Angry Joe Writes A Letter

 

Months ago, my wife and I were invited to a community fundraiser event that would take place sometime this fall. At the beginning, the emails were somewhat vague because the people organizing it were just feeling everyone out. If they could get a group of writers to commit, would we consider attending to this quasi-literary, quasi-fundraiser thingie for a good cause?

We said yes.

Throughout the summer, emails came and went. The list of local writers grew. Fine. Great. That’s what happens. I stopped paying attention because while the emails were always wordy, actual details were sparse. At some point, a local bookstore agreed to send a staffer to sell the books of any writers attending this event. The evening had morphed into a book event and community fundraiser. I had never heard of such a thing.

About a week ago, a pair of emails arrived that struck me as incoherent. In the same graf, organizers asked writers to bring copies of their own books to give as gifts to VIP donors. And they reminded us that the bookstore would be on hand to sell copies as well.

Well, thought I, which was it?

If the bookstore will be on site, why would I need to bring my books? The way I saw it, there are too many ways such a thing can go south.

1. Writer A brings three books. Writer B brings 50. These “offerings,” if I may so describe them, would be lopsided.
2. Just because an author wrote a book does not mean that someone they are schmoozing with wants to take home a copy of said author’s book.
3. Unwanted gifts suck.
4. Not everyone is a reader.
5. Even if a person is a heavy reader, their tastes are bound to differ from the next guy. Offering a book to someone who has no intention of reading it falls into creepy, unwanted gift territory. It also makes writers look desperate.
6. Writers may indeed have their books lying around their homes. But chances are they paid something for them, and hope to sell them or offer them to someone who will appreciate it.

By the time I reached this point, I was angry. (Yes, folks—it happens.) Naturally, I sat down to write an email. Boy, was it satisfying. Spleen vented, I knew immediately that I also would never send that letter.

Because I’m chicken? No—because I am like Abraham Lincoln.

I know it’s a stretch, but work with me here.

All his life Lincoln had a practice where, if someone pissed him off, he’d write a letter to get those feelings off his chest. Then he’d stick the letter in a drawer and never send it. He called them “hot” letters.

His most famous hot letter was one he wrote in 1863 to Major General Meade right after Gettysburg. It was, you recall, a terrible, three-day battle that left 50,000 dead. About the same number of casualties on each side, but the battle was still considered a victory for the Union. Its conclusion came when troops under the command of Robert E. Lee retreated. Meade could have pursued them, crushed them, and taken prisoners. But he and his men were exhausted, and he declined to take that action.

In the letter Lincoln wrote but never sent, he said:

“…[M]y dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape-- He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with … our other late successes, have ended the war-- As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so South of the river, when you can take with you very few more [than] two thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it--

“I beg you will not consider this a prosecution, or persecution of yourself-- As you had learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why.”

I think we can all agree that if this is Lincoln when he was angry, maybe his practice of writing hot letters in the course of his life had served him well.

I myself have never told someone that I was “immeasurably distressed.” I have never been that, um, measured about anything. That’s why, in certain circles, I have earned the nickname Angry Joe.

I encountered my first hot letter as a kid, though I did not know it at the time. Working on a school project on the life of Benjamin Franklin, I came across this doozy, dated July 5, 1775, about three months after Lexington and Concord:

Mr. [William] Strahan:

You are a Member of Parliament, and one of that Majority which has doomed my Country to Destruction. You have begun to burn our Towns, and murder our People. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the Blood of your Relations! You and I were long Friends; You are now my Enemy, and I am, Yours

B Franklin

I was in eighth grade when I came across that letter in a book. I loved it so much, I committed it to memory.

As with Lincoln, Franklin never sent his letter to Strahan, though he shared it with others as a way of letting his feelings be known and exorcising his rage.

Going on the assumption that this might well work for me, here’s the email I didn’t send.

Dear J—,

We haven’t met, so forgive me if this sounds rude. It is unclear to me why the writers invited to this fundraiser are being asked to bring copies of their books as “donations” for the major donors.

According to the link you shared, VIP donors are those who can afford to donate $500 to $3,500 per person to the cause. If this is a night to celebrate local writers—and considering the local bookstore will be on-site with books for sale—I am sure the VIPs can inspect and purchase whatever they like. Given what the VIPs will have paid to attend, our books are a steal at only $15 to $30 a copy.

Unless, of course, this is actually an evening where local professionals are gathering to offer their services for free to everyone in attendance.

If that is the case, then count me in!

