Is It Noir? Native Son by Richard Wright

Recently, I listened to Richard Wright's Native Son on audio. There were a number of reasons, not the least of which being it's on a list of banned books I made two years ago. I did read up on the book ahead of time because it could easily have ended up on a list of classics.

The book, published in 1940, is a treatise on racism at the tail-end of the Depression. Little mention is made of the coming war. Instead, it depicts public relief as a trap as many of its recipients are not permitted to climb out of poverty. They're broke and less-than-citizens, and forever they will stay that way.

That's where Bigger Thomas finds himself. Living in a single room with his mother, brother, and sister, Bigger is idle but restless. He and some friends plot a robbery of a deli which falls apart when one of them provokes Bigger into a fight. Instead, he relents to his mother's pressure and takes a job chauffeuring for the Dalton family. On his first night, he is to take their daughter Mary to a lecture at the university. She has other plans, mainly meeting up with her boyfriend and going to see how those people live. Meaning Black people. Mary and her boyfriend are communists. They know Black people are being kept down and want to help. But Mary, the daughter of rich white parents, is absolutely clueless. They go back to Bigger's neighborhood and insist he dine with them at a diner where everyone knows him. They think they're doing him a favor, but Bigger is humiliated. 

The real trouble begins when Bigger brings Mary home. She's so drunk she can't walk, and Bigger accidentally kills her. Now we get into noir territory. Bigger covers up by burning Mary's body in the family's enormous coal furnace and taking her luggage to the train station as she was leaving on a trip the next morning. When the luggage is returned, and people in Detroit call asking where she is, Bigger convinces his girlfriend to help him fake a kidnapping. But she panics, and he kills her, too. He's found out when one of the reporters crowding the Dalton home helps change the ashes in the furnace, and Mary's charred bones fall out.

Once Bigger is arrested and in the system, Wright seamlessly moves to making his case about systemic racism, how uncomfortable whites of the day are in acknowledging it, and how monumentally stupid the Red Scare is. But in prison, from the most evil people (Think Germany in the late 1920s) to most noble (Henry David Thoreau in jail for not paying his taxes in protest) have a lot of time to write out their grievances. Bigger doesn't write them, but he talks them through with his lawyer, who in turn interprets them for the court, sparing no one. 

But is it noir?

Richard Wright said it was. In fact, he saw that as the best way to get his point across, something more than one crime writer has stated once their books have gotten meatier. Wright's work usually centers on the Black experience in the mid-twentieth century and life in Chicago of the Depression. But he also said this book was "fun" to write. He's clearly a fan of writers like James M. Cain, who delighted in how badly he cold screw over an everyman protagonist. And Wright is definitely taking sadistic glee in throwing every available roadblock in Bigger's way. Plus, at a lecture, Wright said he liked the motif of a modern (for 1940) crime novel. This from a writer who produced mostly short stories and essays. So, like Shakespeare's bewildering attempt at a blockbuster, Titus Andronicus (or... What Happens When George RR Martin actually finishes Game of Thrones), Wright is stretching himself. Naturally, some of his contemporaries, most notably James Baldwin of Go Tell It on the Mountain fame, didn't like it. Baldwin called it a protest novel, which it very much is. But so is Ellison's Invisible Man. Scratch the surface, and Baldwin likely didn't like that kind of work being done as what he considered a dime novel. 

One can imagine the reactions of various readers to Native Son. Love it or hate it, you can't deny it stays with you. And it is noir as hell.

Next column, I revisit The Merchant of Venice, in which the movie version has Al Pacino stealing every scene he's in.

Morpheus is Overrated

March 9^th is my grandmother‘s birthday. It is also my sister-in-law‘s birthday.

And now, and forever more, for me, it will also be the day I got sick.

As I mentioned the last time I posted (and it’s been a few weeks), I wound up in the hospital for nearly a month. Long story short, I had an infection (as I mentioned before, it was cellulitis in my right leg below the knee), and it got into my bloodstream and then my kidneys shut down.

The pain in my leg was unlike anything I had ever felt before, and something I hope never to feel again. And as I mentioned previously, my saviors at the hospital treated my pain by doping me to the gills. Mostly with oxycodone.

Oxy. The stuff of dreams. And not just during my sleep-which is saying something, because those first couple of weeks I slept about eighteen to twenty hours a day-thanks to all of the oxy I was getting pumped into my veins, I experienced all manner of waking dreams, as well.

During this time I couldn’t help but recall the descriptions of drug-induced “trips” in all manner of literature, from classic to crime, and the analytical, always there author in me began to compare notes between what I was experiencing and what I had read.

I gotta say, if my oxy-fueled hallucinations are any indication, I must possess the id of an accountant. My hallucinations were, well, you be the judge:

1. I saw flaming writing scrolling across the ceiling tiles in my hospital room. If you’ve ever seen that scene in Cecil B. deMille’s The Ten Commandments where God carves out his commandments for Moses using heavenly fire, it sort of looked like that.

But the writing was too small for me to read. So, kinda lame.

2. Across from my bed was a wash basin with a mirror above it. Looking into it from my bed gave me an excellent view the drawn blinds on the window over my head. Oxy made this reflected set of blinds seem like the kind of big rolling door you see on loading docks. And my could even make out the blonde guy standing right to the side of the “door” and working the controls that caused it to rise and fall.

3. There were a number of nights where it seemed to me that my hospital room had morphed into the back room at a tattoo parlor, and the nurses and support staff were all tattooists who came in to check on me every half-hour or so.

Oh, and of course the mirror showed me the guy across the street, running that loading dock door up and down then, too.

So my oxy dreams were just kind of…weird and pointless.

And as soon as I could stop taking the oxy, I did.

And I don’t regret it. I don’t miss it, or the banal, beige dreams it brought me, waking or sleeping.

And I’m positive this experience will influence my fiction, going forward.

But I’ll be damned if I know how!

And that’s it for me this time! See you in two weeks!

Speak Nothing but Good of the Dead

 

I don't like to write bad reviews.  They serve a purpose  but somebody else can do that work, thank you very much.  There is a reason that every week I review the best short story I read.  What would be the point of attacking a story which will probably be gone from memory in a month or two?

