A Roundup of Favorite Short-Story Writers

My post today is piggybacking on last week's column by Joseph S. Walker about several of his favorite authors, all of them writers that he hoped others might find and read.

I figured I'd try to add to that by listing some of my favorite genre short-story writers. I focused on genre for this list because SleuthSayers is a mystery blog usually targeting readers and writers of genre fiction--so I have NOT included some further-reaching favorite "literary" short-story authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, Chekhov, O'Connor, Munro, Carver, Maugham, Welty, Fitzgerald, etc., etc. 

The method I used to come up with these was simple: I looked around me here in my home office and counted the number of short-story collections I own from different genre writers. Most of them, it turns out, are by the twelve following authors. And these of course are also (as they should be), the authors whose stories I like to re-read:

Fredric Brown -- A name you might not be familiar with. His genre was mostly SF/fantasy, but he also wrote wonderful mystery/crime stories. Many of his shorts, among them "The Dangerous People" and "The Night the World Ended," were used in the anthology TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He was especially well-known for what used to be called short-short stories (flash fiction), some of those only a page or two in length. My favorite of Brown's stories is still "Voodoo," which is only about 450 words. Others include "Arena," "Nightmare in Yellow," "The Geezenstacks," and "Earthmen Bearing Gifts." 

Jack Ritchie -- Another great shorts writer, Ritchie's stories can be found in a huge number of issues of old Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazines--and also the anthology volumes later created from those two magazines. He wrote only one novel, Tiger Island, which might be one of the reasons so few current readers of fiction know his name. I have a lot of Ritchie favorites, including the stories "Shatterproof," "The Absence of Emily," "#8," and "The Green Heart," later adapted into the feature film The New Leaf with Walter Matthau and Elaine May.

Roald Dahl -- Probably better known for his children's books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl also wrote terrific short stories, several of which were, once again, adapted into episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His story "Man from the South" is still one of my all-time favorites because of its plot--and the same can be said of the delightful twist-ending story "Lamb to the Slaughter." Other favorites of mine: "Poison," "The Landlady," and "Champion of the World."

Ray Bradbury -- This writer, whose name IS quickly recognizable, was an author of mostly science fiction stories, and I would argue that one of his collections, a brick-thick volume appropriately called The Stories of Ray Bradbury, is one of the best short-story collections I've ever read. Aside from novels like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury wrote around 600 short stories. I think my favorites are "A Sound of Thunder," "The Veldt," "The Window," "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," and "There Will Come Soft Rains."

Elmore Leonard -- Like many others in this list, Leonard is known mostly for his novels, many of which were also movies: Get Shorty, Hombre, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, etc. That's certainly the way I first heard about him and got to know his work. But I love his short stories just as much. Examples: "Three-Ten to Yuma," "The Tall T," "Karen Makes Out," "The Tonto Woman," and (actually a novella rather than a short story) Fire in the Hole, which served as the basis for the neo-Western TV series Justified. I actually met him once at a booksigning, for about five seconds.

Louis L'Amour -- An American writer who specialized in Westerns, both novels and shorts. His novels are more famous, especially Last of the Breed, The Walking Drum, Haunted Mesa, Shalako, and the seventeen novels in the Sackett series. Many of his novels were made into films, and some of his short stories. One of those stories--my favorite of his--was "The Gift of Cochise," which became the 1953 John Wayne movie Hondo and then became a novel of the same name. Other well-known L'Amour short stories are "Skull and the Arrow," "To Hang Me High," and "Squatters on the Lonetree." 

Lawrence Block -- Another household name, Block is the creator of series characters Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, Evan Tanner, the hitman Keller, and others, and has written many, many crime novels and short stories over the years. (Also, he's one of the two writers in this list who are still with us and who still, hopefully, are producing stories.) I own several of his collections, the best of which is probably Enough Rope (almost 900 pages of shorts). The stories I remember most are "A Blow for Freedom," "Sometimes They Bite," "By the Dawn's Early Light," and "Strangers on a Handball Court."

Edward D. Hoch -- One of the few writers who actually made a living from writing short stories. He wrote several novels as well, but is known almost entirely for his short fiction, and specialized in not only mystery/crime stories but traditional, puzzle-based mystery stories. Hoch used many pseudonyms and created many series characters, but one of the most amazing things about him, to me, is that he famously appeared in every single issue of EQMM between 1973 and his death in 2007. My favorite Ed Hoch stories are probably "Murder Offstage," "Captain Leopold's Birthday," and "The Oblong Room."

Shirley Jackson -- Her genres were mostly horror and mystery, and I suspect she's most often remembered for her novels The House on Haunted Hill and We have Always Lived in the Castle. My favorite of her many short stories, and one of the most memorable ever, is "The Lottery," which I taught in my writing classes as a perfect example of not only a surprise ending but the third-person "detached" POV. Other stories of hers that I like are "The Summer People," "The Possibility of Evil," and "The Witch."

Stanley Ellin -- Another relatively lesser-known name, Stanley Ellin was a fine mystery writer who produced more than a dozen novels but seemed more interested in short stories. He won, I believe, two Edgars for his short fiction, and many of his stories, like those of some of the writers listed above, were adapted and used in Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His most famous short story, which appeared first in EQMM, was probably "Specialty of the House," and though I enjoyed it, I think my favorites of his might be "The Blessington Method," "Kindly Dig Your Grave," and "You Can't Be a Little Girl All Your Life." 

