Tales from the Jungle

I don’t recall how I first heard of Frank Gruber’s 1967 book, The Pulp Jungle. It’s one of those books that, once you’ve heard about it, you start seeing references everywhere in the writing community. For me, the hype, if you can call it that, always seemed to touch upon three points:

1. If you want to know what it was like to write during the heyday of the pulps, this is the book to read.

2. The book is out of print, and you’ll pay through the nose to snag a copy.

3. Nearly every review I’ve read shares Gruber’s famous lunchtime soup ritual, which neatly encapsulates just how impoverished he was while trying to break into New York City publishing in the 1930s.

I won’t keep you waiting on these points, since I am obliged by the Pulp Jungle code of ethics to disclose them all:

1. Yes, this is the book to read to get a sense of the pulp fiction lifestyle as practiced by writers in the 1930s and 40s, and slightly beyond.

2. Yes, finding an original copy of the book is costly, with prices starting around $50 and quickly shooting into the hundreds. One rare book dealer has for sale a copy of the MS once owned by the author for about $1,300. But now, thanks to Fiction House Press, you can buy a paperback copy for $15.

3. I’ll save the soup story for later. I promise.

Not gonna lie: It’s a weird little book. Gruber tells us in the opener that in 1960 he took a call from a professor at UCLA. Was he THE Frank Gruber who had penned classics of the pulp era? You see, the university was about to launch a Black Mask exhibit…

The call triggers a wave of nostalgia, and Gruber realizes that it has been two decades since he’d written his last story for Black Mask, twenty-seven by the time he got around to writing this brisk, 189-page memoir. Pulp Jungle feels strangely incomplete. For one thing, it ends abruptly in an odd place, and some of the chapters feel rushed as well, almost as if its creator could not be bothered to give it a thorough editing before sharing it with the world. If that does not embody the spirit of the pulp era, I don’t know what does.

Gruber estimates that between 1934 and 1941 he wrote between 600,000 and 800,000 words a year, the equivalent of seven to 10 modern novels a year. In his lifetime, he wrote about 400 short stories, 60 novels, and 200 screenplays for television and the movies (most for projects that were never filmed). He wrote detective stories, adventure stories, love stories, westerns, spy novels, and “spicy” stories (which I take to mean erotica). By the way, I think he grossly undercounts his short story output. In one year alone in the 1930s, he wrote 176 stories. But let's go with 400. It's his book.

Born in Minnesota, he’d longed to write as a boy, after reading a slew of Horatio Alger stories. After a stint in the U.S. Army, he sold his first short story at age 23 for $3.50. In 1927, he landed his first job editing an agricultural newspaper, and eventually moved to a publisher in Iowa, where he edited as many as five of those agri-rags. In between, he wrote and sent rounds of stories to the pulps in New York City.

Just as we do today, as soon as a story was rejected, he sent it in the mail to another editor, using the barely one-decade-old Writer’s Digest as his guide. Between 1932 and 1934, he reports, he wrote about 620,000 words of fiction but never earned a living wage. His dream of becoming a writer plays havoc with his family budget, for in the early decades of the twentieth century, ceaseless rounds of postage cost a fortune.

If he were actually on the ground in New York City, he theorizes, he’d save money on stamps, deliver each manuscript by hand, and meet a ton of editors in the process. In 1934, when the agri-papers tank as a result of the Depression, Gruber sees his chance. He sends his young wife to live with her parents, and boards a train to the Big Apple lugging a suitcase, a typewriter, and $60.

Times are tough. Rent in New York City is exorbitant compared to rent back home. (Upon arrival, he shells out $10.50 for a week’s rent at a hotel.) Over the next seven months, he shares hotel rooms and apartments with other writers. When he gets locked out of one apartment for being late with the rent, he rides the subway all night, trying to keep from nodding off. But golly, at least he wasn’t paying for those damn stamps.

To make ends meet, Gruber patronizes Automats, squirts hot water into a bowl, squeezes in several packets of ketchup, sprinkles crushed soup crackers over the liquid, and slurps it up with a spoon. Instant tomato soup! Cost: $0. He did this for days at a time to stave off hunger.

He estimates that there were about 150 pulp magazines headquartered in New York City, which boggles the mind when you think of the paucity of story markets today. He asserts that 300 writers lived in the New York area who had cracked those markets, with thousands more living in the hinterland wanting in on the action.

The magazines hit the stands with lovely names like Ace Detective, Ace Sports, Ace Western, Ten Detective Aces, Adventure, Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Dime Western, Double Action Western, Love Story, Weird Tales, Western Story, and Western Trails. The “kings” were Doc Savage and The Shadow, published by Street & Smith, and of course, Black Mask.

