House of Creativity

One of many paintings by Temple’s mother
we have hanging in our home.

Temple and I live in a home filled with the creativity of others.

Temple’s mother and my mother were artists, and their paintings adorn the walls, as does a painting by Temple’s great-grandmother on her father’s side. Temple’s father crafted our dining room table, two end tables in our living room, and other furniture throughout the house. We have several quilts sewn by our mothers and other family members. We have original art and limited edition prints we’ve collected over the years, some by friends and acquaintances and some by strangers. Additionally, though I have none of his work, my mother’s stepfather was a photographer who also created and sold jewelry.

Our own contributions pale by comparison: A few shelves contain books I wrote, edited, or contributed to, and many of Temple’s tiny sketches and watercolors peek out from shelves in several rooms. Additionally, though I have none of his work, my mother’s step-father was a photographer who also created and sold jewelry.

Temple and I both come from decidedly hard-working families, none of whom ever made a living from art, but they found time to create it, just as we do now. The attitudes they passed along, though, were markedly different.

As a child and as a young man, I drew and took photographs and created nothing but a drawer full of sketches, drawings, and photographs that demonstrate no particular skill at visual arts. My musical attempts led to a collection of instruments sufficient to outfit a rock band but which serve to remind me I have no particular musical skills.

When I was young, my mother encouraged my attempts. Though she could never afford lessons, she gave me my first guitar, and my first drum sticks and practice pad. She also gave me a Brownie camera. More importantly, when I told her I wanted to be a writer, she gave me my first typewriter and later gave me my second. Though she never made a dime from her art, my mother never told me I needed something to fall back on.

Though her mother and great-grandmother were artists and her father crafted furniture, Temple’s parents did not encourage her. They emphasized the need to get a job and earn a living, so her path to art was a much tougher one. Rather than being in the forefront of her life—as is has been in mine—Temple’s pursuit of art was squeezed into the tiny scraps of time between her adult responsibilities. Only in the last few years has she felt free to explore her artistic calling. Now, just as I have a room where I write, she has a room where she paints.

I wish Temple had not had to battle her upbringing to find her way to art—especially because of her family’s artistic legacy—but, if nothing else, it proves that artists will find a way.

Pencils down

             Among the common laments of struggling writers is the problem of getting started.  Writing that first sentence, paragraph, chapter.  Personally, I like that part.  If all I had to do was start a project, my batting average would soar.  The difficulty for me is starting something good.  That’s a whole n’other kettle of fish.  And a consistent ravager of averages.

            There’s an opposite problem, which is knowing when to stop.  Both these issues are

dealt with by Issac Newton, who basically said getting something moving takes some effort, though stopping it can be even harder, or actually impossible, without the intervention of an opposing force. 

            Technically, the best treatment for this affliction is to have thought out the structure of your book in advance.  If you have a beginning, a middle and an end, presumably you’ll know when it’s time to stop.  This gets us into the tiresome debate over who’s a pantser and who’s an outliner.  If you believe the beleaguered panelists at a writers conference, we’re either one or the other.  Of course, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle, though when it comes to wrapping up a mystery novel, it’s pretty helpful to have a destination in mind as you’re writing along. 

Another trope of the writing commentariat is E.L. Doctrow’s bit, "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  That’s a lovely bit of poetry, but the most likely outcome of this approach is hitting a tree, or running over your next-door neighbor.  Employing a purely Doctrowian strategy, you might find yourself driving from Oxford, Mississippi to the Upper Peninsula, and not have a clue about how to find your way back.  If all that driving is a stand-in for work product, that means you‘ll be throwing out a lot of pages, and this I find

inexcusably wasteful.   I’m more in Reed Farrel Coleman’s camp, who says something like, “I know how to get started, and where I want to end up, and then I figure out how to get there along the way.”

There are believable reports from the conference stage of writers who find their plots revealing themselves as they write, with the finale popping into view at just the right moment, that is, when they’ve reached about 100 thousand words and everything suddenly makes a lot of sense.  I know this happens, and for some, it’s the only way it can happen, but I suspect their genius lies in the subconscious, which has been ably managing navigation while the driver is at the wheel wearing out her pants.

Newton did stipulate that the force needed to arrest motion is external, but this needn‘t apply to automobiles (which have brakes) or disciplined, experienced writers itching to write “Finis”.  Though in support of Newton’s proviso, we also have editors, armed with book contracts, underpinned by production costs and sales forecasts. I worked for a publisher once, and I got to say, “We love your book.  Please cut forty pages.”  I think this always made for a better novel, and importantly, one we could afford to print. 

Have you ever had a big chunk of writing get gobbled up by the computer, and been forced to recreate it all from scratch?  And then somehow come across the original pages?  In my case, the reincarnated version was always better, though some nice bits were invariably lost.  I copy these down and squirrel them away for future use.    

This might give you the idea that you can always improve your book if you have the time to constantly fiddle.  Though there’s a subset of the sin of overwriting, which is over rewriting.  In woodworking and car mechanics, two pursuits that have a lot in common with banging out novels, this is called “Fixing it till it breaks.”  It’s the delusion of perfectionists that refining will always elevate the product, not knowing when they’ve crossed into

sabotaging the messiness that actually creates something fresh and notable.  Whether inflicted by a heavy-handed editor, or ones internal arbiter, it amounts to a crime against art. It's not just about when to stop, but how you do it.

By far my favorite form of ending is one that really isn’t.  The reader thinks he’s idling around in a denouement, when all of a sudden he’s back in the soup.  Or a final twist pulls it all into a more satisfying conclusion (e.g. Presumed Innocent, my personal crime writing GOAT.)  James Cameron, undoubtedly inspired by Rasputin, built about five climaxes into the original Terminator, which my young son at the time renamed The Determinedator.  This technique is a lot of fun, but not that easy to pull off without seeming contrived.  I admire the writers who do.