Richard Matheson -- Matheson's genres were mostly SF/fantasy and horror, and he'll always be close to my heart because of all the stories he wrote for the Twilight Zone TV series--sixteen stores in all, I believe. Though he might be best known for his novella I am Legend, I most remember the movie Somewhere in Time, which was an adaptation of his novel Bid Time Return, and the short story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Other excellent Matheson shorts were "Duel," "Button, Button," "Prey" and "Born of Man and Woman."

Stephen King -- I honestly believe this man is one of the world'd best storytellers. I have every one of his novels on my shelves, and all his short-story and novella collections. King's not much older than I am, and I think one reason I love his fiction is that many of his child protagonists (he uses a lot of those) experienced some of the same things I myself did: I watched the same TV shows, owned the same toys, read the same books. As for my favorites of his short stories, they're probably "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," "Mute," and "The Raft," and my very favorite--one of the best stories I've ever read--is "The Last Rung on the Ladder."

A confession, here: I chose not to include some other favorite genre short-story authors because they're my friends and contemporaries--and if I did list and describe those, this post would become longer than anyone would read. But I must mention here that, seriously, you should search out and read the stories of writers like David Dean, Josh Pachter,  Doug Allyn, Barb Goffman, Dave Zeltserman, Michael Bracken, Art Taylor, Stacy Woodson, O'Neil De Noux, Joseph S. Walker, Rob Lopresti, Steve Liskow, Elizabeth Zelvin, Ashley-Ruth Bernier, and many others, who are probably writing more stories at this very moment.

Now . . . Who are some of your favorite authors of short fiction--and especially genre shorts? Can you single out any stories of theirs, or anyone's, that are your all-time favorites?

As for me, I'll see you again in two weeks. I have plenty of reading--and re-reading--to do.

Have a great August.

The Case of the Waltese Falcon

Back in April I bought a bunch of craft books for writers in a StoryBundle charity offering curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The one that left the greatest impression on me was a book by Rusch’s husband, Dean Wesley Smith, entitled Writing Novels with the Waltese Falcon.*

That was the nickname of Walter, one of the couple’s cats at the time. (A pure-bred Red-Point Birman.) Mr. Smith had grown accustomed to writing in his office while the cat napped nearby. 

I know the feeling.

My writing partner, who contributes nothing to the word count

 but still gets fed. Go figure.

In this book, we watch as Mr. Smith writes three novels. One is a ghostwriting project that he is writing for an unidentified major author. Mr. Smith has already been paid to deliver a 70,000-word book. He budgets ten days of writing, and of course he nails it, writing on average 6,895 words a day. (Day #7 he “only” writes 3,005 words. Day #9 sees his greatest output: 9,373 words.)

In the second third of the book, he writes a book in seven days (a short novel of about 43,050 words), starting with a goal of hitting 3,000 words on Day 1, and adding 1,000 words each day after that. On the 7th day, he must hit 9,000 words. He “only” hits 7,000, but by then the story has neatly concluded.

In the last third of Waltese Falcon, Mr. Smith takes a vacation to hang with his poker buddies in Vegas, and manages to write yet another short novel (37,100 words) in five days. He doesn’t own a laptop, so he humorously seats-belts his giant iMac to the back seat of his Caddy, cushioning it with pillows, and barrels off to Sin City.

You might quibble with the lengths of the last two books, but he explains that he is a devotee of the great writers of the pulp fiction era, whose novels typically clocked in under 50,000 words. He argues that publishers in the modern era began contracting longer books from writers so they could charge more for them.

More significantly, he loves challenging himself to write at speed. He never plots anything in advance—not even the ghostwriting project—choosing to “write into the dark” each time. (During the writing of the ghostwriting project, he laments not knowing where this “stupid” book is going.) But each time he figures out the plot points and wraps each of these stories to his satisfaction.

He’s proud of the seven-day book because he had just turned 65 years old at the time, and was frankly wondering if he was too old to pull off an “add-1,000-words-each-day” challenge. He clearly wasn’t.

What made the biggest impression on me as a reader and writer is how much other work he accomplishes in his regular work days. He takes careful notes of all his activity, and shares his daily schedule with us. He usually wakes at noon, checks in at the offices of his publishing business—then located on the Oregon coast—and does all the things the head of a small firm usually does. Bank runs, dealing with movers, buying office furniture, keeping up with emails and bills. (I believe that during this period he may have also owned and operated other businesses in town, such as a collectibles shop.) So that work also consumes his time. And of course he’s hanging with his wife and pets, enjoying decent lunches and dinners with Rusch and friends, and watching a whole lot of television.

Usually he gets to his writing computer about 6 p.m. and writes in bursts of 50-minute sessions into the wee hours of the morning. He estimates that he required 42 such sessions to write the 43,000-word book. “In other words,” he quips, “I typed at the blazing speed of 20.5 words per minute.”

This impressed me because like everyone on the planet, I feel that I constantly have more on my plate than I can handle. When I am feeling stressed, the first thing to go out the window is my current creative goal.

Not my writing partner, but tasked with the job
 of decimating my spinach.

Mr. Smith has a full day of work at the day job(s), but still manages to write prodigiously in his creative work. The delightful conceit of all of this is that while he is writing each of these novels, he is also blogging about and writing the larger nonfiction book that details their creation.

Which of course sent me down memory lane. Back in 2011, Denise and I signed a contract to ghost-write the memoir of a man who was big in the world of pugilism. The manly art, as history so describes it.

