09 February 2025

2025: Reshaping the literature of our time.




Does anyone else wonder if 2025 will change the nature of mystery and crime novels, as well as literature as a whole? 

Where to stand during an earthquake is one question, how to write during and after one is an entirely different question. Readers gravitate to the genre of mystery and crime novels for many reasons and, though the novels vary from the slow unraveling of puzzles, to the fast paced action to save the innocent or capture the dangerous, at the core of all of them is a world where there is right and there is wrong, where justice is served or, if it's not served, then it still exists as a beacon to light the way and where Orwellian newspeak is called out in the plain language of truth.

Rather than dwell on specifics, because goodness knows we've been inundated with them, I'd rather focus on principles that are often lost in the noise. If someone is convicted in a court of law, then serving their time in jail is something we expect, we rely on. If they are released for no legal reason but, rather, on a wish and whim, is there still a rule of law? If the free press, a pillar of democracy, faces retaliation for printing facts in a democracy, then is it still a democracy when this pillar falls? If the most sacred role of democratic governments - to keep their citizens safe - is eschewed by defunding and inserting an anti-science control over the health science that keeps citizens safe - what other roles no longer matter? If a democracy embraces the Latin term imperium, which originally indicated unrestricted authority of a single person, is it still a democracy?

If all this is changing - how do you write that? Literature must be reflective of the times. Will post-2025 mystery and crime writing, as well as literature in general, change by incorporating - by the osmosis that writers are famous for - the new world we find ourselves in? If settings and characters remain impervious to change, then the literature becomes irrelevant to readers who live in the setting of the day and are, indeed, the characters who live there. If literature ignores the changes in society, it inadvertently becomes historical fiction.

It is not merely the United States that has changed. The world is changing. As the U.S. withdraws from crucial health organizations like the World Health Organization and threatens – for the first time – to take over the countries of allies, the world is realigning. Long time alliances are being questioned. Many thrillers involve international settings and international law enforcements and one must ask, how will those change?

We've seen many authors of mysteries and thrillers become political – some of the biggest names in the business, from James Patterson, Don Winslow, Stephen King to Celeste Ng, have spoken out. Authors speaking out politically in such large numbers is something that we haven't seen since the 1930s. Given the rise of book bans, it takes courage to speak up and the muzzling of authors will also be something all genres will have to contend with. To become irrelevant or be silenced is the question that authors will have to grapple with and, many will speak out knowing that book bans are temporary but valuable literature lasts for generations. Further, history has shown us that, in times when there is much harm being done, those who are silent are judged harshly. 

All these changes feel new and we'll have to see how they play out - it's only February for goodness sake! – but I truly don't believe that the genre will be the same after this. It doesn't feel like a blip in time but, rather, a fundamental change – an earthquake beneath our feet that is reshaping the literature of our time.

08 February 2025

Adverbs Live On, As I Shall Explain


Kill your adverbs. Stephen King says it, your creative writing seminar instructor says it, and even that one guy from the meet-up critique group says it. Kill 'em dead. And they're right, though the critique group guy didn't have to harp on it so much. Adverbs are crutches for weak word selection. A power verb or a better adjective says more alone than any adverb can modify. 

So, kill 'em all. Right? Right.

Although…

Records show adverbs have been around since at least the Sumerians. That makes adverbs remarkably survivable. In fact, adverb-like things exist in every modern language. The adverb's importance led to a high water mark in 1974, when adverbs landed their own Schoolhouse Rock! segment.

It's helpful to remember there are all kinds of adverbs, and killing the good kinds takes out writing quality as collateral damage.

Merriam-Webster defines "adverb" as

A word used to modify a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a preposition, a phrase, a clause, or a sentence and often used to show degree, manner, place, or time.

A word. That's what has everyone on the warpath, the one-word kind. A word such as "often," which I could point out wasn't killed at Merriam-Webster's editorial committee. Often, such adverbs are extraneous. 

But there's also the unhyped adverbial clause. Oh, they're out there doing their thing, modifying verbs and such. Since we're defining things, "adverbial clause" is a group of words 1) containing a subject and verb and 2) functioning like a single-word adverb except it doesn't have to watch its back. An "adverbial phrase" is the sawed-off version without a subject and verb.

Here is an adverbial clause that clicks:

"They kicked me out of school because I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself at all." — J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

To be obvious, "kicked" is the verb being modified, and "because" triggers the modifying clause with the why behind the kicking. I love the dead simplicity in construction and style. Simple isn't easy. "They kicked me out of school" is accurate as a sentence but incomplete. Connecting the why then and there gives the sentence an unfolding power. Great stories don't come down to somebody getting kicked. They come down to the "because."

Another one: 

"Richard Parker and I spent a week on the island, until the day I noticed millions of dead fish on the shore." — Yann Martel, Life of Pi

I dig this kind of switcheroo. One minute you're baited into island relaxation, and then comes the "until" twist. This sense of paradise lost works better as a single sentence entity than two chopped-up ideas.

Closer to our genre home:

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Sign of the Four" 

Holmes is explaining a process, an ongoing and difficult process, so the main clause ("whatever remains") sounds hollow without the deepening elements. "When" signals that depth of thought and opens the sentence up to its classic juxtaposition: impossible versus improbable, with improbable carrying the weight of truth.

And yet, a good yet, that sentence has an air of mystery, a craft trick that helps explain why adverbial clauses aren't marked for death. 

The adverbial clause has a near-identical twin, the adjectival clause. Those buggers play the same modifying role except they attach to nouns and pronouns. One could argue that the "when" in Holmes' quote above describes the elimination resulting in--modifying--the noun "whatever." It doesn't, by strict grammar. "When" indicates the time of the end action "remains." But that's the sort of thing strict grammarians fight about, not readers enjoying the richness of a layered sentence. 

Which is the point, to write something that people enjoy reading. So, kill those fluff adverbs. Don't tell the Lollys, but my last round of manuscript edits includes scrubbing for excess adverbs. Many don't survive. 