If there is a physician offering free medical consultations, I have an elbow that needs looking at. If attorneys are offering free legal advice, I’ll take that too. And I am happy to accept any interest-free loans local business owners wish to extend.

Please understand that when you ask a writer to give something for free, you are implicitly devaluing their work and reducing them to the status of an organ grinder’s monkey.

Here is a link to one of the greats, Harlan Ellison, explaining this simple concept.

I said good day, sir. 

Cordially, 

Joe D’Agnese

And yes, SleuthSayers, I will attend the event. But I’ll arrive empty-handed.

* * * 

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Enemy

When you read / write enough literature, you realize that almost all of it involves overcoming an enemy.  So pick a good one.  

There's the villain, the betrayer, the bully, the sociopath, the serial killer (of whom I am sick unto death), the false friend, the false lover, the rival, the Cain to one's Abel, and all the variations on the theme.  The enemy is the source of tension, that keeps everyone's attention on what the enemy will do next, and the reason why it matters for the hero to win - or lose.  

BTW:  it helps if you pick a good hero, too.

Sometimes the enemy is even more interesting than the hero, and thus the anti-hero is born.  And then the writer has to come up with a new enemy, because even an anti-hero has to have someone to outfight and outwit.  

Sometimes the new enemy is inside the hero / anti-hero:  addiction, PTSD, vampirism (the basis of the whole Twilight series), fear, past crimes, loss, obsession...  Or just self.  

Of course, sometimes you don't know who the enemy is:

Disturbing confession found in abandoned house:

"We found this baseboard in a closet of an abandoned house that recently sold and we were there to give owner an estimate for renovation. The house in an old gated lake community. Everyone there knows everyone and all people’s pasts. The HOA is calling the sheriff to see if they need to investigate further with cadaver dogs at “17” which is a vacant lot where a house once stood.... The HOA board decided to involve the sheriff’s department and 5 deputies and a detective showed up to take a look and collect the board."  (reddit)

There are rumors that this has been entirely made up, and if so, I think that Hollywood should track the person down and put them to good use, either writing or manufacturing sets for thrillers.

AND SOMETIMES YOU FIND OUT THE HARD WAY:

Irish Holiday Home Owner:

SOMETIMES THEY TAG TEAM:

Mothers and Sons:

NON-ALIVE ENEMIES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN POPULAR:

DATA CENTERS

And sometimes, a very unlikely hero:

"Former Playboy Playmate Audra Christiansen told Hefner in 2005 that she had allegedly been sexually abused and trafficked by Epstein, leading to a legal complaint in a Florida court which, sadly, was ignored until now.... The documents allege Hefner subsequently contacted the FBI several times with information about Christiansen’s claims. Yet, according to the legal complaint, the agency did not follow up with her until October 2020, which is roughly 15 years after the initial report."  (LINK)

As one commenter said:  "When Hugh Hefner thinks you’re dodgy…"

I can see it now... someone's going to start writing Hugh Hefner Investigates novels.  They'll sell a ton of them, too...  

 

You Are Entitled to Read My Story

 

I am pleased as punch to report that the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine features "Was That So Hard?" my 45th story there.  And since my first appearance in that august journal was in 1981 I can boast an average of exactly one story a year.  (We won't discuss how many years I submitted stories there before they bought one.)

The idea for this story came from Not Always Right, a website I have mentioned before. People anonymously submit reports on horrible customers.  I enjoy the site so much I use it as a reward: I won't touch it until I have written my quota for the day. It is a huge time sink but I have pulled three short stories out of it. 

"Shanks Has Reservations" (Black Cat Weekly #158) was inspired by a genuine scam that happened in a hotel. "Shanks Gets Lost" came from many tales of customers being rude to fast food clerks. (Black Cat #193) 

And now "Was That So Hard?" was inspired by many reports on rude customers, mostly in grocery stores.  (The title is something an entitled customer says, or more likely sneers, after some underpaid employee goes miles out of their way to be helpful.)  My protagonist is in charge of a high-end grocery store which, just before closing time, is invaded by a mob of the rudest, most entitled customers you could dream up.  Naturally there is a crime involved.

Finally, I want to examine a word I have used twice in this little piece: entitled.  When did it change its meaning? It used to mean that someone has the right to do something.  Now I hear it more often being used to mean that someone feels they have that right.

I checked Oxford English Dictionary and found that they traced that meaning back to Robert Coles' Privileged Ones, published in 1977.

 It is a matter of feeling 'entitled.' A child who has been told repeatedly that all he or she needs to do is try hard does not feel inclined to allow himself or herself much skeptical self-examination.