I bring this up because of a novel I read recently.  It is actually a good book and I will probably say some nice things about it at a later day.

But, boy, is the text a mess.  I am talking about the Olympic prize for typos.  

A friend had warned me in advance so I actually started counting them from the beginning.  I counted 114 errors in 296 pages.  That's a typo every 2.6 pages.  And I was being conservative.  For example, when two characters spoke in the same paragraph ("Hello," Larry said. "Hi," Barry said.") I didn't count it.  

But what kind of goofs were there? Well, there were the typical homonyms that Spellcheck can't catch (you/you're, vile/vial, etc.) Once or twice a character changed their name and then changed back.  But what really freaked me out was a brand new type of typo, one that was clearly connected to a glitch in some automated system.  Look at the box to see an example I made up.

See what happened?  What I assume was an editing program occasionally and randomly decided that a capitalized word in the middle of a sentence indicated a new paragraph.  Rather disturbing.

Now, I am happy to say that the author of the novel got the rights back and has found  a different  publisher.  I trust the new edition will be a lot cleaner.  

I am not going to name the author or the book but I did intend to mention the publisher. I see no need to protect them.  But as it turns out they went out of business last year, so we go back to the title of this piece.

So let me wish you all typo-free reading and publication.

  

Murder, Neat is on a Roll!

In February of 2024, I had the good fortune of having my turn to post here on SleuthSayers fall on the very day that our first anthology, Murder, Neat, was released. The book has twenty-four short stories, all written by members of this blog. Michael Bracken and I edited it, stepping in after our original editor and fellow SleuthSayer, the late Paul D. Marks, fell ill.

Every anthology editor has high hopes their baby will be well received and that the individual stories in it will be beloved. (The authors with stories in the book hope that too, of course.) So you can imagine the smiles we all shared when Murder, Neat was named one of the six finalists a few months ago for the inaugural Derringer Award for Best Anthology. Those smiles turned to grins on May 1 when we won the Derringer, especially because the competition was stiff. (Hats off to the editors and authors of the other five anthologies. You can find a list of the finalists here.) 

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Murder, Neat was named a finalist for this year's Anthony Award in the Best Anthology category. Talk about icing on a delicious cake. So this is a good time to remind you about the anthology and, if you haven't read it, entice you to do so. (I also hope you will check out the four other anthologies nominated for the Anthony Award. Bouchercon attendees, please read before you vote. You can find the names of the nominated anthologies, as well as the finalists in all the other categories, here. One of those other anthologies was edited by Michael Bracken (him again!), working with fellow SleuthSayer Stacy Woodson.)

Back to Murder, Neat. Every story takes the reader to a location where drinking happens. Bars--be they regular, college, dive, or gastropub--make an appearance, of course, as do restaurants and even a winery. What also happens in those locations? Crime, of course!

When the book came out, Art Taylor, a retired fellow SleuthSayer with a story in the book, hosted four other of our bloggers on his personal blog, The First Two Pages. There they each wrote about--no surprise here--the first two pages of their stories. I invite you to click here to read the first of those essays, by Melodie Campbell. Near the bottom of that screen, you will be able to click to read the next essay by one of the Murder, Neat bloggers, Lawrence Maddox, followed by one by David Edgerley Gates, and finally, one by Leigh Lundin.

If you haven't yet read Murder, Neat, you can purchase it in trade paperback and ebook. We all hope you enjoy it. Cheers!

Finally, before I go, a little more news: I'm honored to have been named a finalist for this year's Anthony Award for Best Short Story for my tale "A Matter of Trust," which appeared in the anthology Three Strikes--You're Dead! The other nominated authors are James D.F. Hannah, Curtis Ippolito, Gabriel Valjan, and Kristopher Zgorski. I hope you will take the time to read all of their nominated stories. You can find the names of those stories by clicking on the link in the third paragraph of this blog. And you can read my story here.

Quis custodiet ipsos custode?

             I like democracy.  Churchill famously noted that it’s the worst form of government other than all the other forms that have been tried.  Yet there’s no better way to decide who should be in charge, since people are constantly trying to undertake that responsibility all on their own.  Everywhere you look, there’s some new effort by individuals and their affiliates to impose their ideas and prescriptions for behavior on everyone else. 

            Plato, who admittedly had some pretty interesting concepts, thought philosophers were the ideal rulers, since they knew a lot, which he believed meant they possessed greater honor and virtue.  Okay Plato, you might be right about the first part, but not so fast on the second.  While I had some excellent philosophy professors, nothing distinguished them as particularly virtuous.  I mostly recall bad haircuts and idiosyncratic choices in clothing.  Moreover, they hardly ever agreed on anything, and could easily come to blows over the relative merits of Apollonian vs. Dionysian principles.  Partisan battles pale in comparison.  

Some believe fervently that the government should stay out of the bedroom, which I think is a fine idea since it’s hard enough to get a good night's sleep without sharing the space with a bicameral legislature.  But there are lots of conflicting opinions about who should be doing what behind closed doors, and so far democracy has done a pretty good job sorting that out. 

          Many, like Jefferson, believe the best government is one that governs the least.  Except for those things they think should be governed.  George W. Bush told us he was “The Decider”, a chilling thought.  Much better to throw it open to everyone for a vote.

Since this forum’s pre-occupation is writing and publishing, it’s important to note that readers are the constituency.  They vote with their eyeballs and wallets.  Naturally, there are plenty of editors and publishing outfits who believe there are books that people ought to be reading, and would love nothing more than to enforce their preferences.  Worse, there are politicians and advocates who are heavily invested in what ought not be published.  They believe they are doing this to guard us from harmful subject matter or points of view.  Well then, who is going to guard us from them?

It's only relatively recently that the complicated, frustrating and messy democratic process has delivered us a reading culture that encompasses Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto and Tropic of Cancer.  But it’s no time to be complacent, because that could all disappear if we let it.

If you’ll permit me to paraphrase a line misattributed to Voltaire, I may think your writing stinks, but no one should stop you from writing it.  You might believe this a noble thought, but it’s also the height of practicality.  Censorship, either political or commercial, is the slipperiest of all slippery slopes.  Freedom of expression protects all of us from the biases and preconceptions of some theoretical decider.  To me, this is such self-evident genius, it’s breathtaking that anyone would argue to the contrary.