Still, let's not get lost in the blood-letting. Not all adverbs are one-word menaces. Some are complex ideas that imbue critical elements of conflict, time, and character. If you look closely, you might find those adverbs everywhere, hiding in plain sight, making writing worth reading. 

07 February 2025

Death of an Amusement Park


Chippewa Lake Ferris wheel going to seed
All photos © carnivalofchaos.com

Today, I want to talk about arson. When we're not on about writing, language, books, or writing, we usually like to blog about murder and theft. Sometimes both. But arson is its own thing. Sometimes, it's for money. Sometimes, revenge. Just as often, it's because, to paraphrase Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, someone just wants to watch the world burn.

In the case of Chippewa Lake Park, we may never know why someone, or several someones, began torching the buildings in the idle amusement park. 

For perspective, Chippewa Lake Park was a destination only a few miles from my childhood home. In fact, my uncle began his farming career by working for a dairy farmer whose property overlooked the lake and its coasters. Evenings, one could often hear music coming across the lake, and not just your local band trying to gain a career while playing cover songs. In the park's last year of operation, Cheap Trick played a sold-out concert there.

These days, as the property converts to a county park with some of the rides and buildings still standing, Chippewa Lake is known as a ruin, increasingly overgrown, trees growing through the Ferris wheel. Until 1978, it was mentioned in the same breath as coaster meccas Cedar Point and King's Island. The company that owned the venerable amusement park needed to modernize. However, the village of Chippewa Lake, one of three villages along the eponymous lake, would require an upgrade to local infrastructure. So the park closed at the end of summer, 1978. Even Cheap Trick never knew it was their last gig there.

For about four years afterward, many of those who owned individual rides and attractions stayed within the park. Some lived there, moving to open parks in Florida in the winter. The closure simply became a warm-weather off-season.

Until 1982. Up until 1982, everyone concerned felt the park's eventual reopening would happen, even if it took a decade. That year, someone burned the Penny Arcade. In modern parks, Six Flags, Cedar Fair, and Disney own everything in the park. In more traditional parks before the modern era, many of the businesses and rides were owned by individuals and families. When the Penny Arcade went up, the hotel and grand ballroom were still prepped for a still-unscheduled reopening. Sadly, many vintage arcade machines were destroyed, and the family who owned the arcade lost everything. At that point, people realized the park might not open again.

A second fire in 1988 destroyed the picnic pavilion on the lakeshore. By then, nature had started to reclaim the park. The actual death blow came in 1991, mere weeks before I moved to Cincinnati. 

One weekend, a group of vandals were caught trashing the Chippewa Lake Hotel, one of the largest structures left in the park. Police ran them off. However, they came back after sunset and lit the hotel up. It was one of the biggest fires in surrounding Lafayette Township in recent memory.

1991 Hotel Fire.
The 1991 Hotel fire.
You could still smell it a
week later when I visited.

A coworker was also a volunteer firefighter for the department shared between the three villages along the lake. We worked third shift together, and the Saturday morning after the fire, he invited me out to see the damage. Hardly anything remained of the hotel, once considered a local landmark. But more jaw-dropping was the state of the park. Trees not only grew up through the Ferris wheel, but they had encroached on the Big Dipper, the park's wooden roller coaster. It no longer looked like an amusement park. It looked like an ancient ruin.

My friend said he didn't believe this or the pavilion fire were accidents or vandalism. He suspected someone intended to cash in on the insurance money, though he wouldn't say that to the press.

The last fire occurred in 2002, when the Grand Ballroom went up. (Cue "Smoke on the Water," minus Frank Zappa and the Mothers.) No, a guy with a flare gun or spiteful vandals did not set it off. It was a child playing inside who accidentally started it. Normally, beyond the child's safety (he escaped unharmed), the fire would not have posed a threat to the surrounding village. Only the summer cottages inside the park had become permanent homes. The ballroom's destruction threatened to spread to the cottages, forcing residents to flee. Firefighters were able to contain the blaze. But any idea of clearing the trees and brush and salvaging the park went up in smoke.

This last fire had clearly been an accident. The earliest fire, a tool shed in 1980, had also been accidental and might even have happened if the park had remained open. However, in between, the arcade, the pavilion, and the hotel all fell to arsonists. No one was ever caught, aside from the hotel.

The pier in recent years, before the county park opened.

Other parks in Ohio disappeared. Geauga Lake, eventually a Six Flags park before closing for good in the 2000s, simply couldn't compete with Cedar Point, Northern Ohio's huge coaster mecca. Similarly, LeSourdesville Lake, called Americana when I first arrived in Cincinnati in 1991, would close for a season, make a two-year stab reverting to its original name, then find itself stripped for parts before the New Millennium dawned. And Coney Island, originally the parent of King's Island, finally closed its doors in 2024, making way for a new facility for the Cincinnati Pops.

None of them succumbed to arson, though, the way Chippewa Lake had. Chippewa's ruins were finally demolished in the 2020s with the Ferris wheel (and its attendant trees) sections of the Big Dipper, and a few other rides serving as artifacts in a new Medina County park. So once again, Chippewa Lake welcomes summer visitors, but not thrill seekers or music fans. That might have changed if a handful of firebugs put down the matches.

https://www.carouselofchaos.com/chippewa-lake-park-demise/

06 February 2025

Stories To Help You Cope. Or Not.


In case you haven't noticed, there's a lot going on right now.

We at SleuthSayers are trying to set up a BlueSky account – and have – but are still working out some of the kinks, as in who the **** can actually post something on it. Right now you can join, and you can follow, but we haven't been able to fix the administrator problem, which sounds so much like modern politics it's scary.

There is a small risk of a small asteroid – 2024 YR4, which has an "interesting orbit" and could hit the planet sometime in the next decade. It's about the same size as the Tunguska asteroid which, in 1908, flattened trees over an area of about 1,250 AFTER it exploded in the sky above Siberia. (News) Party time!

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow Sunday and predicted six more weeks of wintry weather. I swear, we have got to stop depending on captive rodents for our weather forecasts.