What surprised me was how often Gruber phoned editors to ask if he could stop by to introduce himself and pitch his work. Many blew him off, erecting walls between themselves and the legions of writers who craved access to their offices. Gruber speaks about sneaking past secretaries and assistant editors to find his marks. In some cases, the editors said yes! Off he confidently went to shake hands, talk about his work, the places he’d written, and lob ideas. Sometimes the editors would bite; often they kindly sent him on his way.

It took me a long time to finish this fairly short book because I was frequently pausing mid-sentence to research the names he drops. Many of the editors and writers were unknown to me. In some cases, the big-name editors struck me as different versions of the editors I knew in New York publishing: Highly educated people who had attended upscale universities but who, for whatever reason or lack thereof, had pursued career paths that led straight into the ink-stained trenches.

Joseph Shaw, for example, attended Bowdoin, won an Olympic medal for fencing, served his country in WWI—and eventually edited Black Mask, filling its pages with the work of Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner. Gruber tried many times to crack Shaw’s market. With each rejection, Shaw graciously dissected the pieces to explain why he had declined them, warmly encouraging Gruber to submit something else.

Black Mask nevertheless struggled to survive, and when “Captain” or “Cap” Shaw wouldn’t take a pay cut, he was dismissed and replaced by Fanny Ellsworth, the daughter of a New York banker, and a Barnard graduate who would later in life earn a doctorate in Turkish Studies. Among the writers Ellsworth lured to her pages was Cornell Woolrich.

We watch Gruber struggle to sell his work, and cringe as he dodges landlords, hotel clerks, and bill collectors. When he has missed a series of meals, he fondly recalls an incident in 1932, while he still lived in the midwest. A magazine for salesmen had mistakenly mailed him duplicate payments for a pair of stories, and Gruber had mailed the extra check back with a note explaining the error. 

Now, in 1934, Gruber answers his hotel door one Sunday afternoon, half expecting to be berated by his current hotelier. But no, standing in the hall is a well-dressed giant of a man, who enters and studies Gruber’s digs. “I always wanted to see how a starving writer lived,” says Aron M. Mathieu, who is the owner and editor of the sales magazine whose check Gruber returned two years ago. By chance, Mathieu is also the editor of Writer’s Digest. For two years Mathieu has been curious to meet the writer who returned that check:

“He swore roundly even then that I was the only downright honest writer he had ever heard of. He insisted that no writer on earth, especially one who was as close to the howling wolves as my letter had indicated, would have done such a thing. So that was why he was now visiting me.”

Would Mr. Gruber care to join him for lunch? Mathieu’s treat, of course. Gruber was so hungry that he was out the door like a dog whose ears perk up at the sound of the word treat. Over lunch at Schrafft’s and for three hours later, Mathieu expounded on his new concept: an annual publication that listed market opportunities, in detail, for writers. It would be called…Writer’s Market. If Gruber would consent to collect the data and send it to Cincinnati, Mathieu would pay a munificent $90, with a $40 advance. Gruber leaves Mathieu’s hotel with two beautiful twenties in his wallet.

Cha-ching!

Next, out of the ether, after six months and a raft of rejections, an editor phones on a Friday. His magazine is going to press Saturday, and he needs to fill a gaping hole. Could Gruber write a 5,500-word story overnight? Why, sure, he could! He delivers the story, and scurries back to his digs to wait for news of its acceptance. He never hears a peep. Only when he stops by the magazine days later does the editor tell him, oh, we pay on Fridays. The editor had forgotten to phone.

“It was already on the press. Good story. Do me another next month.”

Double cha-ching!

After that, Gruber’s luck changes. He summons his wife from the midwest, and they set up house in the Big Town. In 1935, he earns $10,000, which amounts to $238,000 in 2026. Soon he is comparing his income to that of doctors and lawyers. But that does not mean his output decreases. No. If anything, he’s maintaining the same number of words, just shaking it up with new opportunities in Hollywood.

His list of friends, editors, and acquaintances grows. He meets Lester Dent and befriends Carroll John Daly—who most credit as the creator of the first series private eye, Race Williams. One night, Gruber and his writer pal Steve Fisher go out on the town with the introverted mama’s boy, Cornell Woolrich, and prank him by grossly inflating their Black Mask earnings. The next day, editor Fanny Ellsworth phones and chastise Gruber for messing with poor, sensitive Woolrich’s head:

“He came tearing in here this morning yelling that I was paying Gruber, Fisher and Torrey four cents a word and he was getting only one and a half cents and he was never going to write for the magazine again!”