Our most recent terrier, who died having outlived all his successors, always looked like he was eager to get on to the next thing.  He didn’t know what it was, but he was sure it was going to be great.  He might have been possessed by eternal optimism or just some fundamental drive; it wasn’t exactly joy, but certainly the sublime fulfillment that comes from never being entirely fulfilled. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Timmy the Greek

As mentioned once before, during the pandemic, I began sketching cartoons. Eventually, I became addicted and couldn’t stop.

Not everyone loves ’em. My friend Thrush claims he hates them, they’re obscene he says, they’re unfunny. But he dislikes all animation and cartoons, so perhaps I shouldn’t read too much into it.

But that is a problem… I can’t always tell if something’s funny or not, and I definitely lean toward dark humor, less a product of Covid than wicked imagination. Are they any good? I don’t know, I’m an amateur, not a pro, but they’re fun and I’m improving.

What I do know is that a great many cartoons of today either aren’t amusing or rely upon a 5^th grader’s sense of humor. On the flip side, it must be tricky to come up with a funny comic every day or even once a week.

Because of the coronavirus, the majority of my efforts were either medically tied or came from wandering, peripatetic thoughts. Virtually none related to crime. This past week corrected that. What can be more criminal than mobsters having a pleasant chat in a warehouse?

The Interrogation

Influences

Dick Tracy’s Chester Gould suggested the stylized geometry, angular lines, the period, and zoot suits. I debated a 3-D look, but decided against it. Squat characters found at any number of sources finished the cast. The warehouse setting is like a fourth character, silent but menacing. So step back into the dark as we bid hello and goodbye to Timmy the Greek.

Funny or not? Dish it out. I may not have a career in cartooning after all.

The Way I Do It

The other day, as I sat here wondering what to post for my SleuthSayers column, I received an emailed request from an editor for an interview about the way I write short stories. I agreed, he sent me the questions to answer, and one of them was How often do you revise and edit your work? The day after, before writing more of the piece--or do you complete the work, then go into revision mode?

I dutifully responded to that question (and to the others), and only afterward did it occur to me how good a question it was, because I know a number of writers who approach editing and rewriting in many different ways. And--full disclosure, here--I also realized that this was handy fodder for a SleuthSayers post.

Another thought that struck me was something I heard years ago: A good teacher doesn't say, "This is the way you do it." A good teacher says, "This is the way I do it."

So . . . (though I'm no longer a teacher) what do I do, with regard to writing and revising a manuscript?

The whole process, for me, happens in three steps:

Step 1: Planning. I get an idea and--since I'm an outliner--I put the whole story together in my head, start to finish, mostly visualizing separate scenes. It might change a bit later, during the actual writing, but I have to have the entire story, including an ending, in mind before the writing begins. And yes, I know that's not the only way to create a story. But it's what works for me.

Step 2: Writing. I write (type) the first draft of the story, from beginning to end, in all its rough and unedited glory. During that draft, I sometimes substitute letters or abbreviations for characters' names--H for husband, W for wife, N for neighbor, V for villain, and so on--and insert brief notes in certain places like "come up with with a reason for this" or "add detail," or "add background," etc. In other words, I write down the flow of the story, all the way through, and leave out anything that might slow me down.  

So no, I do not "edit as I go."

NOTE: I know many, many writers who do. They write, let's say, an opening to a story, and when that's done, they carefully edit that opening, making sure that section of the story is as perfect as they can make it--and only then do they go on to the next section. They write a few pages of, let's say, the middle of the story, and then edit that part, again making it as perfect as it can be. Then they write the next part, and edit and revise that. And on and on, all the way to the ending. The result is, when those writers are done writing the story, voila!--the story's finished. I mean, completely finished--there's no need to edit or rewrite further. They're ready to send that story out into the world and have it make something of itself.

Step 3: Editing. When I've finished writing my rough draft, I go back to the beginning and edit the entire story.

       3a: I often use a triage approach. By that I mean, I might address the most important things first, like plot holes, continuity problems, timeline differences, weaknesses in structure, etc. I also, during this "step," try to plug the needed information into the place-holders I had put in during the first draft: explanations, clarifications, background details, names of characters, whatever.

        3b: Then I move on to matters of style: strengthening sentences and paragraphs; correcting errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc.; making the dialogue snappier, weeding out unneeded words, and finding and fixing really minor issues like typos, backward apostrophes, and so forth. During this step I read and re-read the story, trying to do it through the eyes of a reader and not a writer. The last thing I do here is run the whole thing through SpellCheck and then read it one more time, looking for things SpellCheck won't catch, like typing "doe snot" when what I meant was "does not."

         3c: Finally, I take a hard look at the formatting of the whole manuscript. Spacing, margins, indentations, italics, scene break designations, fonts, page numbering, other header information, etc.

I should point out, here, that I actually have two reasons for doing all this the way I do, rather than "editing as I go."

Reason #1: Doing that info-dump first draft gives me the feeling that I've put a safety net in place. I like having the whole framework down on paper (well, on my hard drive) before I start editing anything. That probably goes back to being a plotter instead of a pantser. I need that reassurance. And having that ending securely in place, even though I might change it later, keeps me from wandering off the path during the middle of the story. 

Reason #2: I sometimes, during the rewriting stage, I think of new things that might change and improve the flow, or even the outcome, of the story. If I edited each section "as I went," these later changes in the plot would probably require me to go back and change things earlier in the story to make my later changes work. I might need to add all kinds of foreshadowing info. If so, I would be forced to completely re-edit sections that I'd already spent a lot of time editing. That's extra work. I don't want to have to go back and add and decorate another room on the bottom floor of the house I'm building when I have already begun building the second and third floors on top of it.

One final note: I don't do multiple drafts of a story. I write a first draft and save it with the story name as the file name, and when it's done and I start editing it, I type the edits directly into the first draft. So when I finish, I have one and only one file of the story. And these days, I usually don't print the story out at all. Everything--the writing, the editing, and the submitting to a market--is done electronically. I do, however, have an automatic backup of everything, both on- and off-site. I should also mention that I'm one of those odd people who actually enjoys the rewriting and the polishing of a manuscript. I know lots of people hate that part of writing. What can I say?