In Greece, a 2,000 year old statue was found in "an abandoned garbage bag" (NEWS). Not sure why anyone would want to throw this out:

This one makes me sad: "Last 4 escaped monkeys are captured in South Carolina after months on the loose." If you remember, I mentioned that 43 macaque monkeys had escaped from Alpha Genesis, a facility that breeds them for medical research — known to locals as “the monkey farm.” They were lured back "with food and were given peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and “monkey biscuits” — a high-protein Purina Monkey Chow specially formulated for the rhesus macaques."

And here I'd hoped they'd make it out there, populating a whole new macaque breed in the wilds of South Carolina. Well, you tried, little monkeys, you tried! (News)

This is a headline that proves that these days, you can never tell what's the Onion or for real. Yes, this is for real:

Italian soccer club Lazio fires falconer for posting photos of his penis implant. (News)

Not so surprising REAL headline:

Pro-RFK Jr. letter to the Senate includes names of
doctors whose licenses were revoked or suspended.

Lots of them.

BTW, in case you're wondering why Mexico and Canada (our two biggest trading partners, our only two neighbors, and constant allies) got slapped with 25% tariffs:

Prove me wrong.

Also, objective view: to anyone who thinks Elon Musk is selflessly working for the country as a “special government employee,” who is "not paid a salary", all I can say is you really need to think about how Musk got to be a billionaire in the first place. He knows where there's money to be made.

Rule #1 of life: Never, ever, ever, EVER trust a trust-fund baby. Sooner or later, they will screw you over.

Two men went out into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, located in the southwestern part of Washington state, to hunt for Sasquatch. They died of "exposure, based on weather conditions and ill-preparedness." So, if you're going Sasquatch hunting, prepare for the trip. Remember, "there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."

BTW, my favorite part of this story is "In Skamania County, harming Bigfoot is punishable by a $1,000 fine and can include jail time, a law meant to protect the mysterious creature and to prevent hunters with large beards from accidentally getting shot." (Link) (Jason Kelce, be careful out there!)

Also,

"Ancient predatory worms have scientists
rethinking the history of life on Earth"

"500 million years ago, the world was a very different place. Basically all life lived in the water, which held a lot of animals that looked pretty different from the ones we recognize today. One of these was a group of predatory worms with throats covered in spines, hooks and teeth to trap their prey. They built tubes around themselves and lived inside of them, waiting for their next victim to crawl by." (Link)

  1. Ugh.
  2. Are we sure they're extinct?



In the meantime, always remember:

"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

"This too shall pass; like a kidney stone, but it shall pass."

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

!!!HUZZAH!!!

Our first SleuthSayers anthology, Murder, Neat, is one of the six finalists for the Derringer Award in the new category of Best Anthology!

Murder Neat anthology

Available at Level Best Bookshop or, of course, Amazon.

05 February 2025

Stay Out of my Head


photo by Peter Rozovsky

 You have probably encountered Anthony Horowitz in one format or another.  He is a master of television, creating Foyle's War, being one of the first writers of Midsomer Murders, and so on.  His Susan Ryland novels and Alex Rider young adult books have been filmed for TV.

Recently I have been listening to audio versions of his Hawthorne novels.  They are deliberately odd books, featuring a narrator named Anthony Horowitz who writes novels and TV shows, and plays reluctant sidekick to Daniel Hawthorne, a former cop who was kicked off the force because he may (or may not) have thrown a pedophile down the stairs.  They are delightful fair play mysteries.

 Each book plays with the genre in different ways.  In the fifth book, Close to Death, Horowitz is on deadline to write another book but there are no convenient crimes to work on so he attempts to build a volume out of one of Hawthorne's former cases.  This means that big chunks of the book are in third person, since our narrator (Horowitz the narrator, not the audiobook's narrator.  Got it?) was not present for the events.

And that's where I got a big surprise.  At one point we are told that Hawthorne looked off and noticed something.  I don't have the exact wording because, as I have said, I was listening to an audio-book and it wasn't convenient to go back and find it. But I actually jumped a little when I heard that sentence.

Because we have never been allowed into the detective's head before.  That made even this tiny excursion there seem like a violation.  From then on I was paying attention and was able to copy down another example: "He didn't like to be close to people he didn't know." That is not narrator-Horowitz speaking but the omniscient third-person narrator, and it just felt like a violation.

The reason is that Hawthorne himself is a mystery (each book reveals a bit more about him, not all of it necessarily true) and also he is the detective.  We are not allowed to get into his head, because if we knew what he knew, the mystery would be over long before the end of the book.

This reminds me of something Mick Herron said at a Bouchercon I attended a few years ago.  He was talking about his Slow Horses series and he said he could never let the reader into the head of the main character, Jackson Lamb.  If he did we would know how much of his vulgarity, insults, racism, misogyny, etc. was real, and how much was put-on to annoy people.  So while we can get into the skulls of his other characters, Lamb must remain sphinxlike.  


I planned to end this there but I have been reading The Night the Rich Men Burned by Malcolm Mackay (what a title!) and he brings up a slightly different issue.  This Scottish author has a unique style.  I would guess that each of his books has almost twice as many words as another novel with similar page count, because there is almost no dialog.  Everything is happening, present tense,  in the heads of the characters.  If we learn that it is raining it is because a character notices it.

And he is quite casual about head-hopping, moving from one person's thoughts to another as easily as changing paragraphs.  Usually this would drive me mad but Mackay makes it work.  

So how do you feel about writers prying too closely into their characters' skulls?


04 February 2025

Good news!


I've had some good news recently that I am happy to share with you. 

Derringer Award nomination

First up is news that applies to all of us here at SleuthSayers. Our first anthology, Murder, Neat, is one of the six finalists for the Derringer Award in the new category of Best Anthology. Woo-hoo!

This book came out last February from Level Short and was edited by Michael Bracken and me. It includes twenty-four new stories from current and retired SleuthSayers, all set at locations where alcohol is available for sale. We are all pleased as punch--or something with a bit more kick--that we made the shortlist for this honor. 