In another anecdote that I’ve seen shared in many reviews, Gruber attends a party at the Brooklyn apartment of a writer named George Bruce. Thirty or so guests pack the place, having a blast until about 10 pm, when Bruce suddenly remembers that he promised to deliver a 12,000-word story to an editor tomorrow. His guests offer to clear out, but Bruce won’t hear of it. While the party rages on, he sits at his electric typewriter and dutifully pounds out his story. Four hours later, the manuscript is completed, and Bruce rejoins the party and celebrates by knocking back a dollop of gin. Do the math. That is 3,000 publishable words an hour.

On a drive out west, Gruber stops at the home of Erle Stanley Gardner, who seems like a good egg, and, in those days when communication was far from instantaneous, Gardner happily informs our memoirist that an editor back east wants to buy a western novel that Gruber has written.

Gruber is less charmed by other writers he meets. He nearly comes to blows with Raymond Chandler, who badmouths Fisher, one of Gruber’s oldest writer friends, over a screenwriting dispute. (Chandler would never look Gruber in the eye again, but Gruber insists that that never stopped him from enjoying Chandler’s writing.) A mutual friend, Fred MacIsaac, introduces him to Thomas Wolfe, who bores Gruber to tears speaking all night of his own greatness.

Some time later, Gruber tells us, MacIsaac commits suicide. After years of success in the pulps, he has been unable to sell a story for six months. That’s when it hits you. These people mastered the craft not for awards or acclaim or for personal fulfillment. They did it to put food on the table, to support themselves and their families. If their words did not earn bread, then what good were they? It’s easy to see how a writer might have extended that equation to their own self-worth.

In Hollywood, Gruber meets Frederick Schiller Faust, who wrote under countless pen names but was probably best known as Max Brand, the creator of Dr. Kildare. Gruber describes him as a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound man who did not so much write scripts as he did conceive stories that were later scripted by other writers. Faust showed up for work at the studio every day with a thermos of whiskey. When he drained the booze by 1 p.m., Faust snuck out for a liquid lunch, followed by a few drinks in the afternoon at a local watering hole.

Drink stoked his courage. He had grown tired of merely writing adventure stories. He craved adventure itself. He longed to live it! By now, it’s the 1940s, and a second World War is raging in Europe. In a bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot, a booze-stoked Faust shares with Gruber and Fisher the news that a military friend has fixed it so Faust can travel as an embedded reporter with infantry fighting in Italy. Off goes the great Max Brand, to launch a new career for himself as a war correspondent for Harper’s Magazine. Six weeks later, he’s dead at age 51.

By contrast, Gruber lives to witness the passing of an era that enriched writers and delighted readers. I get the sense that he’s melancholy about the death of the pulps, but he never admits as much.

Somewhere, before this book launches itself off a cliff, Gruber comes close to offering the secrets of his success. He enumerates, for instance, The Seven Basic Western Plots. And he spells out his “foolproof,” eleven-point method for writing the perfect mystery. Since we are all about mysteries, allow me to share with you the secret. Are you ready?

Colorful hero.

Theme.

Villain.

Background.

Murder method.

Motive.

Clue.

Trick.

Action.

Climax.

Emotion.

Ta-da! I bet you’re trembling with excitement. Now you can go forth and write your own mystery!

Yes, Gruber does give us a tiny bit more. He devotes exactly one paragraph to each point. Just one. Because why waste time dragging it out longer than necessary?

Perhaps that’s how he felt about his memoir. He had said all he had to say, so stopped he writing and sent it off to an editor. The end. He lived only two years more, but somehow managed to write eight or nine books before departing for his next great adventure.

* * * 

You can also read parts of Gruber's book via the Internet Archive.

Thanks for reading! See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Ever-Shifting Face of Plagiarism, Part One

 “Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.”

- The Rig Veda (Book I, Hymn 164, verse 46)

I would never, ever compare myself to a Hindu sage. No way anyone this side of Mahatma Gandhi comes away from that comparison looking anything other than...incomplete? Still emerging? Ummmm...well, let's just say that I am positive that when it comes to enlightenment, I have many, many leagues left on my own spiritual journey.

And just one of the many ways in which Hindu sages have had it all over the likes of me is in their nuanced understanding of the notion that truth has many looks. What's more, how the truth looks to you can often depend on not just how you're looking at it, but the angle from which you're viewing it. Put simply, the GodHead, the one actual reality (Brahman) can seem truly distinctive depending on one's angle of approach to it.

The Rig Veda quote above expresses that about as cleanly as can be done (even in translation from the original Sanskrit). Seen from one angle, it might manifest as any of Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver), Shiva (the Destroyer), Kali (The Transformer/Liberator), or Ganesh (the Remover of Obstacles), depending on one's perspective when looking, as informed by one's needs at the time. They are all simply different aspects (Saguna Brahman) of what the sages refer to as Nirguna Brahman (unshaped actuality).

Kinda like plagiarism, our conception of it, understanding of the notion, and our incessant need to define and redefine it over time.