Took a few decades to get into the mainstream but now we're stuck with the new meaning and, worse, the people it refers to.  

I hope my story makes you feel a little better about it.

Double Dealing

 

    One reason I always liked going to the courthouse was the snippets you'd see or hear while passing down any random hallway. Pick a floor, get off the elevator, and wander. Think of it as trolling for dialogue. 

    Or sometimes it's handed to you. A while back, I was looking at a probable cause affidavit. A PC affidavit, is a document in which a police officer sets out the reasons why the officer believed he lawfully took a defendant into custody. They aren't intended to be works of literature. This one, however, led with the sentence, "I found the defendant, highly intoxicated, standing outside his trailer along with his mother and both his girlfriends." 

    Setting and conflict immediately apparent. I had an opening line that compelled me to keep reading. I wanted to know more about the defendant's double life.   

    Yesterday, while looking up something else, I took an internet detour and discovered the following story about an old trial. In a roundabout way, it reminded me of the affidavit.

    William Brodie lived as a respectable citizen in Edinburgh, Scotland, circa 1786. His grandfathers were lawyers, his father a deacon (president) of the Wrights and Masons Guild. William, as the eldest son, learned his father’s trade: repairing and building cabinets.

William Creech, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    When his father died, William inherited a tidy fortune and became Deacon Brodie, leader of the Guild. With this position, he also became a member of the Edinburgh City Council.

    Sadly, William possessed an uncontrolled passion for gaming and cockfighting. He kept two mistresses in separate houses where they raised the children they bore him, but were, apparently, unaware of each other. (Here, perhaps, you see the tangential connection to my PC affidavit.)

    His expenses outstripping even his successful business dealings, Deacon Brodie turned to burglary. With access to customers’ houses for his cabinet work, he would make wax impressions of their keys and return at night to steal their possessions. He personified the double life, by day a leading citizen, by night, a cunning thief. His exploits grew, and William added accomplices, including a locksmith, George Smith, an escaped thief, John Brown, and a third man, Andrew Ainslie.

    In March of 1788, he conceived a plan for the big score. He schemed to burglarize the national tax office. The plan, however, failed when, by varying accounts, Brodie fell asleep, or his nerves failed him. He fled to a mistress’s house to establish an alibi.

    One accomplice, Brown, snitched on Smith and Ainslie. Brodie, however, unaware that he had been left out of the confession, skipped the city. Once he ran, all three confessed against him.

    Brodie escaped to Holland but sent letters back to his mistress (not the alibi, the other one). These letters were discovered, traced, and he was arrested. While in Holland, Brodie had been taking forgery lessons and making plans to slip off to America.

    At trial, the prosecutors had a problem. By law at the time, a felon could not give testimony, thereby rendering Brown legally unavailable. The Crown cleared this evidentiary hurdle, however, by pardoning Brown of all crimes. The prosecution also agreed to use Ainslie as a witness and prosecute only Brodie and Smith.

    The trial began on August 27th, 1788. As if Brodie didn't have enough trouble, the presiding judge was Lord Braxfield. In the book Some Old Scots Judges by W. Forbes Gray, published in 1914, Lord Braxfied is described as: 

He came dangerously near being destitute of principle and character.    Unscrupulous, tyrannical, coarse, dissipated, illiterate, he was morally almost    featureless. He had a hard heart, a tainted mind, a cross-grained, domineering    nature, and an uncouth exterior. A noble aspiration or a lofty motive he was    incapable of appreciating. Without faith, without hope, without charity, he moved    continually in a world of sordid interests and ignoble purposes.

    One defense attorney, John Clerk, emboldened himself for final argument by drinking a bottle of claret. He then vigorously attacked “the villain of a witness [Brown] who I tell your lordships is not worth his weight in hemp.

    Against the weight of the accomplice’s testimony, the flight, the letters and evidence obtained from the search of Brodie’s home, a wine-soaked argument proved insufficient. Brodie was found guilty.

    Accounts vary, but as a city father, Brodie had either personally redesigned Edinburgh's gibbet or, at the very least, approved its construction. Either way, it was upon the gallows he helped build that both aspects of his double life came together. William Brodie was hanged on October 1st, 1788. 

Public Domain

 Robert Louis Stevenson found inspiration in the tale of Deacon Brodie’s duplicitous life. Stevenson wove elements of Brodie’s life and nature into his story of a divided human, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Incidentally, Stevenson’s father owned furniture made by Brodie.