The other Derringer Award finalists--for individual short stories in four categories based on length--will be announced on April 1, and then eligible members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society will have all of April to vote for all five awards. If you love short stories, I recommend you check out all of the finalists. You can find the full list by clicking here.

Murder, Neat can be purchased most anywhere you buy books. If your favorite physical store doesn't have it on the shelf, I bet they can order it for you. You can get the trade paperback and a Nook version from Barnes and Noble by clicking here. Like shopping at indies? You can use Bookshop.org to get the paperback from your local favorite. Just click here. And there is always Amazon. For them, click here. Cheers!

 

Agatha Award nominations

Yesterday, the Malice Domestic convention announced the finalists for this year's Agatha Awards. I am honored and delighted to share that I have two short stories that are nominated. 

First is "A Matter of Trust," which was published last April by Wildside Press in the anthology Three Strikes--You're Dead! In this story, when an emotional eater cycles past a donut shop, his weight-loss plans--and so much more--go awry. If you haven't read this anthology, I recommend it. It was edited by Donna Andrews, Marcia Talley and me, and it has fourteen new sports short stories. The book is available in trade paperback and ebook from all the usual sources, including Barnes and Noble and Amazon. If you would prefer to read my story only, it is available on my website. Just click here.

Second is "The Postman Always Flirts Twice," which was published last November by Down & Out Books in the anthology Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy. This anthology has all new cozy whodunits, each written by an author who has won the Agatha Award, the Derringer Award, or both. The book was edited by Gay Toltl Kinman and Andrew McAleer. 

In "The Postman Always Flirts Twice," someone murdered Hazel's mailman and hid his body in the woods behind her cul-de-sac. Fearing the police might look too closely at her, Hazel decides she needs to point them in another direction. So she starts her own investigation, focusing on her neighbors. If you haven't read this anthology, you can pick it up from Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, or Amazon, among other places. I hope the publisher will allow me to share the story online for Agatha voters. I will let you know should it come to pass.

The full list of Agatha Award finalists is available here. Attendees of Malice Domestic will vote during the convention in April. If you've never been to Malice Domestic, I recommend you check it out. It is a fan convention that celebrates the traditional mystery, though you will find authors in attendance who write other mystery subgenres too.

Happy reading!

03 February 2025

Watching Crime in French


I've been brushing up on my French, learning all the latest argot and idioms; poking my nose into coins (corners) as various as oyster farms and châteaux, the Louvre and tiny islands like the Ile de Yeu with its unspoiled natural beauty and the Ile de Ré with its salt marshes and seventeenth-century fortifications; and frowning over the befuddling complexity of the French criminal justice system till my head spins—all via some wonderful French TV series I've been watching via streaming services in French with English subtitles.

When I say "latest," I mean the language as it's developed since the Sixties, when I spent two years in French-speaking West Africa in the Peace Corps and a month in the idyllic village of St Paul de Vence before it was spoiled by plate glass windows in the shop fronts and hordes of tourists in the narrow cobbled streets that meander up and down steps and through arches within the medieval walls. And when I say "developed," yes, Virginia, the French language has grabbed the bit and bolted from its handlers, the rigid Académie Française. Twenty-first century French not only uses plenty of English, clean and dirty, but its own vulgarities have evolved. I'm sure they didn't say, ça chie for "it sucks" in the Sixties; in fact, "it sucks" as used today didn't come into popular usage till the Seventies or later. Then there's verlan, the slang of reversal (l'envers is "the reverse"), in which someone's girlfriend is a meuf instead of a femme (woman) or petite amie or copine (old terms for girlfriend), and if you do something crazy, it's ouf instead of fou.

My French has gotten quite rusty over the years. I haven't visited France since 2014, and I speak and write to my remaining French friends mostly in English. But after watching an hour or more of French TV every night, paying as little attention as possible to the subtitles, I've found my comprehension improving. There are plenty of French on the Upper West Side where I live and even more in Central Park, my neighborhood backyard. I've always caught scraps of conversation I could identify as French. Now I understand the words as they scoot by. I even occasionally find myself thinking in French, which I think is very cool. ("Cool" is tied with "okay" for the word most universally used in other languages.)

But you don't have to know French to understand the wonderful crime shows that are available on MHz Choice (through Amazon Prime), Acorn, and Netflix. Unlike the Korean dramas, in which some of the translations are risible, the French shows have excellent English subtitles. Here are three I recommend highly.

Murder in. . .
Eleven seasons of standalone 90-minute dramas, each in a different town or region of France. Some are well known, some remote. All are beautifully filmed. Viewers get to know as many of the top French actors by sight as we do British actors by watching season after season of Masterpiece on PBS. The shows are uniformly well written and well acted, the plotting complex. Within the framework of a police procedural, two often ill-matched partners must learn to work together as they conduct an investigation (une enquête). Because the criminal justice system is complicated, the teams vary. There's the local gendarmerie, which has a military structure. There's the police judiciaire, which is national, where a juge d'instruction, yes, a judge, may be sent from outside to investigate along with the police. There's the procureur, the prosecutor, who has authority over the investigation. Then there's the drama that comes with the crime and the setting. One of the team may be concealing local ties with the crime or a witness. A family reconciliation may be involved. These stories go deep, and there are plenty of twists before the solution to the crime and often—these are the French, after all—a kiss at the end.

The Art of Crime
Seven seasons so far. The setting is Paris, where Captain Verlay is a homicide detective whose short fuse has landed him in the OCBC, the division of the police judiciaire that investigates the illegal trafficking of cultural goods. Unfortunately, he is not only ignorant but phobic about art. His partner is Florence Chassagne, a brilliant art historian who works at the Louvre. She sees a psychoanalyst, talks to imaginary artists (whichever one's work is implicated in the crime du jour), and has a brilliantly conceived and acted narcissistic father who by turns clings, criticizes, and competes with her. Together, Verlay and Chassagne make a terrific team, especially when art theft turns to murder.

