When Irish Eyes Are Crimin'

 

My Irish-born Great Grandmother, Mary Scanlon

It was a summer day in the mid-seventies.  I was home from college and  on the phone with my friend Tim.  I asked if he had plans for the evening.

"I was thinking of going to a bar," he said, "but I've been there so often I feel like  a groupie."

And so I learned that some of the local Irish bars -- of which New Jersey had many -- featured live folk music most nights.  There was one group my friends and I were especially fond of: two men who both played guitar and sang.  One was American*, the other was raised in Ireland.  Occasionally they played with a third man on electric bass.

We saw them a lot in the next few years. Once we went into New York City to hear them at the Bells of Hell.  There an older gentleman cheerfully heckled them but they didn't mind, largely because it was Frank Herbert, the author of Dune.

Later we discovered another favorite band.  Oddly enough it was also two men, one American and one Irish.

For a fan of crime fiction Irish folk music had plenty of material.  There were the rebel songs ("Men Behind the Wire," "Come Out Ye Black and Tans," "Broad Black Brimmer,")   which another friend of mine cheerfully described as "terrorist music." (And boy, did one of those singers get mad about that.) And plenty of outlaw songs ("Whisky in the Jar," "Wild Colonial Boy,")  But don't forget songs of domestic violence and disharmony ("William Bloat," "Weela Weela Wallya,") Then there was "Danny Boy" which involves no crimes, but which one of the singers hated so much that frequent requests for it almost led him to violence.

But something came along (wearing diapers) that made evenings in the bar more difficult for us, and while that delightful obstacle has grown up and moved away,  here in the Pacific Northwet live music is not so common in Molly's O'Shamrock Erin Pub.

However, recently I got thinking about those good old days and wondering if I could write a crime story about them.  Turns out I could!  "Courtin' in the Kitchen," in the March/April issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine features a Jersey boy who brings his California wife back home for a wedding and runs into one of those musicians he used to know.  My story features an American and an Irish singer, but oddly enough, they were inspired by one member each of my two favorite bands.

And speaking of things long past, 2026 marks fifty years since I first submitted a story to EQMM.  Time to celebrate with an Irish coffee, methinks.

* I recently found out he was born in Ireland but to my ear he sounded American.

  

A Case of Berry Berry

    To paraphrase Garrett Morris's line from an old SNL skit, "John Milton been berry, berry, good to me." Especially since I've never been berry, berry good to him. 

Wikimedia commons, William Faithorn

    

    My knowledge of Paradise Lost, or the rest of the Milton canon, remains sparse. I watched Star Trek growing up. In "Space Seed," Ricard Montalban, playing the character Khan, taught me that it was better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. He then got transported to Ceti Alpha V. Later, watching Animal House at the State Theater, I saw Donald Sutherland play a lecherous English professor. He deployed Milton to seduce Karen Allen.  

    And that, to this day, pretty much represents what I remember about John Milton. 

    

    Ignorance, however, has never stopped me from putting the poet to work. Years ago, I wrote a novella about Milton as a 17th-century sleuth. A blind, housebound poet became a solid stand-in for Nero Wolfe. "A Meter of Murder" won the Black Orchid Novella award and became my first story to be published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.  

        

    In January 2024, Hitchcock published "The Devil in the Details," my second effort at mining John Milton. In this contemporary story, a sodden English professor becomes convinced that he sees a how-to manual for committing the perfect murder written into the verses of Paradise Lost. Before writing the story, I should have read the epic. I owed it to Milton. He had become a go-to source for inspiration. Candidly, however, a good search engine can pull the quotes much more quickly. 

    

    I will confess that I was aware of my debt. When we visited London two years ago, I dragged my family to St. Giles-Without-Cripplegate. This Anglican church tucked within the Barbican is the burial place of John Milton. It's an easy church to explore. While the headline churches, like Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's are packed with tourists, we had St. Giles to ourselves. I paused, respectfully, before his statue. I gazed at the memorial beneath the gothic arches of the old church. In this quiet and overlooked space of literary history, I read the walls and learned, belatedly, about the final resting place of, arguably, England's second greatest poet. 

    

    I also read that in the 18th-century, while St. Giles was undergoing repairs; local drunkards stole parts of John Milton's skeleton. Inspiration, again, found me. 

    

    Oh, John, you've been the gift that keeps on giving. 

    

In the January/February issue, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine published my story, "Paradise Stolen." (I know this blog runs on March 2nd, so it is no longer, technically, the current issue. But my March/April hasn't arrived yet, so I'm fudging.) In the story, I explore this obscure bit of grave robbing. My tale is loosely based on actual events. 