At the time we signed, I was busy working on another ghostwriting project. Denise had finished the research and was drafting the book that would become The Girls of Atomic City. We did not have time to write the fight book just yet, but we did have time to schedule regular phone interviews with our client. This we did, once or twice a week, dutifully recording each call using the audio-record function that was a nice feature of old versions of MS Word.

Cut to February 2012. Both Denise and I had sent our manuscripts to our respective editors. Submission usually means that we have about a month to fritter away while the editors read the MS and write their editorial letters.

Great, I thought. Now we can finally put our heads together and write this damn fight book!

Not so fast. At the last minute, our agent poached Denise to ghost-write yet another memoir for a veteran Hollywood actress. The contract had been signed months ago, but the first writer bailed and left behind little copy that was usable. “I’m begging,” the agent said, and how often does that ever happen?

The money was good, and we knew what would happen.

Denise flew to Los Angeles the next day, planning to spend four weeks in the guest cottage behind the actress’s home and conduct daily interviews with her. I would write the fight manuscript, due in a month.

There are two things in the world I know nothing about: music and sports. But I am a Paganini and Gehrig in those domains compared to my knowledge of punching big men repeatedly in the face. Not to worry: Everything I needed was contained in 20 to 25 audio recordings, and my crappy handwritten notes. Or so I hoped.

Every day I stationed myself in front of the computer from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. I took breaks and ate decently, but not as well as I probably should have. The problem with journalistic nonfiction is that you can barely write a paragraph or even a sentence without checking your facts. I sprinkled a ton of TKs in the text as I went, jotting down questions, and researching on the web during my breaks.

At night after I wolfed down dinner, I sat in the living room and listened to our audio recordings. Transcribing them faithfully would take far too much time, so I did the next best thing: I took short notes as I listened, marking the timestamps so I could go back and listen during my writing sessions if I needed to check facts or get the client’s exact phrasing correctly. I nearly wept when I discovered that one of those files was corrupted!

But I pushed on. Those nighttime sessions with the audio files usually took me close to midnight. I crashed into bed each night, and did it all over the next day.

Keeping track along the way.

I do not regard what I’m telling you as something to brag about, by the way. Each time I have told this story, I always say that it was like waiting too long to research a college term paper and then trying to cram it all in one night. Not good.

The thing is, it worked! Averaging 5,700 words a day, I had 40,000 words by the end of the first week. I was frankly astonished that it could be done. I was sure that I’d made mistakes, misspelled the names of the client’s colleagues, or screwed up his family chronology. Nervously, I hit pause on the writing for two days to reread and proof everything. The client was ecstatic to get the first half of his book, and within a few days, responded to all my queries. Those answers added about 4,000 words to the manuscript before the end of the second week.

By the time he was due to fly to Asia on the Thursday of the second week, he had a first draft as it stood, at 70,083 words. (I have no doubt that he told everyone on that flight—in a private jet?—that they really ought to keep the noise down because he was, ahem, busy Reading His Future Upcoming Bestselling Book. Fifty percent of the clients I get are like that.)

After I hit that 70K, I relaxed, for two reasons. One: I knew from past experience that clients always add more to a book when they read. And two, I also know that publishing contracts allow for a variance of 10 percent up or down. The contract asked for an 80,000-word book, but the editors would accept 72,000. The client could cough, and we’d hit 2,000 words more.

I really only had to write that first 70,000 to prime the pump. When the client read the manuscript, he was inspired to riff on topics that we had never touched upon. Before he was back in the states, he was firing off long emails expanding on anecdotes in the book. 

When he got back, he overnighted a pencil edit with still more recollections. We easily met the deadline at the end of the month with 78,393 words. The biggest chunk, that 70,000, was largely written over a 14-day period of time, with one day and a morning off to proof. 

Still, that’s about 5,800 words a day for me.

The biggest pain point for me were those damn audio files. Call me crazy, folks, but since 2012, has technology changed significantly, or what?

Today you can easily upload an audio file and have an instant transcript. At no time in my journalism career has that been possible until the last couple of years. You either laboriously transcribed audio yourself, or you paid someone else to do it. I could never afford hiring out. The rates were exorbitant because such services were aimed at the physician dictation market.

But you know what’s funny? A dead, lifeless transcript could possibly have meant more work for me. The key to the project was reliving our conversations each night before bed. When the client got stubborn about sharing his vulnerabilities, I could hear one of us—usually Denise—pushing him, saying that if he wanted people to understand what he had gone through in his life, he had to be honest.

I heard his voice crack a few times, but he always came clean. And I swear, I felt that as I wrote it. To this day, the reviews he gets for that book online all reference the sensitive side of his character that so few people knew existed.

That was my only experience with writing at speed. But the Waltese Falcon experiments got me thinking I should try something similar again. I’m 15,000 words into a nonfiction project that I’ve wanted to do for a long while. Currently, my average daily output is only about 3,000 words, but I’m not beating myself up. In summer, after all, I am apparently only a part-time writer yet a full-time farmer. But I want to get this done before I go on the road again for Denise’s book tour.

When the nonfiction speed test is over, I hope to try a fiction project. I’ll let you know how it goes. 

I will leave you with one last scene that made me laugh. On one of those nights in a casino in Vegas, Mr. Smith and his buddies encounter two very drunk girls who ask what they do for a living. He responds:

“I sit alone in a room and make shit up.”

