Oops

 

Mistakes, I’ve made few, but then again, too many to mention.  And more, much more than this, I did it any way I could figure out. 

            When people ask me how I’m able to make a certain piece of wood working, the only honest answer is, “A series of mistakes, randomly interrupted by moments of good fortune.”   I think the only difference between a person who succeeds at a craft, and one who doesn’t, is

the willingness to try.  Failure is not an option, it’s inevitable.  A completed project is the result of winnowing the number of mistakes down to a tolerable, and amendable, few.  Thus, making mistakes is not as important as knowing how to reorganize the flaws. 

            For this, the most important ingredient is humility.  When it comes to craft, we are all born sinners.  Accepting this is the road to endurance and faith that persistence, seasoned by patience and presence of mind, will see you through. 

            Some mistakes achieve an unexpected good.  We’ve heard about Velcro, Post-it notes and microwave ovens, but I have experienced a number of occasions when a colossal blunder resulted in a far better outcome.  This usually happens when I’ve made my intended effect impossible, so I’m forced to redesign the whole thing, turning a repair into a pleasing improvisation.     

Architects have known about this for a long time, probably because buildings are so big and take so long to put together that learning how to glorify a goof was an important strategy.   

            Not unlike building a novel.  I’m sure this is how many of you write.  Perhaps it’s the only way to write anything halfway decent. Anne Lamott’s shitty first draft is actually an exercise in dispensing thousands of mistakes that call for ingenious corrections.  Our most inventive writers are probably people who generate mistakes at scale, writing themselves out of one pitfall after another.

           

            The Grand Master of fortuitous mistakes is nature herself.  For every living thing, reproductive success is a numbers game.  The reason an individual produces far more eggs or sperm than needed to complete the transaction is it increases the odds for an acceptable match.  A byproduct of these multitudes is that little errors creep into the genetic scheme. It’s regrettable that the word “mutation” has a vaguely negative connotation.  Truth is, without mutation, we wouldn’t have evolution, since natural selection needs a toolbox of mis-made parts from which to select the preferred attribute for continued survival.   

If you really want to go large on the value of error, whatever existed before the Big Bang contained tiny quantum fluctuations, deviations from the norm.  This meant the universe didn’t start off perfectly configured, but instead, what cosmologists charmingly describe as slightly lumpy.  This meant that when expansion created the universe we ended up with galaxies, stars, and planets, one of which is our current residence.

            This is what I’d call a happy accident. 

            I’ve recently mentioned the delusion of perfectionism.  Nothing is perfect, and if it was, it wouldn’t do us much good.  It would just sit there in a smooth slab of static nothingness.  It wouldn’t grow, change, evolve or adapt.  This doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to make things better. You just can’t make them perfect, and neither should you try.   

            Say what you will about the advanced technology we live with today, it mostly works.  It’s all pretty much based on quantum mechanics, which everyone applies, though no one really understands.   If you could boil down the unfathomable complexity of quantum theory, the remaining nugget would be probability.  Probably.  Outcomes are not predetermined, but rather the consequence of infinite, unknowable and evanescent interactions.  Heisenberg proved that “here and now” is ultimately an approximation. 

            This wouldn’t happen in a perfect world, but lucky for us, irregularity and imprecision makes the whole thing operational.  It’s been built into the system since the first nanosecond.  You might regret a mistake, but there’s no shame in it.  So have at it.  That’s why we have copy editors, imperfect as they are.   

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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

School Daze

As far as I can tell, I was admitted to Dickinson College, a small, scholastically rigorous institution in Pennsylvania, on the strength of my swimming prowess. Certainly not my academic record, which should have prompted an admissions scandal. I was tipped off when I found the college swim team in my dorm room soon after I arrived. There were no athletic scholarships offered at Dickinson, but the coaches had a cozy enough relationship with the gatekeepers that the occasional standout was snuck through (someone with better high school preparation would have written “was sneaked”).

It helped that my father was prepared to pay full boat, so I opted for a different college path, one mostly involving beer, cigarettes, procrastination and rock ‘n’ roll, none of which were on the curriculum, though individual excellence in these areas was rewarded by allowing you to return every year, provided the maintenance of a shaky C average.

      My basic impediment was the theory of school itself. I could never grasp the concept of sitting together with people my age at little desks all day while someone at the front of the room told us things. That alone would have tried my patience, but they required you to

regurgitate their words at some later time, with rather harsh penalties for imprecise recollection. Worse still, once liberated at the ring of a bell, we had to use precious TV-watching and horsing around time to recapitulate much of the day’s proceedings, and even add to the burden with supplemental labor. The whole thing seemed entirely medieval.