Plagiarism is a concept as old as the written word itself: the act of taking someone else's words and using them as your own. Over time the notion of what actually constitutes plagiarism, and whether or not it is problematic has morphed. Shifting in substance, style and understanding from a culturally accepted practice of imitation intended to pass along great ideas in as close to their original form as possible, into a modern-day professional taboo: a serious ethical lapse seen not as the preservation of great ideas, but as the wholesale purloining of same.

Plagiarism's evolution as an ethical concept can be broadly broken down into three general eras: 

You know who you are.

Pre-Industrial Age: The 19th century clergyman, writer, and eccentric Charles Caleb Colton is likely best known for having coined the phrase, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" (something with which Oscar Wilde is widely credited, but Colton's use of the phrase comes from 1820, well before Wilde was even born). And such was certainly the case during the Classical era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Authors would lift characters, concepts, plot devices liberally from previous works, rarely, if ever, giving credit for same. Shakespeare did it. So did Marlowe. All of the Renaissance poets. Accepted practice? Building on what came before? Lifting it and making your own? We still engage in this sort of practice today, but if we do so openly, it's often done once the copyright of the work in question has expired and the work itself safely passed into the public domain.

Industrial Age: With the advent of the printing press and the subsequent industrialization of the collection and dissemination of information using the printed word (newspapers, pamphlets, books, broadsides, etc.), authorship became more than a point of prestige. The ability to write engagingly, to appeal to and influence the tastes of others became a commodity capable of bringing its purveyors significant remuneration (Ah, the Good Old Days!). Copyrighted work was supposed to bring money to the original author. To copy that and pass it off as one's own rapidly came to be seen as unethical and in many cases, illegal.

Modern Age: If everything ever written is available thanks to an internet connection, all of a sudden it's a whole lot easier to steal someone else's stuff, and frequently get away with it. Sometimes it's as simple as "point and click," "highlight and copy." And not all of it is done on-purpose. Check out this fascinating article in Plagiarism Today concerning, among other things, the notion of "accidental plagiarism."

Post-Modern Age: Six words: "Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models."

So that's it for Part One. An overview and brief analysis. Stayed tuned for Part Two next time around, when we will look at the work of some famous and not-so-famous plagiarists, and wrestle with how the advent of Artificial Intelligence has the potential to change (and to not change) our understanding of the notion of "plagiarism" itself.

See you in two weeks!

Len Deighton

For many of us, Len Deighton goes hand in glove, mentally, with Michael Caine.  The movie adaption of The IPCRESS File put them both on the map.  Don’t think for a minute we weren’t crazy about Bond, but IPCRESS, with its elliptical, deep-focus photography, and the odd, unsettling score (by Bond composer John Barry, no less), signaled something on a different wavelength from the Bond world, with its deep color saturation, exotic locations, and thumping bass line.  Bond signified Empire; IPCRESS was kitchen sink. 

It’s interesting, when you think about it that way, to realize we were introduced to the writer by the movie, and not the reverse.  IPCRESS was a successful book – not the phenomenom of le Carré’s Spy Whom Came in from the Cold, a year later – but the movie was a big return on a small investment; more importantly, from my own point of view, is that I started reading Len Deighton.

Horse Under Water, an underrated and very solid sequel to IPCRESS, was published in 1963; Funeral in Berlin, in 1964; Billion-Dollar Brain, in 1966; and An Expensive Place to Die, in 1967.  Brain is the weakest, An Expensive Place to Die the strongest, the most melancholy, and an evocative valentine to the Paris of the late ‘60’s - so a sentimental favorite of mine, as well. 

Skipping ahead, we get SS-GB, an alternate-history conceit (England loses the Battle of Britain, and the Nazis take over); the outstanding XPD, shorthand for Expedient Demise; and Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, fighter pilots in that same Battle of Britain.  Then the first of the Bernard Samson trilogies, Game, Set, and Match.  He followed up with Hook, Line, and Sinker, a few years later, and Faith, Hope, and Charity.  I’m not that big a fan.  All the naked class hostilities are there, and the icy superciliousness of the upper-class twits running the Service, but in and of itself, it’s not the engine of redemptive fury that it was in the earlier, IPCRESS, sequence of novels.  It seems more like simple exhaustion.

Interspersed, though, are two very good books.  Winter, a story of generational trauma, and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany.  And secondly, City of Gold, the city in question being wartime Cairo, clearly a thematic counterpart to Rick Blaine’s Casablanca, with its shifting loyalties. 

And there’s non-fiction, as well, cookbooks and histories, and miscellany, but the masterpiece among the novels is Bomber, from 1970, which I intentionally slid past, a couple of paragraphs above.  Bomber gets credit for being the first book written on a word processor, an IBM electric typewriter mated to a magnetic tape drive.  This matters mostly because of its dense and detailed storyline, and a draft manuscript of well over 100,000 words.  Using a computer program, you could navigate the material a lot more easily – it’s been almost sixty years, and the rest of us are grateful Len Deighton took the plunge.

