The Footnote That Roared

 

I. THE EDITRESS

In 1828 the United States was 52 years old. The last living signer of the Declaration of Independence was in his nineties. Native Americans occupied vast tracts of the continent. Slavery was yet a scourge on the national character. The network of US railroads was its infancy. The west was wilder. Pioneers had yet to take their wagon trains west. Americans had not yet developed an insatiable taste for beef, which was good, because it was still too hard to transport beeves* to market. Americans couldn’t identify a cowboy because they wouldn’t have recognized that word. Morse Code and Time Zones hadn’t yet been invented. When you stepped off a stagecoach, steam boat, or packet boat in a new city, you had truly entered a new place and time.

The only thing that bound one American to another was a common language, a pair of holidays (Washington’s birthday and the Fourth of July), and the written word. There were a ton of newspapers and magazines. Political speeches and educational lectures were a form of entertainment. When a stranger landed in town, they were greeted first with suspicion and later valued for what news they brought of other places they’d been.

In 1828, a well-educated New Hampshire poet and novelist named Sarah Josepha Hale agreed to edit a lady’s magazine based in Boston. She would have loved to just write her own books and poetry, but her attorney husband had died suddenly, leaving her the sole support for the couple’s five children.

At the age of 40 Hale agreed to become the “editress”—her word—of the Ladies’ Magazine. When this magazine was later acquired by an enterprising publisher, Hale moved from Boston to Philadelphia—the epicenter of American publishing—to helm the larger, better-known Godey’s Lady’s Book. By the 1840s, the magazine had a circulation of 70,000—which was huge, even today. Under her guidance, the magazine’s circulation grew to 150,000, its peak.

The largest-circulation, most powerful voice in the nation was a magazine aimed at women.

The word editress conjures up images of mousy dames but Hale was no shrinking violet. She had stepped into the role she would play for the rest of her life, until she retired from the magazine business at the age of 89.

She was a tastemaker. A crusader. A cultural architect. She was, if you can picture it, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart at a time when there were no women celebrity media moguls. She cultivated and paid for the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Washington Irving. I am cherry-picking names modern readers would recognize. She published many other less-known writers who were able to support themselves financially on their writing. A first in American history.

All the women (and occasional men) in America who picked up her magazine were schooled by the various ideas she gently put forth. Hale spoke from the ink-stained pulpit of the American printing press.

Depending on your perspective, she was conservative…or just careful. She pooh-poohed the idea that women should have the vote, and she danced the tarantella around the slavery issue. She knew that other female editors had lost subscribers for taking abolitionist stances. Hale needed this job badly, so she walked a fine line that offended few.

She wrote a poem called “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which became the first text any American who plays music learns. Hale urged women to wear white on their wedding day. When Buckingham Palace erected a conifer indoors for the first time at Christmas, Hale urged her American readers to do the same. All three of these cultural markers are with us still.

When fundraising efforts for a proposed Bunker Hill monument stalled, she offered her services to the men supervising the effort. The gentlemen of Boston scoffed at the little lady. She asked her readers to send a few pennies to aid the effort. When readers sent in $3,000, hardly enough to finish the monument, Hale announced that she and her like-minded lady friends would organize a craft and bake sale in Boston.

The gentlemen tittered. 

When she raised $30,000 in seven days, the gentlemen choked on their brandy and cigars. The success of her effort attracted the interest of deep-pocketed donors, who chipped in, raising the amount to $50,000, about $1.8 million today. Needless to say, the gentlemen of Boston were delighted to accept the money.

When the home of George Washington had become too much of a burden for his heirs, she urged her readers once again to chip in so Mount Vernon might be saved. In a nationwide campaign, she and other magazine editors raised about $200,000 (about $8 million today), and that’s the chief reason you can visit those grounds today. 

II. THE CRUSADE
One crusade stumped Hale. In the 1840s, she wrote Zachary Taylor, the 12th president of the United States. Her request was simple: she wanted him to institute a national holiday called…Thanksgiving.

The holiday had been celebrated in the nation before, usually at the behest of governors in the New England states. States would celebrate it on different days or months. New Hampshire on one day, Maine on another, and Vermont still another.

