Grabbing the Third Rail

There are a lot of good reasons not to talk about politics in my column here.

It's not really what SleuthSayers is about, first of all. We're here to talk primarily about writing and reading, mostly in the area of short mystery fiction.

It risks alienating some of my readers. In these highly divisive times, declaring any particular political stance is putting a target on your back. Sometimes literally.

And, of course, there's the fact that it rarely, if ever, does any good. There was a time when I believed a well-crafted Facebook post, drawing on sound logic and reliable evidence, could actually persuade people to change their point of view on political issues. That time is well past.

So, yep, there are a lot of compelling reasons I shouldn't talk politics here.

As you've probably guessed, I'm going to do it anyway. 

Specifically, I've been thinking a lot about this question: what's the role of the writer in these times? Is it possible for writing to exist outside politics?

What's prompting this? Well, in addition to my columns here, my stories, and my actual day jobs (teaching, in case you've forgotten), I've somehow found myself serving, for the last year and a half, as the President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (you're a member, right? It's free! It's fun!). Mostly I'm doing this because nobody else wanted the gig, but I've tried to make a go of it with the time I have available.

The heart of SMFS is our discussion board, and one of the things the members have made very clear is that they don't want overtly political content there. This is, of course, entirely understandable. There are plenty of other places online for people to scream at each other about it, and once such discussions start, they're almost impossible to stop. Inevitably they turn hostile, sometimes to the point of rendering the entire group useless for days on end and some members walking away for good.

So one of my roles, as President, has been to police the discussion board, trying to enforce civility and head off potentially explosive topics before they build up a head of steam.

Woody Guthrie

Lately, some folks seem to think I'm not doing a very good job of it.

In the last few weeks, members have posted news about a pair of upcoming publication opportunities focused on what's happening in the US. One is an anthology called American Gestapo; the other is a periodical called the Antifa Lit Journal. As the titles indicate, these are both publications taking a decidedly left-wing stance on current issues. I don't think posting about such opportunities on SMFS is itself problematic. Notifying each other about new markets is one of the things the group is for, after all, and simply informing the group about them isn't necessarily endorsing their political stances. People who know they have no interest in such a market are perfectly free to simply scroll past the post.

That's not what happened, of course. I won't get into all the details of the ensuing mini-firestorm, and as these things go, it was relatively brief and contained. There were some posts that I could only take as attempts to bait the members into a political crossfire, perhaps out of ideology, perhaps out of sheer mischief. There were a series of posts with people instructing each other, in increasingly hostile tones, not to talk about politics. These posts, of course, only prolonged the discussion and made the intrusion of political content more likely.

Recommended Reading

Then came the inevitable complaints that the board is tilted to the left, and that those on the right end of the spectrum were being subjected to unfair mockery, vitriol, and silencing. Now, I'll freely confess that I am a liberal, but I maintain, and continue to maintain, that I've done my best to be impartial in what I allow and what I silence on the board. No doubt I haven't been perfect, but I've tried. Anybody who thinks the job is easy is welcome to run to replace me. Elections are coming up in a few months.

Finally, there were the people who loudly declared that they're sick of politics altogether, and that they have no interest in any political debates, and that both sides are equally stupid, and it has nothing to do with their life or with writing.

And that's what I found I couldn't get past, and what I find myself compelled to write about here, somewhat against my better judgment. The idea--admittedly one propagated by most media coverage--that politics is really nothing more than a kind of sport, one that you can tune out of your life in the same way you'd decide that you really don't care about the Superbowl. One side wins, one side loses, life goes on. The belief that writing, specifically, can exist in an apolitical realm that's somehow above (or at least removed from) the petty political debates of the day.

I don't buy it. And since I can't talk about it at SMFS--where my mandated role is to minimize political discourse as much as possible--I'm going to talk about it here.

Even though I shouldn't.

First: in purely practical terms, politics do have real, concrete implications for people trying to write today. Sell a book on Amazon? You've put a couple of bucks in the pocket of a billionaire who's spent decades systematically dismantling organized labor and driving small businesses under, and who's currently in the process of gutting what was once a pillar of independent American journalism.