Crime, sex, literature, and law—Deacon Brodie’s case was too cool to ignore. I am therefore making it my Trial of the Month for August.

How does my garden grow?

I think often these days of the famous closing line of Voltaire’s 1759 novella Candide: Il faut cultiver notre jardin. (“We have to cultivate our garden.”) Candide is a satire better known to modern Americans from Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 operetta of the same name. Its protagonist, a naive young optimist, learns through horrific life experience that he can do nothing about war, famine, plague, rape, slavery, torture, earthquakes, religious persecution, financial ruin, betrayal, hypocrisy, and a host of other ills. The survivor he becomes concludes that he must accept the futility of trying to sway these uncontrollable forces. He must also stop wasting his time theorizing about philosophies that claim to have answers that will vanquish suffering and evil. All he can do is make his garden grow.

We’re living through times when all the ills that Candide and his sweetheart Cunegonde experienced are still at large in the world. Of those most likely to touch me personally, natural disasters are on the rise, and global anti-Semitism is at a higher level than at any time since the Holocaust, which was still going during my infancy. In July, there was a tornado watch in New York, and we had three days of Hazardous air quality (500 AQI at its worst) in the Hamptons due to Canadian wildfires. Voltaire, who died in 1778 (during America’s revolution, before that of France), did not mention the collapse of systems of government, but that’s another force that’s spinning out of control.

So here’s my garden, twenty-five square feet in pots on my deck at the modest end of East Hampton. It’s given me enormous pleasure and peace of mind this summer. I go out first thing in the morning to talk to the flowers and deadhead a few spent blooms. In late afternoon or early evening, I give them some water if they look thirsty and feed them every couple of weeks if they aren’t as floriferous as I’d like. It sure beats watching the news.

The Power of Prepositions

The Power of Prepositions by Leigh Lundin Aladdin, getting along in years, found he was unable to pitch a tent as he had done in his youth. Smart as well as lucky, Aladdin still kept his magic lamp and, frugal with his wishes, one remained. He rubbed his lamp. When the genie appeared, he begged him. “My camel can no longer thread the needle. Can you cure my erectile impotence?” Genie said, “I can whisk away your problem.” With that, he rubbed his hands, evoking a puff of billowing blue smoke. Genie said, “I’ve dealt you a powerful spell, but at your age, you’ll be able to invoke it only once a year.” “How do I use it?” asked Aladdin. “All you have to do is say ‘one two three’ and it shall rise for as long as you wish, but only once a year.” Aladdin asked, “What happens when we’re exhausted and no longer want to continue?” Genie replied, “All you or your woman has to say is ‘one two three four,’ and it will go down. But be warned: the spell will not work again for another year.” Aladdin galloped home, eager to try his new powers of the flesh. That evening, Aladdin bathed and scented himself with oil of exotic myrrh. He climbed into bed where his wife lay on her side. Aladdin took a deep breath and said, “One two three.” Instantly, he became more aroused than he ever had in youth, a magnificent happenstance of tree-trunk proportions. His wife, hearing Aladdin’s words, rolled toward him and said, “What did you say ‘One two three’ for?” And that, dear readers, is why you should not end a sentence with a preposition.

Whoa, Look at THAT!

So far this summer, I've spent a lot of time on the computer, especially when it's hot as blazes outside, and at least some of it's been productive. I've written and submitted a lot of stories and SleuthSayers posts, I've done some research for future stories, I've read and sent a bazillion emails, etc. But I have also wasted a lot of time. I'm good at wasting time.

My most recent time-waster is watching (believe it or not) movie reactions on YouTube. Yep, you heard me right: movie reactions. Google calls it "feature creators recording themselves watching and responding to films for the first time." There are many sites dedicated to this, like Cinebinge, Totally Whatever, Cinepals, The Reel Rejects, etc.--I think my favorite might be Popcorn in Bed--and, depending on the movie they're covering, they can be a lot of fun. Instead of choosing from a list of what movies each site offers, I usually search for phrases like "Jurassic Park reactions," "Godfather reactions," "Galaxy Quest reactions," and so forth.

The way it works is, you watch parts of a movie alongside one or two viewers, whose faces are shown as the movie plays, and you can see the reactions they have to certain things in the film. Often, and especially if they're filmmakers themselves, they'll make comments about what they're seeing, and that can be interesting too. 