 

So, good or bad, that's my process. How do you do it? Do you edit as you go? Edit every page before starting the next? Write a certain number of pages or words a day? Stop writing with a cliffhanger so you'll be inspired to continue the next day?

Whatever it is, if it works, great. Do whatever's best for you. And vive la difference!

Luke Nickle Fights AI

 

A Resurrection of Poe and Baudelaire

On September 9, David Edgerley Gates wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart", about Edgar Allan Poe's creating "dread through a very calculated use of echoes and repetition, foreshadowing and false narratives. What he’s struggling to write, in effect, is psychological horror. Even though that term, or even the concept, didn’t exist at the time."  (LINK)

I'm not sure that the concept of deliberately creating dread through various means wasn't around in Poe's time is entirely true - there were a lot of Regency Gothic Novels (which Jane Austen made splendid fun of in Northanger Abbey):  1764's The Castle of Ontranto (Horace Walpole), 

“and then the figure, turning slowly round, discovered to Frederic the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit’s cowl. “Angels of peace protect me!” cried Frederic, recoiling. “Deserve their protection!” said the spectre.”
― Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

1796's The Monk (Matthew Gregory Lewis), 1794's The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radclyffe), 

“You speak like a heroine,” said Montoni contemptuously, “we shall see if you can suffer like one.”

― Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

and many more which centered around decay,  corruption, sex, dark romance, supernatural forces, wickedness, innocence, and a whole lot of gore.  

But going back to Poe - he was a poet before he was ever a prose writer, and it shows.  Which is undoubtedly the reason why Charles Baudelaire (considered by many to be the modern French poet, and the French poet of modernity) was obsessed with him.

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

"In...1847, I came upon a few fragments of Edgar Allan Poe, and felt a strange sort of shock…[.] I discovered, believe me if you will, poems and stories that I had already thought of, but of which I had only a vague, confused and disorganised idea, and which Poe had managed to pull together and perfect...." (Source)

 And Baudelaire promptly dropped (almost) everything, and spent his most productive years (1856-1865) translating Poe’s works into French. Now he wasn't the first to translate Poe, but he was the one who made Poe's work sing in French. (Baudelaire's Translations at Gutenberg Press for free.) And his translations became the standard throughout Europe.

First note: Despite his obsession with Poe, when Baudelaire named his poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal -- Flowers of Evil in English -- it was in homage of Nathaniel Hawthorne's highly appropriate Rappaccini's Daughter. (Link here to read on-line)

Second note: In Memoirs of a Drudge, James Thurber reminisces about working at the Riviera edition of the Chicago Tribune in Southern France. (And why didn't my guidance counselor ever tell me about this job?) Anyway, there were regular printers' strikes, and after one of them, the whole press room, half-tanked, got on a train for Cannes. Promptly another argument broke out, this time over which was better, the original or the French translation of Poe's The Raven? And would a real raven be more likely to say, "Jamais plus" or "Nevermore"? "He returned with the claim that our fellow-passenger to a man were passionately on the side of Jamais plus." Betcha the translation was Baudelaire's... 

Another person whom Poe influenced was, of course, H. P. Lovecraft. 

In my early teens, I read most of Poe, most of Lovecraft, and got warped accordingly.  (I'm in good company:  Apparently, so did Stephen King.)  I still say that two of the scariest stories I've ever read are Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House" and "The Shadow Out of Time".  

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

Shirley Jackson must have had a very good memory.  From The Lottery to The Haunting of Hill House to (my favorite) We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson was one of the great horror / thriller writers.  

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

        ― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

True horror stories are mostly about language, aren't they?  

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”  ― Stephen King

"Ye get a hankerin'..."  

"I'm going to let my boy in!"

"Whose hand was I holding?"

BTW, Two other horror stories that will scare the sleep from your eyes are ""'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" (M. R. James) and, of course, "The Monkey's Paw" (W. W. Jacobs).  

By Way of Introduction

Back in July Joseph Walker wrote a piece on an interesting subject: Which book would you choose to introduce a new reader to a favorite author?  Not which is the best novel, or which is your favorite, but which book should a reader start with?

Here is my take on it.  I will start with two where I agree with Joe.

Agatha Christie.  And Then There Were None.  As Joe suggests, anyone who thinks Christie=Cozy has never read this book.  It actually leans toward horror as you realize that 1) all the characters are nasty ranging to evil, and 2) all are doomed.  It is a masterpiece.

Sue Grafton. A is for Alibi.  Along with Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller, with this novel Grafton birthed a thousand female private eyes.  Few are as good as Kinsey Milhone.  Grafton said she wrote this book to kill off an ex-husband, which may explain some of the passion in it. 

Next we move on to authors I love but from whom I selected a different book than Joe.

Rex Stout.  The Doorbell Rang.  Is it his best?  Maybe. It is certainly my favorite.  The book lifted both Stout and Nero Wolfe to a new level with the sheer audacity of the concept. At a time when half the politicians in the country were terrified of J. Edgar Hoover our heroes announce: "On behalf of a client we're going to push his nose in. Just a routine chore, but he's touchy and will try to stop us. So futile."  The nose was a metaphor, by the way. The plot is not his strongest, but plot is not why we reread this guy's books.   The dialog and characterization (a bottle of milk comes to mind) are unforgettable.

Donald E. Westlake. The Hot Rock.  Joe chose Drowned Hopes and I admit that what I call the middle- period Dortmunder books are wonderfully complex, but why not start where it all began?  John Dortmunder is an incredibly unlucky (don't call him incompetent!) thief and in this book he has to steal an emerald, then free the associate who got caught with it, then break into the place it was hidden it, etc. etc.  As one character says "I have heard of the habitual criminal but never the habitual crime." Hilarious.