RIP Journalism

Politics are why library budgets are being slashed in many communities, pushing small publishers--the kind who, say, publish mystery anthologies--closer to the brink. Politics are why schools are banning books and universities are cutting humanities programs. Politics are why I know more than a few American writers hesitant to attend this year's Bouchercon, being held in Canada, because they're not certain they'd be allowed back in the US. Politics are why there's been no real effort to contain or regulate the AI explosion that threatens all artists, including writers (to say nothing of its devastating environmental impacts and terrifying stunting of critical thinking skills).

Those are just some of the concrete reasons writers should be concerned about politics, but more generally, and more importantly, writing is an inherently political act. In part that's because the freedom of expression is itself a political idea, but it goes beyond that. There's a reason despotic regimes make a practice of throwing writers and other artists into cells. Roger Ebert said that "cinema is like a machine that generates empathy." I think the same is true of all art. Creating and consuming art--and perhaps especially fiction--requires and promotes the imaginative effort to see the world through another perspective, from another set of eyes. It encourages us to step outside our narrow individual experience and recognize the fundamental humanity of others. To a certain set of people, that creation of empathy is dangerous. Maybe the most famous example in American history is Lincoln calling Harriet Beecher Stowe "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Uncle Tom's Cabin awoke Americans to the horrors of slavery in a way that nothing else had.

And America today is sorely in need of empathy.

Bad Bunny with a message that
shouldn't be controversial:
"together, we are America"

The descent of the Republican party into what can only be described as a cult of personality, one fundamentally opposed to many basic tenets of American democracy, has been a long process. It probably began with the backlash to the Civil Rights movement; recall LBJ's observation that "if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

For the last sixty years, the GOP has been giving its voters people to look down on, and picking all of our pockets. Reagan set the pattern with his lies about "welfare queens" and the glories of "trickle-down economics." Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh sold the ideology to millions with rants about libtards and feminazis. The catastrophic Citizens United decision solidified it as inescapable policy. It's a simple bargain: give us money and power, and we'll protect you. We'll protect you from immigrants, from gays, from the trans community, from scary brown people of all varieties. We'll protect you from intellectuals and scientists who think they're better than you. We'll protect you from teachers who want to tell your kids that America isn't perfect. We'll protect you from union thugs. We'll protect you from man-hating feminists. We'll protect you from lazy poor people, stealing your money through social programs. We'll protect you from traitorous liberals who want to take your guns and make you eat quiche.

They made people afraid, and they turned that fear into hatred. They convinced millions of Americans that empathy for the other is weakness. And then came Trump, who wields and directs hatred as a weapon in the service of his all-consuming ego.

This is no longer "just politics." This isn't normal. If Trump and his many enablers are not stopped, America will slip into full-blown fascism. Many would say we're already there. And you can pin your hopes on the next election, but right now the GOP is working very hard to suppress and undermine the vote, and that's just the start. Given everything else he's done, does anyone really believe Trump won't mobilize ICE and the other forces at his disposal to "secure" voting locations? Does anyone really believe he'd accept losing Congress? Or will he do everything in his considerable power to declare the results invalid and make himself the dictator he clearly longs to be?

These are not law enforcement officers

This might all seem unthinkable, but a lot of things that have happened in the last ten years used to seem unthinkable. American children are dying of entirely preventable diseases because the American government has tossed science out the window and turned over our national healthcare to a man who brags about snorting coke off toilet seats. Children around the world are dying because American aid to foreign countries has been gutted, in adherence to the President's racism and xenophobia. Our Attorney General screeches at members of Congress that, because the stock market is up, she's under no obligation to investigate child sex trafficking. Our President . . . well, there's no need to make a list, is there? Every day he does something that would have shamed any previous holder of the office into immediate resignation. And he gets away with it, in part because virtually nobody in his party has the spine to stand up to him and in part because everyone immediately gets distracted by the next outrage.