    

    And having completed a Milton trilogy, I may be forced to find another subject for story material. I hope you enjoy this one. It was fun to write. Drinking a pint and munching fish and chips while staring at a classic English church and calling the lunch "research" was pretty cool, too. 

    It's impossible to say with certainty whether John and I are finished. Milton, after all, said that "the mind is its own place..." Sometimes we don't know where it will lead. 

    

    If your tastes run more towards poetry, William Cowper, an 18th-century English poet, got worked to a tizzy over Milton's alcohol-fueled disinterment. He lived and wrote at the time. "On The Late Indecent Liberties Taken With The Remains Of Milton," his poem, expresses his outrage at the desecration. The poem is short; the title is almost as long as the piece itself. I found it at Poetry.com. 

    

    I hope you have a berry, berry good day. 

    

    Until next time. 

Applying the Bechdel Test to Real Life

SleuthSister Melodie Campbell and I have written about the Bechdel Test, a measure of whether a movie has 1. two named female characters; 2. who talk to one another; 3. about something other than a man. Both Melodie and I came up with excellent lists of movies that met the Bechdel criteria, neither of which included most of the movies our SleuthBrothers spend a lot of what journalists used to call column inches writing about.

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2024/06/sleuthsisters-movies-and-bechdel-test.html
https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2024/06/sleuthsisters-movies-and-bechdel-test_01994901369.html

The thought that bubbled up one morning, as I lay in that state between sleeping and waking when so many of my creative notions come to me, was that it might be illuminating to apply the Bechdel standard to real life. We get a strong cultural message that when women talk to each other, it is mostly about "men," as in the award-winning country song: I'm gonna love you forever/ forever and ever, amen/ as long as old men sit and talk about the weather/ as long as old women sit and talk about old men... or in these enlightened times, about intimate relationships regardless of gender—or else about sex, clothes, and shopping, as in Sex in the City. Maybe that describes some women's lives, but it has nothing to do with mine.

So what do I talk about with the women in my life?

Let's start with my SleuthSisters: Melodie Campbell and Eve Fisher, with whom I share an ongoing conversation via daily comments on the SleuthSayers blog posts, sometimes joined by Janice Law and blog newcomer Anna Scotti on literature, writing, language, movies and tv; and on to one-on-one emails for fuller exchanges on politics; sharing, comparing, and discussing our own childhoods, ethnicities, families, and environments; telling funny stories, and laughing at each other’s jokes.

I meet weekly on Zoom with a group of women in our sixties, seventies, and eighties to discuss how we experience the aging process. There's a lot of common ground as well as striking differences in how we're doing and how we're taking getting older. Many of us have become friends who stay in touch via group and individual texts as well as phone calls and Zoom visits. Some conversations are the proverbial “organ recital” of consequences of aging, from deficits in hearing, mobility, and memory to diagnoses such as Parkinson’s, heart disease, and cancer to procedures from colonoscopy to hip and knee replacement to nuisances like shrinking in height. We also talk about our children, grandchildren, and aging parents if we still have them. We also talk about retirement, which everybody perceives differently; creativity, which does not diminish with age; travel, which some of us do extensively; and how we use structured and unstructured time. We talk about loss, death, and sexuality from the perspective of aging women, which is a far cry from "talking about old men." We talk about self-care, including exercise, bodywork, spiritual practice of various kinds. Occasionally we talk about our childhoods and families. And like everybody else in these complicated times, we compare notes on how we deal with the state of the world without freaking out.

As for my longtime friends of sixty and seventy years: what don’t we talk about! My surviving friends in other countries (six in France, one each in the Netherlands, UK, Africa, and Australia) are always interested in my perspective on what’s happening in the US, political, economic, and sociological. With my Jewish women friends from childhood on, I always had a tremendous amount of common ground. Now political challenges have fragmented our opinions, but we still call on longtime affection and frankness to connect with each other across various divides. So we still talk about family, aging, losses, life cycle changes, activities and new ventures, the organ recital, what the kids and grandkids are doing, and what happened to the world we tried so hard to make a better place.

What about my most active friendships? With one friend, who lives in New York, I talk about the state of academia, finances, and music. With another, who lives in San Francisco and whom I've known since we were eleven, we talk about our mothers and our sisters; good food—she's a recreational cook, and we both live in foodie cities; memories, mutual friends, and losses; she talks about Bay Area culture, I about New York museums and concerts; she about her activities, bocce and knitting, I about my writing, my mystery activities, my garden, my photography, my ocean swimming, and my relationship with Central Park.