President Taylor declined. Something about separation of church and state. Hale didn’t understand why she was such a stick in the mud. President Washington had had no such qualms. Back in 1789, he had proclaimed the first national day of Thanksgiving and prayer. Hale’s father had served in the Revolutionary War, and she revered Washington. So much so, she thought Thanksgiving ought to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November because that’s what the great father of the nation had decreed.

Pity Mr. Taylor, not to have glimpsed a future that included giant inflated balloons, back-to-back football games, and doorbuster sales! Refusing to give up, the editress wrote the governors of every state. And governors of American territories. And American ambassadors overseas. Some budged, others didn’t.

Every year, in the pages of Godey’s, she spoke to the nation’s reading women. Thanksgiving ought to happen, she said, here’s how it is done in New England. In those magazines, which you can still find sold online at rare book site, she start talking about Thanksgiving in summer, and kept hammering away on the subject in every issue until autumn. 

Every year in the fall, she treated her readers to recipes appropriate for the day. In Northwood, her first novel, she prescribed a feast so lavish that anyone who attempted it would need a stronger table and a new sideboard to serve the dishes. (Read historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s description of that fictional meal, and her attempt to replicate it.) Three basics modern Americans would recognize were mentioned in Chapter 8 of that novel: turkey, pie, gravy. And more. Oh, so much more.

Thereafter, each president who succeeded Taylor could expect to find a letter from Mrs. Hale in their inbox every year of their term. Millard Fillmore. Franklin Pierce. James Buchanan. They read her letters, and did precisely nothing.

Then one day Hale’s annual letter landed on the desk of Secretary of State William H. Seward, whose hawklike nose smelled opportunity. He brought the letter to his boss with a recommendation.

The nation was mired in a vast national crisis, pitting brother against brother, father against son. In Hale’s proposal Abraham Lincoln must have glimpsed not a mere holiday but a tool for unity, a way to bind a divided nation. In 1863, the same year he traveled to Gettysburg to contemplate aloud this very issue, he proclaimed this American holiday to occur on the last Thursday in November.

Not to be outdone, mayors in southern cities declared their own Thanksgivings, to be celebrated a week before Lincoln’s. Charitable movements sprang to raise money to treat troops in the field to a meal. One Union soldier recorded that his regiment feasted on apples, pies, and coffee on that day, which they also observed as a day of rest. In Michigan, Harriet Tubman went door to door to raise money for a meal for Black Union soldiers stationed in Detroit.

In 1864, Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving again. Jefferson Davis followed suit, choosing a day that fell a week before Lincoln’s holiday. Historians have found notes in soldiers’ diaries marking these occasions. “The enemy observes this as thanksgiving day. All quiet,” wrote one Confederate soldier.

Hale knew that it would ultimately take an act of Congress to establish a federal holiday. She fretted about this point in her letters to presidents. But she wrote them nonetheless. Over the next few decades, after Lincoln’s death, Hale urged each president to make the proclamation. By now they knew to take the advice of the Philadelphia editress. Rutherford B. Hayes was the last to receive a Hale letter. After that her pen fell silent.

You know the rest of this story. The tradition of U.S. presidential proclamations had become so fixed that even after Congress made Thanksgiving a national holiday during FDR’s presidency, presidents always issued a document containing flowery language. Not to do so at this late date would seem un-American.

III. SANS PILGRIMS
There the story ends, except for the curious fact that none of those early presidents, not Washington, not Lincoln, not the New England state governors in the days before Hale took up her cause ever mentioned the Pilgrims. (FDR was the first.)

Hale certainly knew of the Pilgrims. She published poems about them in her magazine. But neither she nor her allies ever associated Thanksgiving with Pilgrims. A slim reference to that 1621 event at Plimouth Plantation had been printed in a book in England, but quickly went out of print and was forgotten.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, Sarah Josepha Hale and her counterparts knew about earlier “thanksgivings” celebrated in North America by Europeans but most likely she and they simply conflated days of religious observance with a tradition of harvest festivals.

Thanksgiving as a practice was known to many cultures in Europe, and native peoples on this continent as well. It’s not exactly a complicated concept—give thanks, express gratitude, repeat as necessary.