I need to explain something, here. I'm one of those people who has always enjoyed going again with others--friends, family, whoever--to see a movie that I myself have already seen and liked. I remember going to the theater for Forrest Gump four times in the months after it was first realeased in the mid-'90s--once by myself, and the next three times with each of our kids--all of them were teenagers then. I got a real kick out of watching their reactions and finding out what they thought of it. Same thing if I'm streaming a film at home on TV or playing it on DVD with, say, one of our children or grandchildren. I get almost as much fun out of watching their faces as I do from watching the movie. I've probably shown the grandkids all of my favorites, at least those that are child-friendly, and I have many favorites.

So why am I telling you all this, in a mystery-blog post? Here's the thing. I have discovered that these viewer-reaction videos on YouTube aren't just fun: they can be informative to me as a storyteller. I won't say they teach me a lot that I don't already know, but they do confirm for me which parts of the story are the most important and interesting and moving to the viewer. And believe me, the viewers' reactions cover the whole gamut--surprise, concentration, fear, sorrow, suspense, delight, sometimes even tears or cheering out loud. And, again, you can see exactly what it is in the story that's making them feel that way. Plus, it's entertaining.

I'm sure this is obvious, but the things that create the biggest reactions are the sad scenes, funny scenes, dangerous or intense scenes, twists, reveals, etc. You can also tell, immediately, at what point the viewer begins to like the hero/heroine, or dislike the villain. You can see the value of a gripping opening, a sympathetic character, an action scene, a mid-story reversal, a slam-bang ending, a satisfying end to a character arc. The kinds of things that might be instructive and helpful to a writer.

I've always felt that the one most important thing a story must do is make the reader feel something--whatever emotion it is--and the more intense these feelings are, the better your story/movie/novel is going to be. And, even though I know I'm belaboring the point, these YouTube videos allow you to see it firsthand, in the viewers' faces, along with the reasons for those reactions.

So that's my pitch. Have you ever bothered to watch one of those videos? (I didn't even know, until a few weeks ago, that they existed.) If you haven't seen them and want to give it try, just think of a movie you enjoyed, search for it in YouTube along with the word "reactions," and take a look. They're silly but they're addictive. 

As for justification, I'll tell you the same thing I say to my wife when she walks in with frowns and eyerolls and says Good grief, what are you watching in here? I tell her it's research. I'm learning something.

Hey, it sounds good to me.

The Gingerbread Man

In June, Level Short released Wish Upon a Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales, an anthology I edited with Michael Bracken. The stories range from light-hearted to noir. Fellow SleuthSayers, Joe Walker, Barb Goffman, and Michael Bracken, share insights about their amazing stories in previous posts and are worth checking out.

Deb Goldstein, Tom Milani, and Andrew Welsh- Huggins discuss the first two pages of their fabulous contributions at Art Taylor’s First Two Pages, also great reads.

Today, I am delighted to talk about my story, “The Gingerbread Man.”

THE GINGERBREAD MAN

Imagine The Princess Bride meets The Sopranos inside a bowling alley in the 1960’s—that’s my Hollywood-style pitch for this story. It is inspired by the fairy tale and the lost world of action bowling.

The story opens with Jack O’Conner and his grandson. Jack tells him a bedtime story, his version of the fairy tale, “The Gingerbread Man.”

Jack flashes back to the 1960’s in New York City, the center of “action bowling,” games that involve small-time gangsters who make high-stakes bets on players. 

Jack “Crazy-like-a-Fox” O’Connor was one of those bowlers. He’s leveraged by the police to become an informant to keep his wayward brother out of jail. His task, to find action bowler Francesco “The Gingerbread Man” Romano, the getaway driver for the Barnyard Gang that is linked to a series of convenience store robberies. 

Action bowlers had monikers, a clue about how they “ticked.” I used these nicknames as a vehicle to retell this iconic fairy tale.

Jack’s version of “The Gingerbread Man” takes readers into the unique world of action bowling. It’s filled with quirky characters and a twist that I hope readers will enjoy. 

THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

• “Hansel and Gretel” by Joseph S. Walker
• “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by John M. Floyd
• “Rapunzel” by Adam Meyer
• “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Laura Oles
•  “Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Michael Bracken
•  “Beauty and the Beast” by James A. Hearn
•  “The Bremen Musicians” by Debra H. Goldstein
•  “Jack and the Beanstalk” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
•  “Cinderella” by Donna Andrews
•  “The Frog Prince” by Josh Pachter
•  “Little Red Riding Hood” by Barb Goffman
•  “The Briar Patch” by Tom Milani
•  “King o’ the Cats” by David Dean
•  “The Gingerbread Man” by Stacy Woodson

If you want to learn more about action bowling, check out PIN ACTION by Gianmarc Manzione. It’s a fun read and offers insights into the history and unique subculture of action bowling.