It's not normal for the Department of Justice to try to prosecute sitting members of Congress because they told the military not to obey illegal orders. It's not normal for a Congressman to insist a Superbowl halftime performance be investigated for the crimes of being in Spanish and asserting that there are countries other than the US in America. It's not normal for a President to demand that media outlets that report bad news about him lose their licenses, or to withhold resources from states because they didn't vote for him.

Or brag about his ability to walk into dressing rooms and ogle naked teenagers. Or grab women by their genitals and expect them to accept it because he's famous. Or post disgustingly racist memes to social media. Or demand his name be slapped on any building he happens to like the look of. Or defend himself against rape charges not by saying he would never do that, but by saying the woman isn't his type. Or shred decades-long relationships with American allies while embracing and praising dictators who flatter him. Or remove references to slavery from historical sites. 

The Attorney General of the US literally
refusing to look at or acknowledge
Epstein victims

Just to make a connection back to crime--since this is a site for crime writing--we might as well acknowledge that crime is at the heart of all of it. We've turned over most of the wealth and power in the country to a small group of billionaires who are now utterly beyond accountability and consequences, even when they have committed the most vile offenses imaginable. Laws that don't apply to everyone aren't laws. They're tools of oppression. If we're going to write honestly about what crime is today, if we want our writing to be anything other than pure escapism, we can't ignore that.

So, no, I don't believe it's noble to claim to be above politics, to regard it as something irrelevant to your daily concerns. Calling yourself apolitical at this moment is a willful refusal to face the reality of what's happening. It's not being high-minded. It's complicity.

During his first Presidential run, Trump claimed he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. What seemed at the time like just another in his endless string of absurdities has become a grotesque reality. Americans are being murdered in the streets, simply for protesting against his masked thugs who claim they are not bound by the Constitution.

This is not normal, and we can't pretend it's not happening.

I don't know if it's too late to save American democracy. What I do know is that, if we're going to save it, one of the things we need is empathy, which is what brings us back, again, to writing. I hope that my little stories do some small amount of good in promoting empathy, in addition to anything else I can do to protest and resist. And I hope we all have the courage to speak honestly about what is happening.

I'll write about something a little lighter next month. Promise.

February Stories

As all short-story writers know (and if they don't, they soon learn), the stories you write and sell can then take quite a while to get published. My waits from acceptance till publication have ranged all the way from a couple of days to a couple of years--and when they do finally get published, it sometimes happens in clusters.

Example: Since my most recent post here at SleuthSayers two weeks ago, I've been fortunate enough to have three stories appear in two publications. Also, as is often the case, each of those three stories is totally different from the others. 

If you're at all interested in this kind of thing, here are some quick summaries: 

February 8 -- "Vanity Case," Black Cat Weekly, Issue #232

This story, besides being shorter than most of what I usually write, is an actual mystery, with a crime and several suspects to choose from. (There's no separate "solution box," as in the Solve-It-Yourself mysteries in places like Woman's World, but all the clues are there for the alert reader to find and use.) The story features small-town sheriff Lucy Valentine, her overbearing mother Fran, and her stalwart deputy Ed Malone, who are recurring characters in a series I've been writing for a long time now--more than a hundred Fran/Lucy installments have been published so far. This one's a Valentine's Day story (pun intended), and involves the early-morning burglary of an electronics store and the task of figuring out which one of three possible suspects is guilty. No dead bodies, no bloodshed, no politics, no literary heavy-lifting, but hopefully fun to read. I must thank Barb Goffman for prodding me into submitting this holiday story.

February 9 -- "Me and Jan and the Handyman," Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 

This one's not a whodunit, or a traditional mystery in any way. It's just a crime story, a TTT (Twisty Turny Tale) featuring wealthy socialites, construction workers, federal agents, blackmailers, informers, bankers, world travelers, prison inmates, etc. It's a fairly long first-person story, and just quirky and "different" enough that I thought it might work for Ellery Queen since most of my successful EQMM stories have been weird. And thank goodness it did get accepted there, although the recent change in ownership of the magazine caused it to take awhile to appear in print. Sincere thanks to the wonderful Jackie Sherbow, who I bet would agree with me that stories with complicated plots and multiple reversals are always the most fun to write. 

