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.

Write What You Know...at Least a Bit

 

If you've been published by The Saturday Evening Post's "New Fiction Friday," you know those stories get a lot of attention. My own On Blackpoint Road made enough of a ripple that I was asked to try turning it into a screenplay. A friend and sometime client who has done well in the film biz generously offered to read my first draft, and I eagerly agreed.

I had in mind Josh Brolin and Robin Wright to play the couple on the big screen, or maybe Michael McGrady and Julia Roberts. The main characters in On Blackpoint Road, a middle-aged couple, are white because…well, because I'm white, I guess. As are, according to the latest UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, about 90 percent of working film and TV writers.

As it turned out, my colleague liked the script, more or less, but objected strongly to my having described various supporting characters as African-American or Black, when they might have been of any race with little impact on the plot.   

I had done this purposefully. It's my idea that film and television writers - whatever their ethnicity - can help ensure that actors of color get cast in their works by specifically writing into the script that this is "a Black cop," "a tall brown-skinned teacher," "An Asian ballet dancer," and so forth, even when race is not integral to the plot. This is necessary because white, in most cases, is the default. If the writer of a script is white, and the main characters are white, most of the cast is going to be white, too, unless someone makes an effort to deem otherwise. So why not me?

But my friend said that for me to specify the race of any character unnecessarily is a kind of cultural appropriation at best, and racist at worst. That doesn't make sense to me. Why should I trust that filmmakers will diversely cast the supporting roles or bit parts in my script? Can't I help that process along by describing some of the characters as I'd like to see them?  

But he's the film guy, not me. Maybe he's right.

The main character in my "librarian on the run" series is white, like me. She's thirty-something, as I once was, and she's similar to me in many regards - social class, educational level, general snarkiness, and so on. But the stories are populated by a diversity of characters - Lori's best friends, Marta and Tony, are Mexican-American. He is from a middle-class suburban background, and she is from the hard streets of East L.A. They are like me in that they are warm, funny, reasonably intelligent, and hard-working. They are parents, as am I. They pay taxes and drink beer. Sames. They're also unlike me in many regards. Tony is a man, and a police detective. I've never been either of those things. He's fully bilingual, whereas I speak English pretty well and am permanently stalled at "beginner" in Spanish and French. Tony and Marta own a home in an upscale section of Los Angeles, and I never will. Does that make me unqualified to give Tony a supporting role in many of my stories?

Lori solves murders. The corpses,  survivors, and villains have been male and female, young and old, Black, mixed-race, Latino, Asian, and white. I'm not a criminal, but many of my characters are. I'm not gay, or Christian, or (very) elderly, or disabled, or rich, or poor. But many of my characters are. I'm not a child, though I once was, and I write about children and teenagers often. 

So what about my friend's idea that race should not be specified unless it's integral to the plot? I think that's nonsense. Every story that includes a Black character does not have to have racism, or even race, as its primary focus, though if you're writing realistically, that evil may not be far beneath the surface. In my story The Longest Pleasure, Lori (here known as Cam Baker) is stunned when Matt Larkin explains his wife's feelings about their son's girlfriend:

"Look, she was a nice enough girl, just maybe not wife material. She

 frequently had dirt beneath her nails and her hair made Nancy crazy,

 bushy and wild and half the time clearly uncombed.” He met my eyes

 and lowered his voice. “Her race didn’t help.” 

Larkin thinks he's exposing his wife's inner thoughts, but his own are on clear display. Race is not the issue here - the fact that Nancy Larkin murdered the girl is. In fact both Nancy and Tom would probably be horrified to find themselves characterized as racists. So their prejudice, while not integral to the plot, fleshes out their characters and makes them believable. 

Similarly, in What the Morning Never Suspected, Cam is helping her client's daughter plan a wedding.  The "maid" of honor is the bride's best friend - a gay man. This detail is completely nonessential to the plot. Its purpose is to make the bride real and quirky and likable, before we learn that, oh, yeah, unfortunately she may be a killer. When the killers are exposed, Cam takes a minute to feel sorry, not just for the victim, but for Mikey, who will never get to strut down the aisle with his bouquet of tulips and baby's breath. I don't need to be gay, or male - or even to have been a bridesmaid - to include Mikey in my story. He's real to me, more than a caricature,  and I hope he comes across that way to the reader, too.

I wouldn't set a story in Paris because I don't know the city well enough to do so without making a gaffe. But I spent a decade teaching in an international community where most of my students and colleagues were French nationals. So yes, I write stories that include French people as important characters, though never as the main character. I know enough to eschew the berets, striped mime shirts, and baguettes, to get my French slang checked by a native, and to keep the accents to a bare minimum. Ditto when Tony Morales exclaims in Spanish, or when Elmont Crawford, an important character in an upcoming librarian story, says "aight," or "This Delilah," omitting the linking verb "is." A very light hand is best when writing accents and dialects.

When the horror of Sandy Hook was still fresh in the news, I wrote a story from the point of view of a middle-aged woman teaching a three-year-old how to handle a gun. The genesis for They Look Like Angels was a prompt I use in my writing classes: write from the point of view of a character very unlike yourself. I'm a strong gun control advocate. I've spent too many "instructional" hours teaching kids what to do if our school is invaded by a homicidal monster. Little Marty's pistol-packin' granny is about as unlike me as one could be, despite our similarity of age, gender, and occupation. But something must have worked; Aimee Liu chose They Look Like Angels for the Orlando Prize offered by A Room of Her Own. The story was subsequently published in The Los Angeles Review and was included in an eponymous collection, which was a finalist for The Claymore Prize two years ago and will be published later this year.

It's my belief that we can - and should, and must - populate our work with characters who are unlike ourselves in many ways: in gender, or sexual orientation, or nationality, or race, or religion or politics or culture or…you get the idea. If we don't reach beyond our immediate scope to find commonality and a shared humanity, our stories cannot possibly reflect the real world - and the screenplays made from them are going to be as flat as pancakes, and a lot less palatable.

Anna Scotti's first collection, It's Not Even Past, went out of print with the recent closure of Down&Out Books. It will be available from a new publisher soon – but if you can't wait, contact the author via her website; she has a few copies available. Meanwhile, find Anna's short fiction in current and recent issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Chautauqua, and Black Cat Weekly.

 On Blackpoint Road - Scotti

They Look Like Angels - Scotti

What the Morning Never Suspected - Podmatic