Richard Stark. Butcher's Moon.  Stark=Westlake, although Westlake said the Stark books only used part of the keyboard.  Dortmunder is in effect the reverse of Parker and in this novel we see a bit of the thief's philosophy.  Gangsters catch Parker's associate and threaten to dismember him if our antihero won't play along.  He does, but not for the reasons you might expect.  A very gory introduction to the amoral thief.

Lawrence Block. Eight Million Ways to Die.  Joe picked When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a choice I fully understand, but I would jump back one novel.  To my mind, these two, plus the last book in the series  A Drop of the Hard Stuff, (published 25 years later!), form a trilogy and are the strongest of the novels.  Together they show ex-cop, sometime-private eye Matt Scudder at the end of his drinking days, the beginning of his sobriety, and at the difficult first anniversary.  

I would include Ed McBain except, truth to tell, I have trouble telling the books apart in my memory.  My favorites are the ones where minor character Fat Ollie Weeks - good detective and lousy human being - starts on a remarkable journey of self-discovery.

Moving on to authors Joe did not include...

Thomas Perry. Dance For The Dead.  Ooh, this was a hard one.  To my mind his best novel, and my favorite, is Island, a hilarious book about con artists who accidentally create a sort of utopia.  But it is not a fair introduction to Perry's work since most of his work is much more grim.  Naturally I turned to his series about Jane Whitefield who is a sort of anti-detective: she doesn't reveal criminals, she hides them "not if the police are gonna put you in jail, but if the police are gonna find your head in a dumpster." The first book is not quite up to par, but by number two he nailed it.

Dick Francis. Reflex.  This was an easy choice.  It is a good example of Francis's formula while showing how a writer can create magic with a formula.  Philip Nore is a jockey, grimly struggling with the fact that his career is almost over.  When he  reluctantly agrees to investigate a mystery in his own family he discovers a past he didn't know he had, and the possibility of a future he never imagined.

Tony Hillerman. Skinwalkers. Hillerman wrote three novels about older, modern-thinking Navaho Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn.  Then he wrote three about younger, more traditional Officer Jim Chee.  The legend says that a fan asked him why he had changed the name of the character, since she saw no other difference between the two, and that led Hillerman to writing this book, the first of many in which the two men work together.  I find that hard to believe because Skinwalkers feels like he was building up to it since his first novel. And the ending... wow.

G.M. Ford. Who the Hell is Wanda Fuca? Jerry Ford (not that one) wrote a series of terrific novels about Leo Waterman, a Seattle private eye whose secret weapon is a team of homeless people (they can spy anywhere because no one ever notices them). His masterpiece is Cast in Stone, but start with the first book. Witty and gritty in equal measures.

Elmore Leonard. Bandits.  Truth to tell I have the same problem with Leonard as I have with McBain.  I enjoy his books but have trouble telling them a part a year after reading them.  But the ex-nun in this book is a standout in his vast collection of scheming crooks and reluctant heroes.

S.J. Rozan. China Plaid.  Most of Rozan's books feature young Lydia Chin and older Bill Smith, both New York private eyes and semi-partners. .  Half of them are narrated by her and half by him.  All are a delight. Start at the beginning.

Mixing Urban Legends and Crime Stories

Coming up with anthology themes isn't always so easy. Ideally a good theme is at least a little different from what's already been done (unless readers are clamoring for more of a theme you've already used--hey, it happens). In our field, a theme also needs to work well with crimes/mysteries, of course. And most important, (at least for me), the theme should be fun. Something that will excite writers and readers.

When Donna Andrews, Marcia Talley, and I came up with what ended up being the theme of our newest anthology, we knew we'd hit the trifecta. Crime stories with graveyards, ghosts, and monsters--mixed in with human baddies? Yes, please! The result became Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder! It was released last week by Wildside Press.

Urban legends easily lend themselves to being used by crime writers because so many urban legends involve creepy things. The Hook legend is a perfect example. You remember the tale, right? A guy and girl go parking, and while they're steaming up the car windows, a news alert comes on the radio. A deranged man with a stainless steel hook for a hand has escaped from the asylum for the criminally insane that is right in their town. The couple break apart. The guy floors it and drives the girl home. Because he's a gentleman, he gets out of the car, walks around to her side to open her door for her, only to find ... a bloody stainless steel hook hanging on the car door handle!

That classic story has crime built in. But not all of them do. The legend of the Phantom Hitchhiker is a good example. One variation is that a guy is driving down a dark foggy road at night when he spots a teenage girl walking. Knowing it's not safe for her to be out on a night like that, he offers to drive her home. She accepts. The next day, he realizes she left her jacket in his car, so he drives back to the girl's house to return the jacket. But when an old woman answers the door, her eyes widen. It turns out her daughter was wearing a jacket just like that on another foggy night thirty years ago--when the girl died in a car crash on the same road the driver found her on.

These types of spooky tales--stories people swear happened to a friend of a friend of a friend--are perfect starting points for coming up with crime stories. When we put out our call for stories, we told the authors they could riff off actual urban legends or come up with their own. In the end, we have an anthology with a good mix of each. 

All the authors' names are listed on the back cover, but in case you can't read them clearly, they are: Donna Andrews, Ellen Byerrum, Ginny Fite, Barb Goffman (yes, me), Shari Held, Kathryn Holland, Smita Harish Jain, Meghan Lewis, Jane Limprecht, Alan Orloff, Pat Remick, KM Rockwood, Daphne Silver, Shannon Taft, Marcia Talley, Robin Templeton, and fellow SleuthSayer Joseph S. Walker. 

The back cover

My story in the book is "Into the Woods." I riffed off the Bigfoot legend, though my fabled creature is a foxsquatch--an eight-foot-tall vulpine creature that supposedly lives in the woods. Women and girls are his favorite meals, which is why this town forbids females from ever going into the forest. But one day, two rogue librarians sneak into the woods ...