For the Europeans, the word was associated with a day of prayer, deep contemplation, humiliation**, and fasting—not feasting. (That’s the way Washington would have thought of it.)

You declared a day of thanksgiving. You singled it out. You denoted that day in your calendar as something special. And on that day, you humbly thanked your god. And let’s face it, sometimes the thing they were humbly thanking the deity for was the destruction of their enemies in battle. Humans gotta human.

In 1844, a Boston clergyman named Alexander Young compiled a book of Pilgrim history and lore. By then, a copy of the long-lost description of the 1621 event had been rediscovered in Philadelphia. Young printed this new-to-him story of the Pilgrims and Indians, and inserted a footnote at the bottom of the page saying, in effect, Gee, I guess this was the first Thanksgiving.

He probably didn’t know of the other North American thanksgiving events that historians accept today: one in 1564 (by French Huguenots in Florida), 1565 (Spaniards; Florida), 1598 (Spaniards; Texas), 1607 (English; Maine), 1610 and 1619 (both English; Virginia). And yes, at these events, the word “thanksgiving” was noted in the record, and some of these events involved feasting with indigenous people. There are probably more. There must be. Gratitude is a universal human instinct.

The older I get, the more I understand just how much humans and Americans in particular crave myth over truth. The simpler the better. If that story quietly reinforces something we’d rather not speak aloud, all the better. When immigrants started arriving in the U.S. in droves in the late 19th century, suddenly magazine editors trotted out the first Thanksgiving myth that had been circulating since Rev. Young’s 1844 footnote, and schools passed it on, unquestioned, to children. The problem with grammar school history is that it is rarely corrected in high school or college. You reach adulthood with primitive childish notions lodged forever in your head. Ask any critical thinking American adult if they buy the Pilgrim story, and they will giggle and say no. But they’re at a loss to tell you what parts of the story are fiction.

Over the years, some U.S. presidents have seen fit to lionize the Pilgrims in their annual proclamations as rugged individualists on a par with pioneers and cowboys. Yeah, they weren’t. Even if you accept that they did something incredible—leave Europe to practice their way of life in a wilderness, the 1621 story has problems, to say the least.

IV: PROBLEMS IN THE RECORD
There’s no evidence the Pilgrims regarded that day as special. In the records we now have access to, they never referred back to that event as a declared day of thanksgiving. They did declare a formal day of thanksgiving in 1623, to thank God for that year’s abundant harvest, so the distinction was known to them.

In 1621, the Wampanoag arrived on the scene after hearing shots fired. The Pilgrims had been hunting for game. Previously, in a treaty, the Wampanoag had agreed to help the Pilgrims if they were ever attacked. The Wampanoag may have arrived in the settlement to honor that pact.

Oh—after that pact was “signed,” Wampanoag men would often visit the English settlement unannounced, bringing their wives and children. The Pilgrims finally sent a delegation to the indigenous people to say, in effect, “Stop coming. Or, if you must, please leave before dinner because we can’t feed you.”

This time, the uninvited guests stayed for three days, and both peoples hunted enough to feed themselves. The Wampanoag party outnumbered the Pilgrims.

Within a year after the meal we regard as the basis of the modern American holiday, the Pilgrims were displaying the head of a native person outside their fort, a warning to all others. Myles Standish killed three native men he suspected were plotting against the colony, and mounted one fellow’s head on a pike.

There’s a ton more, but these few lines should suffice to demonstrate what a problem it is to hang a beloved national holiday on a single occasion that amounts to three sentences—one hundred and twenty words—in the historical record.

Hale didn’t need the Pilgrims to make her holiday happen. Nor did Washington, Lincoln, or any of the others who came before them.

It makes more sense to celebrate in the spirit humans have always given thanks around the planet. Sometimes footnotes should stay footnotes.

* * *

Sources:

Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers… by Alexander Young (Little & Brown, 1844).

Young’s now-famous footnote appears on page 231 of his text.

Proclamations for Thanksgiving… by Franklin B. Hough (Munsell & Rowland, 1858).