February 15 -- "Mutiny in the County," Black Cat Weekly, Issue #233

The third of the three stories in this mini-tsunami of releases, "Mutiny in the County," was unusual in several ways. First, it marked only the second time I've had stories appear in consecutive issues of Black Cat Weekly (the first was in June 2023--Issues #92 and #93). Second, it was one of the only two stories out of the 22 I've had published at BCW that were submitted through the portal to John Betancourt instead of being acquired via Barb Goffman or Michael Bracken. Third, it was one of only four of my BCW stories that were SF/fantasy instead of strictly mystery/crime. It did have a crime that was central to the plot, but it was otherworldly in that it featured a sheriff's-deputy protagonist who discovers that he's really, of all things, a character in a short story. (The antagonist is the writer.) As you might imagine, I had a good time with this one--cross-genre stories, like those with many plot twists, are usually more play than work--and I was pleased and grateful that John liked it. 

Anyhow, that was my rare three-stories-in-eight-days occurrence for the month--and probably for the year--but it's always a kick when that kind of thing happens, especially when the content and structure of the stories are vastly different from one another. (If you're a writer, has that kind of happy surprise happened to you? I suspect it has.) Sadly, I predict there'll be fewer of those clusters of out-of-the-blue publications in the future, for all of us, because there'll probably be fewer markets out there to send stories to. But I could be wrong.

I truly hope I am.

To Have and Have Not - Hemingway Noir

Source: The Hemingway Society

 Usually, when you read Hemingway, it's about World War I or the Spanish Civil War. Or the Lost Generation in France. But Papa was all over the map with his short stories. Yet one novel sticks out to me, having just listened to it on audio. To Have and Have Not, which, ladies and gentlemen, is, as the kids say these days, is noir AF.

Mind you, as a boy, I'd have had my mouth washed out for saying AF. I found that Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner taste. Heady, but with a touch of mellow smoothness. I digress.

The story concerns Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain from Key West operating out of Havana. He gets a brief glimpse of is future when three Cubans try to convince him to take them to America. He declines, and good thing he does. The Cubans are gunned down right after talking to him. Anyway, Harry has a client, a rich man who wants to catch a marlin. He lands one, but it gets away, taking Harry's tackle with him. Harry hands him the bill for three weeks and the lost gear.

The rich man skips out on the bill. Now broke, Harry takes a job for a Chinese man running immigrants from Cuba to America. When it becomes clear he's going to kill the unsuspecting Chinese laborers, Harry takes the job. And the money. And kills the Chinese trafficker, leaving his fleeced charges on a beach in Cuba. 

But this becomes his life. He takes these jobs, running illegals and booze and occasionally getting into scrapes. Before long, he loses his boat and unsuccessfully tries to steal it back from the government. After securing the use of someone else's boat, he loses his forearm. Finally, he loses his life. We're left with Hemingway describing the problems of rich people. Most of them don't make it easy to sympathize wit them. 

But To Have and Have Not is a product of the Depression and an act of middle-class rage. (Hmm...Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) Harry Morgan meets the classic definition of the noir protagonist. When I started writing, someone gave me a shorthand difference between hardboiled and noir. Hardboiled = touch. Noir = screwed. And Harry is very much screwed.

But the difference here is there are no femme fatales. There are gangsters, but their menace is vague, men taking advantage of the poor and not caring who gets hurt. Harry is a fundamentally decent man doing bad things to support his family. Rather than the classic man vs. man (or woman, as is often the case in noir), it's man vs. the machine, as in Rage Against the...Harry Morgan's battle is against a rigged system that punishes him for playing along with the game after playing by the rules proves to be a losing bet. 

Between this and For Whom the Bell Tolls, it represents some of Hemingway's darkest work, short or long. 

Ripped From the Headlines!

Chelsea, MI police looking for woman who donated a human skull at Goodwill

(LINK)  Possibilities:

1. She was tired of it lying around the house.
2. It was the last of her grandfather's belongings, and she didn't want it.
3. Someone gave it to her (I hope not for Valentine's Day).
4. She'd picked it up at the town dump / local bar / the back of an Uber.
5. Well, she had to get rid of it somewhere.  
6. Nobody knows.