I know for some it’s a professional responsibility, but I will never give a book a bad review, at least not publicly.  To paraphrase another bit of wisdom, if you can’t say something nice, put a sock in it.  Mind you, I think the world would be a better place if everyone loved my books.  It would certainly be a better place for me and my self-esteem.  But aside from questioning a reviewer’s taste and good sense, a one-star review is the price of doing business.  I just don’t want to do such a thing myself.

       As Churchill said, democracy isn’t perfect.  Mistakes happen.  Hitler, Hugo Chavez and Hamas were democratically elected.  But I agree with William Buckley that “I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”  Or for that matter, The Christian Coalition of America.  I also don’t want them to decide what we should write, read or publish.  Same goes for The Association of Nobel Laureates in Literature (if it existed), or the head of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Libertas perfundet omnia luce.

Pecking Order

In the final hours of preparing today’s article, I discovered my resource material had been removed from the web, having violated ‘Rule 6’, whatever that is. As I was feeding Valentine, my goffin cockatoo, I struggled to come up with a quick replacement.

I recalled a crime from some time ago in Dallas. Normally, I would tell the story myself, but a YouTuber called Mr Ballen has told it in an entertaining way I would find hard to beat. Here is his short presentation:

Pass the Popcorn

I watch a lot of movies. So many, actually, that I often run out of current and recent movies and wind up re-watching those I've seen many times before. At least those are easy to find: I have three dozen boxes, each holding 26 DVDs, scattered around the house, plus God knows how many more DVDs on and underneath the bookshelves here in my home office. It's enough to make my wife scream. Thank goodness I'm a great husband in all other respects (he said modestly).

Anyhow, I recently rewatched The Quiet Man, a lighthearted John Wayne/Maureen O'Hara movie set in Ireland, which on the one hand is not my usual kind of movie and on the other hand is one that I always enjoy. And it occurred to me, when it was finished and the credits were rolling, that this well-known and award-winning film was adapted not from a novel but from a short story, first published by Maurice Walsh in The Saturday Evening Post in the early 1930s. Whoodathunkit?

That, of course, got me thinking about other film adaptations from the short stuff. And since I had an upcoming and uncompleted SleuthSayers column that needed to be completed . . .

Here are my highly-biased (and always changing) picks for the ten best movies adapted from short stories:

1. It's a Wonderful Life -- from "The Greatest Gift," Philip Van Doren Stern

2. Rear Window -- "It Had to Be Murder," Cornell Woolrich

3. High Noon -- "The Tin Star," Mark Casper

4. Bad Day at Black Rock -- "Bad Day at Honda," Howard Breslin

5. The Quiet Man -- "The Quiet Man," Maurice Walsh

6. Hondo -- "The Gift of Cochise," Louis L'Amour

7. The Killers -- "The Killers," Ernest Hemingway

8. The Swimmer -- "The Swimmer," John Cheever

9. 3:10 to Yuma -- "Three-Ten to Yuma," Elmore Leonard

10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," F. Scott Fitzgerald  

Five runners-up: The Birds ("The Birds," Daphne du Maurier), Stagecoach ("The Stage to Lordsburg," Ernest Haycox), The Tall T ("The Captives," Elmore Leonard), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ("The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," James Thurber), Million Dollar Baby ("Million $$$ Baby," F.X. Toole)

Continuing with this idea of short fiction to screen, the following are my picks for the ten best movies adapted from novellas:

1. The Shawshank Redemption -- from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King

2. Stand by Me -- The Body, Stephen King

3. The Thing -- Who Goes There?, John W. Campbell, Jr.

4. The Mist -- The Mist, Stephen King

5. Apocalypse Now -- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

6. Silver Bullet -- Cycle of the Werewolf, Stephen King

7. Hearts in Atlantis -- Low Men in Yellow Coats, Stephen King

8. The Old Man and the Sea -- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

9. The Man Who Would Be King -- The Man Who Would Be King, Rudyard Kipling

10. The Snows of Kilimanjaro -- The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway

NOTE: Yes, I like Stephen King.

Five runners-up: A River Runs Through It (A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean), Minority Report (The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick). The Fly (The Fly, David Cronenberg), Breakfast at Tiffany's (Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote), Shop Girl (Shop Girl, Steve Martin)

Breaking news: I was reminded, by SleuthSayer Joseph D'Agnese's column yesterday, of several more good movies that started out short: Arrival, All About Eve, Brokeback Mountain, etc. (Joe, do great minds think alike, or what?)

Okay, which ones, Faithful Readers, did I leave out? Which do you think shouldn't have been included? Have you writers had any of your short stories or novella-length fiction adapted for the movies or TV? (For me, no.) Anything pending or promising? (No.) Any near-misses? (Yes.) Sold any film options? (Yes.) Do you have cinematic hopes for future projects? Who knows, right? 

Who knows, indeed. If you're like me, and none of your fictional creations have made it to the big screen, don't lose hope. Hold steady, stick to the plan, maintain the course. 

Anything's possible . . .

Maybe You Don’t Want Hollywood to Turn Your Book into a Movie

I admit it: it’s a clickbaity title but work with me here. This week the issue of book-to-film rights popped up on the boards of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and it nudged me to think about the specifics of deals I’ve been privy to.Authors dream of Hollywood deals because we assume they lead to big money. Granted, everyone’s idea of big money differs, but I venture to say that these days those fantasies involve six zeroes.

I have in my possession an interesting document that confirms the fantasy is possible. Don’t ask me how I got the doc, which pertains not to one of my ghostwriting clients’ books, nor my wife’s, and certainly not one of mine. Suffice to say someone just got sloppy.

Let’s preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer, agent, or hotshot writer. But I do think that the publishing and film industries like keeping writers in the dark about how much their work is worth. So if someone was stupid enough to slip me a doc, I figure it’s okay to share, provided I don’t identify the people involved.

The document is a response to a studio option offer for a book written by a young writer who, at the time the 2024 document was written, was already a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author in one genre. This deal was for the person’s debut in another genre, which will be pubbed in 2025. No, I am not acquainted with the writer.