The First Thanksgiving by Robert Tracy Mackenzie (InterVarsity Press, 2013).

This Land is Their Land by Robert J. Silverman (Bloomsbury, 2019).

We Gather Together by Denise Kiernan (Dutton, 2020).

Northwood; a tale of New England by Mrs. S. J. Hale (Bowles & Dearborn, 1827).

* I love this word but never get to use it. Enjoy.

** In the parlance of the early republic, humiliation meant to humble oneself before God.

* * *

Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating next week. I’ll see you in three weeks.

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Philip II OF Macedonia: Sometimes the Bastard Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree (382–336 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week, King Philip II of Macedonia, the father and role model of that most terrifying of ancient conquerors, Alexander the Great!

*     *.    *

O how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living.

—Philip II of Macedonia 

The hard-bitten, ambitious, and ruthless youngest son of an undistinguished royal house, Philip II of Macedonia was a usurper and military genius who reorganized the army of his backward mountain kingdom and in so doing changed the course of history. He also fathered and trained the most successful conqueror the ancient world ever knew. 

Born in 382 B.C., Philip had two older brothers and was deemed so expendable that he was used as a hostage (a political practice during ancient times in which two sides in any given conflict exchanged Very or Semi Important Persons after the signing of a peace treaty, as guarantee of their future good behavior towards each other). Thus, he spent years in the Greek city-state of Thebes while still a boy, and carefully studied the organization of the Theban army. 

After his return to Macedonia, a Greek-speaking kingdom situated in the mountains and plains north of Greece itself, Philip soon found himself regent for his nephew Amyntas IV, infant son of his older brother Perdiccas II. In 359 B.C., Philip took the throne for himself, setting aside the young king and declaring himself the rightful king. It was a naked exercise of power and nothing else. 

The Macedonian Phalanx

Moving quickly to modernize his army, Philip arranged to pay his soldiers, drilling them incessantly and converting what had previously been feudal levies into the first truly professional nonmercenary fighting force in the ancient world. For the next two decades, he campaigned every year, gradually expanding Macedonia’s territory in all four directions, but especially to the south, toward mainland Greece. 

In 349 B.C., Philip captured the city of Olynthus (in northwestern Greece), whose leaders had made the twin mistake of opposing him and housing two rival claimants to the Macedonian throne. In a preview of what his famous son would later do to those who defied him, Philip destroyed the city utterly and sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery. 

The ruins of ancient Olynthus–destroyed by Philip II in 349 B.C.

By 338 B.C., Philip had conquered all of Greece and the rest of the Balkan peninsula besides. Then he got himself “elected” leader of the so-called “Hellenic League”(a loose collection of Greek city-states that banded together against the Persians). He announced his intention to invade the Persian Empire as revenge for the Persian burning of Athens 150 years previous. 

Philip assassinated at his daughter's wedding

But problems at home distracted him. He quarreled with his son and heir Alexander, who fled along with his mother, Philip’s first wife, Olympias. Recently married (Macedonian kings habitually took more than a single wife) to a much younger woman who quickly bore him another son, Philip disinherited Alexander, making his newborn son his heir. Philip was assassinated in 336 B.C. (allegedly with the complicity of both Alexander and his wild, scheming mother), leaving his infant youngest son as “king” for all of about ten seconds before Alexander, echoing his own father's move against his own brother's son, set aside the baby king and took the throne. 

Farewell to San Sebastiano

 I learned recently that James Powell died last year. He was one of those friends I knew for years through the grace of the Internet, but  never met.  He was also one of the most brilliant writers of comic short mysteries. 

I once wrote that the average (hah!) Powell story "contains a fully realized plot stuffed with wild free associations wrapped around a bizarre central idea that, if it had occurred to most writers, would cause them to swear off late-night enchiladas."

For example, he wrote three stories about Inspector Bozo, a cop in Clowntown. In one of these tales we meet a mute ventriloquist ("he threw his voice and it never came back") who partners with a mind-reading dummy (who knows what jokes he wants to tell). The victim died of "a heart attack with severe side splits" from laughing too much. And so on. 

 His first story, which you can read here, "The Friends of Hector Jouvet," is set in a tiny Riviera country centered on a casino.  You are thinking of Monaco, but Powell writes about San Sebastiano.