Scientists Recreate What a Mummy's Voice Would Have Sounded Like

(He doesn't sound that enthusiastic to me, but he got his wish.)

Firefighters Rescue Swan in the Connecticut River  (Link)

"Crews also rescued a duck and a dog, but said saving the swan also gave them a valuable opportunity to train for future ice rescues."

Serial underwear thief at New Zealand school identified as...  (LINK)

"A serial thief who has been stealing items including towels, shoes and underwear from a New Zealand school for over a year was finally caught on camera and identified as a literal cat burglar."  As in meowy kind.  Nobody yet knows why the cat was enamored by objects smelling of sweat and a hint of chlorine.

Swimmer's lost prosthetic leg washes up 10 months later, 14 miles away  (LINK)

So... jealous mermaid?  A hoarding octopus?  A kinky surfer?  My favorite part is that it was found with the sock still on it...  

Texas big game hunter killed while stalking African Cape buffalo (Link)

I like to think of it as Animals 1: Humans 0.  

Australian Mushroom Murderer Finally Sentenced:   (LINK)

Mrs. Patterson, a 50-year-old mother of two, was sentenced in early September, weeks after she was convicted of killing three of her estranged husband's elderly relatives with poisonous mushrooms in a home-cooked meal. 

The menu:
"...individual portions of home-made beef Wellington, a steak dish wrapped in pastry, usually with a paste of finely chopped mushrooms. And, as Patterson herself acknowledged during the trial, that paste contained death cap mushrooms, which are among the most poisonous in the world." 

Also, Pro Tip:  If you're going to host a toxic meal, do not, I repeat do not, serve your portion on different tableware than that of your guests.  It raises suspicions.

An Upteenth Case of Child Porn in South Dakota

"James Allen Frank, a 36-year-old man from Spearfish, has been arrested for possession of child pornography, according to a ticket and probable cause affidavit obtained by KELOLAND News.  Frank’s address, listed on the court documents, matches the address listed on business filings for an unlicensed in-home child care center run by his wife...  The tip from NCMEC included three videos depicting the sexual content involving prepubescent and pubescent girls.  He has since been sentenced to eight years in prison."  (I would think this rated a little longer sentence, like... 20 years?)  (LINK)

Boxer Loses Hairpiece in the Ring.  (LINK)

Before:  

After:  

(NOTE:  The bout was eventually scrapped because he failed a drug test.)

From News of the Weird:  (Link)

"Shepherd Dieter Michler had no real answers for why 50 members of his flock split from the 500-sheep herd and made their way into a Penny supermarket in Burgsinn, Lower Franconia, Germany, on Jan. 5. Shoppers and employees quickly took to higher ground, climbing atop the conveyor belts of the checkout lanes to make way for the ovine interlopers, who left broken bottles, droppings and strewn products in their wake when they were eventually removed from the store. Michler told the Main-Post newspaper that he suspected the wandering sheep became distracted by acorns as he led the herd across the industrial area, and, after losing contact with the rest of the group, meandered into the store's parking lot."

"Skip Cunningham, 70, was asleep on his couch on Jan. 13 when a car crashed into his home and landed on him, WWNY-TV reported. "I woke up and blood running down my head and a car laying on top of me," Cunningham said. "The guy's running around saying, 'Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.' I says, 'Well, call 911.'" An ambulance took Cunningham to the hospital, where he got 13 staples in his head. But on the way, trying to play out his amazing "luck," he asked the ambulance driver to stop so he could buy a lottery ticket. "But they wouldn't stop," he said. Cunningham has lived in the house for 50 years and said cars have run into his home five times." 

Dear Skip, MOVE. Sincerely, Concerned.

And my favorite:

"Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into a Frog." Source

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney’s 2009 musical comedy. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”  

Yeah, right...

"I got better."

Pyramid Schemes

A Cairo pub

 Last month my wife and I took a tour of Egypt organized by the Biblical Archaeology Society.  It was amazing.  I'm trying to figure out what to tell you about it, since this is supposed to be about crime and writing.