A year ago, the still-to-be-pubbed book must have been considered “hot,” whatever the hell that means these days, because in the push-back document the author’s book-to-film agent believed that they could get $150,000 for a 12-month initial option, with a renewal at the same rate and length. An option is the money a production company or studio pays a writer to have the exclusive rights to a work (for a fixed period of time) while the studio attempts to get the film greenlit. When talking about options, agents focus on several deal points such as:

Initial option: How much the studio or production company will pay the author to exercise their option on the work (story or book), over how much time.

Extension option: How much they will pay to renew this option on the work.

Purchase price: How much they will pay if/when the work is turned into a film or TV show.

Royalty: How they will pay per episode if the work is turned into an episodic TV show.

Backend: How much the author will participate in the gross profits of the resulting filmed project.

These are just the basics. There are a litany of other points, from the onscreen credit the author will receive, the rights the author will reserve to the project, all the way to how much creative control the author will be allowed to have on the final product, not to mention travel perks, etc.

The options I’ve seen for my ghostwriting clients, my author friends, and my wife involve a payment for a term lasting one to two years, usually with a built-in renewal clause with payments at the same rate or slightly higher. It’s safe to say that of all the contracts I’ve been involved with, I’ve never seen figures as high as the ones in this document. And yes, I’m a newb in this world.

Back to the doc in hand. If the opposing side accepted the agent’s counter, the author would earn $300,000 on the option over two years. If the production happened, the author would be paid a purchase price of $1.5 million. Already we’re at $1.8 million. This fits our six-zero dream nicely.

Remember, this is a counter-offer, so in a way it represents the agent’s wish list for the author’s book. I don’t think the agent would have been throwing around such figures if they didn’t think it was feasible. The purchase price figure seems designed to arrive at $1 million after the lawyers get involved.

In this particular document, that $1.5 million figure is thrown out as if it covers all types of productions. The memos and contracts I’ve seen tend to break out different purchase prices for, say, cable or network TV productions, major motion pictures, limited series, etc. I assume the agent wanted to send a message to the opposing side that they wouldn’t get the license for this book cheaply.

Not every literary agent has the credentials to sell their clients’ work to Hollywood. So they partner up with a book-to-film agent, who has the track record and contacts. The book-to-film agents I’ve met appear to practice the Spaghetti + Wall method of promotion. They email a glowing pitch letter with attached manuscripts or book proposals to studio heads and production companies they think might be interested, then sit back and wait.

They don’t pick up a phone to verbally pitch a damn thing—i.e., “work”—unless something in the news has suddenly made a project “hot.” (Yes, there’s that stupid word again.) Like literary agents, book-to-film agents don’t have to sell your book to make a living. They just have to sell a book. But if a name director, producer, or actor has read or heard about a book or story, then the agents can sit back, field offers, and play each bidder against the other.

Side note: My favorite movie scene of a talent agent defending his existence…

There’s always stupid additional money and perks involved in the deals these agents lock down for authors. If the book I’m discussing gets turned into a TV series, the author would theoretically be paid $7,500 per episode as a royalty, $25,000 per episode as befits the author’s proposed non-writing executive producer (NWEP) credit. (This is why everyone wants to be an executive producer.) The author will also earn a percentage of the modified adjusted gross receipts (MAGR), which is the “backend” in the laundry list above. What’s more, this particular author will be allowed to offer “meaningful consultation on all creative decisions” and be able to participate in the writers’ room if the work is turned into a TV show.

If the author must travel 60 miles from home to indulge in these bouts of creativity, the production must provide travel, accommodations, and a per diem to cover the writer’s expenses. If the film or show is nominated for awards, our author is guaranteed an invite to the award presentation, with a similar travel package and budget.

As written, every thing on this sheet of paper is a sweet deal, and I hope the writer got what the agent proposed, or close to it.

We have not discussed the impact this production will likely have on the author’s book, which, let’s remember, has not been published yet but will soon. With the kind of exposure a TV show or film is likely to generate, the book will no doubt sell phenomenally well, which is every writer’s dream.

That is the whole point of a print project going Hollywood. Movies and TV shows raise the visibility of books and authors, and have since the first moviegoer walked out of a theater hoping to snag a hard copy of Gone With the Wind. I would not have read Wicked without hearing about and later seeing the Broadway play. I’m a Baum fan from childhood, which is why I won’t be seeing the movie. Two versions of that story was enough.

So yeah—a Hollywood deal is sweet, which is why everyone wants one. It’s wonderful to have a piece of paper detailing such a juicy option in your hands—or even a complete stranger’s—except that none of it may ever come true.

Most books are never optioned by Hollywood. And the ones that are are rarely made. Notice how many times I have used the word if in discussing everything up to now. As you may have surmised from my headline, I am here to argue that sometimes it’s perfectly okay if an optioned piece of writing never gets made into a movie.

My premise is based on the experience of a friend who started in journalism and later switched to writing narrative nonfiction books. (That’s code for history that doesn’t suck.) All but one of his titles have been New York Times bestsellers. None have been made into movies. His big breakout book sold modestly in hardcover but hit its stride in paperback, when—goes the publishing biz theory—it was eagerly gobbled up by book clubbers who wanted to read a real-life story that “read like a novel.”

Decades later, his breakout book still hasn’t been made into a movie, despite being optioned way back in the early 2000s, and having a revolving door’s worth of name actors, directors, and producers attached to it over the ensuing years.

Said friend is not weeping over this state of affairs. At the time we first met him, he estimated that he had earned $100,000 from a decade’s worth of option money. That figure is now probably $200,000. The studio he signed with just kept extending the option. Again and again and again.

The writers I know who have accepted modest options on their books typically pocketed $5,000 every six months for terms that lasted 12, 18, or 24 months. Yes, that’s a small dollar figure—only three zeroes—compared to the sweet numbers and perks I detailed above, but it’s real money. The rest is so hypothetical you cannot bank on it. When you sign that contract, the option money is the only thing that’s real. Just like advance money is the only cash you’re guaranteed to receive when you sign a book contract. Royalties, if they happen, are gravy.