We all have plenty to talk about besides men!

Service Without Service, part 1

Days ago, friends faced off with our local Code Enforcement. If you’re not familiar with this form of government overreach, it’s like a steroidal HOA (homeowners association), where a few people relish telling other people what to do. Hey, I’m somewhat of a maven on the subject, which is about as glorious as a rancher hitching up his trousers and saying, “Why yes, Little Missy, I am an expert on cattle bloat. You must read my dissertation on Guernsey rumenectomy.”

Genuine photo of
Code Enforcement Clerk

Meanwhile back at the ranch, my friends stumbled upon a lien filed on their property to the tune of $45,000 and ever increasing. Lambs in the woods and babes to the slaughter they were. They phoned Code Enforcement innocently asking what they must do, much like asking a Big Bad Wolf where to buy your building materials. They said, “Pay the fines and interests and liens and anything else we can dream up.” Yeah, they said that, more or less.

“No,” said I. “No, no, no,” said other friends, some who had direct experience with the agency. “Code Enforcement is not your friend,” we told them. “Don’t pay the lien. Take it before the board. Take it before their magistrate. You might pay a few hundred dollars, but you won’t pay tens of thousands.”

I volunteered to go before the board. Armed with a limited power of attorney, I was willing to do battle. This offer wasn’t without a plan.

My friends had done something unusual: they’d saved every bit of mail going back decades. They hired an investigative bookkeeper to unbundle those boxes of mail searching for Code Enforcement communications. None. Not one whit could she find. In particular, I enquired about proof of service. None. Not a scrap in evidence.

Consider me unsurprised. I’d been dealing with County Code Enforcement a long time. They almost demolished a house twice while pretending they were victims of a computer error. Strange… The signature on the demo order looked awfully human-like.

I learned some of their tricks. Statutes offer a substitute service option of ‘publishing’, i.e, inserting a notice in a local paper. Our local newspaper is The Orlando Sentinel, but funny thing: certain county departments routinely published in the Heritage Florida Jewish News in Fern Park. The county claimed that saved taxpayers money. The rest of us had a darker hypothesis. However, thanks to saving all their mail, my friends found themselves in the unique position of proving a negative. 

Code Enforcement hadn’t come up with proof of service, so I felt more confident than ever. “You’re in a great position,” I said. But… have you had friends who asked your advice but invariably did the opposite?

They said, “That’s not what the nice Code Enforcement lady told us to do.”

“Code Enforcement is not your friend,” I repeated. “You’re asking your cellmate why you need an extra bar of soap.”

My brilliant combination of mangled metaphors did not deter them. I’m devastated to report they didn’t request an appearance before the Board or CEB magistrate. I feel horrible.

I'm pretty sure an office party erupted. Code Enforcement's windfall celebration could be heard in Alligator Alley.

Now that I got that off my chest, I confess this has been a buildup to write about process service– or the lack thereof. See you next time.

When They Stop Teaching the Classics...and Cursive

I heard recently that the school district I am in has decided to stop teaching Shakespeare.  That alarms me for so many reasons, but also for a personal one.

Quite simply, I'm having a hard time finding books to use as examples in teaching fiction writing.

I used to have a lovely example, when trying to show what was meant by 'plot'.  I'd ask my class:  "What is the plot of Gone with the Wind?"

Several people would put up their hands, and say, "It's about the Civil War." 

And I would say, "No it isn't.  You've just described setting.  The SETTING of Gone with the Wind is the civil war.  The PLOT is something like this:  Scarlet O'Hara falls in love with a man who does not return her love, and she spends the entire civil war chasing after him.  Until in the end, she decides other things are more important."

Lots of Ohs! and Ahs!  Smiles all around.

Flash forward to my last term. I ask the same question of the class (all adults):  "What is the plot of Gone with the Wind?"

Not a single hand went up.

Nobody had read it or even seen the movie.

Me:  "Come on, people!  I can't use Harry Potter for EVERY example!"  (lots of laughter)

Yes, Harry Potter seemed to be the only book everyone in the class had read.  And - dare I say it - most had seen the movie Twilight (but not necessarily read the book.)  This does not leave a lot for me to reference as examples.

Further gripe: 

So here we are today, taking Shakespeare out of the school system.  Does anyone honestly think kids will read Shakespeare on their own?  Are we honestly to face a world in which no one knows the lessons learned in The Scottish Play, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, the Richards and Henry's?  And so many more.