Inventing San Sebastiano freed me from the tyranny of facts. If you go into a large public library you will see a pale crowd of men and women researching books or articles they plan to publish or preparing for courses they intend to teach. And these are all noble things. But there are other researchers there, an even paler crew who accumulate knowledge so they can write letters to the editors of mystery magazines peppered with words like ‘egregious’ and ‘invincibly ignorant.’ ‘Dear Editor,’ they write, ‘in your issue of November last, I was astonished to find a character in a James Powell story releasing the safety catch of an 1864 sleeve Derringer, model 302, a.k.a. “the Elbow Smasher.” I think not. That particular model Derringer did not come with a safety catch until January of 1865.'”

A Pocketful of Noses is a collection of short stories set in San Sebastiano, focusing on four generations of detectives, all named Ambrose Ganelon.  (In order they are: a deductive detective, a scientific dick, a hardboiled P.I., and a down-on-his-luck detective because his ancestors chased all the criminals away.)

Let's explore the residents of this principality a little, shall we?

    * One store in San Sebastiano can be recognized by “the blank sign and the bare window, the place of business of the maker of the finest invisible ink ever concocted.”

    * In the Armenian quarter you will find “rug merchants like the notorious Leon Barbarian who sat in front of his shop until all hours, begging each passer-by to come in and rob him blind because his wife needed a brain operation. This remark never failed to infuriate Mrs. Barbarian who would burst out of the shop, wild-eyed and incoherent with rage. Barbarian would give a sad little shrug, his point made.”
 

* During a brief military dictatorship the principality’s citizens were encouraged to revolt by a mime who “leaped up onto a vendor’s barrow and mimed a message, urging everyone to march against the stiff wind of tyranny, shatter the shrinking glass box of oppression, and pull together on the rope of common purpose."

Powell was a native of Canada, by the way, which he describes as “a land doomed many times over because it had been built on a vast snowman graveyard.” One of his most popular characters is Acting Sergeant Maynard Bullock, who may not be the brightest member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but is certainly among the most imaginative. He blunders into conspiracies involving defective beaver hats, migrating Bigfeet (Bigfoots?), and the “blue bread of happiness.” Like his author, the character is one of a kind.

Those stories feature  a Mountie named “Gimpy” Flanagan who had “sworn never to pull his revolver without drawing blood, an oath that cost him several toes.”  Powell also informs us that Scandanavians tend to underestimate Canadians, seeing them as “a frivolous southern people much like the Italians…”  And the Canadians have sworn to defend the U.S. from an overland attack by Russia, because they know “that if Mexico ever tried to invade Canada by land, the United States would do the same.” 

My absolute favorite Powell concoction was “The Plot Against Santa Claus,” one of his many yuletide tales.  It is told from the view point of the North Pole’s chief security elf. 

Another of his many holiday tales, “The Tamerlane Crutch,” has one of my favorite opening paragraphs of all time:

Marley was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. And when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.

The first time one of my stories appeared on the cover of Alfred iItchcock's Mystery Magazine they were kind enough to commission an illustration for it (as opposed to buying existing art).  Jim immediately noticed a discrepancy between the text and the picture and wrote to me to say:  "Your hero is so tough he eats his scrambled eggs sunny-side up." Which doesn't make much sense but sure made me laugh. That was often the case with his tales, as well.

A few more Powell-isms and I will let you go:

“To really succeed neatness-wise you need a messy best friend.”

"Time isn't a clockwork thing." 

The great circuses of Europe were destroyed by World War I which "drafted bareback riders into the cavalry, sent their dapple grays to drag artillery pieces through the mud, and marched the clowns off into the various general staffs.

"In the end all our stories must be too short."  

Amen to that.

 

A History Mystery

I like dabbling in historical mysteries. They're some of my favorite stories to read. I especially like the challenge of building a story set in a different time. I like researching enough detail to tell a credible story and finding the hinge fact that brings disparate past characters together and also connects contemporary readers to a historical event.