The most money any one of my short stories has earned—with reprints—in its lifetime is $1,220. Who am I to sneeze at a semiannual payment that is 409 percent higher?

I hope you are not reading this thinking, “Oh sure, that’s all well and good for novelists. I’m a short story writer. No one’s ever going to pay me that kind of money.”

Slap yourself upside the head right now. The films All About Eve, It’s a Wonderful Life, Arrival and tons more all started life as short stories. I am not even bothering to Google a list of the bajillion more examples that surely exist. Okay, I lied. And look at me—I keep lying. (However, in the comments, please chime in with the names of other films. I think it will warm all our hearts.) [EDIT: The day after this post appeared, fellow SleuthSayer John M. Floyd posted an entire article on short stories that became movies. See it right here!]

The real issue is learning a) to keep doing good work, and b) to be happy with so-called “small” paydays. Option only a few stories and those four-figure checks can provide an enviable income that will help you create more work. Perhaps a more accurate headline for this article might be “Getting Rich $5,000 at a Time.”

I guess the question is how you trigger that gravy train by getting your work optioned. I have seen numerous articles for writers that touch on this, and I’m sure you have too. Articles that tell you to, say, mail your work to actors and directors whose work you adore. (Don’t. I’ll explain why one of these days.) Other articles tell you to attend “pitchfests” to drum up interest in your work. (I hate talking to people, so don’t look for me at one of those things.)

Two movies I enjoyed got their start as quite obscure books. So far as I can tell, The Descendants hit the bestseller list for the first time after the George Clooney film hit theaters in November 2011. The Prestige, a marvelous science fiction novel by the late Christopher Priest, has won a respectable number of genre awards but I venture to say most of us who’ve read it did so after catching the Nolan Bros. film.

Each of these books were brought to the attention of their directors by book-to-film agents. What pushed those directors to take notice was the endorsement of someone in their circle who had read the books and loved them.

It sounds like something out of the realm of fantasy, doesn’t it? People who read books! In Hollywood! But it happens.

A producer I won’t identify used to keep an apartment in Florida so he could visit his son from a previous marriage. One morning, while riding down in the elevator of this condo building, he spied a poster for a book club meeting where attendees were slated to discuss a nonfiction book published a few years earlier. He wrote down the name of the book, bought it, read it, and later called my wife’s literary agent hoping to work out a deal.

“Wait,” I said the first time I met him. “You really read the book?”

“Cover to cover. Why, you wanna quiz me?”

---

Next time, if I get permission, I will share the details of a book-to-film contract.

See you in three weeks.

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Voices on a Summer Night

While I mostly write short stories, I have written two novels in my youth:  one for Guidepost's "Mystery and the Minister's Wife" series - The Best is Yet to Be - and a classic teenage post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy with what I thought at the time were strong female heroines.  And no, I'm not going to give you a sample of the latter.  (A  collective sigh of relief is heard throughout the land.)  

No, I stick to short stories, partly because I'm more comfortable with the format, because I grew up in a time when people still told stories to each other.  Aloud.  In person.  On a porch.  Or over a summer dinner.  Or over winter cocktails, playing cards, doing a puzzle...  No cell phones, no TV on, maybe a distant radio, just human voices, telling stories that (to child Eve) ranged from boring (how many genealogies do I have to listen to???) to the really, really interesting (especially if I was under the table while the women whispered about things like s-e-x) to the downright scary.  Old monsters die hard.

For example, it was a dark and windy night in summer, and as we did almost every summer, my mother and I were visiting my grandmother in Kentucky.  We were out on the porch, and my mother started telling "The Headless Horseman".  

She was a former teacher and a pretty good storyteller.  She had me huddled up on the porch swing as she built up, slowly, to the peak line:  "AND THERE HE IS!!!!"  And sure enough, there was this guy coming up the porch steps, with his collar pulled up just high enough against the rain that I wasn't entirely sure if there was a head there or not.  Well, I screamed and ran in the house, everyone outside had a heck of a good laugh, and eventually I realized that it was only one of our neighbors.  The story was spread far and wide, to some hilarity, and much shame for me.  But in the end I had the last laugh, because after that, that poor man was always known as "Headless".  Actually, I had the last TWO laughs:  years later I wrote a story sort of based on that, "The Headless Horseman" published in AHMM in 2015. 

The first story I ever published in AHMM (April, 1997) came from those days, too.  "Grown-Ups are All Alike" stemmed from my Kentucky grandmother's next door neighbor's wife.  She was an invalid, and she had her bed in the living room, which I'd never seen before.  We'd visit as a family, of course, but I was also sent over to read to her, though I have no idea why she couldn't read to herself.  (I read my way through many a Reader's Digest that way.)  What I'll never forget is that one year my grandmother talked about her, but she called her a different first name, and that confused me.  

"I thought her name was Sarah."  

"That was his first wife's name," my grandmother explained.  "She died, and he remarried."

"Then why is she still in bed in the living room?"

"Well, she had an accident, and now she's an invalid too.  Some people just don't have any luck but bad luck."

I think we can all see the story potential there.

BTW:  I am the most fortunate person in the world.  "Grown-Ups Are All Alike" was the first mystery story I ever wrote, and I got it published in AHMM!!!!  I still can't believe it.  I really hit the lottery with that one.

There was a difference between my father's relatives and my mother's.  My mother's were all in Kentucky, where the drawl is long and slow and some men sound like they have mush in their mouths.  They take their time, and can keep a story going for many a long hour.  

My father's were all New Yorkers, Greek immigrants, and they talked fast and furiously.  But they were just as good at story telling, and talking around things.  My grandparents lived in a brownstone in Astoria (back when it was an all Greek neighborhood).  When we moved to California, my grandparents sold the brownstone and moved across the street.  Years later, it occurred to me to wonder how in the world my Greek immigrant grandfather got up enough money to buy a brownstone, and asked my father about it.

"Oh, he did a favor for this guy, long time ago, and he gave him a nice little truck route. I've told you about it. We sold pies and stuff to the various bakeries."  

"What kind of favor? Who was the guy?" I asked.

"I don't know what kind of favor, but the guy was some guy named Gambino."  My father gave a mysterious smile, and I will never know if he was joking or not.  