Candice Renoir
Ten seasons, plus an eleventh consisting of two 90 minute specials. I've written about Candice before. A lush divorcée with four kids, she uses being underestimated as an interrogation technique. However, if a member of her team tries to keep something from her, she says indignantly, "What do you think I am, an idiot?" Or as they say in French, Tu me prends pour une quiche? She wears pink rubber boots to crime scenes, flashes her police ID in a pink holder when she knocks on doors, and has her own methods of disarming suspects both literally and figuratively. She drives her superiors crazy, but she gets results.

From Candice Renoir and from the many, many women in positions of authority in Murder in. . ., I've also caught up on how feminist language has progressed in France. Candice's rank at the beginning is Commandant, one step above captain and head of her investigative team. The traditional form would have been le commandant, as in "Oui, mon Commandant," even when women started being advanced to that rank. But thanks to the women's movement, it's now Commandante Renoir. That "e"—and other changes, such as la dentiste, when I was taught long ago that it's le dentiste even when the dentist is a woman—makes a small but very significant difference in women's prestige and authority.

02 February 2025

Half Time at Hard Time


You remember that larcenous prisoner pal Shifty. Turns out his brother-in-law, Shaky, the crime ring’s explosives expert, was in the penitentiary and looking for a way out. He discovered the prison updated their security system at midnight.

inmate lighting a fuse

At zero-hundred hours, the computer initiated the cycling process. Exactly 45 seconds later, it shut off the electrified fence and alarms for mere moments, whereupon it was fully reactivated with fresh recording media. If Shaky could breach the fence at the 45-second mark, he could escape. Three seconds early or late, and his goose was cooked. And by goose, we mean an electric Shaky.

There was just one problem. A bell always clanged at midnight, but how could Shaky time 45 seconds without a watch or cell phone, both banned by incarceration rules.

Having studied under explosives master Dixon Hill, Shaky felt confident he could figure out a way. He discreetly assembled fuses in the prison workshop. Although each length burned exactly one minute, they burned unevenly. The first half of this homemade det cord might burn in forty seconds while the second half would race to the finish in twenty. He couldn’t depend that three quarters of a fuse would give him 45 seconds and not risk his life.

But then Shaky saw the answer. Armed with two one-minute lengths of det cord and a lighter, he affected his escape. How did he do it?

Rules

  1. The prison’s system reset begins at midnight when a tone sounds. Exactly 45 seconds later, the fence deactivates and mere moments later it re-electrifies.
  2. Shaky carries only a lighter and two lengths of fuse cord.
  3. Each cord will burn exactly one minute. However, burn rate is not proportional or even.

How did Shaky escape?

Here is an entertaining three minute Ted Talk presentation and answer to the puzzle.

 
   
  © SleuthSayers

 

Solution

01 February 2025

Five Favorite Markets


  

Much has been said at this blog lately, by me and others, about anthologies. We've talked about everything from submission calls to themes to editing to publication schedules. That's probably because there seem to be so many anthologies being produced these days--especially crime anthos. And because of that, as I have also mentioned before, I've been doing more writing for anthologies over the past few years than for magazines.  

But there are exceptions. At this moment, as luck would have it, I have short stories in the current issues of five magazines, and those particular markets have been among my favorites for a long time. I hope I've been good for them; I know they've been good to me.

Here they are, in no particular order:

 


1. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

One of the most pleasant surprises of my so-called literary career is the fact that I've been published fairly regularly in a magazine that I had read and enjoyed long before I started writing and submitting stories--and it was one of the first major publications to buy my stories, early on. My first sale to AHMM was a 1200-word short story called "Teamwork," in early 1996, bought by then-editor Cathleen Jordan--I think I ordered about two dozen extra copies and gave one to everybody I knew, including the mailman. Since then--mostly in the last ten years--I've sold AHMM a lot more stories, far less than those of my friends Rob Lopresti, R. T. Lawton, and Doug Allyn, but still enough to gladden my mystery-lover's heart. Probably because of the magazine's long response times, I don't submit as many stories to AHMM as I once did, but I still send them fairly often, and it's always a thrill when one is accepted.

My story in the current (Jan/Feb 2025) issue is called "The Cado Devil," an average-length short story that's almost all dialogue, set in the present-day Mississippi Delta. If you want details, here's a piece I did for AHMM's Trace Evidence blog that describes a little about the story. My next story, "Heading West," is scheduled for their May/June 2025 issue--it's about a young couple, a tornado, and a train robbery in the 1880s. Yes, the magazine does sometimes consider Westerns--I had another one published there a couple of years ago. As most of you know, AHMM's editor is Linda Landrigan, one of the kindest and most professional editors I've known.


2. Strand Magazine

My first sale to the Strand was in 1999, shortly after their "rebirth" here in the U.S.; the previous incarnation of Strand Magazine had been published in London for many years, featuring names like Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. I've forgotten how and where I heard about the new Strand, but somehow I did, and snailmailed them a story called "The Proposal," about a Houston oil executive who'd hired a hitman to kill his wife. The editor contacted me by phone several weeks later to accept the story--it appeared in their second issue, and was the first of the many stories I've had published there. As I've mentioned before in discussions about markets and submissions, most of my Strand stories have been in the 3000- to 5000-word range, contain no otherworldly elements, feature more suspense than mystery, and are heavy on plot twists and reversals. (I'm not saying that's what everyone should aim for, but those things seem to have worked well for me.) So far, my Strand stories have been nominated for an Edgar, won two Derringer Awards, and were selected for three editions of the best-of-the-year mystery anthologies--so the magazine has been kind to me. Also, managing editor Andrew Gulli and fiction editor Lamia Gulli are a dream team to work with. Seriously.

My story in their current issue (#74, December 2024) is a 3200-word tale called "Lizzy in the Morning." It's set in the desert Southwest and includes a bank robbery, a scheming wife, a sneaky cop, a prison guard, an escaped convict, and long-buried loot. Again, as with almost all my Strand stories, it includes multiple surprises and has a plot that's more howdunit than whodunit. I hate it when I hear writers say a story "almost wrote itself," but this one did--it was great fun to put together.



