Write What You Know...at Least a Bit

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 On Blackpoint Road - Scotti

They Look Like Angels - Scotti

What the Morning Never Suspected - Podmatic

What About Innocence

Back in 1993, The United States SCOTUS ruled on Herrera v. Collins. "The issue in that case was whether an inmate could present new evidence to make a claim of habeas corpus, the ancient legal vehicle by which prisoners can seek relief from unlawful imprisonment."

Nine years after his conviction for shooting and killing two police officers, Herrera produced writs stating that he was innocent, and that his deceased brother had actually committed the murders. Herrera's last-ditch effort failed, but his case was then used by the Supreme Court in order to decide whether any inmate could use claims of new evidence to argue that their imprisonment violated their Constitutional rights. They decided no. In other words, a claim of innocence based on newly discovered evidence — according to this decision — didn't provide grounds for habeas corpus relief.

Scalia concurred with the court's 6-3 decision that a claim of innocence should not serve as the sole grounds for habeas corpus relief, stating in his written opinion that sufficient legal relief already existed for people presenting new evidence of innocence (to be fair, Scalia also said 'not that factual innocence was irrelevant') and "that ruling otherwise would impose an unmanageable burden on lower courts to review newly discovered evidence." (LINK)

ME - Which seems to be basically saying, it would be too damned much trouble and costs too much money to check one more time before executing someone to see if they are indeed factually innocent. Which is where I blow a gasket and start screaming.

Lest you think this is a problem solely in the United States, Lord Denning, the most celebrated English judge of the twentieth century, said in 1988, “It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than that the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned.” Denning was discussing the Birmingham Six, a group of Irishmen who were convicted of bombing two pubs and then spent more than a decade protesting their innocence. The Court of Appeal had dismissed their case, and Denning himself had thrown out allegations of police corruption, because even the idea of the police could be corrupt was “such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right.” (More screaming from me.) After activists and journalists took up the issue, Denning complained that it would have been better if the men had all been hanged. “They’d have been forgotten and the whole community would be satisfied,” he said. (New Yorker)

Anyway, it turned out that the police had been corrupt and fabricated evidence against the Birmingham Six. They were finally freed in 1991. Their case was one of several – the Tottenham Three, the Bridgewater Four, the Maguire Seven - in the eighties and nineties that eroded faith in the British justice system.

As a public outcry grew over wrongful convictions, the Criminal Cases Review Commission was formed and started operating in 1997. The CCRC was designed as an independent check on the Court of Appeal, but it was never given full freedom. It was allowed to refer cases only if there was a “real possibility” that the Court of Appeal would overturn them, and defining that limited the cases severely.

In 2021, a cross-party inquiry issued a damning report, concluding that the CCRC was “too deferential to the Court of Appeal.” Wrongful convictions in the U.K. were repeatedly traced to failures by police or prosecutors to hand evidence over to the defense (see, it doesn't just happen here), but the CCRC didn't look into it very often, and its work was 'routinely hampered by officers’ destruction of forensic evidence.'

A classic example of police 'officers’ destruction of forensic evidence' is the Whitehouse Farm murders, "The U.K.'s Most Infamous Family Massacre".

Late at night on August 7, 1985, Jeremy Bamber called the police to Whitehouse Farm, where they found Jeremy's parents, Nevill and June Bamber, his sister Sheila and her six year old twins all shot to death in different rooms of the house.

At first everyone believed it was Shiela, diagnosed with schizophrenia and was often threatening, who'd shot everyone and then herself. But then other things came up.

Like the police.

Detective Inspector Ron Cook, the lead crime-scene officer, was known as "Bumbling Ron." The night of the murder he picked up the Bible that was either on Sheila's body or by her side - no one will ever know for sure - and started flipping through it. Without wearing gloves. He also moved the murder weapon without wearing gloves, and no one checked for fingerprints until weeks later. And he actively disposed of bloody carpets and bedding. Cook died several years ago, but his deputy, Detective Sergeant Neil Davidson, revealed that after Bamber was declared the prime suspect, “The shit hit the fan, big time."

“ ‘What can we salvage? Who can we blame?’ ” Cook spent weeks “chasing about, red in the face,” trying to find scraps of evidence, Davidson told me. “He was trying to dig himself out of the hole. The whole forensic thing was really a shambles, because nothing was preserved.” Watching the chaos unfold had left him conflicted about the case. “I would not be surprised if, one day, someone comes along and says, Here’s definitive proof that he didn’t do it.”