* * *

* Writing with the Waltese Falcon has since been revised slightly and re-released as three titles: Writing a Novel in 10 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in 7 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in Five Days 2026 While Traveling.

Two fun pieces of news:

* Since I saw you last, a country western star released a single entitled Girls of Atomic City, inspired by Denise’s book. Did not know this was happening until a friend sent us the press release.

* Denise’s book, Obstinate Daughters, is now a National Bestseller.

Talk to you soon!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Hammett in Celuloid

Readers of this blog may well recall that, like many of denizen of the SleuthSayers rotation (Eve Fisher, Rob Lopresti, Joseph S. Walker, Art Taylor, just to name a few), I am a long-time member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. And since our writing ideas can come from just about anywhere, it should come as no surprise to the savvy crew who constitute the Sleuthsayers readership that I get some of my best writing ideas from the SMFS email list.

Today's blog entry represents one of those times.

A thread about stories with great final lines begun, I think, by our own Rob Lopresti, morphed into another SMFSer (Bobbi Chukran) weighing in about finding a TV adaptation of Hammett's novel The Dain Curse available on both Amazon Prime TV and in abbreviated form on YouTube.

Yeah, this was NOT good.

As an unapologetic fanboy of the works of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, I am, of course, familiar with The Dain Curse (far and away the consensus choice among Hammett fans as his worst novel. I recently re-read it, and was reminded all over again how inferior it was to the rest of Hammett's canon. Of course, when you're comparing any novel to the likes of Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass Key, odds are it will definitely tend to suffer by comparison.), and with the 1970s James Coburn fronted TV project referred to above.

And it got me thinking.

Linking to any number of existing Hammett adaptations which have made it to the big or small screen might be a helpful guide for our readers who enjoy films based on great (or in the case of The Dain Curse, not-so-great) crime fiction.

I mean, the nameless Continental Op acquires a name, and that name is "Hamilton Nash." Not even a tough guy like James Coburn could do much saddled with a mouthful like that.

Well look no further! Full disclosure, there is a lot to this subject, so I will be breaking my post on it up into two entries. 

The Adaptations

Every one of Hammett's five novels has been made into a movie (or in the case of The Dain Curse, a three-hour miniseries, I think? I was twelve the first time I watched it, back in the '70s) at least once. And that makes sense. After all, with every one of his novels, Hammett practically invented a subgenre of the crime fiction milieu: 

Red Harvest: The "Town Tamer" novel.

The Dain Curse: The "Psychological Suspense" novel.

The Glass Key: The "Machine Politics/Public Corruption" novel.

The Maltese Falcon: The "First True P.I." novel (Carrol John Daly fans be damned!).

The Thin Man: The "Crime Novel as Comedy of Manners."

But what about Hammett's short stories?

Hammett cut his teeth writing short stories in an age (the 1920s) where periodicals were constantly on the look-out for content and actually paid well (Ah, the Good Old Days!), and he quickly distinguished himself as a master of the form. Stories such as "The Tenth Clew," "The Gutting of Couffignal," "The House in Turk Street," and its sort-of sequel, "The Girl With the Silver Eyes," "The Scorched Face," and "Dead Yellow Women" made both a name and fair amount of money for Hammett before he turned his hand to writing novels full-time.

And one of his absolute best stories, "Flypaper," was actually made into an episode of a SHOWTIME anthology series of noir stories entitled, "Fallen Angels" in 1994. Christopher Lloyd starred as Hammett's famous nameless detective "The Continental Op" (an "operative" for the "Continental Detective Agency," a thinly-veiled fictional version of the Pinkerton Agency Hammett himself had worked for). The supporting cast is great, too: Michael Rooker, Peter Berg (before he gave up acting for directing) and the always wonderful Laura San Giacomo.

The best part? You can watch all 29 minutes of it here, for free, on YouTube. And it is well worth your time!

Okay, now for the novels!

First there's Red Harvest, Hammett's first novel, serialized in Black Mask magazine as four related novelettes before its publication in 1929.

There are several terrific adaptations of this novel, none of them under its actual name, although the incomparable Megan Abbott is reportedly working on a screenplay for a new adaptation with Scott Frank (responsible for a lot of great stuff coming out of Hollywood, not least the script for the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight  and the terrific Monsieur Spade). You can read more about their collaboration here.

The first of these is Akira Kurosawa's 1961 masterpiece: Yojimbo. It stars Toshiro Mifune as a masterless samurai in Medieval Japan, and follows the central premise of Hammett's novel (the Continental Op subverting expectations and manipulating competing factions in the town he's just arrived in, setting them up to take each other out). You can watch it here. It is well worth your time!

Up next is Sergio Leone's 1964 spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars, shot in Spain, with a largely Italian cast, it made Clint Eastwood a star (Leone is reported to have said of Eastwood's acting, "He has two expressions: 'hat on,' and 'hat off.'" That tracks.). It's nothing short of a shot-for-shot remake of Yojimbo. So not a direct adaptation of Red Harvest, but rather an outright theft of Kurosawa's adaptation. Kurosawa himself said in a letter to Leone not long after the film's release: ‘I’ve seen your movie. It’s a very good movie. Unfortunately, it’s my movie.'"

Did he really NEED to act?

Still an enjoyable movie. And you can, of course, catch it from any number of streaming services, including here.