I think that historical mysteries offer something besides their entertainment value. By shining a light on an earlier era, they remind us that the problems we grapple with are not new. Along the way, the stories may offer a different perspective and teach us things we don't know. Or maybe just help us to better understand things we think we already know. E. L. Doctorow said, "The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like."

If we scribble out a list of themes from contemporary fiction, the list likely includes good versus evil, alienation from society, the struggle to survive, battles against power, corruption, or prejudice, heroism and courage. We find all these themes and more in the historicals. The themes are what connect us to the stories. How people cope with these universal problems has changed very little. A historical tale reminds us that we are not the first. The specific event may change, but the themes remain the same.

Like science fiction, historical storytelling builds worlds. The tales allow a writer to obliquely touch on a contemporary problem. An immigrant story with a MAGA warrior and a border wall may easily polarize readers. The act of choosing sides may detract from the ability of a reader to lose themselves in the story. A historical setting may facilitate an easier consideration of us versus them. We can reflect and consider the contributions of all sides without the baggage of modern labels. The author can touch on issues without being overtly political.

If politics is defined as the acquisition or use of power, then crime fiction writing always seems to be political. The stories deal with upending or restoring order. One value of historical stories is that they allow us to view political questions at arm's length.

How far back must we go before a writer may call a story historical? A standard definition is that the story must be set fifty or mere years in the past and be based on research, rather than autobiographical experience. I prefer a more subjective answer. A story is historical when it deals with a time when the world was markedly different than the present. In our technological era, that shortens the gap. A world without cellphones, door cameras, and a ubiquitous internet feels like a historical period.

In 16^th century England, Dutch and Flemish settlers arrived in Norwich. Cheap, skilled, Protestant workers escaped political and religious oppression in the Catholic Low Countries. Queen Elizabeth authorized the immigration wave motivated by religion and economics. England had sheep; the settlers brought experienced weavers.

The arrivals were known as Elizabethan Strangers, or simply Strangers. They both revitalized and disrupted the local economy. The Strangers brought differing customs and languages. Most residents of Norwich were glad they came. Some were not. Angry residents claimed that the immigrants took jobs rightfully belonging to Norwich citizens. In 1570, there was an unsuccessful revolt against the new arrivals.

For the current Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Michael Bracken compiled an issue of historical stories. Set during World War II, my story, "Masterpiece," deals with the challenges of coping with or combatting France's oppressors during the Nazi occupation. There's not much mystery about who the good and bad guys are in this one. That's usually what happens when you drop Nazis in the mix.

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine has also kindly included "The Tangled Web They Weave," in the November/December issue. When I began to think about writing a story, immigration questions were headlining the news. I wanted to touch upon the issues.

And because the Strangers were weavers, the story lets me introduce the metaphor of a society as a cloth made from many diverse threads. Stunning in its originality, I know.

The 16^th century historical example does not perfectly align with our modern world. Nor does the story offer a solution to broad immigration or national sovereignty issues. But answering those questions was never the purpose. "The Web They Weave" is a whodunit. If it stimulates anyone to reflect upon the place of immigrants in the United States, that's a bonus.

Until next time.

Truth be told.

           The subject of my most recent SleuthSayer post was uncertainty.  I’m certain of that.  In that piece, I asserted that crime fiction was the natural home of ambiguity, an abiding state of nature, and a hallmark of every great mystery.  This may or may not not be precisely true, but on the other hand, likely true enough to be contended here. 

            Another fact of nature that plays an important role in crime fiction is that people often don’t tell the truth.  Almost never.  They lie, hedge, dissemble, prevaricate, and weasel their way through their lives, flooding the environment with oceans of uncertainty. 

            Not everyone lies all the time, but everyone is in the habit of telling only part of the truth.  This is usually meant to maintain civility and pleasant relations, though there’s a lot of daylight between complimenting your mother-in-law’s lousy meatloaf and telling the cops that you were home all night and have no idea how that BMW ended up in your garage.  We do these sorts of things naturally and fluently, having evaded responsibility for cleaning out the cookie jar or socking little brothers as soon as we can form sentences.  It’s innate.

Raymod Chandler described detective fiction as “riding around in cars and interviewing people.”  Maybe he didn’t actually say that, but it fits with his general view of the genre.  And while driving skills are fairly widespread, a good interviewer is an artist. 