Someday that's going to come up in a story, too...  

***  

Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

As you HOPEFULLY know, SleuthSayers' anthology, "Murder, Neat" has won the Derringer Award for Best Anthology!  And now it's a finalist for the Anthony Awards!

Thanks, Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman for a fantastic job of editing, and thanks to all of us weird and wacky SleuthSayers for writing some really wicked stories!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!  Huzzah!

Night Train to Munich

Carol Reed and David Lean were contemporaries, and hit their stride in the immediate postwar years, when British cinema came roaring back from austerity.  Lean was the more celebrated, later, with Lawrence and Zhivago, but for a time, they were neck and neck.  Lean came out with Brief Encounter in 1945, Great Expectations in 1946, and Oliver Twist in 1948.  Reed released Odd Man Out in ‘47, The Fallen Idol in ‘48, and The Third Man in ‘49.  Reed had directed a dozen pictures before the war, while Lean was still making his bones as an editor.  Reed shot Night Train to Munich in 1939, and it was released in 1940. 

They were uncertain times in Britain, as elsewhere.  The movie covers six months, from March to September, 1939, from the German military occupation of Czechoslovakia, to the Polish invasion and the UK declaring war.  The tensions of the picture hinge on that time-frame. 

Night Train has an unconventional structure.  There’s essentially a prologue, the attempted escape from Prague, the break-out from the prison camp, the brush contact with British naval intelligence.  Rex Harrison doesn’t show up until twenty minutes into the movie.  And the clock runs out on the first act with Paul Henreid standing on the conning tower of the sub.  The second act picks up with Harrison doubling back on the Germans, lasts another twenty minutes, and the third begins with Charters and Caldicott reading Mein Kampf and runs to the end of the picture, a breathtaking forty-five minutes.  You don’t notice, because the hour-and-a-half runtime is so tight. 

The screenplay was by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who wrote The Lady Vanishes, among many others - more on this, below.  According to Gilliat, the source material, a Gordon Wellesley short story, accounted for the first ten minutes of the script, and he and Launder winged the rest.  The inconsistencies and plot holes are paved over with snappy dialogue and terrific pacing.  They never give you pause to reflect. 

Margaret Lockwood made The Lady Vanishes for Hitchcock in 1938, and The Stars Look Down for Carol Reed in 1940, both co-starring Michael Redgrave.  But when Redgrave wasn’t available for Night Train to Munich, they decided on Rex Harrison.  Harrison wasn’t box office; Lockwood was a much bigger name.  But it’s a career-making performance.  Lockwood later told an interviewer, Rex loved getting up in that Nazi military drag, the shiny cavalry boots and the monocle, coming to attention, clicking his heels – and you can see it, his relish in shifting gears, from the clownish and languid Dickie Randall/Gus Bennett to the punctilious and condescending Major Ulrich Herzog, of the Army Corps of Engineers.  He’s barely restrained from licking his lips. 

Paul Henreid is Harrison’s foil, as the SS officer, first an infiltrator in the prison camp, then undercover in Britain, and lastly back in uniform, in Germany.  It was a big part for Henreid (then credited as Paul von Hernried, his billing before he fled Nazi-annexed Austria), although he’d had a substantial supporting role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips the year before.  You might even wonder if Henreid is lined up to be the hero, after he springs Lockwood from a detention camp and smuggles her into England, but not after the spectacular switcheroo in the optometrist’s office.  Henreid’s character is possessive of Lockwood, and he’s a play of light and shadow, his conflicted feelings a flicker behind his eyes.  It gives him greater depth, almost as showy a part as Harrison’s.  His personal suspicions make him second-guess his professional ones.  The final shot of Henreid, left behind to bind his wounds as the cable car reaches safety, is ambiguous, and you’re almost sympathetic with his loss.  He might have given it all up for love. 

And then, Margaret Lockwood.  She was a pretty big draw, beginning in the late 1930’s, but her movie career tanked in the mid-1950’s, which makes no more sense to me than why some people won’t eat potatoes.  Those enormous, luminous eyes, just to begin with.  She got a name playing bad girls in period pictures, some of them re-shot for the American market because too much cleavage showed in Regency costume.  She was twenty-two when she made The Lady Vanishes, and there was talk of teaming her with Michael Redgrave in imitation of William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series.  She has an immediacy that seems unrehearsed, and a liveliness, an appetite.  It feels completely genuine. 

Night Train to Munich is sometimes said to be a sequel to The Lady Vanishes, or a variation, but they bear only a slight family resemblance.  The same scriptwriters, a train trip, and, of course, Charters and Caldicott.  The element of madness, the gaslighting, is missing entirely.  And once past the intro, the crowded mountain inn where Iris and Gilbert meet cute, all the action in The Lady Vanishes takes place on the train, which gives it a cramped, claustrophobic quality, a physical trap, for characters trapped by circumstance.  A very Hitchcock device.  Night Train to Munich has its share of the artificial, but no metaphor so literal.  In the Hitchcock, Charters and Caldicott stand in for the audience, skeptical but willing to suspend belief; in Night Train, their function is less whimsical and more dramatically urgent, although they still get in some stiff upper lip zingers.

CHARTERS    Bought a copy of Mein Kampf.  Occurs to me it might shed a spot of light on all this how d’ye do.  [Pages through book]  Ever read it?

CALDICOTT   Never had the time.

CHARTERS    I understand they give a copy to all the bridal couples over here.

CALDICOTT   I don’t think it’s that sort of book, old man. 

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who played Charters and Caldicott, went on to play them in a couple of more pictures, and on radio (with Gilliat and Launder scripting, again).  They’re pompous, dense, and endearing. 

The Lady Vanishes is a fantastic movie, one of the best early Hitchcocks, and a box of marvels to unwrap.  You can watch it over and over, and still be charmed every time.  Night Train to Munich is overshadowed by the movies Carol Reed directed just after the war, and because it’s seen as derivative of Lady.  I don’t agree, as I’ve tried to make clear.  You can find it on YouTube, in a very decent print, but for truly crisp and lustrous, get the Criterion DVD.

Words and Phases

My traveling companion and I hit the road after Malice Domestic. We traveled through early May. Bases needed to be touched. After a bit more than a week knocking about the Eastern Seaboard, we have finally returned to Fort Worth.