And then there's the crime-scene photographs, including ones which were not made available to the original defence. Let's just say that in these photographs, dead bodies move and things come and go. Some show Sheila's right arm and hand in slightly different positions in relation to the rifle, which is lying across her body. The rifle itself also appears to have moved, more than once. (I think Bumbling Ron probably struck again.) Former DCS Mick Gradwell, shown the photographs by The Guardian, said in 2011: "The evidence shows, or portrays, Essex police having damaged the scene, and then having staged it again to make it look like it was originally. And if that has happened, and that hasn't been disclosed, that is really, really serious."

Much of the trial revolved around a silencer, which had been photographed (?) on the rifle. Somehow the police failed to secure it at the time, and it vanished. But then 3 days later, David Boutflour, Jeremy's cousin, found it in the gun cupboard and took it home, where he and his parents, etc, handled it freely for three days before giving it to the police. Boutflour said it felt sticky, and they found red paint and blood on the silencer. When the police did collect the silencer on August 12, five days after the murders, an officer reported seeing an inch-long grey hair attached to it, but this disappeared by the time the silencer arrived at forensics. There a scientist, John Hayward, found blood on the inside and outside surface of the silencer, but not enough to permit analysis. Later, the blood inside was found to be the same blood group as Sheila's, although it also could have been a mixture of Nevill's and June's – or David Boutflour's.

Speaking of David Boutflour, there was a second silencer, identical to the first, which was his. The police eventually took that one away too, which didn't just muddle the waters, it pretty much turned them to sludge. To this day, no one knows which silencer was actually tested, or both. There are three exhibits, titled "SBJ/1", (because it was handed over by Detective Sergeant Stan Jones), "DB/1" after David Boutflour had found it, and another labeled "DRB/1" because there was also a Detective Constable David Bird. Which what where? No one knows.

BTW, the whole point of the silencer – and it was the major point of the prosecution - was that the rifle was short enough that Sheila, who was also short, could not have killed herself with the rifle if the silencer was on it. So, my question: If the silencer was on the rifle, why were they looking for it in the guncase? Why are there pictures with the silencer and without it? And how did Boutflour find the silencer (a silencer) there 3 days later?

NOTE: David Boutflour's family inherited Whitehouse Farm after Bamber was convicted.

But details, details. The prosecution argued that if Sheila's blood was inside the silencer, it supported the prosecution's position that she had been shot by another party, but if the blood inside the silencer belonged to someone else (and later tests indicated that it was her mother June's), that part of the prosecution case collapsed.

NOTE: Bamber's defence brought this up in an appeal after later tests indicated it was probably Sheila's mother June's blood. "The judges' conclusion was that the results were complex, incomplete, and also meaningless because they did not establish how June's DNA came to be in the silencer years after the trial, did not establish that Sheila's was not in it, and did not lead to a conclusion that Jeremy's conviction was unsafe." (Wikipedia) In other words, screw you, we're sticking with our decision.

More cock-ups: Officers did not take contemporaneous notes; those who had dealt with Jeremy wrote down their statements weeks later.

The bodies were released days after the murders, and three of them (Nevill, June and Sheila) were cremated.

Jeremy's clothes were not examined until one month later.

Ten years later, all blood samples were destroyed.

Oh, and there's Jeremy's girlfriend Julia Mugford, with whom he'd broken up before the murders. She said that he'd planned and done the murders. The police promptly arrested him, and at the station, Bamber insisted that Mugford had invented the story after he broke off their relationship. “If she could put me behind bars then nobody else could have me,” he said. (Apparently she also tried to kill him at one point, literally telling him, "If you're dead, no one else can have you!")

About a month after the murders, Mugford testified against Bamber. Later, during appeals, Jeremy's lawyers argued that a 26 September 1985 letter to Mugford from John Walker, assistant director of public prosecutions, raised the possibility that she had been persuaded to testify in the hope that charges against her would not be pursued. You see, during her police invterviews, Mugford had confessed to drug offences, burglary, and cheque fraud, and in the letter, Walker had suggested to the Chief Constable of Essex Police, "with considerable hesitation", that Mugford not be prosecuted for any of it.

Also, after Bamber's conviction, Mugford sold her story, complete with semi-nude photos, to a tabloid and got enough "blood money" as she called it, "to buy a flat."

Despite all of this and more, Bamber was convicted and sentenced to five life terms. He's been appealing ever since, based on the unbelievable incompetence and general 'mucking about' of the police – and so far the CCRC has rejected all appeals.