***

My latest story, "She Loves You," appears in Black Cat Weekly, Issue 255. "She Loves You" follows a lovesick country music singer who receives an unsolicited reading from a geriatric psychic and gets more than he bargained for in this twisted tale about loyalty, trust, and inevitable consequences.

When Writing Historical Fiction: It's Better to Travel

(It's mid-August and I am enblow deep in end-of-summer projects. Haven't forgotten my promised follow up installment on celluloid Hammett. Will have that for your next go-round. In the interim this is a repost from a while back. Still useful. Hope you enjoy! - B.T.)

[Elmore] Leonard was originally no more a man of the West than was the Ohio-born dentist Zane Grey. While a kid in Detroit, Westerns enthralled him as they did most people in the 1930s and 40s. When he grew interested in writing during college Western fiction seemed a promising genre he could work in part-time. Unlike many writers then selling Western tales to pulps, though, Leonard insisted on accuracy, and kept a ledger of his research over the years, later crediting his longtime subscription to Arizona Highways Magazine for many of his authentic descriptions. All had to be genuinei: the guns, Apache terms and clothing; the frontier knives, card games, liquor, and especially the horses.

— Nathan Ward, from "Elmore Leonard's Gritty Westerns," in Crime Reads

It's certainly never a bad idea to follow the writing advice of the great Elmore Leonard. His Ten Rules For Writing are rightly famous as terrific advice for any writer of fiction. 

The Great Elmore Leonard

In those instances where Leonard's advice isn't readily available, it never hurts to follow his example, if at all possible. Take the one in the quote above from Nathan Ward's Crime Reads article on Leonard. For years Leonard apparently leaned heavily on the content of Arizona Highways magazine.

It's a fine notion. Now, don't get me wrong: it's always better to travel. There is no substitute for actually going to and spending time in the place you're writing about. But, if you're writing about someplace and you can't afford to go, read travel writers. For that matter, even if you can afford the investment in both time and treasure to visit the region where your work is set, read travel writers. No one can help you get a feel for a certain place like people who make their livings helping their readers get a feel for a certain place.

Take William Dalrymple. The British-born-and-raised son of a Scottish baronet, Dalrymple these days is best known for his recent run of riveting books on the history of the subcontinent: India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Dalrymple is a terrific writer and a first-rate historian who splits his time between a farm just outside Delhi, in India and a summer home in London.

William Dalrymple

But before he began to make a name for himself with books such as White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842, and The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of An Empire, Dalrymple began his writing career as a travel writer, taking readers on a tour through the Eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Land (From the Holy Mountain: a Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East), and of course, chronicling the early days of his life-long love affair with India. With his first book In Xanadu: a Quest, published in 1989, Dalrymple chronicles his modern retracing of the journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem in the summer palace of Kublai Khan in China. But it was with his second book, 1994's City of Djinns: a Year in Delhi, a memoir of his first visit to the city which has had such a tremendous impact on his adult life, that Dalrymple really began to make his mark.

And there is so much to this memoir which can be of use to the writer reading about the city. Here's an early excerpt laying out his introduction to Delhi and to India:

I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices. Moreover the city—so I soon discovered—possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. Friends would moan about the touts on Janpath and head off to the beaches in Goa, but for me Delhi always exerted a stronger spell. I lingered on, and soon found a job in a home for destitutes in the far north of the city. The nuns gave me a room overlooking a municipal rubbish dump. In the morning I would look out to see the sad regiment of rag-pickers trawling the stinking berms of refuse; overhead, under a copper sky, vultures circled the thermals forming patterns like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. In the afternoons, after I had swept the compound and the inmates were safely asleep, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me.

Now, I ask you. Can this guy set a scene, or what? Really helpful for drinking in the flavors, colors, scents and sounds of what on the face of it comes across as a truly unforgettable place. Really not a bad guide if you're interested in writing about modern-day India.

But what if, like me, you're a writer of historical fiction?

In Leonard's case, as stated above, he exploited a modern magazine to help give him local flavor not just for another region of the country, but for that region in another era. No mean feat. It's a testament to Leonard's talent, coupled with his singular vision that he was able to "world build" (to borrow a phrase from our friends who write speculative fiction) using these building blocks for his foundation.