Bomber takes place over a single night, as a squadron of Lancasters crosses the English Channel on a raid into the Ruhr industrial zone, and through miscalculation hit the wrong target, a small German market town.  It’s told from multiple POV’s, the RAF bomber crews, the German fighter bases on the coast, and the people on the ground, caught in the storm of incendiaries and high-explosive.  There are successes and humiliations, heroism and futility, politics, opportunism, and naked terror.  The deserving and the undeserving alike will die, or be spared, by no logic but the hand of God, or the rough odds of accident.  It should be said, however, that the novel is in no way indifferent or nihilist.  You simply don’t know who’s going to live through the story, and neither do they.  I think that’s the point.  We’re in the hands of a higher power, and that power doesn’t show sympathy or intelligence or warmth.  You can’t petition it.  It simply is. 

I don’t know that this is a consistent theme in Deighton’s work.  It doesn’t seem to be.  He himself appears genuinely cheerful, surprised at his good fortune, not too terribly reflective, perhaps.  Or not prone to look a gift horse too closely in the mouth. 

He lived in Portugal and Guernsey.  My guess is he was a tax exile.  And he quit writing, thirty years ago.  I think he got bored with it.  By his own admission.  He once said that it’s fun to tell people you’re a writer, but after the party, you have to go home and actually do it.

He’d just turned 97.  God bless. 

A Sleep or A Scrape

As part of an irregular series of blogs looking at notable trials from this month in history, I'd like to enter Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine. Let's revisit 1845 and the murder trial of Albert Tirrell. Although old, the case offers an opportunity to consider the roles of defense attorneys, prosecutors, and novel defenses. 

Twenty-two-year-old Albert Tirrell was no paragon of virtue. The scion of a wealthy Weymouth, Massachusetts family, he left his wife and two children to maintain a relationship with Maria Bickford, a prostitute living in a Boston brothel. Although they traveled and were constantly together, she refused to abandon her profession. Maria was successful in her work; she could afford a maid and expensive clothing. The relationship between Bickford and Tirrell was described as volatile. Maria reportedly said that she enjoyed quarreling with Albert because they had such a good time making up.  

In September 1845, local authorities charged Albert with adultery for cohabiting with Maria while married. He surrendered, posted a bond, and returned to Maria.

Albert visited her at her disreputable boarding house after her last customer on October 26^th, 1845. Late that evening, the proprietor saw and heard the couple arguing. The next morning, the proprietor and his wife heard a scream and a heavy thud from the upstairs room. They heard someone running down the stairs and out the door. Maria was found on her back, a neck wound nearly cutting off her head. Someone had set fire to the bed on which she lay. At the foot of the bed was a bloody razor. A man's walking stick and vest in the room were found spattered with blood. The landlord also found a letter addressed with the initials, "A.J.T. to M.A.B."

National Police Gazette

At about the same time, Albert Tirrell arrived at a nearby stable and requested a horse. He had gotten into a little scrape, he reported. When the police tried to find Tirrell, they discovered he had fled. From Weymouth, Tirrell traveled through Vermont to Canada. There, he boarded a ship bound for Liverpool. Bad weather forced the ship back to port. He journeyed to New York and booked a boat for New Orleans. He was arrested in Louisiana.

Tirrell hired Rufus Choate to defend him. A protégé of Daniel Webster, Choate is considered one of the great American lawyers of the 19^th Century. An outstanding orator, he was famous for delivering the “longest sentence known to man.” (1,219 words)

The prosecutor presented a strong circumstantial case, relying on the abovementioned facts. The witnesses, however, all resided in the brothel, and no one was beyond impeachment. Additionally, no one witnessed the murder. Still, robust evidence pointed toward Albert Tirrell.

Then Rufus Choate began his defense. His strategy was three-pronged. Maria may have killed herself, the defense argued. Choate’s associates impugned Maria’s character and suggested that suicide was “almost the natural death of persons of her character.” This theory suffered, however, from the violent nature of the injury to her neck. The defense team also presented evidence of Albert’s good character before he was ensnared by the lascivious Maria. Choate suggested another resident of the boardinghouse might have done it. And finally, the defense argued that if Tirrell had killed her, it was while he was sleepwalking.

A parade of friends and family testified to his sleepwalking habit beginning as early as age six. They elicited testimony that the somnambulism had increased in frequency and manifested bizarre behaviors. These episodes, according to his family, included window-smashing and threatening his brother with a knife. The dean of the Harvard Medical School testified that a person in a somnambulistic state could rise, dress, kill, set a fire, and escape.  