In July 2025, the CCRC announced that they had reviewed four of Bamber's latest ten grounds for appeal and had decided they should not be referred to the court of appeal. The other six grounds remain under review… But I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

'Michael Naughton, a scholar of sociology and law at the University of Bristol, said that the C.C.R.C. had come to serve the opposite of its intended purpose—it was effectively insuring “that miscarriages of justice don’t come to public attention, because they diminish confidence and trust in the criminal-justice system.” In 2004, Naughton began launching innocence projects at universities across the U.K., emulating a movement that has exonerated hundreds of convicts in the United States. The network closed down after eleven years, having overturned just one conviction. “People tend to say terrible things about America, but they have this real commitment to innocent people not being convicted,” Naughton said. “We don’t have that focus on innocence in this country.”' (My emphasis added.)

Sources: (The Guardian, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Wikipedia Jeremy Bamber)

I've sat in at a lot of parole hearings to testify on the behalf of inmates. All too often, the State's Attorney of the case shows up, claims they're not there to relitigate the case, and then promptly relitigate the case with a venom that has to be heard to be believed. Most of them simply don't want any inmate who was convicted under their watch to get out. Even if they might be innocent.

And I've seen inmates who have been granted commutations linger for years in limbo, waiting for the Governor to sign the commutation papers. Again, even if they might be innocent.

Is the majesty of the law more important than the accuracy of the law?

Is the majesty of the law more important than finding out the truth?

Should there be a limit to the costs (financial and time) to the state to prove whether someone is innocent or not?

As a human being, I would reply "NO" to all three of those questions.

But, "The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy."

— Ronald Reagan

Back to the Bay

Getting Historical with  Aubrey Hamilton, Diana R. Chambers, Karen Odden, S.J. Rozan

 I spent the last week in San Francisco, eating Rice-a-Roni and leaving my heart while wearing flowers in my hair.  Or something.

Actually, we were at Left Coast Crime, the West Coast's annual conference for mystery fans.  And we had a great time. 

Before I get into the details I want to say this: I mentioned the conference on FaceBook and a writer much better known than myself said that he had stopped going to cons years ago and it hadn't affected his sales.

I replied that I don't go to them for marketing purposes.  I go to be with my tribe, recharge my creative batteries, and maybe learn something.  All of which I did in San Francisco. 

Libraries Panel with Pat Sellers, Jenn Hooker, and Randal Brandt

I was on a panel about choosing the right period to write historical fiction about.  I also got to do a presentation about how my library spent almost two years investigating a crime and caught the man who had robbed over a hundred libraries.  And speaking of libraries, I moderated a panel on Libraries Helping Authors Helping Libraries.  It was great to see so many people interested in those institutions. One of our panelists, Randal Brandt, was the con's Fan Guest of Honor because of his work as the curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection at UC Berkeley.

Swag

Mysti Berry and I co-sponsored a table at the LeftyAwards Banquet.  Since a lot of my stories are set in New Jersey I provided all of our guests with Garden State magnets and a real Jersey shore treat: Berkeley Candy's molasses salt water taffy paddles robed in dark chocolate. A piece of my childhood!

We also attended Author Speed-Dating (and let me tell you, it is much more fun to sit at a table and let 18 pairs of authors come to you than to be one of the authors trying to repeat your pitch at 18 tables).  The highlight for that might be the author who said their publisher had had an astronomer choose their publication date.  

Loot

Another highlight is the New Author Breakfast sponsored by Sisters in Crime (interesting to see how some of the rookies are much more relaxed and practiced than others), and a bunch of panels.  And we brought home a ton of loot, all free (unless you count the cost of airfare, hotel, and the conference, so we won't).

I also bumped into two SleuthSayers, Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson, who did their panels brilliantly (naturally).

Of course, since San Francisco is one of our favorite cities we also  threw in some time for sightseeing, which I won't bore you with.*

But the biggest highpoint of the conference for me personally happened at a panel on short stories. Vera Chan mentioned that Rex Stout wrote two novellas that started with the same chapter, but she couldn't remember the title.  Now, I frown on people who, during the question and answer period, offer a comment instead of  a question, but I couldn't resist.  When Q and A time came I raised my hand.  "That Rex Stout story is 'Counterfeit for Murder.'" 

There was a smattering of applause and Catriona McPherson, the moderator, said: "That's a librarian!"

Which indeed I am.

Next time: words of wisdom from the conference.

 * Cable cars, the Embarcadero, the Ferry Building, the Exploratorium, Chinatown, North Beach, the City Lights Bookstore, cable cars, Congregation Sherith Israel, Fisherman's Wharf, Musee Mecanique, Ghiradelli Square, cable cars.  I like cable cars.

The Conferences and Conventions We Didn’t Know We Needed

The audience at Left Coast Crime 2026’s
“Short But Usually Not Sweet” panel.

With the success of ShortCon, the Premiere Conference for Writers of Short Crime Fiction, it’s obvious that some segments of the crime writing community have long been overlooked.