So sure, you can (and should) definitely use your imagination to fill in the cracks. There is certainly no substitute for imagination in the fiction writer's tool kit. That said, you need more than one tool in order to get the job of writing fiction done. I've often felt like our "tool kit" as fiction writers should be more aptly called a "tool warehouse." And of course, another way to use travel writing as one of those tools, to help get the feel for a city or street, or region or state or county or what-have-you during a bygone time is to go and find travel writing from the time in which your work-in-progress is set.

I have a writer friend whose current work-in-progress is set during World War II. One of his major characters has a back-story in which he lived in Germany during the 1930s, in the run-up to the war. I referred him to A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, the first volume in a superb three-volume memoir of a trip on foot across Europe, from Holland all the way to Turkey by travel writer, war-time British commando (the account of his part in a successful kidnapping of a German general in Crete is not to be missed), bon vivant, and (some say) one of Ian Fleming's models for his literary creation James Bond, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Leigh Fermor set out for Constantinople (Istanbul) in December of 1933, less than a year after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had come to power. His narrative is replete with rich details about German life during that period, laying out how the Nazis had both a heavy and in some ways, a negligible impact on the country they would eventually drive to absolute ruin. Here is Leigh Fermor's initial impression of Cologne, the first major German city he visited:

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest’s initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it. Tinsel and stars flashed in all the shops and banners saying Fröhliche Weihnacht! were suspended across the streets. Clogged villagers and women in fleece-lined rubber boots slipped about the icy pavements with exclamatory greetings and small screams, spilling their armfuls of parcels. The snow heaped up wherever it could and the sharp air and the lights gave the town an authentic Christmas card feeling. It was the real thing at last! Christmas was only five days away. Renaissance doors pierced walls of ancient brick, upper storeys jutted in salients of carved timber and glass, triangles of crow-steps outlined the steep gables, and eagles and lions and swans swung from convoluted iron brackets along a maze of lanes. As each quarter struck, the saint-encrusted towers challenged each other through the snow and the rivalry of those heavy bells left the air shaking. Beyond the Cathedral and directly beneath the flying-buttresses of the apse, a street dropped sharply to the quays. Tramp steamers and tugs and barges and fair-sized ships lay at anchor under the spans of the bridges, and cafés and bars were raucous with music. I had been toying with the idea, if I could make the right friends, of cadging a lift on a barge and sailing upstream in style for a bit.

Again, this is quite a scene the writer is setting! So much good material, such a solid feel for the place. Leigh Fermor wrote the memoir some forty years after the trip, based on large part on the deep and thorough entries he made in his journal as an eighteen year-old looking for adventure in a rapidly changing world. And then he goes on to talk about his attempt to "make friends" in that timeless way young people have from time immemorial: he went to a bar:

I made friends all right. It was impossible not to. The first place was a haunt of seamen and bargees shod in tall sea-boots rolled down to the knee, with felt linings and thick wooden soles. They were throwing schnapps down their throats at a brisk rate. Each swig was followed by a chaser of beer, and I started doing the same. The girls who drifted in and out were pretty but a rough lot and there was one bulky terror, bursting out of a sailor’s jersey and wearing a bargeman’s cap askew on a nest of candy-floss hair, called Maggi—which was short for Magda—who greeted every newcomer with a cry of “Hallo, Bubi!” and a sharp, cunningly twisted and very painful pinch on the cheek. I liked the place, especially after several schnapps, and I was soon firm friends with two beaming bargemen whose Low German speech, even sober, would have been blurred beyond the most expert linguist’s grasp. They were called Uli and Peter. “Don’t keep on saying Sie,” Uli insisted, with a troubled brow and an unsteadily admonishing forefinger: “Say Du.” This advance from the plural to the greater intimacy of the singular was then celebrated by drinking Brüderschaft. Glasses in hand, with our right arms crooked through the other two with the complexity of the three Graces on a Parisian public fountain, we drank in unison. Then we reversed the process with our left arms, preparatory to ending with a triune embrace on both cheeks, a manoeuvre as elaborate as being knighted or invested with the Golden Fleece. The first half of the ceremony went without a hitch, but a loss of balance in the second, while our forearms were still interlocked, landed the three of us in the sawdust in a sottish heap. Later, in the fickle fashion of the very drunk, they lurched away into the night, leaving their newly-created brother dancing with a girl who had joined our unsteady group: my hobnail boots could do no more damage to her shiny dancing shoes, I thought, than the seaboots that were clumping all round us. She was very pretty except for two missing front teeth. They had been knocked out in a brawl the week before, she told me.