They hadn’t yet identified ADHD in the 50s and 60, but I had such a ferocious case that my parents had to resort to drugs to keep me still in kindergarten. Thus afflicted throughout my school career, I thought “isn’t realizing his potential” was my middle name. Though I did have an ace in the hole. As with many things in my young life, it was provided by my big brother, who was an excellent student, but also an omnivorous, indefatigable reader. He caught the habit from my mother, so our house was crammed stem to stern with books.

Since I did everything my brother did, I read every book I fell over, and then some. As compulsions go, this was a lucky one to succumb to. Unsupervised as it was, my pool of knowledge was quite deep in some areas, and barely a puddle in others. My subsequent test performances had lots of hills and valleys, which evened out to around, well, a shaky C average.

The psychological lesson for me was that information I read tended to stick, whereas anything delivered from the metaphorical pulpit sounded like Charlie Brown’s TV parents. This led more than one teacher to ask my mother why a student who aced the test on Ancient Greece (didn’t every kid devour Edith Hamilton?) could barely add and subtract (still largely true.)

Although my math SATs never rose above the statistical probability of correctly guessing at least some of the answers, I did okay on the English side of the house, maybe just well enough for Dickinson to retain its accreditation. I’m not sure how much I learned in public school, but there’s an awful lot of information available when you have access to your mother’s Book of the Month subscription.

Most relevant to this platform, my bibliophilia soon blossomed into full blown hypergraphia. This not only saved my scholastic bacon, it provided the template for my entire life. When things were looking dire, I could always write myself out of trouble. In college, there was nothing more exhilarating than the option of a term paper versus a final exam. Somewhere within those ivy walls, I’d heard some critics regarded form as important as content. This theory was sorely tested across a variety of disciplines, but I made it through.

My roommate not only shared my general strategy, he honed it to perfection. A professor wrote at the bottom of one of his papers: “You write well, which is good, since you have very little command of the material.” He clinched a B in Russian Literature by using the liner notes of the Dr. Zhivago movie soundtrack as his sole reference. This is the stuff of greatness.

Since so little time was committed to slaving over The Brothers Karamazov, or door-stop biology texts, we had ample in reserve for 8 ball, making midnight grinder runs or destroying our hearing with electric guitars. Whatever was left on the schedule for actually writing those papers was usually reserved for about ten hours before the deadline. This was also, for me, an invaluable life lesson.

      It wasn’t until my Creative Writing MFA program, when the focus was entirely on matters of interest to me, that I discovered the pleasing embrace of a classroom, stimulating professors and the novelty of academic achievement. Since I had to pay for it all out of my own pocket, that might have enhanced my focus. But I came to regret being such a lousy student and all the stuff I could have learned had I been paying attention. Among my screwball college friends there are a few lawyers and corporate executives, along with a stockbroker, CEO and Dean of the Boston Cathedral. There’s no evidence that a decent grade point average distracted from their attention to the extra-curricular.

Trinity College once asked a cross-section of professionals to come speak to their students about proper career preparation. I was the designated advertising copywriter.

“First,” I told them, “don’t even buy the textbooks until about halfway through the semester. Take a passing glance when you get a chance, in case your parents come to visit and ask what you’re studying. On the night before your paper is due, get some pizza and sample the keg in the dorm basement, play a lot of pool, or basketball, if that’s your preference, until everyone’s gone to bed, then slip page one into the typewriter. Think desperately of something to write that will sound even remotely persuasive. Then you have to actually write something down, if you can stay awake.

“If you pass, they won’t kick you out, and you’re able to preserve your lifestyle (and in my case, stay out of the draft.) This is the life of a copywriter. Working with scant information, often exhausted, forced to produce a compelling argument under extreme pressure in a very short amount of time. Oh, and the stakes are pretty high. Just ask your kids, if you’re lucky enough to have them.”

They never asked me back. Don’t know why.

As time goes by

I made the mistake of going back to read some of my favorite hard science fiction novels, most of which had been published in the late 20th century.  Brilliant, inventive works as they are, the writers got some of the science wrong.  Not their fault, the updated information had yet to be discovered.  Sadly, some of the undergirding plot lines depended on these false predictions, which caused the books to fall apart faster than a reflecting pool renovation.