Additionally, having recently returned from Left Coast Crime in San Francisco, I am reminded once again of where most of the important things happen at mystery conventions.

So, I propose a new crime-writing conference and two new new mystery conventions.

FlashCon

ShortCon is an annual one-day conference intended to teach new and early career writers how to build and sustain a long career writing short crime fiction.

But what about writers of flash fiction? Don’t they need their own conference?

I propose FlashCon, a two-hour conference with three half-hour presentations and 15 minutes between each presentation where new and early career writers learn how to build and sustain a long career writing flash crime fiction.

HallCon

At nearly every mystery convention I’ve attended, I’ve met more people and learned more during unplanned meetings in the hallways between panels and presentations.

So, let’s flip the script for HallCon. Instead of 45-minute panels and presentations with 15 minutes between them, let’s have 15-minute panels and presentations with 45 minutes between them.

Fifteen minutes is more than enough time for moderators to introduce panelists and for panelists to say, “Buy my book!” Or, if they’re short-story writers, to say, “Read my story!”

If the conference venue is small enough and the event rooms located close together (rather than spread over multiple floors), this will enable attendees to crowd together in the hallway and have meaningful conversations that can lead to any number of positive outcomes.

BarCon

At some conventions—Bouchercon in Minneapolis was one—the bar is small, centrally located, open late, and where nearly everyone gathers after dinner.

So, how about BarCon? There’s no programming, and the non-programming doesn’t start until eight p.m. and lasts well into the night.

Your Thoughts

So, what about you? Do you see opportunities for conferences and conventions that meet needs not currently served by the mystery/crime fiction community?

* * *

“Under the Proctor Street Bridge” was published in Time After Time (Thalia Press).

“Wealth of Knowledge” was published in Kings River Life, March 14, 2026.

Jukes & Tonks, originally released by Down & Out Books, has been rereleased by Audecyn Books.

Strategy

There is no doubt that there are, if not formulas, at least recipes for most fiction. These change over time as tastes in protagonists change, worries over crime wax and wane, and society turns from one set of problems to another.

The ever popular UK procedural is a nice example. Almost always well acted and often well scripted, it mixes and matches a variety of familiar characters, situations, and crimes. These are instantly recognizable to fans of the genre. There's the crusty, but savvy, DCI and his or her gifted, but occasionally difficult, subordinate. There's the clueless superior and the often snobby top brass. These come as part of a still functioning class system, often a target for up from the ranks coppers with no interest in making nice with the entitled.

Then there's the suspects, preferably both colorful and plausible, and the victim. The latter come in two varieties: young, beautiful, and regretted, or unmourned and not missed. You get the picture.

Unforgotten, a well made UK import now in its sixth season, is currently appearing on Masterpiece (PBS).  I have not seen earlier seasons but clearly the show has been popular in the UK. Season six suggests that its creators are unafraid to tweak the formula. They do this in two ways, in the highly cooperative and egalitarian relationship between DCI Jess James (Sinead Keenan) and her trusted colleague DI Sunny Kahn (Sanjeev Basjklar) and, even more importantly, in the characters of the all important persons of interest.

Possible perpetrators are usually a rum lot, each full of the big and little vices that lead mortals to murder and beyond. Not so in Unforgotten. There are four principle suspects, each with a significant other, who might or might not be involved as well. And here's the thing, they are all sympathetic, and not just sympathetic, but often admirable. What's more, each has been dealt a difficult hand. We have a college teacher bedeviled by sanctimonious students and spineless administrators and a young, autistic man with a bedridden mother. We have an Afghan refugee who has faced both danger at home and horrors abroad, and a provocative right wing pundit whose lover struggles to recover from a devastating spinal injury. 

In each case, our suspects are responsible for difficult but vulnerable companions: a rebellious teenaged daughter, that bedridden mother, the crippled lover, and a newly arrived Afghan without papers. Impossible not to root for these folks.

This cast of suspects – and they are, indeed, suspects, with forensic evidence against them, as well as quick tempers, family problems, and detectible lies – alters the nature of suspense in Unforgotten. How often do procedurals harvest tension from the unknown killer, set to strike again? The plot of this procedural rules out that strategy: the victim has been dead for four years and there were plenty of folks who disliked him. His murder was no random killing.

Instead, what keeps the viewer uneasy is the question: which of these basically decent people not only killed Jerry Cooper but dismembered him? And how could someone that we'd hate to to see in the clink take saw and knife to his carcass?

Good questions and the twin difficulties for the Unforgotten's script must have lain in selecting the appropriate killer and in reaching a solution that is both legit and consoling. I think they managed. The Unforgotten ends on rare notes of reconciliation, unusual in crime dramas but perhaps just the tone that is needed today. 