It is an essential element of most crimes that the defendant intended to commit the offense. As a society, we criminalize behavior that a person knows or should know is wrong. But if they don't understand, then punishment serves no purpose. Usually, this applies to young children or to the insane.

Harvard Art Museum

On March 27th, 1845, Rufus Choate gave his closing argument to the jury. He began by telling them he did not intend to take up much of their time. He then talked for five hours non-stop. The court recessed for a meal, and when the court resumed, Choate continued for another hour and a half. He spent much of the postprandial argument focused on somnambulism.

The jury deliberated for two hours before acquitting Tirrell.

The strategy worked again when the prosecutor tried to convict Tirrell of arson for setting the room on fire.

Tirrell later wrote to Rufus Choate asking the lawyer to return half his legal fee. He argued that he shouldn't have to pay so much for a case where it had been too easy to persuade the jury of his innocence.

I do not want to leave the blog with the impression that somnambulism serves as a get-out-of-jail card. According to an internet search, the defense has been tried perhaps sixty times. Most of the time, it has not been successful. Sleep scientists say it would not work today; Tirrell's behaviors, especially the flight, cannot be explained by sleepwalking. Even Tirrell did not get away completely. He went to prison for the original adultery charge. The judge refused to dismiss the case and sentenced him to three years.

Besides an interesting fact pattern, the case highlights the roles of the prosecutor and the defense. The government must prove each element. The government needs a clear message to explain the defendant’s actions. It has a problem, even today, when a victim comes from a marginal or ostracized part of the community.

The defense, meanwhile, succeeds when it undermines even one necessary element of the government's case. To do this, sometimes an astute lawyer presents a unified theory; other times, he or she scattershoots. Sometimes, the defense merely picks at the government's case, testing its reliability and challenging the credibility of the witnesses on which it rests. In other cases, the attorney prosecutes the defense—putting forward an alternative theory that explains the evidence and exonerates the client.

Choate tried all of the above. He picked at and maligned the government's evidence. He highlighted matters the prosecutor had not brought up--chiefly an eyewitness. He also put forward several alternatives. Choate's chief theory, the one that keeps the murder case of Albert Tirrell in the public eye, was the defense of somnambulism. A novel defense that in this case worked. 

Albert Tirrell's murder trial is the March Trial of the Month.

Now go get a good night's sleep.

Until next time. 

Caveat Scriptor

         Lately, I’ve been getting warm, personal emails from bestselling authors.  I’m touched by this, because I really didn’t know how much they cared.  Another exciting development is the number of professional book marketers who see tremendous potential in various titles from my backlist.  I most appreciate the effort they’ve put into these communications, not only gathering facts about the works, and myself as the author, but providing very coherent, persuasive arguments.  I mean, these guys are good.

        Scary good.  Actually, literally terrifying. 

        Most of my professional experience has been in advertising.  One of the things you quickly learn in that business is you need a healthy dose of cynicism.  As Lilly Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.”  It also helps to have your ego ground into a gelatinous paste on a regular basis.  We didn’t just experience rejection, it came at us all day long, every day.  So I’m probably the least susceptible target on earth for flattering marketing ploys. 

        Thus, I knew almost immediately that I was being played by Artificial Intelligence.  But what threw me was how incredibly sophisticated these appeals were.  The best were not just factually sound, but textured and nuanced in how they framed their arguments.  They have complete fluency in the language of both marketing and publishing.  And worst of all, it didn’t seem possible that they weren’t written by a human being.  That’s because the composition had an emotional quality, a personal touch that rookie promotional writers take years to develop.

        It seems pretty stupid to try to scam everyday fiction writers, of all people.  Clearly they don’t have access to our tax returns or go deep enough to find the entry for advances/royalties.  Though as I often remind myself, you can make a lot of money by taking a little money from a lot of people.  As the headline on a recent article in The New York Times puts it:  “Hungry for Affirmation, Vulnerable to Scams:  As a Writer, I Know the Feeling.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/books/review/publishing-scams.html

        This is the crux of the matter.  All aspiring artists are equal parts devotional, ambitious and insecure.  We get into it because we want to create, often driven to do so.  And we want to succeed, because success means having an audience that appreciates our work, and provides the means for continuing in the pursuit.  But since no one can truly be an arbiter in their own efforts, we have to rely on others to approve or reject.  It’s a perilous place for anyone yearning to achieve in their chosen art form.  So boy, vulnerable as you can get.

        The scams that feed on lonely hearts, often elderly, and then steal their life savings are particularly heinous.  The material loss is financial, but the emotional toll is far worse, since the hopes and dreams of the victims, their most heartfelt, are used against them.  To say nothing of the self-recrimination and embarrassment. 