3. Black Cat Mystery Magazine

I remember well the very first issue of BCMM, almost eight years ago--I loved the cover--and the magazine remains a quality publication. My first story for them was in that issue, a long (7600-word) Western called "Rooster Creek," one that I believe was submitted to then-editor Carla Coupe. In the years since then, one of my BCMM stories was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories and another won a Shamus Award, and for those honors I will always owe a debt both to BCMM and to editor Michael Bracken. The only thing tricky to remember about the magazine is that it's irregularly published and has a relatively short submission window, so I've always tried to have a story ready and waiting when those submission calls are announced. (Sometimes I can deliver, sometimes I can't.) At least one of my stories that was accepted by Black Cat Mystery Magazine was later diverted to the also-great Black Cat Weekly instead. More about BCW in a few minutes. 

My story in the current BCMM issue (#15) is "A Cold Day in Helena," a heist tale set in a snowstorm and told through the POV of one of two bank thieves--and it'll probably be no surprise to readers that the bad guys' carefully-planned robbery doesn't exactly go as expected. This serves as even more proof to writers--and to me--that the "complication" part of the problem/complication/resolution template is usually the most important of the three. If my records are correct, I have another story, "Ship Island," coming up soon at BCMM. One final note: As many of you know, Michael is an excellent and (thank goodness) patient editor.


4. Woman's World

Yep, WW is still around, and as long as it is, I plan to send them a story now and then. Usually a mini-mystery; I've had better luck there with mysteries than with romance stories, over the years (they publish one Solve-It-Yourself Mystery and one Five-Minute Romance in every weekly issue). I first sold WW a story in the spring of 1999, back when both the mysteries and the romances were a bit longer and paid a bit more than they do now, and I've been fortunate enough to be a more-or-less regular contributor ever since. Most of my Woman's World stories have been installments in a mystery series featuring a smart, bossy, retired schoolteacher and a not-so-smart but good-intentioned sheriff who was once her student in their small Southern town--she helps him solve mysteries whether she's invited to or not, and (not so helpfully) corrects his grammar in front of his deputies. One reader told me my Angela Potts/Chunky Jones stories remind him of a Mayberry in which Aunt Bee is always trying to tell Sheriff Taylor how to do his job. I hope that was a compliment, but I'm not sure.

My story in the current (February 3, 2025) issue is called "Sure as Shootin'," and it involves a farmer, a trick-shot artist, a preacher, a computer guru, a psychic, and of course a puzzle that needs solving. I haven't yet seen the issue but found a picture of the cover, which--as expected--features an attractive lady and a pointer to weight-loss secrets. Editors I can thank for my good fortune at this magazine (and I do, sincerely) are Sienna Sullivan, Maggie Dillard, Patricia Gaddis, and the long-retired but fantastic Johnene Granger.


 

5. Black Cat Weekly

Among all these print markets, there's an online magazine that's also close to my heart. Several years ago Wildside Press began a daunting venture: a weekly e-zine featuring stories of several different genres--and it's been a great success. My first story there was called "Debbie and Bernie and Belle," back in 2020, when it was known as Black Cat Mystery and Suspense Ebook Club. I believe it became Black Cat Weekly in 2021, and has included works not only from current writers but from some long-ago authors like Jack Ritchie (one of my all-time favorites). Another difference is that BCW features a mix of original stories and previously published works--something for everyone. (Not only do I have an original story in this week's issue, I'm scheduled to have a reprint in the one coming up next week--but that is, one might say, another story.) I'm sure a big reason for the magazine's success are the folks on the masthead: John Betancourt's the publisher and Barb Goffman and Michael Bracken are co-editors.

My short story in the current Black Cat Weekly (Issue #178) is sort of a weird Southern coming-of-age adventure/fantasy tale called "The Dark Woods." It involves a couple of schoolboys, Kevin Parker and Tommy Ward, who're planning a day at the movies, but Kevin's having to hang around for a while beforehand, waiting for his pal to finish his chores. During that time, Tommy's granddad tells Kevin a long and creepy story about one of the old man's childhood adventures, and, well, it turns out to be scary in more ways than one. This story, which at 2,000 words is pretty short, was a special treat for me to write because some of it really happened to me and one of my childhood friends when the two of us were wandering the backwoods one day on an ill-fated adventure of our own. (The true or almost-true stories are almost always the most fun to write.) 


What are some of the markets that you focus on first, with your story submissions? Are they the ones that have been the most receptive to your work in the past? Are they the ones you feel more "comfortable" submitting to, and maybe more optimistic about your chances? Do you have some magazines that are high on your target list simply because they present a challenge? (Personally, I like to submit stories to EQMM but I'm not as successful there as I'd like to be: half a dozen sales out of a zillion tries. Do you have similar mountains to climb?) Do you have a bucket list of magazines or other markets? (Mine includes Asimov's and Analog, although I have few hopes of ever actually selling them anything.) Do you find yourself writing to, and submitting stories for, more anthologies than magazines? Why? If you're in a confessional mood, let me know in the comments. 


And that's it--I'll be back in two weeks. Meanwhile, keep writing, keep warm, and keep sending out those stories. Good luck to all!


31 January 2025

Citadel of Ignorance


Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash


Back in June 2022, I deleted my social media accounts. I shared that news right here on SleuthSayers, enumerating the resources that help nudge me to that decision: three books and two documentaries. Each of those resources were sightly different, but they all telegraphed a truth that took a while in coming, but is now taken for granted by anyone who reads: social media rots your freaking brain.

In my 2022 post, I promised to check back in the future to let you know how my cessation was going. The future is now.

The backstory: I joined Twitter in 2010, and from that point forward, I joined everything else under the sun because everyone said it was in a writer’s best interest to do so. I did Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram. For a time, my only working blog operated on Tumblr. I created accounts on sites that lasted four minutes in the life of the Internet. (Who remembers Klout?)