There was an awful lot I liked about the advertising business, but aside from creating ads, the thing I liked most was qualitative market research.  That is the academic term for what mostly involves interviewing people, one-on-one, or in groups.  You might believe, like most people, that marketing is a soulless endeavor, but not if you’ve had a bunch of guys in a room talking about their cars.  Or intercepted a pack of teenagers in a mall to learn why they’re buying brand new jeans with the knees ripped out.  Or shadowed kitchen-table insurance agents as they chatted with ordinary people about death, disability and destruction. 

           

            After hundreds of these encounters discussing thousands of individual judgement calls, I’ve learned a few things. 

            Everyone likes to talk about themselves and what they do for a living, or how they spend their free time.  In other words, their lives.  That’s why salesmen, journalists, homicide detectives and hostage negotiators want to get the conversation on a personal level as quickly and smoothly as possible.  You cynics out there claim the interviewer’s true feelings can be faked, but they can’t.  You won’t succeed without some natural empathy and a genuine interest in what people have to say. 

            Although a research interview isn’t a test, everyone thinks there’s a right answer.  There’s an urge to please that’s very powerful, but also a desire to look good in the eyes of the interviewer.  That’s why focus groups (a session where one questioner tries to extract information on a specific subject from five, or eight, or ten people sitting around a conference room) can be a harder nut to crack, since few enjoy standing out from the consensus.  You have to convince each individual that the only right answer is what they actually believe if you want any meaningful outcome. 

            You’ve probably noticed that the accuracy of political polling has been falling dramatically.  One reason is it’s hard to get people on the phone, and even harder to catch them face-to-face.  In my experience, phone interviews themselves are far less effective than in person, for reasons explicated above.  I think written questionnaires are close to worthless, and online surveys worse than that.  Social research is a bit of a science, but it’s mostly an art.  Which is why detectives and savvy researchers always prefer to handle their assignments in the flesh.  You can hide those lying eyes, but it’s harder with the questioner staring you right in the face. 

            Body language is often the most articulate.  This is because gestures and facial expressions are less voluntary.  Things just sort of leak out that you aren’t intending.  Consequently, the first reaction is usually the most reliable, because it springs from an emotional response.  Over the following few seconds, the conscious mind takes the reigns, and people begin to say what they think they ought to say, or what their conditioning says is the proper point of view.

            People often don’t know why they want what they want.  Or why they did what they did.  Humans aren’t robots, but we do tend to delegate a lot of our behavior to unconscious impulses.  But when gently pressed to apply logic and reason to emotional decisions, we’re not that bad at figuring it out.  It may not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it’s often good enough for storytellers in any line of business. 

Art Imitates Art

Minding my own business, I was. Scrolling through clickbait we used to call news feeds. Subject to pitfalls and rabbit holes. And la, in the style of Movie Master John Floyd, a film collection article slid into view titled,

Different Movies with the Same Plot

Writer Brianna Zigler explains:

“Many plots in modern-day stories—even across continents, time periods, planets, and dimensions—echo each other's plot arcs. Typically, even the most original works of art nowadays owe credit to others that came before, sometimes dating back to ancient myth. … In film, scripts of one studio [can be picked] up while another takes the same idea and gives it a slight spin … Art imitates art.”

My simplistic definition: Different Titles, Same Plot. In other words, we’re not including remakes, do-overs with the same titles (although some remakes take off in wildly varying directions).

Titles began to pair in my head and within a minute, ten had come to mind. I couldn’t resist checking where she ranked them and, to my surprise, not one of mine made her list. Not one.

Okay, no person can watch every movie ever. Blowup/Blowout are a bit obscure not to mention opaque, but surely most people have heard of John Travolta, Charton Heston, Sean Connery, or are we experiencing Baby Boomer irrelevance? Bond, James Bond. Who?

Zigler goes on to pair thirty four movies (after two updates). I dug into the Web to garner additional opinions, which are included in the table. Some pairings seem tenuous and specious at best: Forest Gump v Benjamin Button? I Robot v Roger Rabbit? The Matrix v The Lego Movie? Fugitive v Minority Report v every individualist ever taking on dystopian society?