A world in which I could say, "He would make a great Caliban" in a business meeting, and no one would know what I meant?  (I made the mistake of saying that once.  Probably not my best political move...)

So this leads me to my latest fear:

I hear they are no longer teaching Cursive.  Which means, in a few years, only a very very few people will be able to read any historical documents.  Any manuscripts in the original.

In fact, I was told today that a California town is asking people who know Cursive to apply for town jobs. 

Does this not scare others?  When only a few can access original text, I worry that everything will be 'as interpreted' by a central body.  

We already know how Homer's work was translated and tinkered with by men centuries ago to change and sometimes diminish the role of women in it.

Dammit, I'm worried.  I want a world where everyone is given the chance to be exposed to ideas.

Not a world where only a few can refute the masters (AI or other) who control the narrative.

Melodie Campbell worries and writes on the shores of Lake Ontario.  Her latest book (available for pre-order everwhere) was given the following review by BOOKLIST (we're permitted to post one sentence in advance of issue date):

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writing Conferences: Networking vs Connecting

Early in my writing career, I was given the advice to attend writing conferences and network.  

I never liked the word, “network.” It feels transactional. (I am seeking a connection with you because you have something I need or know someone who may benefit my career.) 

Still, I would attend conferences, and they were always nerve-racking events. I’d either try to sell myself, or I was so nervous that I didn’t know what to say.

Until a few years ago, I had an epiphany. 

I was at ThrillerFest, attending a cocktail party, looking out at the sea of people and feeling anxious, as always.  When it hit me. The people in this room, we all share the same passion. We all love stories—reading them and writing them. This is my tribe. How lucky am I to be here. 

And this perspective changed everything for me.

Conferences stopped being about networking and became about connecting—talking about stories, sharing experiences, learning from others, and contributing to a community I cared deeply about. 

When I return home now, I remember these moments long after the conferences are over because they came from an authentic place of genuine interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm. 

If you're reading this and the idea of connecting at conferences still feels awkward or intimidating, consider shifting your mindset. Seek connection, contribution, and curiosity as opportunities to build meaningful relationships, share value, and learn from others. 

Here are a few conversation starters to help you get started:

Connection:

What do you write?

Are you working on something right now you are excited about?

What are you hoping to get out of this conference?

What are you reading?

Which panel did you like the most so far and why?

Contribution:

Share a resource or a tip that may benefit someone else.

Introduce people who may be able to help one another.

Ask about volunteer opportunities at the conference or how you can help support your local writing chapters.

Curiosity:

What’s the best way to work with an editor?

What’s the best resource for anthology calls?

What advice do you have for someone first starting out?

Is there a craft book or podcast you may recommend?

When you focus on connection, contribution, and curiosity, the pressure fades, and you just may create relationships that continue to grow long after the conference is over.

*** 

Feel like exploring this idea more? Check out my conversation with Jeffrey James Higgins at Elaine’s Literary Salon Podcast from November 2025. We talk about the writing community and the difference between networking and connecting. You can listen here. I hope you will check it out.  

What AI Fundamentally Misunderstands About Fiction

 Disclaimer: this is NOT a doom-and-gloom, "AI will kill us all!" rant.

We're gonna talk about AI Slop today.

Yes, you read it right. "AI Slop." I use the term advisedly, because it defines a particular type of "Large Language Model" (LLM/AI) generated writing. How do I know this?

Well, in part because "AI Slop" was Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year. In the PBS article linked in the previous sentence, Webster's defines AI Slop as: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

From the article:

'It's such an illustrative word,' said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster's president, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday's announcement. 'It's part of a transformative technology, AI, and it's something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit ridiculous.'

 

And while there are all manner of examples of non-textual (especially image-generating) AI Slop (see the end of this post), for the purposes of this particular post we're going to focus on AI Slop attempting to pass for human-generated fiction.

But before we dig in to this topic, let me just say that I find AI to be a welcome and powerful tool for all manner of things: especially assistance with organizational problems.

It's pretty nifty at generating historical images, too.

AI can organize, systematize, collate, quantify, inventory, lay out, define, compare and contrast a wide variety of data at the snap of your fingers.

But it can’t think for itself (no matter how well it may have been “trained” to fake cognition), and it’s not been able to bridge the so-called “uncanny valley.”