Remarkably, perhaps, presciently, I never created a personal account on Facebook, but don’t let me off the hook so easily there. My wife and I did create four Facebook Pages, one for each of the books or series of books we were touting at the time. Well before my breakup with social media, I deleted three of those four because I just didn’t see the point.

At the very beginning, I took the advice of a buddy, who served as the social media guru for Barnes & Noble. He said to keep the promotion of my books and work to maybe 20 percent of my feed. The rest should be a mix of writerly service to my community (“Hey, look at this cool article I found on pitching agents!”), and personal observations and interesting tidbits from my personal life (“I cooked a ham this weekend! Look!”).

Well, I did all that, and I still felt stupid, awkward, and icky doing it. Everywhere I turned, people offered advice on the right way to do social media. Some of that advice came from the idiots that ran the publicity and marketing departments at publishing houses. Their underlying message was, “Do our jobs for us, please, since our employers have never trained us to do it properly!”

Like most people who declare themselves sick of the technology, I just didn’t know where the hell I was going to get the “content” I was expected to share on these platforms. I resented that agents and editors judged me for my low numbers of followers.

I read articles that said I should strive to be as authentic as possible, and I was at a loss how to accomplish that. (“Guys, I really, really need to share how I feel about the ham I cooked.”)

I finally dropped the pretense of promoting my work, and used, say, Twitter to disseminate a series of hilarious one-liners. I was a hoot on Oscar night, not that anyone noticed or cared. I gave up talking about books unless I adored something. Instagram became fun when I decided to simply share one photo, just one, every day. If it revolved around writing or a book, so be it. It was on Insta, for example, that I announced to the world that Pat Conroy’s cookbook was the only one I’d ever read cover to cover, because I just had to know how it ended. I still mean that. Mostly, though, I shared pics of nature, food, glasses of wine shot against the backdrop of the flowers in my garden.

You might say that social media rewarded me after I stopped caring.

And then one morning, I accidentally swiped to the right of my iPhone’s home page, revealing statistics about my daily phone usage. The phone insisted that in the last 24 hours, I had spent 3 hours and 25 minutes on Instagram alone.

“Liar!” cried I.

If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that my behavior around these apps had become obsessive, and, ahem, compulsive. If I was out with my wife, I checked the phone when she left for the restroom. I scrolled while waiting in the car for stores to open. The phone helped me kill time on queues the way that paperbacks did in the 1980s. And while I still read short stories (because, methinks, they’re short), my reading of books had dropped to all-time lows. Like the journalist Johann Hari, whose book I mentioned in my earlier post, I felt as if my mind was too splintered to finish most of the books I started. The thought of reading an entire series of mystery novels by an author I enjoyed—the way I had as a kid—seemed exhausting. Why read the Slow Horses series, when I could just watch it?

What’s worse, after a series of troubling political events in 2016, I obsessively checked social media and three to four news sites every morning, to keep myself apprised of current events. During the Covid lockdowns, my ritual was to read aloud the morning headlines to my wife as we sipped coffee on the patio, then read aloud the articles she requested, until we were both too sick and terrified to continue.

Scrolling—whether for fun or doom—had become a problem.

For a while, to assert control over my life, I merely deleted the apps from my phone. Cal Newport, one of the authors of the book referenced in my earlier post, advised checking social media on your desktop, and only if you needed to for work. That worked for six months, then I began simply reloading the app to sneak peeks anyway.

By 2022, I had read and absorbed the message of the 2018 book by Jaron Lanier—the computer scientist who advised everyone to completely delete their social media accounts in their entirety. The man is a genius, and his arguments were based on a deep understanding of the underlying technology and the corporate structures of the social media firms he consulted with. I understood why he urged this action, but I still felt I had to maintain those accounts. (What if someone claimed my old account and pretended to be me?)

By 2022, I had watched and rewatched the 2020 HBO documentary The Social Dilemma, and digested Hari’s 2022 book, which opened with him escaping to an isolated beach community for a month, sans phone and laptop. He found that his brain returned, and he read copiously, joyously, promiscuously.

Intrigued, I took the plunge mid-year 2022. Deleted all my remaining accounts, as well as the News app on my phone. From that moment forward, I was on a permanent social media purge, and tentative-for-now news fast. A journalist friend scoffed at this when I ran into him at a funeral of a colleague: “News fast? News. Fast! Come on! Is that even a thing?”

He and others like him wonder aloud how I can live without knowing what’s going on in the world. To be honest, I do feel sad when I don’t know that some personage has died. The In Memoriam reel at the Oscars has been something of a shock for the last two years, sure.

But you know what? If something is so huge, it’s not like the rest of you peeps aren’t talking about it. I do still maintain a Feedly account. It’s keyed only to news of the genres I enjoy, articles on writing, and the book world at large. Inevitably, news of the outside world seeps into those articles. If I want to know more, I allow myself a peek and do a search. Just one, then I close the browser. When the hurricane hit our city in autumn 2024, I sat on the patio in the dark and listened to my hand-cranked NOAA radio for updates. Because that’s what you do.

And yes, it is a pain not to be able to announce when I have a new story in a publication, but I am trying to preserve my sanity. In the world beyond literature, I know that there are school shootings, wildfires, and reprehensible political behavior. I don’t want to (or need to) ride that daily roller-coaster anymore. I can’t. Like my nephew used to say when he was young and a classmate offered him a bite of a peanut butter sandwich, “No thank you. It’s not good for me.”

I don’t keep a reading journal, though I probably should. But I do read a lot of ebooks. There, the evidence is clear: in 2020 I read 12 ebooks, in 2024, 64 ebooks. Granted, a lot of those 2024 titles were single short stories or novellas, but the same is probably true of 2020. And there are still other paper books in both years for which there is no record.

While it’s nice to have proof that the void inside my cranium functions still, I am troubled by the most recent attack on my Citadel of Ignorance. Many writer friends have migrated to Substack, so my inbox and browser teem daily with their irresistible musings. Substack is social media, which means these folks can, within the body of their newsletters, refer you to still more articles that they found interesting by equally fascinating writers.