The dangers of anachronisms lurk within literature as a whole, though not usually with the dire consequences of forecasting an event that hasn’t yet taken place.  Much of the absurd quibbling over the Odessey movie revolves around controversial moral and social updates, though the basic scaffolding remains intact and easily accessible by our tender 21^st century sensibilities. This is largely true of most of the historical novels I’ve read, mysteries and otherwise, a credit to the authors’ disciplined research.   

(A shout-out here to Jim Benn’s Billy Boyle WWII mysteries, focusing on an era I’ve taken an interest in, which never disappoint, or have me reaching for Wikipedia.)    

When the question arises at writers conferences on how to deal with the assault of advanced technology, in particular the ease with which you can now instantly harvest information about nearly everything without leaving your parents’ basement, some authors breezily say they just set their books before all that happened. 

However, if you chose to start the timeline even a couple decades in the past, you better be on your toes.  You might say, yeah, but I was there!  To which I’d reply, how’s that long term memory working?  Brain scientists will tell you not as good as you think.  Never has the term “trust but verify” been more true.  Nor the value of border collie-like fact checkers of greater value.

One thing’s for sure.  It’s a lot more interesting to follow Phillip Marlowe – as he drives around in his jalopy, intrudes on people’s privacy, drops dimes into payphones and hectors reliable sources in the LAPD or Los Angeles Times – then to describe a lonely guy tapping out commands to Gemini or ChatGPT.

            If there ever was an existential threat to the business of murder mysteries, this is it.  Having your hero hook up with a tech nerd helps – I’ve got one myself – though this has now become such a tired trope, I wish I hadn’t succumbed to the temptation.  On some TV shows, the humans in the operation are reduced to performing the few tasks left to them, such as punching bad guys in the face, or appreciating a nice sunset.  It’s worse when equally clever geeks are on either side of the good vs. evil divide, trying to out-tech each other.  Why not just have Hera and Athena duke it out with lightning bolts, like they did in the old days?  At least the pretense of human agency is not an issue. 

Science fiction, ever resilient despite the risks, has some solutions.  In one book, alien bacteria have eaten all the insulation around electronic conductors, collapsing the whole edifice.  In another, there’s a super cyberintellience, but it turns out it likes to lie, just for fun.  Alien lifeforms are often good for mixing it up, especially when the author has the sense to grace the other worlders with entirely different sets of urges and motivations.   

Chaos Theory (interestingly named, since it actually delineates order within seemingly chaotic dynamic systems) features the state of phase transition, such as the frenzied condition of liquid H2O right before it turns into steam.  We’re living in such a thing ourselves, caught between past experience and the hurtling uncertainties of the future.

             A friend of mine, a retired stockbroker, has a healthy catalog of aphorisms that helped guide his career.  One of my favorites is, “People have a tendency to extrapolate current circumstances indefinitely into the future.”  Science would agree this is entirely fallacious, since the only constant in the universe is that everything has a cycle, that current circumstances will always change, you just don’t know exactly how.  There is no Steady State, even though Einstein once tried to prove there was, an effort he later abandoned, somewhat sheepishly. 

Perhaps the most reliable constant informing literature is that people are infinitely complex, and that love, vulnerability and death play havoc with every being’s emotional and intellectual composition.  The human factors may vary with the sociology of the era, but the fundamental things apply.

Maybe not forever, but for now, that’s good enough. 

It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools

             I mostly concur with this proverb, though I have had tools come apart in the middle of a cut, all on their own, resulting in marred work and much cursing, mostly directed at the tool’s manufacturer.  Though the villain is nearly always the operator, in whose charge proper tool maintenance justly resides.

            I started trying to write in a time when the only available tools involved ballpoint pens and mechanical typewriters.  For me, the typewriters were non-starters.  Too clunky and hard to use, the travel distance from key to paper amounting to several inches of quarrelsome

springs and levers.  The pen, in this case, was mightier, though the handwriting was abysmal, assuring that my works in progress were basically unreadable by anyone but myself until I succumbed to a typewriter for the final draft.

            Word processors saved my life and finger joints and I’ve never looked back.  Only now there's a new tool widely available, artificial intelligence, though I submit that this isn’t a handy assistant, but rather a fraud, pure and simple, and unworthy of any other designation.