So, crime. Several people worried about our trip: Was Egypt... dangerous?  

Well. It is a developing country.  Things are different there than any country I have been in before.  We never felt in any danger (except when our taxi driver decided to save time by going the wrong way up on a one-way street...  straight toward a car.  Yeesh.)

On the other hand, on several days we were accompanied on the bus by an armed man in plainclothes.  And every hotel and several museums had a metal detector..

The street sellers and beggars did make us feel harassed.  They were more aggressive than I am used to.  When my wife and I went for a walk in Luxor (against our guide's advice) we must have been met by half a dozen such folk, including a driver of a horse and wagon who followed us for blocks trying to convince us to take a ride.

And then there was our arrival at the Cairo Airport.  Our checked bag had not made it through the transfer at Frankfurt Airport (in spite of the plane being delayed for an hour there, sigh.) We were having trouble figuring out where to talk to someone about that.  I found an Information Desk and there was a woman standing in front of it.  We chatted for a couple of minutes and finally found our way to the right office.  While I was  waiting to fill out forms I said I needed to figure out where to get local money.

"Oh," said the woman, "I will take any currency."

And that's when the penny (or Egyptian pound) dropped.  She hadn't been behind the Information Desk.  She wasn't any kind of official helper.  She was another person looking to get money from tourists.  After that I didn't believe her advice, good or bad as it may have been.

None of this is a crime, of course.  But the ten men I saw fist-fighting each other in the street were definitely breaking some law.  We were on a bus, so no danger.  

But enough griping.  Let's start with the greatest highlight: I can't imagine anyone looking at  the pyramids and the Sphinx  and being disappointed.  They are stunning.    

And here is our first connection to writing.  Between the front paws of the sphinx you find what is called the Dream Stele.  (A stele is a stone notice board, usually with a curved top.)  It explains that Thutmose IV dreamed that the Sphinx told him that it was being smothered by sand and if he got it all cleared away the Sphinx would make him pharoah. So he did that and voila, he got the crown.

Modern scholars interpret this to mean that Thutmose  IV did not have a very strong claim to the throne so he made up this story as political propaganda.  

But it gets more complicated because the writing on the stele is later than that pharoah.  One guess is that the priests of the sphinx copied the text because it showed how important their statue was - a genuine kingmaker!

Most of what I knew about ancient Egypt before the trip came from Barbara Mertz.  She wrote a brilliant book called Red Land, Black Land, which shows no interest in pharoahs, mummies, or animal-headed gods.  What it does tell you about is the life of average people, the farmers, fishers, and so on.

Valley of the Kings

But Mertz did more than that, of course. Under the name Elizabeth Peters she wrote a wonderful set of mystery novels about Victorian Egyptologist Amelia Peabody.  Amelia loved pyramids but most years she and her husband dug in the Valley of Kings.  That's the desolate landscape where the pharoahs hid their tombs once they realized that building a pyramid was like hanging a neon sign that reads Hey thieves! Treasure in here! Alas, all the royal tombs in the Valley were robbed - except one - but at least they tried.

In the Valley we visited the tombs of Ramesses III and IV. Lucky for us the thieves couldn't swipe the wall decorations.   

K.T.

A minor character in Peters' novels is Howard Carter, a real-life Egyptologist.  She presents him as a nice guy and a good archaeologist, but incredibly unlucky.  Amelia often  tries to cheer him up  by promising that something will turn up.  The inside joke here is that in 1924 Carter found that only unrobbed pharoah's tomb - that of King Tutankhamun.

Ushabti

The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), which is magnificent and opened just a few months ago,  contains among its 100,000 plus artifacts 5,000 items from King Tut's tomb.  The tomb itself was tiny but packed like a moving van. Seems quite a lot turned up for poor Howard.  (By the way, ushabti are small figurines intended to serve the deceased in the afterlife.)

