendous discipline, hard work and sacrifice.  So it’s a lot easier to talk about than actually do.

            I might have had a bigger literary career if all I’d done was write books.  I’ll never know, and I really don‘t care.  Instead, I got to do an awful lot of interesting things, meet a wildly diverse array of people, master several different commercial and manual skills (like playing the funky bass), and pay all my bills.

Mostly on time. 

 

 

Wabbit Time

The celebrated actor with the most unusual command of the English language never stepped into the Globe Theatre or on any other London stage, nor Broadway for that matter. His enunciation of Shakespeare brought down the house. Consider these famous lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

“A wose by any other name…”

and

“Woemeo, Woemeo, wherefwore art thou?”

Yes, this is the megastar who uttered arguably the cleverest, wittiest, most famous applause-winning line in any theatre:

“My twusty wifle 
  is a twifle wusty.”

You nailed it, we’re talking Elmer Fudd, the thespian who put the ‘warning’ in Warner Bros.

A Fudd by Any Other Name

Unbeknownst to many fans, shotgun-toting big ‘El’ had his name appropriated by outside forces. Nay, not those words of conspiracy theorists: FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) or its variant, FUDD (fear, uncertainty, disinformation, doubt).

Instead, dictionaries define fudd as an old-fashioned person. More narrowly, NRA fans derisively refer to non-militant gun owners who use rifles made of wood and steel exclusively for hunting rather than weapons of war fabricated from carbon fiber, and esoteric ceramics and polymers.

Generally, fudds of this sense don’t see the necessity of tactical weaponry. They are thought to side with more restrictive pre-Clarence Thomas interpretations of the Second Amendment. Personally, I thought they missed a bet by not using fuddite. Luddite… Fuddite… Never mind.

The above are North American denotations. Among British definitions of fud is a Collins entry of Scottish root meaning tail of a rabbit or hare. Which brings us to today’s terrible Easter crime. No, not the terrifying Skeezicks or Pipsisewah weirdly nibbling the souse off Uncle Wiggily’s ears, but handling an over-population of Beatrix Potter bunnies.

Oops. Sowwy

One childhood Easter my young brothers, friends, and I thought abusing the Peter Rabbit song would be hilarious. I’m not sure if the real crime was the homicide of Peter or that we drove parents nuts singing it to the saturation point. So on behalf of disturbed third graders everywhere…

Here comes Peter Cottontail Hopping down the bunny trail. ★BANG!★ Thud. Thud.

{sigh} Children can be horrible little delinquents. And along with millions of children everywhere, we bit the ears off chocolate bunnies! (although I preferred giant coconut eggs.)