Nearly forgotten these days is the great Walter Hill's take on the Hammett novel: 1996's Last Man Standing, starring Bruce Willis. It gives Kurosawa a writing credit, and yet is set in the same period as Hammett's book (the 1920s), with the location is moved from the frontier mining towns of Montana to the Texas Borderlands. Willis does a great job, it's full of action, and features solid performances all around, especially from Christopher Walken as the film's Big Bad. And he is (unsurprisingly) scary. You can find it lots of places, especially here.

It's Walter Hill, and it's Bruce Willis and it's Christopher Walken (And did I mention William Sanderson and Bruce Dern, too?), so it is also well worth your time!

And the final entry for this week's post is an early '80s entry very much in the vein of the aforementioned Monsieur Spade. A fictional take on the life of Hammett during the early years of his writing career, it's titled simply Hammett. Directed by Wim Wenders and the immortal Francis Ford Coppola from a script written in part by mystery writer and Hammett Scholar Joe Gores! Furthermore, it features the always watchable Frederick Forrest (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Hammett) in the title role.

The resemblance really is uncanny.

As if this wasn't enough, this film features the great Peter Boyle as the detective Hammett used as the inspiration for the Continental Op. Boyle is, as always, fantastic. As is Marilu Henner as Hammett's "inspirational" librarian neighbor. Fans of Hammett's work will find all manner of easter eggs in this one.

Definitely worth your time!

And the best part? It's available for free on YouTube. You can watch it here!

That's it for me this go-round. Next time we'll finish walking through the film adaptations of Hammett's work. See you in two weeks!

The Man, The Myth, The Trickster

 The regular readers of my blog entries (both of you) will not be surprised that my wife and I went to see Christopher Nolan's new film The Odyssey the first day it was available. We are achraeology and mythology buffs.

Short review: Not a masterpiece but not an embarrassment. To paraphrase Lincoln's book review, people who enjoy this type of film will definitely enjoy this one.

But what I want to discuss here is how, inevitably, Nolan had to make this 3,000-year-old character more palatable for a modern audience. Because Homer's Odysseus is a long way from what we would call a hero.

The very first sentence of the poem describes him with a word translators have been struggling with ever since. "A man of twists and turns." "A man skilled in all ways of contending." "That ingenious hero." "The crafty man." "The Shifty."

Emily Wilson translates it as "a complicated man," and she is worth noting because her 2012 version is the most popular these days (Nolan mentioned it in interviews) and has sold more than a walloping million copies this year alone.  I imagine Christopher Nolan is on her Christmas (or Saturnalia) card list.

So Odysseus is not just smart but tricky.  He lies, he cons, he gloats about it, and Homer expects us to admire him for it. This doesn't fit our idea of a hero these  days, so Nolan burdened the big O. with a guilty, post-traumatic conscience.  Sure, the guy dreamed up ther Trojan horse, leading to the destruction of the city and the slaughter of men, women, and children, but doggone, he feels awful about it.  In fact, you could argue that except for the phony horsey his wife Penelope does more tricking in the movie than her husband.

But tricksters were held in high regard in those cultures. I think one of the more interesting examples is Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish general during the Jewish War against the Romans.  He was part of a group of seventy soldiers who, trapped by the enemy, decided to commit mass suicide, killing each other,  rather than surrender.  When only two were left Josephus and the other survivor promptly surrendered.  

How do we know about this dastardly deed?  Because he bragged about it in his book The Jewish War, written while he was a guest of Vespasian who he had correctly predicted would become emperor.  He knew his Roman readers would appreciate his cleverness, rather condemn his treachery.

Folk tales are full of tricksters, especially admiring those who outsmart stronger enemies: Aesops's fox, Anansi, Brer Rabbit, Loki, Puss and Boots, Jacob.

Actual armor from Odysseus's age

I've been trying to think of good examples from mystery fiction.  Sherlock Holmes, multiple disguises and all, seems too straight-forward to qualify.  Nero Wolfe? Perry Mason?  Possibly.  

Jackson Lamb?  Absotively.

I want to leave you with one anecdote from the Odyssey which didn't make it into the movie, not quite having that heroic vibe.

In Book Nine (where Wilson has Homer describing our guy as "the lord of liars") he talks about his ships arriving in the land of a people called the Cicones. Odysseus and his men sack the city, killing most of the men and taking the women as slaves.

But then, wouldn't you know it? The Cicones called on their allies and attack, killing many of Odysseus's men.  "Poor us!" Wilson's O. laments.

Imagine the unfairness of it.  You declare an enemy's ability to conduct war has been obliterated and they keep fighting back.

Thank the gods that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.

Dicing a Potato

     The July/August issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine contains my story, "Potatoes Au Rotten." I am always thrilled to learn that one of my tales is appearing in the magazine. Their website says that they've changed print services due to a variety of issues. If you receive a hard copy of the magazine, I hope you get it soon. 

    I'll gratefully wait. As hinted by the title, the story features a reappearance of a series character. He is a private investigator who moonlights as a marketing rep for the Potato Advisory Board. The details of this employment arrangement were explored in some of the early stories, but the short answer is that, unlike his PI clients, the Board's checks always cash, and the corporate job offers better dental insurance. The principal character is forever known simply as the "Spud Stud." With "Potatoes Au Rotten," the kind folks at Hitchcock have published six Spud Stud stories. 

    The email from Hitchcock notifying me of publication got me thinking about the elements that make a good mystery series character. Perhaps I should have thought about the question sooner, but it wouldn't be the first time that I was late to the party. 