And obviously I think using any variety of AI to attempt to replace human cognition in the workplace is both shortsighted and bound to fail long-term. (#layoffs)

This one may seem familiar to those who have read any of my recent posts here at SS.

I am also in no hurry to read the “fiction” it will generate upon command.

If you have spent time reading Kindle Unlimited content, or on writing sites such as Medium or Substack, you have without doubt encountered AI Slop that someone is attempting to pass off as human-written. And if you, like me, don't want to be bothered with investing any time in "faked human" fiction, there are "tells" you can keep an eye out for.

And who better to help flag these sorts of giveaway electronic tics, than one of the "good" AIs?

Talking about Claude.

(First off, shout-out to my friend Xochi for steering me in Claude’s direction. Thanks Xochi! Secondly, and Full disclosure: Anthropic, Claude's parent company is currently putting the finishing touches on a $1.5 billion copy-write infringement settlement with authors whose works were used to help build Anthropic's LLM. A legal action to which I, and damned near every other author I know, are all parties. And boy, do I have big plans for MY coming settlement! All kidding aside, while I don't find Anthropic's attempt to address copy-write concerns raised by the manner in which LLMs have tended to be built perfect, I also don't see the likes of Open AI, Palantir, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, or Meta stepping up to try to reimburse the authors who produced the content they used-without-permission to build their insanely profitable LLMs, either.)

I guess you could say I went to the well. I mentioned one of the most common "tells" I've seen signifying AI writing (the so-called "not because X, but because Y" rhetorical structure) and asked Claude about other common tells.

I find what I got back very much worth sharing:

Yes, I'm familiar with this critique. It's become a recognizable pattern that readers and critics have started flagging as a kind of AI stylistic fingerprint. The core observation is that these constructions share a few telltale qualities:

The corrective reframe — "not because X, but because Y" — artificially dramatizes interiority by presenting a false binary and then resolving it. Human writers tend to trust readers to infer motivation; this construction over-explains while trying to look like depth.

The fragmented "twist" sentence — "She smiled at him: not with kindness. With liberation." — uses punctuation to manufacture a pause that signals profundity. The colon-then-fragment structure tries to replicate the rhythm of a revelation, but it often feels mechanical because it's applied indiscriminately, regardless of whether the moment actually earns that weight.

What both share is a kind of performed literary quality — they're doing the gestures of literary fiction (subverting expectation, revealing inner contradiction) without the organic necessity that makes those moves land in genuinely strong prose. Human writers use these constructions too, but AI tends to reach for them constantly, because they pattern-match to "good writing" in training data without understanding when they're appropriate.

There's also a broader critique underneath this: AI fiction tends to be emotionally explanatory rather than emotionally evocative. It tells you what the feeling means rather than making you feel it. These sentence structures are almost a microcosm of that tendency.

And then Claude went on to elaborate further:

A few other tells that tend to cluster with those patterns, in my observation:

Emotional labeling dressed as showing. "A wave of grief washed over her" or "he felt a complicated mixture of anger and relief." It gestures at complexity while doing the opposite of demonstrating it.

The wisdom-summary sentence. A paragraph of action or dialogue, then a standalone sentence that packages its meaning: "Some wounds, she understood now, never fully closed." These appear constantly and almost always at the end of sections or chapters.

Over-varied dialogue tags. Characters don't just say things — they murmur, breathe, exhale, rasp, offer. Human writers vary tags too, but AI does it with a kind of aggressive consistency that draws attention to itself.

Sensory cataloguing. Descriptions that hit smell, sound, sight, and texture in rapid succession in a way that reads like a checklist rather than a scene.

The reflective gerund opener. "Watching him leave, she realized..." or "Turning away from the window, he wondered..." These appear with suspicious frequency as scene transitions.

Oh yeah, these all seem really familiar, come to think of it!

And of course, there's the most obvious tell of all:

Pulled from a novel published and available on Amazon. Highlights mine.

If you're too lazy to write your own content, I guess it stands to reason that you might well be too lazy to even proof-read what you copy and paste into "your" work-in-progress, right?

C'mon, man. No one wants to see that.

Is it any wonder we're beginning to see "badges" such as this one on fiction offered for sale?

So hey, use AI for what it's good for: organization, systematization, categorization, copy-editing?

And, of course: helping you, as the reader/customer, avoid wasting time/resources on AI Slop attempting to masquerade as "human-written" fiction.

Lastly, see below for what ChaptGPT came up with in response to my prompt requesting a "comprehensive visual image embodying AI Slop."

See you in two weeks!

Don't say I didn't warn you!