*****

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

• https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

• https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864

Service Without Service, part 2

Service with a Smirk

Once upon a time, I lived in a Minnesota state forest, my home base from where I traveled extensively. I had started a couple of minor businesses, but when I began working overseas, I needed to divest. An acquaintance asked to buy one. We wrote out an agreement in which she would take over the shop, the company bank account, the assets, and pay me over time. I flew out for a nine month stint in Europe.

Cell phones were a couple of years from reaching the mass market, limiting continent-to-continent communications. When I finally returned, I found the shop’s doors padlocked and empty of contents. The bank account was empty; no payments had been made to me.

Worst of all. I found a multi-thousand lien on my house. What the hell?

I pieced together the events, discovering in my absence I’d been scammed. The acquaintance who ‘bought’ the business had no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. As soon as Northwest’s wheels left the ground, she liquidated the assets, and, in an excess of brutal dishonesty, she sued, claiming she wasn’t a proprietor but an employee and I’d failed to pay her wages. With me out of the picture, she could fabricate a narrative without anyone to dispute it. After a default judgment, she placed a lien on my house in the woods while court gears slowly ground. Fortunately, I disrupted her scheme by returning sooner than expected.

Typical Process Server

Proof of service receipts from the court were revealing. The server claimed the residence was occupied, but no one answered the door. As evidence, he said a television was on, and he found newspapers at my door and letters addressed to me in my mailbox. Wood smoke, he said, rose from the chimney..

Whoa. Let’s take this step by step.

I had no ordinary street address, no television, and no mailbox. Instead, I kept a postal box closer to Minneapolis, unrelated to the township of my physical forest address. I subscribed to no newspaper. The house was heated not by wood, but by a propane tank the size of a Volkswagen.

Not one scintilla of evidence matched my residence. Clearly the server had not visited my house. Did our little scammer mislead him or did the server flat out lie?

My attorney was pessimistic. Even if we could prove malservice and I was blindsided, the court was loath to reopen a closed case. However, with my presence and willingness to pursue the case, the judge reluctantly allowed me to deport $10k into a bank escrow account, until the parties were ready to proceed. Funny thing, with me back on the scene and highly motivated, the other party seemed oddly unenthusiastic about pursuing the suit. It languished for a lengthy period until the bank released the funds back to me.

I got my money back and one painful lesson. But let’s review. 

The plaintiff knew I was out of the country, knew I was unavailable to defend a suit. Whether or not that party misled the process server, the court-approved server did not do his job, that of locating the correct house and determining the whereabouts of the respondent.

We need a word for faking and falsifying serving of documents as required by courts and government bureaus. ‘Disservice’ is out and ‘misservice’ doesn’t quite cover malfeasance. Maybe malservice™? (I might as well invent the word,) During the Great Depression when thousands of North Americans lost their homes, the term ‘sewer service’ surfaced. Process servers might dump hundreds of summons in a ditch whilst claiming they’d hand delivered them.

Service Done Right

Previously in SleuthSayers, I mentioned coming up against a scamming, scheming disbarred lawyer, ‘Dr Bob Black’. He made the mistake of conning a New York City homicide detective. The detective hired an attorney, hired me, and hired a process server. His was not an ordinary server, but one noted for dedication and persistence. When a defendant seemed litigation proof and especially service proof, this was the guy the pros called. No case was too small, no task too mundane, no case too difficult.

Dr Black bragged he was lawsuit immune and judgment proof. All of his assets were stashed overseas. Everything else was in his wife’s name and he maintained no assets in the US. Nevertheless, our detective pursued justice whilst our server pursued the slippery, slimy, slithery Dr. Black.

Black proved elusive. Our process man turned from server to dedicated observer. At a tactical distance from Black’s house, he camped in his car and jotted notes about the days and times of lawn service, mail pickups and drop-offs, trash pickup, and food deliveries.

One of Black’s peculiarities was to schedule appointments to the minute, say, 9:44am or maybe 14:23 in the afternoon. Black claimed he specified these odd times because he was so tightly booked. I viewed it as a conceit, but it also served a purpose: If his afternoon doorbell rang and it wasn’t exactly 2:23, he wouldn’t open the door.

Not to be outwitted, our server took to the trees… literally. He climbed a magnolia off the corner of Black’s McMansion where he could oversee the entryway without being seen. By then he roughly knew delivery routines and he waited. Right on cue, a dry cleaning truck arrived. As Black stepped outside, our man slid down the tree and dashed. Before Black knew what was happening, the server was on the conman, gleefully shouting those infamous words, “You… have… been… served!”