        These frauds targeting writers are a close cousin.  I’m sure an fMRI would reveal that the same areas of the brain that light up from romance are kindled by a writer being offered the validation they so eagerly desire. 

        As I write this, there are striving writers out there who are being seduced by these diabolical con jobs (I mean that literally, even biblically).  I wonder about myself at that stage, and how it felt to have those tender emotions hanging off my sleeves, dripping from every pore.  I’d be a sucker for sure, and I’m not sure how well I’d recover. 

        My hope is that anyone reading this will 1. Never reply.  2. Report the scam to the platform, even if you think it’s not worth it.  3. Tell every writer they know to watch out.  They’re after you, and you won’t always see it coming, no matter how experienced, cynical and hardboiled you think you are. 

Get Edalji

File this under: I do love getting lost in a book.

I’ve been a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing since I was a teenager. So, it came as a surprise earlier this year to learn of something I didn’t know about Doyle – his involvement in the Edalji Affair. And I also had only peripheral knowledge of what the Edalji Affair was all about. Thanks to an excellent new book, Get Edalji, by Rose H. Schmollek, I got up to speed.

The Edalji Affair was a complicated cobweb of events that began in 1903 in Great Wyrley – a village in Staffordshire, in the West Midlands. Events that became known in the papers, and history, as the Great Wyrley Outrages: a series of brutal slashings of horses, cows, and sheep. A 27-year-old local solicitor, George Edalji, was convicted of one of the attacks (on a pony) and was sentenced to seven years' hard labour at His Majesty’s pleasure.

It gets more complicated.

George Edalji was the son of the local parson, and the parson’s household had, since 1888, been subject to an ongoing campaign of poison pen letters (many threatening, many vile), fake newspaper announcements, and many other harassments. Blame fell upon a member of the parson’s household staff, a maid. She was subsequently brought before the court, where she pleaded guilty – in exchange for being given probation (she couldn’t afford a defence lawyer, and she maintained her innocence until her death).

The police sergeant investigating, however, was convinced George Edalji had been responsible for the letters and other annoyances. Others at Scotland Yard shared this view. In short: The constabulary wanted to get Edalji.

It gets even more complicated.

Poison-pen letters weren’t just sent to the vicarage, but to others, including the police. And the letters (self-purportedly) were written by a variety of authors, with one stating he was a member of the “Wyrley Gang,” the group responsible for the animal mutilations. This writer wrote that George Edalji was himself a Wyrley Gang member.   

In short: Because of the existing, long-running suspicion of George Edalji (the poison-pen letters), and some circumstantial evidence connecting him to the maiming of the pony, he was arrested, tried, and convicted of animal mutilation. 

George’s mother began an earnest campaign to free her son from jail. The premise of her argument was that no firm evidence had been presented, and that George’s innocence had been clouded in the court’s view by their belief he was responsible for the poison-pen letters, of which there was also no firm evidence. Her position saw over 10,000 people sign a petition and a flurry of discussion in the legal world. 

In short: George Edalji was paroled three years into his sentence, and his case led to the establishment of the British Court of Appeal. 

However, George Edalji was not granted a pardon.

And the poison-pen letters continued. 

Enter, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

One of the key reasons the Great Wyrley Outrages are so famous is Doyle. Sir Arthur took an interest in the case. He met with George Edalji, investigated the events, and subsequently campaigned for George’s pardon. In Doyle’s opinion, George Edalji could not have committed the attack on the pony. Doyle was also sceptical of handwriting experts who claimed George had written some of the letters. In Doyle’s eyes, George Edalji was an innocent man wrongly accused of all crimes. Given that Doyle was the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and, in that first decade of the 20th century, was at the height of his celebrity, most people took Doyle’s word for it. Who are we to argue with a doctor, a knight, and the creator of one of literature’s greatest detectives?

Doyle was successful in his endeavour to some extent – Edalji was pardoned, but he was not granted a full pardon (he was never acquitted, which Doyle wanted, and he was never compensated for his prison time).

What transpired at Great Wyrley took place more than a century ago. Looking back from today, the events appear as a great tangled cobweb that spans several decades. Many books have attempted to unravel it, including one by Doyle himself. Over the years, there have been films, television series, and countless journalistic investigations. Most favour Doyle’s conclusions. Who are we to argue with a doctor, a knight, and the creator of one of literature’s greatest detectives?

GET EDALJI reopens the case. It undertakes a fresh, up-to-date examination of the events, and it draws different conclusions from those of Doyle. It uncovers evidence that others who have written about the case have not. It untangles the web.

The research presented in this book is rich and detailed. It is a criminal case analysis worthy of Sherlock Holmes; it has his tenacity and attentiveness. The Edalji affair is a complex series of events, spanning many years, and involving dozens of people. GET EDALJI admirably presents these events and persons clearly and consistently. If you come to this story with no prior knowledge, you won’t get lost in a myriad of details. 