Amelia's favorite form of transport was a dahabiya, a barge-like boat for sailing up and down the Nile.  I would have considered myself lucky to have seen one but as it happened the owner of the tour company which planned our trip in Luxor arranged for the 40-plus members of our tour group to have a sunset cruise and dinner on his personal dahabiya.  Picture three decks including rooms to sleep 24.  Also one of the best meals we had in Egypt.  

Merneptah Stele

We also visited the Egyptian Museum, now known as the (Old) Egyptian Museum since GEM opened. It still has plenty worth seeing, including some written artifacts of note.  For example there is the 10-foot-tall  Merneptah Stele, containing the only mention of Israel found in ancient Egypt.  Pharoah Merneptah brags of destroying Israel, which appears to have been an exaggeration.

Amarna Letters

Those clay  pieces you see are part of the Amarna Letters, an amazing find.  Pharoah Akhenaten, arguably the first monotheist (ca 1350 BCE) forbid the worship of any gods but the sun disk and built a new capital city, Amarna.  After his death the city was abandoned and so archaeologists were able to find its untouched archive with thousands of letters to and from the monarchs of his day.

Photo by Schlanger

One more piece of writing-related history.  We visited the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. The fascinating thing about this beautiful building is a small window in the women's balcony (up on the left), which led to a geniza.

The rules of  Judaism state that when a text that contains God's name (such as a Torah or prayerbook) is no longer usable it must be buried in a graveyard. Until that is convenient the papers are kept in a storeroom called a geniza.  As it turns out, nobody emptied the Cairo geniza for a long time. Researchers emptied it and found over 400,000 pieces of paper, some a thousand years old. More excitingly, they weren't just religious texts: they found personal letters, merchants account books, legal documents, etc.  The result is, scholars know more about the lives of eleventh-century Cairo Jews than they do about, say, Christians in Paris during the same period.

An old friend

The written word -- or hieroglyphs -- have power.

Oh, and in that same old section of Cairo I met an old friend in an underground bookshop.

It was quite a trip.

Red Herrings Can Still Stink

Five years ago, I ran the following column, which had the most views of all my SleuthSayers essays published before and since then. It therefore seems worthwhile to run it again, with minor modifications.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something that may be controversial, at least among writers: Readers should understand why a red herring (something that is said or happens in a novel or story that leads the reader to a false conclusion) was not the solution to the puzzle by the time the tale is over.

Until recently I didn't think this was a controversial opinion. I thought it was a standard approach to writing mysteries. Sure, I'd sometimes heard authors say they didn't need to explain by the end of their stories why Character X said Y because Y was a red herring, but I thought they were mistaken, and since I wasn't their teacher, it wasn't my place to correct their misguided notion. But recently I edited a story by an author I respect, someone who's a solid writer, and the issue arose. Since I was this person's editor, it was my job to say my piece.

I'm going to talk about the story, but I'm completely changing the names and plot so that you can't identify the author because who this person is doesn't matter. In the whodunit story, Princess Consuella tells Annie the Amateur Sleuth that murder suspect Bad Bad Leroy Brown lied about something, based on personal observation, and therefore, Leroy must be the killer. Princess Consuella was believable and seemed absolutely certain, so I suspect most readers would have finished that scene believing Leroy had indeed lied and thus must have been the killer. It's what I thought. Yet at the end of the story, I learned I'd been fooled. Leroy may be bad, but he never killed anyone--at least not in that story.

I raised the problem with the author--that no explanation of Princess Consuella's statement about Bad Bad Leroy Brown was provided by the story's end. Either Leroy did lie (which by the story's end didn't seem right, since we never learned any reason Leroy would have lied about the issue in question) or the princess had been wrong (but how could that have been true, since she had seen with her own eyes the thing she was certain Leroy lied about, and it wasn't the type of thing that could have been misunderstood, and she had no reason to lie either). The reader would be left wondering how to reconcile this situation, so some  explanation should be provided, I said. The author pushed back, saying that no explanation was necessary since it was a red herring designed to fool the reader into thinking the wrong suspect was the killer. The reader learns who the actual killer is by the end, and that's what matters, the author said; we don't need to revisit the red herring. 