And that's just a taste. Leigh Fermor's three volumes here truly form a treasure trove: a window into a long-vanished world, and a feel for both the time itself and the timeless humanity of its cast of thousands. Well worth a read whether you're writing something set in Middle Europe during the 1930s, are a student of human nature, history, great writing, or (most likely) some combination of all of the above. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor (Right) in Crete, 1943

And that's all for now. Tune in next time when I I wrap up our tour through Cinema’s many adaptations of the work of Dashiell Hallett.

See you in two weeks!

John Crowley

I’ve been reading Gibbon’s history, Decline and Fall, at bedtime, and I was going to write a SleuthSayers column about it, but over the weekend, John Crowley died.  He would have found it entertaining, to hear about the Gibbon.  He would have thought it appropriate.

[CROWLEY’S HAND & MANUSCRIPT]

I met John in Lenox, Massachusetts – introduced by our mutual friend, the bookseller Matt Tannenbaum – and we fell into a kind of pipe-and-slippers habit pattern.  He was working on Little, Big at the time, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what a talisman it would turn out to be.  He told me he’d written a science fiction novel loosely based on the War of the Roses, and I read The Deep with great enthusiasm.  Beasts, his second novel, was chewier, but I thought it was very accessible, and I was surprised to find out people thought his stuff was difficult.  (I wasn’t surprised to learn he admired Nabokov.)  This would have been the winter of 1978-79, and to my knowledge, John hadn’t shown many people the book he was writing.  His agent, his editor at Bantam, and his old pal Lance Bird, the filmmaker.  So when he asked me if I’d be interested in looking at it, I was of course flattered, and said yes. 

Little, Big was about two-thirds of the way done.  He was actually further along than that, but the manuscript he gave me was as much of the finished rough as he felt confident in.  It was mostly typescript, but with a lot of handwritten interpolations, and the last hundred pages were entirely in his hand.  He wrote with a fountain pen, and a calligraphic nib, so the downstrokes were heavy, and the horizontals more delicate.  I found his handwriting in and of itself hypnotic, but it was also very sure.

That year, the third novel, Engine Summer, was published.  He told me it was in fact his first book, which he’d written in all innocence, not knowing about Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “By the Waters of Babylon,” or Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz – in other words, he wrote a post-apocalyptic story not realizing there was already an established library. 

It’s an over-simplification to call Little, Big a fantasy novel.  It is, of course, but it plays very little with the conventions.  Reading the rough draft, I was struck dumb.  I couldn’t believe I actually knew the guy who was writing this.  (A couple of years later, when the book was published, and I was pressed for a description, I called it a cross between The Wind and the Willows and A Hundred Years of Solitude.)  At the time, I wasn’t comparing it to anything; it seemed as if he’d invented a new fiction.  You were invested in the idea of story. 

I believe one of the reasons so many people are charmed by Little, Big is that you feel a sense of ownership.  As if he were writing to you.  John spoke sometimes of the ideal reader, as opposed, I think, to the generic reader.  What he meant was, that as a writer, you write to that person – to the ideal reader.  The many, many readers of Little, Big imagine themselves to be in on the secret, and they are. 

John was a lapsed Catholic.  This explains, among other things, his fascination with forgotten rituals, and lost brotherhoods, and secret signs.  Much of this comes out in the Ægypt quartet, the Rosicrucians, John Dee, alchemical mysteries, transmutation and transubstantiation.  You don’t have to believe conspiracy theories, but the faith in them of people who do is a kind of mystery.  The world is not how it’s always been, or it’s no longer the way it was, but once upon a time, these things were true.

Crowley had a distinctive voice, and an enormous curiosity.  He could take a familiar thing, and hold it up to the light, turning it back to front, and show you something entirely different.  There’s a fantastic metaphor he uses in Little, Big – the Art of Memory, which I remember him explaining to me, one night, when we were half in our cups, which goes like this:

You take an object, a leaf, a rose, a glass half-full, and it represents a memory, of childhood, of courtship, or mourning, and you place that object on a shelf, or in a niche, in an imaginary room, in your mind.  And you people that room with memories.  And over time, you build many rooms, and turn those rooms into a house of memory, that you enter at will, to bring back your own history.  And it may happen, that you wander in this house, and you come into one of your many rooms by a different door, and you see all the memories in that room from behind, as if their masks have slipped, and your orderly arrangement is no more than a fiction, a story told by the firelight. 

I’ll miss that curiosity.  His appetite for wonder, his intelligence, his kindness.  He was deeply thoughtful, and deeply thoughtful of others.  He was a sweet, decent man.  And for all of that, he wrote an immortal book.  He changed people’s lives.  He certainly changed mine.  God rest him.