Genial Landlord Lawyer

Misuse of Pronouns

And so the hurricane season of 2004 came to pass, four monster windstorms, one attack after another, that tore apart Florida. Dockets became jammed with customers suing with evictions, with foreclosures, with insurance companies reluctant to pay. Independent lawyers picked up several dozen cases at a time in mass rubberstamp hearings where people lost their homes in less than ninety seconds.

In that mess, an HOA (homeowners association) targeted me. I wasn’t aware of the suit until it was over. My first question asked how I was served. Sure enough, the signature form, called ‘return of service’, referenced a residence, which was then a vacant hurricane damaged house. The notes read to the effect, “Respondent acknowledged she was Leigh Lundin. Server confirmed identity but she declined to leave her signature.”

Wait. What?

The HOA lawyer claimed it was a simple mistake, typos that gender swapped ‘he’ into ‘she’ and ‘his’ into ‘her’ and in the press of so many suits, errors were understandable. In court, I complained and the HOA attorney repeated his assertions. The harried judge snapped at me. “Well, you’re here now.” Damn. I was hoping to see a slap down and I got it… me.

Summons Summary

Courts and clerks opine that misservice and particularly malservice almost never happens, but I would like to see studies to determine actually numbers. The reluctance of one court to reopen a case and the dismissive nature of another is discouraging, a signal that defendants can be overlooked– deliberately.

I have sought remedies in court, mostly small claims. In support of independent workers, I’ve preferred private process servers, you know, like Kinsey Malone. In a case where I sued a large corporation (and won), I paid a county sheriff’s office to do the deed on the theory a uniformed deputy marching through a Tallahassee glass tower might meet less resistance.

In one infamous case of malservice, a judge set aside a $7.7 million judgment. One of my favorite internet lawyers, Steve Lehto, discusses cases in Texas and Michigan. He drew attention to a stinging NBC exposé.

If false service happened to me in court cases at least twice and more than once by Code Enforcement, how common is the practice? Probably not common at all, but when it happens, it happens big– one man ditching hundreds of service documents in Maryland, thousands of documents dumped by a New York law firm. Such cases rarely make the news, but become known throughout the profession and legal circles.

This happened to me. What can I do?

First, don’t panic. Consider consulting an attorney, even in small claims court. Judges should take misservice seriously.

Obtain the receipt of service and look for errors. In my cases, errors were obvious. Being out of the country makes it difficult to receive service. Getting gender wrong is a major problem. Check dates and times. I’ve never had to argue this, but a habit of signing upon acceptance might lend credence to a false service argument.

Following are resources you might find helpful. If you’ve been misserved, good luck.

• The Process Server Institute documents cases:
• https://psinstitute.com/whatisaproperproofofservice/
• https://psinstitute.com/criminal-liability-for-preparing-false-proofs-of-service/
• LegalClarity.org discusses the issue, offering professional advice for sticky situations.
• https://legalclarity.org/what-to-do-if-a-process-server-lied-on-an-affidavit-of-service/
• https://legalclarity.org/what-happens-if-you-cant-serve-someone-court-papers/
• LegalServeUSA  offers consumer oriented advice.
• https://legalserveusa.com/fake-process-server-calls/

See you soon.

The Underappreciated Keen Eddie

A sad truth about television is that series get canned for being too good. A lost favorite of mine is the hybrid Keen Eddie (2003), a comic cocktail of style, pace, cops and robbers, big heart, sharp sense of humor, and British send-up. 

And it got the hook after seven episodes. Thirteen, if you count the final six that Bravo burned in 2004. No streaming service carries it at last check. You can barely find it on YouTube.

Given all that, Keen Eddie needs a primer. 

The Premise

Eddie (Mark Valley) is a New York cop. He's clever--but not as clever as he thinks he is. He gets played and screws up a carefully arranged international drug bust. NYPD banishes Eddie to London to assist New Scotland Yard with that piece of the blown investigation. Could that ever actually happen? Bear with me.

Eddie clicks with new partner Monty Pippin (Julian Rhind-Tutt), an eccentric libertine, and they get about breaking cases. Thirteen of them. Meanwhile, Superintendent Johnson (Colin Salmon) comes to begrudge Eddie's dogged successes but never his American nonsense. Eddie's accidental roommate, Fiona (Sienna Miller), is running a support grift on her parents and angles to get Eddie out of her hair.

The Packaging

British humor doesn't scream pace (or it didn't in 2003), but the show solved that with slick packaging: dynamic editing, striking visuals, fast cutaways, Dutch angles tossed in for fun. A progressive techno soundtrack kept things bubbling. 