If I owe you an email, start the clock now. We've been largely incommunicado these last few days.

Today, I am unpacking the flotsam of a mystery convention. In my briefcase, I discovered that I had tucked the April 27th issue of The Washington Post. It contained an op-ed about the resignation of John Ulyot, the spokesperson for the Defense Department. The piece quoted Ulyot talking about why he'd left the administration. "The president deserves better than the current mishegoss at the Pentagon."

Without getting stalled by the politics, the Yiddish word struck me. According to the Jewish Language Project, mishegoss means foolishness, nonsense, or craziness. The word also describes chaotic actions. I hadn't known the word before I read the article. The expressions I use to chronicle that sort of senseless activity typically involve one or more profanities. I hope to have this gentler word at the ready next time.

I also found a card in my briefcase from friend and fellow short story writer, Mary Dutta. A blog on her webpage introduced me to the French expression l'espirit de l'escalier. She writes that the phrase literally translates to "stairwell wit" and refers to that clever comeback you think of after the moment has passed. Perhaps, as the expression suggests, you find your retort as you descend the stairs on your way out the door. Again, I didn't know the expression until I read her blog. Hopefully, I've tucked it away for future reference.

I don't think I'll be quicker on the rhetorical draw. But at least on future occasions when I'm disappointed by my timing, I'll have a French phrase to explain it.

Mary's blog, by the way, doesn't offer a word for the winded guy who runs back up the stairs and futilely tries to steer the conversation back to the original point so that he can drop the delayed bon mot.

John Ulyot and Mary Dutta got me thinking about words I don't know. In particular, I thought about words that may not exist in English, but we wish they did, so we've swiped them from another language. Schadenfreude is my all-time favorite example.

In the heady atmosphere of a readers and writers convention like Malice Domestic, I get exposed to an array of outstanding short stories. Sometimes I read a story I truly enjoy, but it comes from a place or describes a character so far removed from my experience that I know I could never have conceived of that person or done that place justice. My feelings are full of enjoyment and admiration.

It's when the stories hit closer to home that things get complicated.

© Creative Commons

Occasionally, I read a story where the characters, setting, or theme seem to be within my grasp as a writer. My response can easily become a big stew. I still have the enjoyment and admiration. I ask myself how the author achieved the effect I've felt and what I might learn from her for the next time I sit down to type. There is a pinch of covetousness, perhaps, a wish that I'd thought of the particular twist or developed the characters in that way.

But I don't really like covet as the descriptor. I don't begrudge the author. It's a big pool, and there is room for all of us to play in it. Maybe there's a soupçon of self-flagellation for believing I should have thought of it. Perhaps I need a therapist rather than a thesaurus.

Do you ever read a story that conjures up the mix of similar feelings? Do you have a word for it. If you do, I'd love to learn it.

I might think of it myself, but I'll likely be descending a long stairwell at the time and won't be able to write it down.

Until next time.

Disclaimer

    One of the best movies of the 'Sixties was Rashomon, a beautiful black and white film set in the samurai era by Akira Kurosawa and based on a story by his country man, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The plot revolves around an assault and murder; a samurai and his wife, traveling through a forest, are attacked by a bandit. When the dust settles, the wife has been raped, the samurai is dead, and the bandit, eventually to be captured, is on the run.

Cate Blachett

    Each of the protagonists presents a radically different view of events, the wife and the bandit in person; the dead samurai, via a trance medium. Unsurprisingly, each story casts the teller in the best possible light, though one commonality is that there is no good ending for the woman in any scenario.

    I thought about Rashomon, seen so long ago, with Disclaimer, the brand new Apple + series by Alfonso Cuaron and based on the Renee Knight novel of the same name. Truth is once again closely related to self interest and self image, but modern society gives far more opportunities for  promoting one's point of view. The samurai, his wife, and the bandit had only their testimony. The characters in Disclaimer have books and websites and photographs and email and messaging.

Kevin Kline

    But as Pontius Pilate asked, What is truth? And how can it be untangled from passion, malice, self interest, shame, hate and guilt? Rashomon took under two hours; Disclaimer takes seven episodes, but both come to similar conclusions, and sad to say, one of them is that societal odds are still stacked against women.

    Just the same, Disclaimer, well cast and quite elegantly photographed, is mostly entertaining with dramatic final episodes. At heart, it is a story of grief becoming toxic and a man finding purpose in revenge after the loss of his son and his wife's depression and eventual death. Played by Kevin Kline, Steven conveys both genuine sorrow and cold, manipulative malice.  

    In this age when print seems old fashioned, it is reassuring for a writer that Steven's chosen instrument of revenge should be a self published novel. But then The Perfect Stranger only needs a handful of readers, beginning with Catherine (Cate Blanchette) the woman he blames for his son's drowning. And though the novel begins with the usual disclaimer that the work is fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidence, in this case, Steven doesn't mean a word of it.

Leslie Manville

    No, The Perfect Stranger is the absolute truth about a long ago holiday in Italy, and if Catherine or her husband (Sasha Baron Cohen) or son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) have any doubts, well here are some photos to back up the story. And here is an Instagram website purportedly belonging to the long dead Jonathan (Louis Partridge) with more pictures and lots of troll bait. 

    The Perfect Stranger, actually composed by Steven's wife (well played by Leslie Manville), is a genuinely good read. Plus, Steven seems diffident, vulnerable, earnest, and compassionate, even when the viewer already knows his game.

    The structure of the series helps to make him convincing. Contemporary events are intercut with scenes from that long ago Italian summer. These, while absolutely essential to the working out of the plot, are the weakest episodes in the series, with various wrong notes smoothed over by erotic scenes reminiscent of the men's magazines of the last century.

Louis Partridge

    These glimpses of the past certainly could be shorter, but they serve a clever purpose, and viewers who persist will be rewarded with a gripping finale. And some questions, too. With all our tech, are we any closer to accurate knowledge of events than the ill fated trio in Rashomon? Or are we, in fact, more vulnerable to lies, ever rushing to find truth and quick to endorse – and spread ever more exaggerated opinions? Nervous, on the one hand, lest we offend the proprieties of the moment, and on the other going to extremes when we are convinced we are right? 