Sherlock Holmes frequently solved his mysteries through the behaviour of man, by considering human psychology. This book does, too. Our understanding of the mind and its workings has evolved enormously since Doyle’s day. Things he was oblivious to in his time are readily observed and understood 120 years later. GET EDALJI sheds light on these. It is sensitive, equally, to the racial attitudes and prejudices prevalent in Victorian/Edwardian England. Edalji was of mixed race.

The ace in the research's hole are the many letters at the heart of the case – modern forensics has been applied to their texts. Dr Isabel Picornell, a leading authority in forensic linguistics, has made a detailed study of the letters, and her findings are presented in this book. 

This is a delight of a book to hold and touch (see the photos). All books should come with such lavish presentation: supplements, hard-bound encasement. The pages too are populated with a variety of illustrations, photographs, and many newspaper clippings. There is attention to detail here. It’s immersive.

GET EDALJI was written by Rose H. Schmollek – a pseudonym for author Petra Weber. Petra chose the pseudonym (it’s also an anagram) as a nod to the many people – an international team – who helped her in the book’s research. Petra Weber is the author of 17 crime novels and short stories (written under a different pseudonym) and is the publisher of KrimiKiosk, a popular true crime podcast.

The book’s title, “GET EDALJI,” can be read three ways. (1) Literally, Get Edalji. As many in law enforcement at the time wanted to. (2) It’s the man’s name: George E.T. Edalji. (3) Get, i.e., understand, Edalji. Clever.

Immerse yourself in the social fabric of England 120 years ago and find yourself in a mystery both intriguing and puzzling. It’s definitely a three-pipe problem.

Be seeing you.

Stephen

Pulpwood Fiction

I like that term. Pulpwood Fiction isn't an established genre, but it's a definite--and different--area of storytelling, one that focuses on the gritty, blue-collar people of the rural South, where the setting plays a central role. I've also heard it called Redneck Noir, and Grit Lit. A blog I found a few years ago refers to it as "good old-fashioned noirish pulp fiction with a Southern twist."

One reason I like those kinds of stories is, of course, that I grew up in that part of the country, with all its weird food and scenery and characters and traditions. As I said in one of my private-eye stories a few years ago, the Deep South is like the song: fish are jumpin', the cotton is high, and the livin' is easy. At least usually. Everyone moves at a slower pace and many things get done at a slower pace, including talking. Most of us sound like Billy Bob Thornton, or Holly Hunter, or Walton Goggins.

Some of my short stories that were the most fun to write are set in that world, both past and present--partly because it's familiar ground and partly because it's just easier. I don't have to do as much research. 

I think the best writer of so-called pulpwood fiction is Joe R. Lansdale. Most of his novels and short stories are set in East Texas, in and around the fictional town of LaBorde (often compared to Nacogdoches, the author's hometown). My favorite Lansdale books are standalones, but I also love his series of novels and stories featuring Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. 

A quick description of those two: Hap is a white, straight, liberal redneck who doesn't like guns and Leonard is a gay black Republican who doesn't like much of anything except Dr Peppers and vanilla cookies. They've been best friends since childhood, and despite mostly-good intentions they wind up in deep trouble at every turn--and often have to shoot their way out. 

So far, three movies have been made from Lansdale's novels and novellas. Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) with Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis, Cold in July (2014) with Sam Shepard and Don Johnson, and The Thicket (2024) with Juliette Lewis and Peter Dinklage. All are worth watching, and The Bottoms, which won an Edgar for Best Novel in 2001, is supposedly under film development. There's also an excellent TV series appropriately called Hap & Leonard, starring James Purefoy and the late Michael Kenneth Williams. The first of the three H&L seasons is the most fun, but all of them are good.

Another thing worth mentioning: We've talked a lot at this blog about humor in fiction writing--and Lansdale is one of the best at this. I've learned a lot from him, and I think any writer can.

Here are some of my favorite Lansdale standalone novels:

Edge of Dark Water

Sunset and Sawdust

The Bottoms

Paradise Sky

A Fine Dark Line

The Thicket

And my favorite Hap & Leonard novels:

Savage Season

Mucho Mojo

The Two-Bear Mambo

Vanilla Ride

Rusty Puppy

Hatchet Girls

The Elephant of Surprise

If you're interested, Lansdale has also written plenty of short-story collections, my favorite of which is Driving to Geronimo's Grave.

That's all I can think of, for today. If you haven't read Joe Lansdale, I hope you will. I believe I have everything he's written right here on the shelves of my home office, and I've read several of his novels and many of his stories two or three times each.

And why not? I can identify with these folks.