    Researching the question proved harder than I thought. I couldn't find a definitive article on the subject, so I compiled the following list gleaned from several sources. As I began the catalog, I immediately started grading my protagonist on a 1-4 scale. (On my phone, I have a potato emoji that looked pretty cool for this analysis. Alas, I couldn't figure out how to move the graphic to the Sleuthsayers blog.) 

Minimal Backstory (2)

    The sources suggest that a good series character needs an easily explainable premise. The character should be capable of being described in a sentence or two. An abbreviated backstory fits the limited space of a short story. 

    The PI/Potato Pitchman requires a few sentences to explain. The set-up takes a bit. I've scored him a 2 on this one. 

A Flexible Social Circle (4)

    For a series to succeed, the sleuth has to encounter a variety of different people presenting an array of problems. 

    After a slow start, the Spud Stud bounces back. He works with food products. Everyone eats. He can meet anyone in the potato retail business. Over the course of the series, he's dealt with grocery store employees, P-listers on the glamorous potato social circuit, and corporate bigwigs. This category earns him a 4. 

A Strong Central Theme (2)

    The Spud's investigations bring order to chaos. He seeks to find truth, bringing him into conflict with those who want to keep it hidden. I want to give my Potato Palladin strong marks on this one, except that these elements are hallmarks of mystery fiction. I've settled on a 2. 

A Baked-in Reason to Encounter Crime (1)

    Successful series characters have a reason why people come to them with their investigative needs. Usually, it's occupation. The Spud Stud is a PI. But the cases in the published stories all arise out of his work as a marketer. Neither the profession nor the location offers a natural locus for crime, so I've scored him a 1. But see the Social Circle thoughts above. Everyone, sooner or later, comes to a grocery store to buy food. Any place people gather, and money is exchanged, offers an opportunity for misdeeds. Perhaps the grocery store as a den of iniquity is under-appreciated. 

A Quirk that Advances Plot (2)

    We all read them. The characters with eidetic memories or super sensitive noses. They draw us in if only to see how the special skill will resolve the current mystery. The Spud is fully versed in the potato varietals sold on the American market. He knows his way around a grocery store. These tidbits of arcane knowledge come in handy, but maybe they're not as cool as knowing the batting average of every baseball card ever read. The Spud Stud scored a 2 here. 

A Distinctive Voice (4)

    The unique way a character expresses himself, shaped by his experiences and personality. The character's voice makes them instantly recognizable. 

    With no false modesty, allow me to state that the Spud Stud may be the leading mystery-solving, potato marketing representative in American short fiction today. The unique position sets him apart from all the world-weary cops and chocolate shop operating librarians who occasionally trip over bodies. His voice is his own. I've given him a 4. 

Conclusion

    The Spud Stud delivered a mixed score. The categories, though, may be useful not only for evaluating my character, but also for thinking about building your own. Constructing a character to carry across several stories means creating someone easy to explain, quick to place at the scene of a crime, and compelling enough to grab a reader's attention. 

    Anything else I should have added to the list? 

Bonus

    Writers often get asked about their sources of inspiration. This story has its roots in an old New Yorker magazine article about Taco Bell's test kitchen. The fast-food chain is not having the best month. This tidbit may help the CEO feel better. 

Until next time

Real live Death

           Having just posted an appreciation of Agatha Christie and her flavor of classic cozies, I want to stumble back into the world of the hardboiled, with a five o’clock shadow, a stiff bourbon and a dame in the waiting room. 

I’m prompted by death.

            I noticed on several re-reads of Agatha Christie and similar authors, that side from all the other signposts of what I’d call classic mysteries, the works have an odd relationship with the matter of death, an event usually at the centerpiece of the action.  Often a number of

events, since there’s usually a pretty high body count, with members of the cast dropping like flies throughout the proceedings, closing out chapters and twisting plots into pretzels.  What struck me, was that in the standard British model, there’s remarkably little grief and anguish at each passing, even when the departed is a fiancé, brother-in-law or lifelong friend (though never a cat, as we all know). 

            “I’m sorry to inform you, Lady Cavendish, but your husband has just been discovered with a ceremonial Khurkuri sword protruding from his chest.”

            “Oh, dear.  And I just served him breakfast not an hour ago.”

            Being mostly of British heritage myself, I understand personal restraint, especially in matters of life and death.  With the balance of my cultural foundations apparently German with a dash of Scandinavian, I'm used to family members who've married one of us murmuring, "You stoic Knopfs."  But I think there's more to it when contemplating the Agatha worldview.

           I suppose it's a necessary sanitization meant to maintain a lightness of narrative, minimizing the emotional encumbrances.  It provides plenty of room for comic interludes, tours around dilapidated English country estates and brisk, lighthearted dialogue.  I like all these things, especially the absence of existential despair.  If I want brooding over the inconsequentiality of human life in the face of an indifferent and unforgiving universe, I know where to look.  And since my books are firmly in the hardboiled camp, I can write it myself.

            But still, it’s hard for me to suspend the belief that violent death is more than an important plot element.  I also prefer a certain economy in the number of murders that follow in quick succession, especially when our protagonists are fully engaged in their investigations.  Most murderers like to space these things out, or at least pick a nice quiet moment when he or she doesn’t have to shed bloody clothes and navigate various corridors and secret doorways in time for the first toast of an elaborate dinner party. 

