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.
"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!
I love these kind of background stories. I remember "Grown-ups" but didn't know it was your first. Way to go. Someday I will tell you my own Gambino story...
ReplyDeleteOoohhh, Rob, I really want to hear your Gambino story!
ReplyDeleteWait a minute, Eve - you're telling me your dad *knew* my relatives? grin - fun column!
ReplyDeleteI don't know if my dad knew your relatives, but I think my Popoo knew your Nonno!
Deletegrin - I always knew you were a kindred spirit :) Mel
DeleteMeanwhile, I was dating Cecelia Mongiardo from Brooklyn…
ReplyDeleteEve, congratulations on all your stories! Well done.
When I was little, I remember not a bed, but a casket set up in my grandmothr's living room… for my grandfather I suoppose. He had built that house, and one of its 'modern' features was a telephone alcove. I combined the casket, telephone alcove, and childhood silliness into a pretty good campfire ghost story. It isn't suitable for publication, but I got some mileage out of it.
Ooohhh, that sounds interesting. I have a friend who has a casket in her TV room. You can't explain these things, and most wouldn't believe them.
DeleteEve, sorry I didn't see this one till today. My dad was the family raconteur. Many of them were classic Jewish stories, brilliantly told. Too often, the punchline was in Yiddish—not that my parents, from Hungary and Ukraine, spoke Yiddish, but all the grownups knew enough for the jokes. When we would clamor to know what it meant, they'd say, "It's untranslatable."
ReplyDeleteMy father's parents spoke Greek, of course, and broken English. My grandfather was the one who told me about the siege of Constantinople, in such harrowing detail and breathless suspense, that I was stunned, years later, to find out he was describing what happened in 1453...
DeleteThat's fabulous, Eve. My husband talks about certain historical events like that. I once saw him selling to collectors in a friend's toy soldier shop, and you could almost smell the black powder and hear the cries of anguish. I know about 1453, because that's when my Jewish characters' benefactors the Ottomans came in and Constantinople became Istanbul. Mystery writer Alan Gordon (aka Allison Montclair of the beloved Sparks & Bainbridge series) sets one of his medieval mysteries starring Shakespeare's jester Feste, A Death in the Venetian Quarter, at the siege and sack of Constantinople in 1203, during the mismanaged Fourth Crusade (but weren't they all?).
DeleteOh, all the Crusades were mismanaged, uncoordinated, and I used to tell my classes that one of the main reasons for them was the large number of impoverished noble young men who were trained to fight but not work, so they sent them overseas.
ReplyDelete