Four of the authors with stories in the book have crafted essays that Art Taylor is running on his First Two Pages blog. Two weeks ago, he ran an essay by Pat Remick about the opening to her story "Screaming Jenny," based on a real urban legend set in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Last week, he ran an essay by Shannon Taft about the beginning of her story "The Cave Man," which is a legend she built from scratch. Another essay should be running today and the last one, next Tuesday. You can find them on Art's blog here: https://arttaylorwriter.com/the-first-two-pages/.

The book is available in ebook and trade paperback formats from lots of online bookstores, including indie bookshop.org. 

Donna, Marcia, and I are going to be hosting a Zoom one weekday evening in October with as many of the anthology authors as can make it. The authors will talk about their stories and maybe offer tips for writing short stories too. The event is still in the planning stages. I'll share more details when I post again in three weeks. 

In the meanwhile, enjoy Spooky Season--and make sure to always check your backseat before getting into a car. You never know when a deranged killer will be hiding back there ... waiting for you. 

Standalone Characters: Making Each Brief Encounter A Night to Remember

I thought I would write something different: a literary short mystery in the third person. I got one paragraph out, a description of the lush North Florida setting of my fictional writers’ workshop. Then the tart voice of a menopausal woman remarked, “At least the little literette could write.” And my protagonist Hester was born. By taking over the story and telling it in her unique first-person voice, she brought it to life. The “little literette” was the trophy-age grad student who’d stolen Hester’s aging husband. What was Hester going to do about it? I don’t outline, and neither does Hester. But Hester was workshopping her novel, The Bigamist’s Wife, and I had five thousand words.

Character and voice are my greatest strengths as a writer. I have two long-running series, one contemporary and one historical. Its protagonists and strong supporting characters have been talking on the page and in my head in the Bruce Kohler Mysteries since 2003 and in the Mendoza Family Saga since 2008. But a character in a standalone short story, as Shakespeare put it, “struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” Making standalone characters count is both a challenge and an opportunity that I’ve met in a variety of ways. Some of the results appear in my new collection, Rifts & Reprisals:Collected Stories II.

How Hester deals with her husband’s infidelity with the “little literette” appears in “A Work in Progress,” which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Another betrayed wife finds a very different solution elsewhere in the collection.

Andy is the first-person protagonist of “Who Stole the Afikomen?” The story first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was selected by Rob Lopresti as the “best story I read this week” on his blog Little Big Crimes on April 4, 2021. It's also in Rifts & Reprisals. Andy’s the Irish Catholic fiancé of a Jewish lawyer who’s taken him home for Passover to meet her family. Rob thought it was hilarious. He quoted some of my own favorite lines.

Uncle Manny kept saying, "Focus, people, focus. We've got a goal here."
"To get the Jews out of Egypt?" I whispered.
"To get past the rabbis to the gefilte fish," Sharon whispered back.
"Is that the Promised Land?"
"The pot roast is the Promised Land."

My own family was less eccentric than Sharon’s and didn’t have Yiddish accents, but in some respects I based the fictional Seder on memories of ours, of my Irish Catholic husband who was once such a newcomer, and on the anomalies of a mixed marriage. I wrote a serious “Passover” poem about the real-life first Seder in 1978. This time, I wanted to have fun.

“Never Again,” first published in the anthology Me Too Short Stories, had two protagonists: Valerie, a teenager whose father had molested her since the age of four, and Frances, the obese survivor of childhood abuse by the son of her church’s pastor, now married to an abusive alcoholic. Both of these characters’ experiences are not uncommon in real life, as I know very well from my work as a therapist. Sure, to some extent I was going for shock value. But that wasn’t the point. Valerie’s and Frances’s stories carry a powerful message. They are crying out to be heard. I wanted readers to get that and empathize—and cheer when...you can find out in Rifts & Reprisals.

Here's Valerie:
Once, when she was seven, Valerie tried to tell her mom what her dad was doing to her. The sex ed teacher talked about that: "Tell a trusted adult what's going on. You don't have to deal with this alone." Not that they taught sex education to kids that young. It wasn't appropriate, even though it happened to four-year-olds.

And here’s Frances:
She’d had a neighbor once, a thin neighbor, who’d become sort of a friend. Sitting over coffee at Ivy’s kitchen table one morning, she tried to explain what it was like to be invisible. Because she was so fat, no one ever looked at her as if they wanted to do what the preacher’s son had done. But the fat also blotted out Frances. Sad Frances. Mad Frances. Frances who might want to scream or even crack a joke once in a while. Ivy didn’t get it. “But you’re very visible!” she said. “No,” Frances said. “I’m conspicuous.” Ivy moved away soon after that, and Frances never tried again.

“Vice Cop,” first published in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, is the story in Rifts & Reprisals that comes closest to a police procedural. The two protagonists are a vice cop dad and his teenage daughter, who sets out to help by trapping an online predator she’s sure she can outwit. I not only had to make each of them memorable, but I also had to distinguish them from one another within the relatively brief span of 7,000 words and the confines of a complicated plot. To emphasize that the all-important voice was different for each of them, I wrote fifteen-year-old Gracie in the third person present tense, as well as doing my best to have her think like a kid with an irrational belief that she’s invincible. I alternated her POV with that of the first person narrator, juggling the incompatible roles of ace detective who finally has the bad guy in his sights and worried dad in a situation that’s spinning out of control.

There are a couple of flash stories in Rifts & Reprisals and a few more in its companion volume of standalones, Breaches & Betrayals: Collected Stories. I’ve lived with some of my characters for twenty years, as I have with Bruce, Barbara, and Jimmy of the Bruce Kohler Mysteries. I’ve met others only for the space of five hundred words, like the young Sixties woman in “Don’t Think Twice” who is getting sick and tired of all those guys in Cambridge, MA who keep singing that damn Dylan song. Either way, I love them all.

True North Strong and Free: a lighthearted take on a deadly serious issue, because we sure need it.