            Holmes, Poirot and Nero Wolf aren’t immune to the human consequences of the deadly puzzles they solve, yet we have little access to their deeper personal examinations.  Not so with Spade, Marlow or Lew Archer.  These guys are nothing if not tortured by the moral and metaphysical implications of every untimely, tragic demise.  They aren’t yapping about it with every piece of dialogue, but you know it’s what’s driving their actions and defining the purpose of their quests.  And unlike their classic cousins, they express little in the way of intellectual arrogance, since the puzzle isn’t the point.  They have their clever insights, but mostly solve their cases though dogged determination and self-sacrifice, often losing a few teeth and much of the promised compensation in the process.

             This is what I think Chandler was mostly getting at in his essay, The Simple Art of Murder.  We’ve come a long way since he made his argument, and the culture is well-schooled in the ugly alleys and byways of realism and moral ambiguity. What goes on under flickering streetlights and on dusty, impoverished back roads has become mainstream.  Meanwhile, the classic mystery is living in comfortable retirement, well financed by annuities and fresh income from a steady production of successful cozies and less philosophically demanding fare.

            What unites the hardboiled and cozy worlds is a satisfactory conclusion.  The books open with a disordering of the universe through some wretched, anti-social deed.   It’s evil rising from the depths, chaos threatening the fragile equilibrium.  The puzzle-solvers and dark angels are called upon to put things back into balance, to cleanse the collective of foul corruption and treacherous instability.

            These are satisfying destinations, but how you want to get there is a matter of taste.  Sometimes you want Spielberg with a side of Frank Capra, sometimes full-on Scorsese.  It’s all fine with me.

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

For a little over a year, I've been attending the monthly meetings of a mystery book club at my local independent bookstore. It's been a lot of fun, particularly since they tend to choose books that don't quite match my normal reading tastes, with a strong emphasis on recent cozies and domestic thrillers. It's always good to read outside your comfort zone.

This month, though, the club made one of its periodic forays into classic territory, with Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train. Several members, it turned out, are Christie enthusiasts who have read all her works, often more than once, while others were encountering her for the first time. This led the group to consider an interesting question: what book did the hardcore Christie fans think would make the best introduction to her work for a new reader?

I immediately thought this would make good fodder for a SleuthSayers column. Considering some of my own favorite writers and series characters, what one book would I choose for a new reader, and why? What story would best capture what I loved about that author, and be most likely to bring the newbie back for more? 

So here's how I'd answer the question for ten (or nine, depending on how you count) members of my personal pantheon. 

REX STOUT: I've written before about my love for Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, and the Manhattan brownstone they call home. This is definitely a series where I wouldn't give a new reader book #1 to start with. Fer-de-Lance is a fine novel, and Wolfe himself is already there almost complete, but I don't think Stout had yet refined Archie's voice. Given how important the brownstone is to what I find most appealing about the books, I'd also eliminate the entries where Wolfe ventures out into the wider world, though some of those (Some Buried Caesar, Too Many Cooks) are excellent. Ultimately, my choice would be And Be A Villain, in which a man is murdered during a live radio broadcast. Wolfe and Archie are at their sharpest, the key supporting characters are present in fine form, and the mystery itself is satisfyingly complex, with a surprising resolution. Some would object to this choice on the basis that the novel is the beginning of the "Zeck trilogy," introducing the only recurring villain in the Wolfe stories, but I think the book stands up fine on its own.

AGATHA CHRISTIE: It means forgoing the pleasures of Poirot, but in my view there's no finer way to meet Dame Agatha than And Then There Were None (hey, are all my choices going to start with "and"?). What's not to love? A fiendishly clever plot with plenty of inventive twists, an incredible setting, a cast of memorably nasty characters--everything great about Christie is on full view here, including the darkly cynical tone that gives her work such lasting depth. The atmosphere in this one is anything but cozy, and there's a reason writers are still ripping this premise off after almost a century. Now, if you must have Poirot and his little gray cells? It may be too easy an answer, but I'd have to go with Murder on the Orient Express. (If you must have Miss Marple, you must ask someone else, as the character's never done much for me.)

ROBERT B. PARKER: I've also written before about how formative the Spenser novels were for me when I began reading adult crime fiction. I still relish them, but there are particular challenges in introducing them to a new reader. The first Spenser, The Godwulf Manuscript, isn't much more than a Chandler pastiche, with little indication of what would later make the character distinctive. The second, God Save the Child, introduces Susan Silverman, but is one of several early books in the series with gender politics that have aged very poorly. The book I've reread most often, A Catskill Eagle, relies heavily on the reader's prior knowledge of Spenser and Susan's relationship. So my recommendation for the reader new to Spenser is The Judas Goat, in which our man goes to Europe to track down a group of terrorists. The case is fast-paced and exciting, and Spenser is formidable without yet being the invincible superman he'd be in the later books. The climatic showdown, at the 1980 Montreal Olympics, is a terrific action sequence. Most importantly, the book has the lively, funny interactions between Spenser and Hawk that are usually the highlights of any Spenser outing.