            

                When I wanted to buy my first electric guitar, my father asked me if it played the music for you.  It took me a moment to figure out what he was saying, but quaintly, he actually thought that maybe the electronics industry had leaped ahead about sixty years and invented a device that rescued the musician from the inconvenience of learning to play music.  This would have been quite a technical achievement for the time, but I doubt it would have resulted in creating The Beatles’ oeuvre, much less anything else people would be interested in listening to.

           

                So why would you hire a robot to do your writing for you?  Well, I guess if you don’t know how to write, and have no interest in doing so, AI is some sort of blessing.  It’s no accident that Kurt Vonnegut called his anti-automation novel Player Piano.   There’s nothing wrong about having an upright piano in the living room to entertain guests with Scott Joplin and Gilbert and Sullivan before acquiring the luxury of vinyl and cherry-veneered stereo consoles.  But no one but the fully deranged or duplicitous ever claimed to be performing the works themselves.

            

               The promise of AI is that you can have your exposition scored and performed by someone else, and then easily foist it off as your own composition.  In my old-fashioned brain, this is merely deception, forgery, plagiarism, theft of intellectual property and the kind of plain old cheating that used to get you heaved out of whatever legitimate pursuit you’d be engaged in.

        

              I don’t think the subject is even worthy of debate, though I’ll try anyway.

           

               The Luddites famously got all out of sorts when machinery began to replace manual craft.  I’d like to get one of these guys in my wood shop, show him a table saw, drill press, dove tail jig, plunge router and a stack of raw wood and tell him to whip up a Federal-style highboy.  I bet, like my father, he’d learn that these modern machines don’t do any of the work without human intervention.  My son is an expert with the type of hand tools favored by the Luddites, but can also make mind-blowingly intricate wooden objects with laser cutters and CNC milling machines.  The designs still come out of his head, and the computer applications only know how to do what he’s programmed them to do.  They are tools, and if you think they make the art easy, just give it a try.

            I imagine someone could enlist AI to render work in his style, but the product would be akin to the slop anyone could crank out by asking Chat GPT to write a Hemingway short story.     

            There’s a gigantic qualitative difference between using a machine to make something and having the machine make it all by itself.  I have great admiration for anyone who can make a perfect dove tail joint by hand, but I just don’t see the point in spending a month doing something I can do pull off in an afternoon with a jig and a couple routers.  One could also spend a few years designing and manufacturing a machine that can make a thousand dove tail joints in that same afternoon.  But unless I have a furniture factory, why bother?

            

             Before straining the analogy past the breaking point, it’s important to note that writing isn’t manufacturing.  It’s a craft and an art, and in its fullest realization, it’s creation.  You can’t hand this over to a robot and expect to come out of the experience whole.  Even if no one notices, you’ve sold a crucial part of yourself down the river. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Real live Death

           Having just posted an appreciation of Agatha Christie and her flavor of classic cozies, I want to stumble back into the world of the hardboiled, with a five o’clock shadow, a stiff bourbon and a dame in the waiting room. 

I’m prompted by death.

            I noticed on several re-reads of Agatha Christie and similar authors, that side from all the other signposts of what I’d call classic mysteries, the works have an odd relationship with the matter of death, an event usually at the centerpiece of the action.  Often a number of

events, since there’s usually a pretty high body count, with members of the cast dropping like flies throughout the proceedings, closing out chapters and twisting plots into pretzels.  What struck me, was that in the standard British model, there’s remarkably little grief and anguish at each passing, even when the departed is a fiancé, brother-in-law or lifelong friend (though never a cat, as we all know). 

            “I’m sorry to inform you, Lady Cavendish, but your husband has just been discovered with a ceremonial Khurkuri sword protruding from his chest.”

            “Oh, dear.  And I just served him breakfast not an hour ago.”

            Being mostly of British heritage myself, I understand personal restraint, especially in matters of life and death.  With the balance of my cultural foundations apparently German with a dash of Scandinavian, I'm used to family members who've married one of us murmuring, "You stoic Knopfs."  But I think there's more to it when contemplating the Agatha worldview.

           I suppose it's a necessary sanitization meant to maintain a lightness of narrative, minimizing the emotional encumbrances.  It provides plenty of room for comic interludes, tours around dilapidated English country estates and brisk, lighthearted dialogue.  I like all these things, especially the absence of existential despair.  If I want brooding over the inconsequentiality of human life in the face of an indifferent and unforgiving universe, I know where to look.  And since my books are firmly in the hardboiled camp, I can write it myself.