Like many Canadians, I love our anthem and, since childhood, have proudly belted out our anthem whenever asked and sometimes, even when not asked. Word of advice: the latter is less appreciated in elevators than it should be. 

These lines have always been my favourite:

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free.

From far and wide,

O Canada,
we stand on guard for thee.


To paraphrase Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, the True North part slays me.

For those who haven’t been following (but really, who would that be?) Canada’s sovereignty has become a heated issue and, for reasons not often stated (translation: they want to rob us of our natural resources, from critical minerals to water), Canada's sovereignty is now the punching bag for constant late night rants.

My recent research into the issue of Arctic sovereignty on Ellesmere Island in the early 1900s was a refreshing change from internet scrolling and really made me sigh; that was a gentler time. And a funnier time, at least in retrospect - my apologies to the wonderful Canadians who did the work of standing up for our north so we could all sing about it, even in elevators. I appreciate your noble work and my silly take is not meant to take away from the immense respect you all deserve. 

Let me set the stage: in the early 1900s, people communicated through mail, telegraph, newspapers and a few landline telephones in urban areas. So, how were threats handled when no one was able to type into their phone to reach wide swaths of the population through the internet? If you were sending threats, you could submit them to a newspaper, wait for them to be published and those who read the threats, if throughly inflamed, could rapidly write a letter (by long hand or, for high tech aficionados, with a typewriter) and fire it off into the mailbox to arrive in days or weeks. All this tends to slow down the rage baiting from an incessant drum beat to, at most, a slow tapping or scribbling noise.

How did the 1900 sovereignty threats to Ellesmere Island play out? 

Ellesmere Island is Canada's northernmost island, almost abutting Greenland. There is archeological evidence that Ellesmere island was occupied about 4,000 years ago, and ancestors of the Inuit, the Thule peoples, lived there around the 12^th century. Interestingly, numerous Norse artifacts, including knife blades and a shipwreck have been found. So, this remote island has had its share, albeit small, of inhabitants and attention. 

In the 16^th century, Britain claimed the far north, but in 1880 Britain gave to Canada her title and claims in the Arctic, including Ellesmere Island.

There were even then, concerns about Arctic sovereignty. I'd like to ignore, for the purposes of this article, the many interesting historical details and pare it down to the absurd parts, because these were a lovely respite for me and I hope you will find it a relaxing stroll. 

To counter early American and European threats to its sovereignty in the north, Canada … wait for it… affirmed its title with an 1895 Order-in-Council. That really should have done it, eh? What can be clearer than an Order-in-Council? Surprisingly though, despite this throw down of a hefty gauntlet, in the early 1900s, things got heated.

“American sponsored explorations were apparently in the offing and it was reported that a recently published American atlas showed Ellesmere in the same colour as Alaska—an ominous sign to concerned Canadians.” This is the 1900 equivalent of the inflammatory maps we are now seeing posted online but, rather than using AI, a mapmaker was summoned, swiftly drew a map that was instantly submitted to an atlas that was sent to the printers post-haste and promptly printed and mailed out. I suspect the process was completed within the short span of months. Or years. Canadians were upset, naturally, and their retaliation was swift (or swiftish, because, the 1900s). The Department of the Interior formed a small group of senior civil servants into the Advisory Technical Board in 1919.

Take that you brutes.

The threats to our north did not stop there and swiftly, (again, swiftish) by 1920, the Danes , who viewed Ellesmere Island as a no man’s land, began hunting on the island. Canada took this threat to its sovereignty seriously and retaliated by forming a committee.

That will teach you.

It’s obvious that Canada doesn’t play around with our True North, has dealt with all threats fiercely and the threats actually went away, until now, when we find ourselves in 2026, with a foghorn blasting in our ear.

Should we retaliate, early 1900 style, with a committee or, given the constant threats and insults, a committee and an Advisory Board and, if needed, the dreaded Order-in-Council? 

Should we send letters ASAP (typewritten for speed) to newspapers, and insist they take a telegraph poll of Canadians to assess the support for these rather drastic actions?

If only these would work, but a Canadian can dream...

The Louvre Heist, One Year Later

SUNDAY MORNING, 19 OCTOBER 2025: 

Two masked men parked a truck-mounted furniture lift along Quai François Mitterrand, cut through a Louvre window, and climbed into the Galerie d'Apollon. Less than eight minutes later, the crew was speeding across Paris with an estimated €88 million in crown jewels. Almost a year later, it's becoming clearer that the crew wasn't necessarily all skilled professionals. But the French response wasn't bumbling, either. Arrests began within a week. 

THE RECAP

Inside the Galerie, the two-man crew was methodical--careful, sort of. They stayed near their window exit and cut into display cases within easy reach. Some accounts speculate their movements were rehearsed, and surely that can't be dismissed. They'd have known their time window and tools available and slow-grind escape route. 

The guys also seemed clueless about the collection's true value. In that sense, they bagged an amazing haul: three pieces from the sapphire set of Queen Marie-Amalie and Queen Hortense, three emerald-laden pieces from Empress Marie Louise's set, and two pieces belonging to Empress Eugénie. They also tried bagging Eugénie's crown. It was essentially crushed during the theft. 

Valuable, absolutely. But other pieces in the Galerie's collection are more famous--and reportedly more valuable. Maybe the guys were behind schedule, or maybe they just didn't know.

THE RESPONSE

You might call it flat-footed. Louvre security spotted the truck lift outside, but this was the Louvre. There are always contractors around. Worse, the Galerie's security cameras pointed away from the window, and the security systems were badly outdated, a problem noted in a 2014 audit. Only after evacuating the crowd and inspecting the Galerie did they confirm that a theft had gone down.

Things went better quickly. The Police Secours arrived within minutes. Seriously, the Prefecture was only a half-kilometer away. The big guns, the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme (BRB), arrived soon after. Detectives collected a treasure trove of evidence: Eugénie's broken crown, discarded gear and clothing, shoe impressions indicating the crew's size, and even the stolen truck lift the thieves had tried — and failed — to torch. 