RICHARD STARK: Once again, I've written before of my devotion to Stark's novels about the coldly efficient professional thief Parker, for my money the best series of crime novels ever written. They're all great, but I think one perfect entry point is The Score, in which Parker joins a gang with a seemingly foolproof plan to rob every business in a small mining town in a single night. As always, things go wrong, and the pleasure comes from watching Parker scramble to deal with the multiple complications and still walk away with the loot. In addition to the novel, the comic book adaptation by the late, great Darwyn Cooke is most definitely worth seeking out.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Stark, of course, was a penname of Westlake's. While Stark's Parker novels are the best straight crime books ever written, Westlake used his own name on the Dortmunder series, about a thief cursed with the worst luck of anyone in the genre, and darned if they're not, by a mile, the best comic crime capers. It's kind of not fair that one guy should be so damn good at both. I think most Dortmunder fans would recommend new readers simply start with the first book, The Hot Rock, but I'd actually go with a much later entry, Drowned Hopes. Here, an ex-con recruits Dortmunder and his regular crew of misfits to help with an unusual problem: the town where he buried his loot is now underwater, thanks to a dam built while he was in prison. Worth the price of admission just for the scene where Dortmunder tries scuba diving. For bonus points, the novel also includes an unusual crossover: in one chapter, the characters from Joe Gores's DKA series make an appearance. Gores and Westlake cowrote the chapter, which also appears in the DKA novel 32 Cadillacs. So this book can actually introduce you to two top-tier crime series!

JOHN D. MACDONALD: Just as Hawk is vital to the best entries in the Spenser series, so the most memorable books about Travis McGee, MacDonald's "salvage consultant" hero, tend to be the ones with the most involvement from Meyer, the philosophically inclined economist who serves as McGee's unlikely best friend. So while it might seem perverse to choose the next-to-last novel in the series as an entry point, I'd still go with Cinnamon Skin, in which Meyer is central to the plot and present in almost every scene. When Meyer's beloved niece and her new husband are killed in a boat explosion, he and McGee set off on a cross-country quest to find and punish the guilty party. There's some great detective work in this one, and a memorably cold-blooded bad guy. Of course, the McGee books are only a fraction of the work put out by the highly prolific MacDonald. For a non-series taste, try The Executioners, which has been the basis of three (increasingly unfaithful) filmed versions under the title Cape Fear.

ED MCBAIN: Choosing a starting point for the 87th Precinct novels is just about impossible, partly because of the sheer scope of the series (55 novels over fifty years!), partly because it features a sprawling ensemble cast instead of a single hero. There are a few plot threads which run through several novels--Detective Steve Carella's relationship with his wife, the recurring villain The Deaf Man--but by and large you can read the series in pretty much any order. It's been persuasively argued that the books really constitute a single long novel, one of the greatest ever written about New York City (thinly fictionalized as Isola in McBain's universe). McBain didn't invent the police procedural, but the 87th Precinct is surely the grandest incarnation of the form in mystery fiction. Forced to choose an introduction, I might go with Eight Black Horses, in which the Deaf Man returns to exact revenge. It's got a clever plot and shows the main characters at their most human--but I might be choosing it just because it's one of the ones I've most recently reread.

LAWRENCE BLOCK: Two of the greatest figures in the history of the American PI were introduced in the 1970s. Robert B. Parker's Spenser is the paragon: well-read, absolutely committed to an admirable code of honor, a superb cook, irresistible to women, and very nearly undefeatable with either a gun or his fists. As much as I love Parker's writing, by the last third or so of the series, Spenser had become essentially superhuman, impervious even to aging, and the endless scenes of him and Susan congratulating each other on the perfection of their relationship had gotten a little old. Spenser's contemporary, Block's Matt Scudder, is a much different, and ultimately much more human and thus more compelling, character. Scudder tries to do the right thing, but he's deeply flawed, most notably by his alcoholism, which remains a central theme of the series even after he joins AA and sobers up. You could start the series from the beginning, but to jump in at a point where Block has fully mastered Scudder's voice and world, go with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a flashback novel set during Scudder's drinking days that features a compelling plot and one of the all-time great titles.

SUE GRAFTON: Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. There's no doubt that Grafton got better with experience, but there's also no doubt that her "alphabet" series about California PI Kinsey Milhone was strong from the start. Watching Milhone's character develop over the course of the series is one of its main pleasures, and best appreciated if you're with her from the start of her journey: "A" is for Alibi. It's not a perfect book (you'll see the end coming a mile away), but it will make you eager to spend more time with the character. It remains a tragedy that the series never reached Z. 

STUART M. KAMINSKY: The (IMHO) underappreciated Kaminsky had several series characters, including Florida process server Lew Fonesca, Chicago cop Abe Leiberman, and Moscow inspector Porfiry Rostnikov. I frequently return to them all with pleasure, but my favorite is Toby Peters, a down-on-his luck PI working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. Peters works for a different celebrity in every book, and Kaminsky, an accomplished film scholar in his professional life, fleshes out the stories with rich detail about the period and the biographies of the real-life figures Peters encounters. As in all of Kaminsky's series, there's an expansive and highly entertaining cast of supporting characters and an engaging combination of melancholy and humor. Mostly because it's where I started, I'd direct new readers to the second Peters entry, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.

Agree? Disagree? Who are your favorites, and what do you think would make the most effective starting points for readers new to them?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Edited by Adam Meyer, In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Genesis came out from Down & Out Books last year, shortly before that publisher went, well, down and out. As a result, the book never got the attention it deserved. I'm delighted that, earlier this month, a new edition of the book was published by Audecyn Books, and is now available in both print and electronic editions. It's a great set of crime stories, including contributions from my fellow SleuthSayers Stacy Woodson, Michael Bracken, and Barb Goffman. My story, "Just a Job to Do," is about a bodyguard, assigned to a mobster's wife, who develops her own ideas about what protection really means. Don't miss your second chance at this one!