            But still, it’s hard for me to suspend the belief that violent death is more than an important plot element.  I also prefer a certain economy in the number of murders that follow in quick succession, especially when our protagonists are fully engaged in their investigations.  Most murderers like to space these things out, or at least pick a nice quiet moment when he or she doesn’t have to shed bloody clothes and navigate various corridors and secret doorways in time for the first toast of an elaborate dinner party. 

            Holmes, Poirot and Nero Wolf aren’t immune to the human consequences of the deadly puzzles they solve, yet we have little access to their deeper personal examinations.  Not so with Spade, Marlow or Lew Archer.  These guys are nothing if not tortured by the moral and metaphysical implications of every untimely, tragic demise.  They aren’t yapping about it with every piece of dialogue, but you know it’s what’s driving their actions and defining the purpose of their quests.  And unlike their classic cousins, they express little in the way of intellectual arrogance, since the puzzle isn’t the point.  They have their clever insights, but mostly solve their cases though dogged determination and self-sacrifice, often losing a few teeth and much of the promised compensation in the process.

             This is what I think Chandler was mostly getting at in his essay, The Simple Art of Murder.  We’ve come a long way since he made his argument, and the culture is well-schooled in the ugly alleys and byways of realism and moral ambiguity. What goes on under flickering streetlights and on dusty, impoverished back roads has become mainstream.  Meanwhile, the classic mystery is living in comfortable retirement, well financed by annuities and fresh income from a steady production of successful cozies and less philosophically demanding fare.

            What unites the hardboiled and cozy worlds is a satisfactory conclusion.  The books open with a disordering of the universe through some wretched, anti-social deed.   It’s evil rising from the depths, chaos threatening the fragile equilibrium.  The puzzle-solvers and dark angels are called upon to put things back into balance, to cleanse the collective of foul corruption and treacherous instability.

            These are satisfying destinations, but how you want to get there is a matter of taste.  Sometimes you want Spielberg with a side of Frank Capra, sometimes full-on Scorsese.  It’s all fine with me.

Cozy up

            In Raymond Chandler’s famous essay, The Simple Art of Murder, he eloquently provided the artistic and intellectual foundation of hardboiled crime fiction.  As one of his committed devotees, I lapped it up, and eagerly followed his direction (unwittingly, not having yet read the essay) with my own hardboiled series, trilogies and standalones.

            That notwithstanding, I’ve never believed that embracing one form, or sub-genre, requires rejecting all the others.  I lean more toward the omnivorous, having begun my reading life with my mother’s handoffs of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout and Earl Stanley Gardener.  And all on my own, Arthur Conan Doyle.  Lately I’ve been back at it, with a deeper appreciation for everything that Chandler condemned, realizing that these presumed shortcomings are actually the point.

            You might have noticed there’s no surfeit of cynicism, treachery and immorality on display in our daily newsfeed.  This was equally true in the first half of the 20^th century, probably more so, since they experienced two world wars and economic upheaval we can only imagine.  What most people wanted to do was escape, and these master hands understood just how to provide the ideal transport.  But as I read now, having lived the intervening years in the back alleys and mean streets of Noir fiction, is that there was much more to it than that.

               

                Looked at objectively, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes are exceedingly bizarre individuals.  Even with their loyal sidekicks and benighted enablers, they exist entirely apart from general society. Introverted to the edge of misanthropy, riddled with obsessive compulsions and hints at dark caverns of the subconscious, any would fit nicely into one of Marlowe’s sidetracks.  It isn’t just that they easily read the criminal mind, they empathized, familiar with the moral ambiguities that entangle even the most callow and supercilious.  All three are honorable men, yet none could be called trusting or emotionally available.  All would afford an interesting date, but you wouldn’t want to move in together. 

            Anyone tempted to belittle Agatha Christie should give it a try themselves.  In particular, her prose has a distinct clarity, efficiency and immediacy, required for packing a lot of setting, character development and extravagant plotting into fairly compact spaces.  She never wastes a sentence, much less a full passage, on anything unessential to her story.  I relish Marlowe’s circuitous diversions and introspections, but it would be fair for Christie to say, ”For pity’s sake, young man, get to the point.”