In short order, French prosecutors assembled a swarm of investigators, forensic scientists, art theft experts, cyber cops, and anyone else a furious government could muster. Traffic camera footage showed the crew taking the A6 south, and hours of social media videos captured the crime from start to finish. 

By June 2026, the French had reportedly charged five alleged members of the crew.

THE INSIDE MEN

Well, there was a lot of DNA recovered, and the police quickly matched some of it in the law enforcement databases. The people linked to those matches allegedly lived in the same north Paris arrondissement. And two of the matches maybe pointed toward the inside guys.

One early arrest was a guy with a minor record. News reports said that DNA evidence linked him to cutting tools recovered from the Galerie. According to those reports, the guy claimed to have been recruited only days before the heist and told that they would hit a jewelry store. In his statement, he said that he'd never have signed on if he'd known the target was the Louvre. His reported cut was €20,000.

Another early arrest was the alleged other inside man, an unlicensed taxi driver believed to be the smash-and-grab guy. That had been his literal instruction, the guy said according to French media, to smash and grab what he could. Investigators reportedly found his DNA on the display cases and the discarded equipment. His alleged cut was as little as €15,000.

After speeding off, the crew blended in with Paris traffic and circled a northerly route to Aubervilliers. Investigators retraced the drop route thanks to traffic and private cameras, witness accounts, and phone metadata. The guys, it seemed, held onto their burner phones. Both guys arrested reportedly mentioned the same lead contact, who berated them for not smashing and grabbing more. 

THE LIFT GUYS

The two guys working and watching the truck lift weren't hard to track down, apparently. Reports say that the lift had been their one job--and it remained outside the Louvre, allegedly along with their DNA on the lift and gear. Oui, said the lift rental company, these were the same guys who jacked their truck off the lot days earlier. 

According to news reports, the lift crew had done their work in their own silo. They were only connected with the inside guys in the hours before the job. 

FIELD SUPPORT

Another cell reportedly handled communications and logistics. Supply teams garnered scooters, and scouts buzzed around the Louvre, scouting the area and relaying go signals from burner phones. Reportedly, this cell didn't know anyone else involved in the job, sometimes even their fellow scouts. 

The French rounded up several potential suspects based on their past connections and cell phone signals during the heist and possible DNA found on recovered scooters. Three of these arrested have been charged as conspirators.

THE MASTERMIND

The inside guys seemed to know what to do and did it, mostly. The lift guys lifted, and the scouts scouted. Mistakes or not, conflicting statements or not, this was an operation. Coordinated.

The suspects awaiting trial all mention such a ringleader, if neither named nor described, but it follows that a mastermind intent on controlling risk and communications would likely use intermediaries for recruitment and training. Just as plausibly, a serious organization combined expertise and a network of neighborhood relationships. 

THE RECRIMINATIONS

No one does outrage like the French, and this wounded the national pride. The thieves had needed only glass cutters and a furniture lift, pour le Dieu. At the Louvre. 

Public and media criticism was withering. French ministries harrumphed over the fiasco and no doubt thanked the stars that the core failures weren't theirs. Even the truck lift manufacturer got in on the action, with an ad touting the lift's reliability.

The Louvre director, Laurence des Cars, reportedly offered her resignation in the immediate aftermath. The Minister of Culture refused it. Instead, des Cars was kept on while the investigation and security reviews swirled, which was important leadership continuity--and perhaps also a fate worse than termination. Critics insinuated that des Cars pursued other priorities instead of aggressively closing known security gaps. 

By June 2026, des Cars had moved on. "A planned transition," the Ministry of Culture said.

THE FUTURE

The Galerie remained closed off and locked down for weeks. After the forensics team left, the Louvre installed a sweep of high-tech devices in the Galerie and throughout the museum. Other reported enhancements tightened the contractor loophole and improved coordination with the police. Today, the Louvre is a harder target. But more upgrades will go on for years.

And for even longer, much about this heist will remain a mystery. The mastermind may never be found. Jewels--even crown jewels--can be stashed indefinitely, or dismantled, or cut into untraceable pieces. 

One thing is abundantly clear: The heist, like the Louvre itself, has found its place in history.

I Remember Everything—and Nothing

 

Erie Lackawanna tower, Hoboken.

I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. I can remember how it felt, sure, but at this remove I need a historic timeline to assemble the pieces correctly. So I have used that to help me remember.

I worked from home in those days, freelancing for a string of magazines. I don’t remember my morning routine, but I know that my browser home page was set to the front page of The New York Times.

That morning, when I woke my desktop, above the NYT headline was a tiny sentence in red or black announcing the breaking news: a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The plane had struck at 8:46 AM.

I immediately assumed the aircraft was something small, like a Piper Cub. I imagined a young, inexperienced pilot making the most egregious of errors. But I couldn’t confirm that because one sentence was all the newspaper knew at that point.

I wasted time poking around other sites, hoping to glean more than that single sentence. I came up empty at the Associated Press and a few other news sites before I turned on the television. I did so just in time to watch the second jet hit the second tower. That happened at 9:03 AM.

By then, everyone knew what was going on.

I don’t know when I called Suzanne. She was an old college friend who had recently moved to Hoboken, our little river town across the Hudson River from Manhattan. She was the only other freelance journalist I knew in town.

I don’t remember when she came over my place. Before, or after 9:37 AM, when the third jet crashed into the Pentagon? I know we were in my apartment watching TV, worrying about friends we knew who worked in the vicinity of the towers, when one of the broadcasters announced that the south tower had fallen.

Such a thing seemed unfathomable.

I had grown up watching those towers being built. For what seemed like forever, my family had passed the construction site every time my father drove us to Brooklyn to visit our grandmother. As an adult I’d spent a long winter night at the rooftop restaurant, Windows on the World, during a lavish Christmas party thrown by my then-employers at the children’s publishing house, Scholastic, a firm enriched by franchises such as Harry Potter, Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club. Hell, I had been in one of those towers as recently as last Friday, taking the escalator down to the PATH station for my ride home after meeting with some editors.