    Disclaimer is a slick and sometimes manipulative thriller that raises some of the real questions of the moment.

History, Language and Crimes

This is exhausting. Life once seemed like a road to travel - choose the less traveled one or walk the one you know, whatever you wanted, but it was a road going forward. Now, it feels like a merry go round without the fun, just the going round and round part because:

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The learning part is missing, hence the round and round part, as well as the language, history and crimes part. 

What have we failed to learn? 

Way back 1946, In Politics and the English Language: An Essay on Writing George Orwell wrote, "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better."

In 1949, in the Appendix of 1984, The Principles of Newspeak, George Orwell wrote, "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view...but to make all other modes of thought impossible."

If we travel forward in time to just a few years ago, we will remember a world where infectious diseases like measles were held at bay by a robust uptake of vaccines because vaccines were considered a responsible way to protect our children and those around them. However, today we have measles outbreaks throughout North America because what has decimated vaccinations are antivaxxers words like "freedom". Freedom is defined as, "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action" and its antonyms are "slavery, bondage, captivity, confinement, oppression, imprisonment". One can see why antivaxxers chose the word 'freedom' to describe their dangerous choice. They also tout phrases like, "do your own research" to dismiss the expertise of researchers and doctors and pretending that true expertise can be replaced by internet searches. This language hides the truth of community responsibility, the complicated expertise behind vaccine effectiveness and worst of all, it hides the suffering and deaths caused by these infections. The freedom to cause suffering and death is a freedom no one should want. 

Fast forward to a meeting last week between Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Trump where language was again used to 'corrupt thought'. President Trump revisited the annexation of Canada, claiming the Canada-U.S. border is an "artificially drawn line...Somebody drew that line many years ago with, like, a ruler — just a straight line right across the top of the country... When you look at that beautiful formation, when it's together — I'm a very artistic person — but when I looked at that beaut, I said, 'That's the way it was meant to be.' "

Prime Minister Carney responded by saying, “Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign ... it’s not for sale. Won’t be for sale, ever.”

Prime Minister Carney's response was applauded throughout Canada by the owners of Canada. However, there was a great deal to worry about in that meeting. The U.S. president, on the world stage, touted some dangerous language, inciting some dangerous crimes and all crimes have victims.

Annexation of countries is prohibited by international law and at the core of that law is respect for territorial integrity of countries and their borders:



"The international legal norm that prohibits forcible annexations of territory is foundational to modern international law. It lies at the core of three projects that have been central to the enterprise: (1) to settle title to territory as the basis for establishing state authority; (2) to regulate the use of force across settled borders; and (3) to provide for people within settled borders collectively to determine their own fates." 

This International law should not just be known, but the history of it must be understood as a law born from the atrocities of WWII. German annexation of Austria in 1938 was accomplished without the use of force but with the threat of force. Germany then went on to 'annex' other countries, igniting a world war and then losing that war. When the allies occupied Germany after the war, they did not annex Germany, hence earning the allies a place in history as standing on the side of ethics while German actions have been rightfully scorned. 

The prohibition of annexation was born from the need to protect countries and protect the world from devastating wars. Understanding that history - the difference between those who annex and those who don't - is important. 

What about the talk of calling the Canada-U.S. border an "artificially drawn line"?  Well, that goes hand in hand with annexation because not invading countries means you respect their borders and their right to decide what happens within their borders. 

"Respect for territorial integrity - the principle under international law that nation-states should not attempt to promote secessionist movements or to promote border changes in other nation-states, nor impose a border change through the use of force - is a guiding principle among OSCE participating States under Article IV of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975."

This language of annexing Canada, making it the 51st state, by erasing the borders between the countries is dangerous. Orwell said, "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view...but to make all other modes of thought impossible." What is missing in this world-view is the illegality of annexation, the respect for borders as crucial for territorial integrity, the history of why annexation is illegal and how it has kept the peace. Basically, the complicated issues and history are replaced with catchphrases. On social media, even democrats opposing Trump have done so by buying his statements, saying they want to be annexed by Canada - a shocking statement indeed. 

If we don't understand and learn from history we are forced to repeat it and the history we should remember is not just recent, it's ongoing - the attempt of Russia to annex the Ukraine has led to a devastating loss of life and the destruction of a way of life for Ukrainians within their borders. The reason annexation is illegal is because, like all crimes, there are victims that suffer. That is what would result in Canada as well if the U.S. attempted to annex us and make no mistake, Canadians understand the risk this poses for the ones they love, the life they love and the country they love. The anger of Canadians is because we understand what is at risk and have no patience with ridiculous jokes about our lives.  

Imagine if this was another action that was once legal and is now illegal, like rape, was turned into a line repeated without acknowledging the ethical and personal implications. It would be outrageous to debate who will rape who, or saying that the use of the word 'no' is artificial and can be ignored. This is exactly what Orwell meant when he wrote, "language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better."

So here we sit, on a merry go round of history not understood, language corrupted and limited to words and phrases failing to encompass any complexity of the concepts and the human costs of crimes. We have learned little from how simple words and phrases dismantled 225 years of robust vaccination. Annexation has been illegal for less than 100 years. What are the chances that it will withstand the new assault with language and how long until countries revert to taking over other countries as if it's not illegal?  

Many of us tried to fight back against antivaxxers, and now we're fighting against annexation - the language, the simplicity of thought, the shrugging off of complexity and human suffering - it's all the same. So, round and round we go. While some have conversations about annexation with smiles on their faces, nodding in agreement, the rest of us are drowning in frustration, sadness and fury at the suffering and crimes their words are hiding. Language is being bastardized - removed from the history of words, the grave issues those words entail and this is a call for crimes to be committed with no regard for the victims impacted. When Putin called for the annexation of the Ukraine, the rest of the world was appalled and the resulting death and destruction has broken our hearts. Yet, a few years later when President Trump calls for the annexation of Canada, he is surrounded by supporters nodding, smiling and speaking with the media supporting this horrific action. 

This is the exhausting round and round trip we're on - all it would take is a deeper understanding of history and language to get off the roundabout and walk forward on an open road again.