If that sounds pretentious, it wasn't. The show understood that its tongue must always be in its cheek, and the humor was as much London underworld class as highbrow. One moment, it was an awkward conversation with Fiona's wealthy parents or at a society gathering, the next the cops would be bartering with oddball street informants. Either, the dialogue zipped and zinged. 

Examples of crimes Eddie and Pippin investigated:

• A prize racehorse stolen for its sperm, but the thieves can't decide on who has to obtain the samples;
• Stolen football tickets;
• A safecracking where the thieves forget where they put the safe's operating manual.

The show also won a comic writer's hat tip for pulling something ever more rare: the running gag. As Eddie settled into his expat life, episodes revisited his dog's swath of destruction or his awkward flirtations with the Superintendent's assistant. In isolation, any one gag might've flopped, but none were in isolation. They were neat-fit parts of Keen Eddie's snow globe London.

That London was very much a major character, one that the producers took great lengths to make cool. Well, I did find it cool, but I'm their target Anglophile. I also think drizzle and banoffee pie are cool. 

The Players

And it was all meant to build those characters. If it was going to work, the casting had to be, as they say across the pond, spot on. The producers went for the pragmatic. In 2003, the main four characters were their own blend of established performers and emerging talents. Valley had made the rounds on soap operas and guest star slots. He had the charm to play a leading man, the presence to play a seasoned cop, the brashness to play a loose cannon, and the vulnerability to play a loose cannon all too aware of his mistakes. 

Julian Rhind-Tutt was an excellent foil. At the time, he was already respected in British theatre and television, not least for his comic gifts. He leaned into his libertine character with a refined, seen-some-things openness to life that contrasted well with Eddie's American need for closure. 

Colin Salmon was also by then a well-known actor in the U.K. He played the martinet Superintendent with firm smolder and British deadpan. 

The star just breaking out was Sienna Miller. She'd earned a name for herself as a model but was transitioning to acting. She played her character as a control freak and exasperated when control inevitably evades her. She's every bit the mistake maker as Eddie but can't process it with his self-deprecating shrug.

The Undoing

In 2002, Fox was American Idol and then everything else. Fox thought it was getting a high-concept cop show run by producers with a track record. And that was exactly the series turned over to them, but the network's feet had gone cold. Too concept, too British. In the end, Fox shunted Keen Eddie to the summer replacement line-up. From there, things went about how you might think.

Keen Eddie took over the Tuesday 9pm slot from 24, which had finished its second season and was growing its audience. The competition was Last Comic Standing (NBC), According to Jim (ABC), and The Guardian (CBS) riding in JAG's 8pm audience wake. Seven weeks was the extent of Fox's patience. They turned the slot over to a very different sort of premiere, The O.C.

In retrospect, the switch seems instructive. In 2002, few network viewers were tuning in for smart comedy, let alone when baked into a police procedural. The new golden age of TV was happening elsewhere, on paid cable--The Wire, The Sopranos, Sex in the City--and this was years before anyone uttered the word streaming.  

Keen Eddie was caught in the middle. A cop show with comedy, a comedy show with brains, an American show with too British a feel. It was good at everything but at finding a network audience. 

Which is a damn shame. Keen Eddie was a great show with a great perspective--that didn't take itself the least seriously. It was there to entertain and did so relentlessly. 

If only more of us had been watching those summer nights.

Mitchell and Webb do Poirot

 

Kids These Days: Awesome Whether Or Not You Believe in Them

This time last year I was on my second day of what would turn out to be a month-long stay at my local hospital, where I got to experience being told I might lose my leg, that kidneys might never work again, and  the otherworldliness of getting regularly dosed with Oxycontin to help deal with the pain in my leg.

And now, a year later, my kidneys work great, I'm on medication that helps maintain them and the rest of my renal system, and my leg only aches sometimes.

Today has been one of those times.

And with the news of the past few months by turns infuriating and depressing me, I figured it might be time to dust off one of my most optimistic and hopeful posts and repost it here. Sure did wonders for my spirits, yet again! And I hope it does for yours too!

So here it is: a post I originally wrote ten years ago, in the midst of a divisive presidential election-one that reflected (and continues to reflect) my unshakeable faith in this country. And here we are, a full decade later, and that faith in my fellow Americans remains strong and unshakeable.

*     *     *     *     *

So, about my day gig.

I teach ancient history to eighth graders.

And like I tell them all the time, when I say, "Ancient history," I'm not talking about the 1990s.

For thirteen/fourteen year-olds, mired hopelessly in the present by a relentless combination of societal trends and biochemistry, there's not much discernible difference between the two eras.

I wish!

It's a great job. But even great jobs have their stressors.

Like being assigned chaperone duty during the end-of-the-year dance.