That response prompted me to do some research about red herrings. Had I been wrong all these years? Do red herrings, by their very nature, not require explanation? To my surprise, I found nothing addressing this issue. There are a lot of articles about crafting solid red herrings, but I found nothing addressing the idea that red herrings should be explained by a story's end, that the reader should be able to understand how she got fooled. Even now, some time later, I remain quite surprised, because if authors can toss in red herrings without eventually providing an explanation for them, it makes writing a mystery too easy. It feels like a cheat.

In the case of Bad Bad Leroy Brown, sure, he could have been lying for reasons the reader never learns, despite seeming to have no reason to lie. Alternately, Princess Consuella could have lied for reasons the reader never learns about or she could have been wrong, despite being so certain and giving the reader no explanation for how she could have been mistaken. It certainly would make life easy for authors if they could write red herrings that didn't have to be explained in the end, but I think it would leave readers with a bad taste in their mouths. That is why I believe such scenarios need to be resolved. Did Leroy lie and why? Or did the princess get it wrong and how could that be? Without an explanation, the red herring feels contrived. It makes me feel like the author was playing games with me. 

This is why I recommended the author use a little misdirection when the red herring was introduced. More specifically, I suggested that when the princess called Leroy a liar, the author should use the wiggle word "recall" in the dialogue. Notice the slight difference:

Scenario A: The princess slams her hand on the table, its sound echoing throughout the castle. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown is a liar! I was sitting right next to him in the dungeon cafe last week, and he didn't leave money for his meal on the table when he left. I wonder what else he's lying about. I bet he rips off restaurants throughout the kingdom all the time. He's a rip-off artist."

Scenario B: The princess slams her hand on the table, its sound echoing throughout the castle. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown is a liar! I was sitting right next to him in the dungeon cafe last week, and I don't recall him leaving money for his meal on the table when he left. I wonder what else he's lying about. I bet he rips off restaurants throughout the kingdom all the time. He's a rip-off artist."

In Scenario A, the reader ends the story shrugging, thinking Leroy (who has a reputation for honesty, despite his name) had no reason to lie when he said he paid for his lunch, yet the princess's adamant accusation against Leroy remains unexplained. (She too had no reason to lie, and her certainty indicated she hadn't made a mistake.) In Scenario B, the reader can go back and reread the language of the princess's accusation and think, "Oh. The author fooled me."

Here's why Scenario B works: Because (1) the reader has no reason to think the princess lied; (2) the princess seems certain, so the reader will believe her account; and (3) the princess distracts the reader by slamming the table, muttering about what else Leroy might have lied about, and declaring that he's a rip-off artist, the reader easily could read right past the key words--the princess didn't recall Leroy leaving his payment. When the reader gets to the end of the story, she could flip back to reread the princess's accusation and think: "Oh! It was right there. She merely didn't remember that he had paid. It makes sense considering that she was distracted. I was fooled fair and square." That's the way to make a red herring work. That's the way to make the reader feel satisfied rather than feeling played. It would especially work if the author built elsewhere into the story that while the princess was at the cafe, something else was going on that could have held her attention.

Alternately, the reader could learn by the story's end that Leroy did lie for reasons unrelated to the murder. If there was a good reason for his lie, especially something that worked well with the plot, then revealing both the lie and the reason for it could have elevated the story. It also could have left the reader feeling satisfied because, while she was fooled, she wasn't played for a fool. Distracting the reader into missing a key word is playing fair with the reader. In contrast, dropping a lie into the story to fool the reader without any ultimate explanation isn't playing fair, not to me, at least.

So that's my advice about red herrings. If you're going to use them, make sure they're explained by the end so they don't seem contrived. Otherwise, you're taking an easy way out and you're not playing fair with the reader. Just like fish that sits out too long, that approach stinks.

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In other news, here's a little BSP: My short story "Baby Love" has been nominated for the Agatha Award. The story was published last August in the anthology Double Crossing Van Dine. The attendees of the Malice Domestic mystery convention will vote on the winners in April. Click here to see the finalists in all six categories. The titles of the five short stories link to PDFs of those stories for your easy reading. 

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