Defending My Selections

Whodunit? Beats Me.

  

All of us who write and sell short stories know there are ups and downs, hills and valleys, boomtimes and dry spells. It's mostly been dry for me lately: I just don't publish as many stories, or as often, as I once did. One reason is that there are fewer short-story markets out there now. Especially markets for mystery stories, which is what I most enjoy writing.

Having said that, I must say that November has started out well. In the first four days of the month, I was fortunate enough to have three stories published--one in Black Cat Weekly, one in a food-themed anthology, and one in an anthology of stories from Strand Magazine. Those three stories have very little in common with each other, except for one thing. (I'll tell you that in a minute.)

The first story, published November 1 in Issue #218 of Black Cat Weekly, was "City Lights," a short, quirky, lighthearted tale about a retired Southern schoolteacher on vacation in New York City. She stops in to visit an old friend from her hometown and--in the process of three or four pages--manages to spot a financial scam and save her friend from falling for it. A simple and (I hope) fun little story.

The second story appeared on November 4 in the anthology Cooking Up Death (Camden Park Press), edited by Lyn Worthen. This story, "Chef's Surprise," features a restaurant owner who runs into a vengeful man from her past, one she knew in name only, and winds up fighting for her life during an otherwise calm Thanksgiving dinner date. Her only weapon is her quick mind, which--as we all know--is sometimes enough. It's a "framed" story, told later by the protagonist to a friend, and is probably more of a suspense/thriller/survival story than anything else.

The third one of these stories was also published November 4, in an anthology called Best of The Strand Magazine: 25 Years of Twists, Turns, and Tales by the Modern Masters of Mystery and Fiction (Blackstone Publishing), edited by Andrew Gulli and Lamia Gulli. I've not yet seen the book or read any of the other stories, but it should be a good one, featuring authors like James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, and so on. (How I squeezed in there is anybody's guess.) My story, "Foreverglow," first published in The Strand in 2018, is about a complicated department-store heist of a jewelry collection, told from the POV of one of the robbers.

Is there a point to all this bragging? Yes, believe it or not. I said earlier that these three mystery stories had one thing in common. That shared fact is that none of them is a whodunit. Not even close. There's no list of suspects in any of them, no detective or investigation, and the identity of the villain is never in doubt. And the really funny thing is, if I look back on all the so-called mystery stories I've published over the past thirty years, very few of them are traditional whodunits. Most of my stores are howdunits, whydunits, howcatchems, or howtheygotawaywithits. 

I think that's okay. I always find reassurance by going back to the definition that Otto Penzler refers to in the introductions to his annual best-of anthologies. He says (paraphrasing, here) that a mystery is any story that contains a crime, even it it's only a hint or implication of a crime. It does not have to be a whodunit. Also, a mystery doesn't have to be a murder mystery. I suspect that more than half the stories I've written and sold have been about lesser crimes: robberies, burglaries, kidnappings, blackmail, fraud, etc., etc. 

Some crime-writer friends who don't accept that definition of Otto's have told me they always say they write crime/suspense fiction, not mystery fiction. If that makes them feel better, fine, but I say that's being too restrictive. As I've said, I write more thriller/suspense stories than traditional mystery stories, but just as the mystery section of the bookstore will always contain novels like The Silence of the Lambs and No Country for Old Men, we short-crime writers can always call ourselves mystery writers. It's fun to point out that even though Columbo will always be thought of as a TV mystery series, not one of its 69 episodes was a whodunit. The audience always knew, within the first ten minutes, who the bad guy was--and the fun was in finding out how he got caught. Same thing goes for the recent Poker Face series.

So, what do you think? If you're a crime writer, do you focus mostly on whodunits? Do you, like me, rarely write them? What if you're a reader? (And God knows, every one of us writers better be a reader.) Are whodunits more fun for you to read? If you don't write only whodunits, do you feel that you're stretching the definition a bit when you say you write mysteries? I've already confessed that I don't think so. If pressed, I would say whodunits are a subgenre.

But how should I know? It's all a mystery to me.