Maybe you're familiar with what currently passes for "popular music" among fourteen year-olds these days. I gotta say, I don't much care for it. Then again, I'm fifty-one. And I can't imagine that most fifty-one year-olds in 1979 much cared for the stuff that I was listening to then.

And it's not as if I'm saying I had great taste in music as a fourteen year-old. If I were trying to make myself look good I'd try to sell you some line about how I only listened to jazz if it was Billie Holiday or Miles Davis, and thought the Police were smokin' and of course I bought Dire Straits' immortal Making Movies album, as well Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door when they both came out that year.

Well. No.

In 1979 I owned a Village People vinyl album (Cruisin', with "YMCA" on it), and a number of ElvisPresley albums and 8-track tapes. I also listened to my dad's Eagles albums quite a bit. An uncle bought Supertramp's Breakfast in America for me, and I was hooked on a neighbor's copy of Freedom at Point Zero by Jefferson Starship, but really only because of the slammin' guitar solo Craig Chaquico played on its only hit single: "Jane." And I listened to a lot of yacht rock on the radio. I didn't know it was "yacht rock" back then. Would it have mattered?

The sad reality

But bear in mind we didn't have streaming music back then. And my allowance I spent mostly on comic books.

Ah, youth.

Anyway, my point is that someone my age back then may very well have cringed hard and long and as deeply if forced to listen to what I was listening to at eardrum-bursting decibels, and for the better part of two hours.

That was me on the second-to-the-last-day of school a week or so back.

Two hours.

Two hours of rapper after rapper (if it's not Eminem, Tupac, or the Beastie Boys, I must confess it all sounds the same to me) alternating with heavily autotuned "singing" by Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, etc.

Thank God we got some relief in the form of the occasional Bruno Mars song. Bruno, he brings it.

All Hail Bruno Mars - Savior of My Sanity

And through it all, the kids were out there on the floor. Mostly girls, and mostly dancing with each other.

Great album, great cover, great band.

One group of these kids in particular caught my attention. Three girls, all fourteen, all of whom I knew. All wearing what '80s pop-rock band Mr. Mister once referred to as the "Uniform of Youth."

Of course, the uniform continues to change, just as youth itself does.

But in embracing that change, does youth itself actually change? Bear with me while I quote someone a whole lot smarter than I on the matter:

"Kids today love luxury. They have terrible manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love to gab instead of getting off their butts and moving around."

The guy quoted (in translation) was Socrates, quoted by his pupil Plato, 2,400 years ago.

And some things never change.

Getting back to the three girls mentioned above, their "uniform of youth" was the one au courant in malls and school courtyards across the length and breadth of this country: too-tight jeans, short-sleeved or sleeveless t-shirts, tennis-shoes. They looked a whole lot like so many other girls their age, out there shaking it in ways that mothers the world over would not approve of.

In other words, they looked like thousands, hell, millions of American girls out there running around today, listening to watered down pablum foisted on them by a rapacious, corporate-bottom-line-dominated music industry as "good music", for which they pay entirely too much of their loving parents' money, and to which they will constantly shake way too much of what Nature gave them–even under the vigilant eyes of long-suffering school staff members.

Yep, American girls. From the soles of their sneakers to the hijabs covering their hair.

Oh, right. Did I mention that these girls were Muslims? Well, they are. One from Afghanistan. One from Turkmenistan, and one from Sudan. At least two of them are political refugees.

You see, I teach in one of the most diverse school districts in the nation. One of the main reasons for this ethnic diversity is that there is a refugee center in my district. The center helps acclimate newcomers to the United States and then assists in resettling them; some in my district, some across the country.

So in this campaign season, when I hear some orange-skinned buffoon talking trash about Muslims, stirring up some of my fellow Americans with talk of the dangerous "foreign" *other*, it rarely squares with the reality I've witnessed first-hand getting to know Muslim families and the children they have sent to my school to get an education: something the kids tend to take for granted (because, you know, they're kids, and hey, kids don't change). Something for which their parents have sacrificed in ways that I, a native-born American descendant of a myriad of immigrant families, can scarcely imagine.

(And it ought to go without saying that this truth holds for the countless Latino families I've known over the years as well.)

I'm not saying they're saints. I'm saying they're people. And they're here out of choice. Whether we like that or whether we don't, they're raising their kids here. And guess what? These kids get more American every day. Regardless of where their birth certificate says they're from.

Just something to think about, as we kick into the final leg of this excruciating election season.

Oh, come on. You didn't think this piece was gonna be just me grousing about kids having lousy taste in music, did ya?

(And they do, but that's really beside the point.)

Seems an appropriate way to tie it all together.