            

            In order to have the description “mystery” appended to any work, it needs to have a puzzle.  It’s no accident that ”Ludwig”,  a new show from Brit Box, features an actual puzzle creator thrust into a career of solving mysteries.  You may seek out Agatha Christie as an unthreatening pastime, but you better be on your mental toes, the plots so thick with clues, both portentous and incidental, that I’m tempted to open a spreadsheet.  Even then, you may not be able to crack the code, since she had only a passing loyalty to the principle of fair play.  Modern mystery critics would find this irredeemable, but I like to point out that no such problem ever occurred to Arthur Conan Doyle.  Sherlock isn’t only a deductive genius, he spends a lot of time offstage performing capers we only learn about in the final pages when the mystery is triumphantly solved for us. 

Speaking of Brit Box, a first-rate mystery needn’t unfold at an English country estate, though for me, the form achieves its most sublime in the presence of Jeff caps, sheep, ancient pubs and a whole population of flinty, emotionally repressed tea drinkers.  I find refreshing the absence of histrionics (who needs grief counselors when you can put on the kettle or have a barman pull a draft), abundance of deadpan humor and rich colors muted under permanently overcast skies.  Along with the nobility of simply carrying on despite it all. 

Immortality Writ Small

          In 1978, my late father-in-law gave my wife a dehumidifier for the old house she bought in Hartford, Connecticut.  At issue was the damp basement, an environment well suited for growing mildew, colossal spiderwebs, or even some varieties of edible fungi.  The dehumidifier was a well-used appliance even then, so conservatively, already about ten years old. 

        Last week, after giving us years of continuous service (I’d let it rest for maybe four months during the cold weather) it gave up the ghost, and I think the ghost itself has probably died of old age.

        I have a bench grinder that I often use to clean metal parts and sharpen tools.  I inherited it from my grandfather, who told me when I was a little kid that the motor was over a hundred years old.  I’m now 75, so do the math.

 

        They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. 

        As much as I appreciate this kind of durability, an important act of mental hygiene when you hit 75 is to avoid fetishizing monuments of the past.  Not completely, of course, but one should heed Springsteen’s cautionary tale, Glory Days, and not be left “with nothing, mister, but boring stories.”

        Speaking of stories, they can also take up residence in the same quadrant of the brain that stores superannuated pop songs, appliances, cars and amber-tinted memories of that first slow dance (in my case, to Don’t Worry, Baby. Not forgetting that.) 

        It’s common sense that impressions of any art form are more fixed when exposed to fresh, unsullied brain cells.  It’s more of a jolt, unregulated by accumulated experience, conscious evaluation and creeping cynicism.  This is why I think of stories by Hemingway, JD Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Thurber, Edgar Allen Poe and Guy De Maupassant as STORIES, and everything that came after simply earnest efforts at achieving that transcendant perfection.

        

M. Maumpassant

        This isn’t good.  In fact, it’s a type of psychological hardening of the arteries.  But once again, the mystery genre stands ready to provide an artery-cleansing antidote.  It’s possible you could read every story published annually by Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery Journal, hundreds of short story blogs and countless anthologies, but you’d have to forgo all other pursuits.  I’ve never come close to this, but what I have read are uniformly excellent renditions of the form.  You certainly don’t have to restrict yourself to short-listed Derringer entries, though doing so would likely knock you into Barb Goffman and Art Tayor, brilliant purveyors of both the brief and startlingly fresh.  I assume they’re nagged by the same electronic nuisances as the rest of us yet somehow find a way to conjure the mental state that embraced Chekov, Mansfield and Jorge Luis Borges. 

        When I was an advertising copywriter the assignment I most dreaded was Bumper Sticker, quickly followed by Billboard.  Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s freaking near impossible to get right.  We’d often have pages of input, with various supporting documents, and were asked to distill it all down to a tiny little chain of compelling words.  I wanted to say, oh no, please, how about that 12-page brochure with lots of captions and ant type?  (I used to force junior copywriters to study haiku – no better way to pack a lot of meaning into very compact quarters.)

All-time bumper sticker champion.

        Starting a novel feels so much better.  All those pages of story development stretching out before you.  A thousand-word limit?  Not so inviting.  This is why my admiration for you serious short story writers is, well, limitless.  You set yourself a much more difficult task requiring tremendous discipline and control over all the elements of plot, description and character development.  As with haiku, every phrase has to contribute to the whole, its extraction leaving the structure teetering, like knocking out a lolly column. 

        As with ancient bench grinders and short stories, only time will determine ultimate durability.  I can’t know, but I choose to believe that the best of the mystery writers we’re enjoying now will find their work set in all caps in the minds of future septuagenarians.