Anyone who is interesting (and many who aren’t) has a Substack. People I like or find compelling. Without even trying, I discovered Substacks by people such as Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Cheryl Strayed, Margaret Atwood, Michael Pollan, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Moore.

In the coming weeks or perhaps months, I will discover if I have the strength to unsubscribe from this new temptation, and leave it all behind. I’m sure that all these scribes have important things to say, but who has the time? If their words stand the test of time, they will have the good sense to put them in a book, where I will read them some day while waiting at the DMV, the way the good Lord intended.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

30 January 2025

Write Fast! Write Slow! Write Daily! Write When You Can!


 I currently exist in two distinct hells: Rewrite Hell, and End-of-Term-Grading Hell. So I thought I would repost something I wrote back in 2013 under the title: Writing Efficiency in its Myriad Forms. As a rumination on efficient writing it has aged surprisingly well. As a snapshot of life at Casa Thornton it is definitely a fly flash-frozen in amber. (occasional parenthetical updates in italics are additions/emendations intended for this repost, btw.) I hope you get something out of it either way. See you in two weeks! - B.T.

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In his excellent piece This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Moseley gives the following advice: “The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day–every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work.”

In his defense, Walter apparently has the luxury to plan out his schedule to quite a specific degree.

Along with “Write every day,” “Write fast” seems to be the mantra of this generation. “Writing fast and producing copious amounts of word product is the key to success,” so many “how to” books seem to say.

Bosh.

I’ll tell ya, I have had my share of 2,000 word-count days. Not a one of them came independent of either a hell of a lot of time spent thinking about what I wanted to write that day, or by dint of a whole lot of later tweaking, editing, or outright re-writing.

Put simply, I can write fast, or I can write well. I cannot do both.

This is not to say that such a thing isn’t possible. It is! Just not for me.

I once wrote a pair of 40,000 word books (80,000 words total) in eight weeks. Tight deadline. Unreasonable (and unprofessional, and unhelpful) development editor didn’t make it any easier.

I was an unmarried, kidless apartment dweller at the time. I had (and still have) a day gig that required a fair amount of headspace. So it was work, home to write, bed, rinse and repeat.

Talk about a miserable couple of months!

Astonishingly these two books are still in print.

We spent longer on reworking what I’d written into something passable than it took to write the initial drafts, or, for that matter, for me to have written them well in the first place. But that was a different time in my career, and in my life.

If I were to find myself in that sort of situation today, I’d have to give back the advance. Seriously. I’ve got a marriage and a house and a wonderful one (now twelve!) year-old son, all of whom require my time and attention.

More to the point, they command my time and attention. I enjoy the hell out of being married, being a father, and owning a home. I suspect the fact that I was in my mid-forties by the time I experienced any of these pleasures does nothing to lessen them.

Couple these aspects of my daily life with the fact that my day gig still requires a lot of my energy and attention, and I find myself left with the question, “How do I get anything written at all, let alone sold?”

The answer is that for I published my most recent book in 2011. That was also the year in which I collected and edited an anthology of crime fiction called West Coast Crime Wave. I got married and bought my house in 2010. My son was born in 2012.

(I've published a lot of stuff since then, glad to say!)

So there was some adjustment involved in taking on these new responsibilities, adjustment time during which my publishing slowed to a stand-still.

This is not to say that I stopped writing during this time. Far from it. I figure that during the second half of 2011 and all of 2012, I easily wrote 50,000 words on my work-in-progress historical mystery.

I just won’t be publishing any of those words. They were intended to keep my hand in it, if you will, not to be part of the final equation.

And it worked.

You heard it here first: I’m just wrapping the sale of my first short story in years. I’m also nearly 2/3 of the way through the final draft of my current WIP, a historical thriller set in antebellum Washington, D.C. By this time next year, I’ll have this and another novel wrapped, in addition to writing three more new short stories, and publishing them along with some of my previously published canon in a collection.

And I won’t do it by “writing every day” or “writing fast.” With my schedule that’s just not feasible. So I do the next best thing.

I write when I can where I can as much as I can and as often as I can. Sometimes it’s 2,000 words a day. Sometimes it’s 2,000 words a week.

(And some days it's a few hundred words on my phone!)

It takes a while longer to get my head back into the story once I’ve been away from it for a while, but I think that’s a small price to pay for making time to play with my son every day, spend quality time with my wife, and keep the house from falling down around our ears.

For example, I wrote the ending to “Paper Son,” my short story featured in Akashic Books’ Seattle Noir anthology, while sitting in Seattle Mystery Bookshop, waiting for my friend Simon Wood to finish up a signing there. What’s more, I wrote it on my Blackberry smartphone and emailed it to myself.

I’ve also been known to record story ideas while driving. My commute contributes to some terrific “alone and pondering” time.


Plus, I don’t tend to let story ideas fall by the wayside. This is especially true of short stories. I will get an idea, do some research (remember, I write historical mystery/crime fiction, after all), then begin working on it.

This has so far stood me in good stead. So far I’ve published five short stories (soon to be six), all with paying venues, out of a total of seven shorts actually completed.

In fact, the second story I sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, “Suicide Blonde,” was initially rejected. I reworked it, submitted it to the annual MWA anthology contest. They also rejected it.

But I believed in the story enough to resubmit it to Linda Landrigan AHMM, and this time she bought it. What a great feeling!

By the way, I almost never finish a short by working on it straight through. Usually the ones I’ve published have come from months or years of on and off development. Take the story I am about to sell. I first began work on it in 2007.

I guess in the end I don’t really disagree with Mr. Mosley’s excellent advice, at least in spirit. After all, while I can’t really generate new fiction every single day, I definitely do write every day (in various forms), and I believe I’m in complete agreement with the spirit of his advice, which seems to emphasize the importance of establishing a routine in order to help make you more efficient as a writer.

In that regard, I’m doing the best I can. And life is good!

(And it's even better now!)