But now, watching that morning, Suzanne and I could not believe that a building could be toppled so quickly. Were they absolutely sure? After all, there was all that smoke…

Only one way to find out.

I lived in an old five-story tenement building several blocks west of the river. We stepped out the back doors of my apartment, and scampered up to the roof.

It was was a Tuesday. A beautiful clear day. I do recall that.

I saw the river. I saw the smoke. I heard sirens emanating from the city below me.

But for the life of me, I cannot remember the color of the smoke. Black? Gray? White? Today I need the photos as badly as the timelines to fix those images securely in my mind.

While we were on the roof, the north tower collapsed. And yes, even with the smoke, it was obvious. There one second, gone the next.

Only minutes ago on TV, we had heard the voices of family members telling the on-air broadcasters just where in those towers they believed their loved ones were trapped. In elevators. On stairwells. On the roofs.

Had those people gotten out?

Suzanne and I hugged briefly, then went back to scanning the scene across the river.

Then, honestly, I don’t remember the next few hours.

I know that phone and mobile phone service were disrupted regionally. When I couldn’t connect with my parents, who lived about 20 miles north of me, I made the foolish decision to drive home to check on them. Foolish, because the traffic was insane, and my drive took forever.

They were fine, but of course they were. I spent a few nights sleeping in my old bedroom. I heard that my young cousin—who had a heart condition and worked in the Wall Street area—had joined the long line of dust-spackled commuters who trudged back to their homes over the Brooklyn Bridge. Her husband, then a school teacher at one of the public schools, had done the same.

By Friday, a group of us Scholastic alums carpooled to south Jersey to attend the wake of the brother of one of our colleagues. The drive down, on the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, to a funeral home at the Jersey Shore, is associated in my memory with the sight and sounds of vehicles flying American flags and honking in soldarity to each other.

On the car radio, actor Henry Winkler was telling a DJ that going forward, our mourning nation would have to learn to take better care of each other and better care of ourselves. Why he stressed those words, I don’t know.

I don’t remember much of the wake. In, hugs, out, then dinner somewhere before the somber ride back north. Our colleague’s family were lucky only in the sense that their loved one had escaped to the presumed safety of one of the tower roofs. When that building pancaked on itself, his remains were among the first to be discovered and identified. Or so we were told. And thus one family was permitted the closure denied to so many others.

One of my other cousins, who then worked as a U.S. attorney, requested, nay, demanded, my presence over the weekend. Over the years, she had gotten chummy with the firefighters who worked at the firehouse near her office in downtown Brooklyn. They had invited her to a wake and pot luck gathering in honor of their fallen members.

“You gotta come with me,” she said. “It’s going to be too painful.”

Did she bring food for the pot luck? Did I? She was (and still is) the type who can be counted on to make a giant crockpot of meatballs, but I just don’t remember.

I do remember us standing outside that firehouse, pouring ourselves plastic cups of beer from kegs literally positioned on the sidewalk.

I remember how congenial the firefighters were. How dry-eyed they were as they told us of the friends they had lost.

One man stands out in my memory for his wordplay. He talked about how, once they were allowed to search the rubble for bodies, they found so few.

“You know why?” he said “They were gone. Poof.”

Then he launched into a litany of words which all rhymed, and which all have roughly the same meaning: Decimated! Obliterated! Annihilated!

Over the years, I have tried to recall many of the other things people said and did doing those first few days, and I take myself to task for not taking the time to write much of it down.

You were a reporter, I tell myself. You should have known to capture what you were witnessing. Where was your pen? Where was your notebook?

I do remember walking to the water’s edge in Hoboken over the next week to watch smoke rising from Ground Zero. I remember the flowers and photos and tokens people left by the railing on the southernmost corner of that riverside park. And in the weeks that followed, I remember seeing posters of missing people fluttering on every surface throughout the city. Families holding out hope that their loved ones made it out alive.

At the time, I was researching a medical story for a science magazine about a family of physicians located in Massachusetts. On one of those phone interviews, the eldest sibling told me how Mass General in Boston had leapt into action, preparing their emergency room to receive potentially hundreds of patients who might be airlifted from New York City to Boston for care.

“But no one came,” he said. “They didn’t need us.”

Eventually, yes, I did write a short story based in part on what I saw that day and what came after. It’s the story of a former tough guy from Hoboken who has escaped his previous life until 9/11 forces him back into the fold.

“Back to the Boke” was written about ten years after the fact. By then, I was married and had left Hoboken for good. I based the piece mostly on the old-timers I remembered populating the city. Guys who played endless rounds of cards at the social club across the street from my apartment building. The guy on our block who earned money hauling scrap metal in his rusted-out pickup. The Italian American grocers, butchers (aka “meat-cutters”), bakers, and cheesesteak vendors who lamented the loss of families in a town made famous by Sinatra and Brando, and who ceaselessly excoriated the inevitable ascendance of Wall Street yuppies.

The story found a home at Beat to a Pulp, which kept it available until the site closed. It holds the distinction of being my first “long” story to be published at a mystery venue.

I still beat myself to a pulp wishing I had kept a better record of those days. A solid paper trail in my own hand would be far more valuable to me now than my recollections.

Once, at a book festival, I met an author who wrote a couple of books on the fragility of human memory. How what we think happened often turns out to be untrue when meticulously fact-checked. I recall being so impressed by the reporting in The New Yorker after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Those writers had fanned out into the city looking for stories, they had carefully recorded them, and then they had rushed back to file their pieces. Maybe I would have done better if I myself had been on deadline. Who knows.

But hey—if there’s any lesson to be learned after 25 years, it’s to keep a notebook and pen handy, to know when to use them, when to tuck them away, and when to look, listen, and feel instead.

Hoboken days:
Visiting Sinatra’s birthplace.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com