Extraordinary People

Everyday New York midtown crowd

A lot of crime fiction writers I know describe their process as one of taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary circumstances. Such prototypical ordinary protagonists are jolted out of their comfort zone into sudden danger. The writer keeps putting the pressure on and raising the stakes. Their characters must be resourceful to survive. All they want is for things to return to normal. They want those they love to be safe and their lives to be exactly as they were before. But circumstances change them. Either they rise to the occasion and become heroes, or they are sucked into violence and criminal behavior from which there is no way back.

In cozies, the stakes are less dramatic than in thrillers—a domestic murder, a group of people under suspicion. Again, the premise is that the characters are ordinary people. The amateur sleuth is a divorcee with kids, a bakery owner, a book club or knitting circle member. The law enforcement antagonist and/ or love interest is a police chief, sheriff, or detective, also an ordinary person doing their job. The story starts when the amateur sleuth’s circle is thrown out of their comfort zone by the murder. The death has consequences, and the investigation stirs up suspicion and uncharacteristic behavior in a community that may have seemed untroubled on the surface.

Define Normal, Central Park

It has never occurred to me to say that I write about ordinary people. The great John Floyd has affectionately called my characters "zany." But John lives in suburban Mississippi, and I live in New York. My characters, like New Yorkers in general, don’t seem zany to themselves. They range from interesting to extraordinary, which is how I like them. How else could they leap off the page crackling with life and feeling? How else could their dialogue sizzle with wit? My favorite characters are clever, but they're also long on empathy. They have heart as well as humor. Like other writers’ ordinary characters flung into danger, they're resourceful survivors. But my premise is that they survive and triumph against odds because they're extraordinary from the start.

My first series, the Bruce Kohler Mysteries, has a protagonist and two sidekicks to begin with, his friends Jimmy and Barbara, and eventually a third, his girlfriend Cindy. Bruce is a recovering alcoholic with a New York attitude, a smart mouth, and an ill-concealed heart of gold. He is in the gutter in the first novel, and by the twelfth and latest short story, he's almost ten years sober. He's never relapsed, and he's grown up. He's become a mensch, as we say in New York. That's extraordinary. Barbara's a nice Jewish girl, smart and funny and a born rescuer. She's never met a needy person she didn't want to help. At first, she was a lot like me. But as a writer, I realized that didn't work. So did I tone her down? No. I took her over the top. Unlike me, Barbara never learns from her mistakes. She has to help. She has to investigate. She sniffs out murder like a bloodhound. She drags Bruce and Jimmy into danger. She's extraordinary—and hilarious. Jimmy, another alcoholic, has "been sober since Moses was studying for his bar mitzvah." He's a computer wiz, an obsessed history buff, and a New Yorker who freaks out if he has to leave Manhattan. Not ordinary. Nor is Cindy, an NYPD detective who gets her gold shield before she's ten years sober and has also done a lot of growing up.

Sultan Bayezid II welcomes Jews to Istanbul

My second series, the Mendoza Family Saga, is about an extraordinary Sephardic Jewish family. My real-life family is Ashkenazic, ie Eastern European Jews, but they inspired the Mendozas to some extent, as did Louisa May Alcott's fictional March family from Little Women. In 1492, young Diego Mendoza sails with Columbus on the same day the Jews are expelled from Spain. A year later, he and his sister Rachel join the second voyage. The family ends up in Istanbul, where the Ottoman Empire welcomes the Jews. Rachel marries the last surviving Taino and has a family. She is arguably the best traveled woman of her time. By 1520, she is working as a purveyor to the ladies of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent's harem. She is also solving mysteries in partnership with the Kizlar Agha, the Chief Eunuch of the Harem.

Esperanza Malchi, a kira who sought 
wealth and power and was murdered 
by sepahis in 1600

Rachel is my favorite character, but all the Mendozas are extraordinary. They have intelligence, resilience, flexibility, compassion, and integrity. The family's outsider perspective as dispossessed Jews allows me to explore the theme of cultural relativism in an age of absolutism. Rachel's children are brought up to be at ease with both Judaism and Islam. As Rachel tells them, “If we had not learned to tolerate a great deal of inconsistency, not a single Mendoza would have made it out of Spain alive back in 1492, much less reached Istanbul to prosper and produce such cheeky children.”

Kizlar Agha, 17th c painting
by J-B Vanmour

The Kizlar Agha, the Chief Eunuch of the Harem, is an extraordinary character in himself. Rachel's—and my—Kizlar Agha is fictional, but the office existed from 1574 until its abolition in 1908, carrying a range of ceremonial and practical duties and political power in different eras.Other than women and the Sultan himself, only he and the black eunuchs under his supervision were permitted to enter the royal harem. In my portrayal, he is a figure of great intelligence, magnificence, and gravitas, but very lonely. It is not surprising that he and Rachel begin by matching wits and come to enjoy each other's company—and their investigations—immensely.

Revisiting the Art of My Youth

The group of young Asian Americans beside me gaze at The Starry Night with its sharp spears of cypress piercing the swirling patterns of the sky.

"Is it real?" one of them asks.

"It is," I say. "Those are the real colors Van Gogh painted and the real brushstrokes. You won't see those in the immersive digitized version. This exhibition from the 1880s to the 1940s is only a fraction of what we got to look at every week when I was a kid. But the art from the 1960s to the 2020s hadn't been painted yet."

On the day of this conversation, I'd just scored a free year's MoMA membership, usually three figures, as a perk of the NYC ID that New York residents are entitled to as photo ID with numerous benefits. When I was in high school, I spent every Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. We took the subway from Queens and feasted on art for free. Now, they've curated the hell out of the bits of the collection on display. My very favorite, Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide and Seek, doesn't fit any category so may never make the cut.

The Cubists have plenty of wall space. I've been reading a mystery series based on art crimes, the Genevieve Lenard novels by Estelle Ryan. The Braque Connection gave me a new appreciation of Cubism and Georges Braque in particular, as seen through the eyes of its autistic protagonist. I'd never liked Braque because his art at MoMA in the 1950s was limited to a few brown and gray paintings, which hung next to similar brown and gray canvases by his buddy Picasso. A visit to Google Images taught me that Braque had an enormous stylistic range and a broad and vivid palette. Back at MoMA in 2025, I looked at his work and that of Picasso, Juan Gris, and the other Cubists with fresh eyes. Braque's Road near l'Estaque, which I don't remember, is a Cubist abstraction with the colors of a Cézanne.

Some of the paintings I visited many times in my teens made me feel as if I'd come home. Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, Chagall's I and the Village, and Cézanne's Château Noir all put a huge smile on my face.

You don't watch the news?

Some people are astonished to hear I don't watch the news. One friend who expressed shock told me that she'd been waking up to the headlines on the radio every day for the past twenty-five years in the same breath that she said she was feeling depressed. I could understand why. She's a brilliant woman, but she resisted making the connection.

Here are three questions people ask me, in tones ranging from baffled astonishment to horror.



You don't watch the news?

For many people, watching the news is like breathing. And morning coffee. The fact that the news is invariably depressing at best, terrifying at worst, seems to be irrelevant, even though it inevitably sets the tone for their day.


What do you do in the morning?
Lie in bed and think. Idea time. The germ of a new story may come to me. Or maybe it's a title. Or my series characters start wisecracking in my mind. Sometimes my unconscious writes a publishable flash story or the next chapter or scene of a book I'm reading or show I'm watching in my head. Word for word. Recently it wrote a scene in the TV series Murderbot, based on Martha Wells's multi-award-winning novella, All Systems Red, in which the rogue protagonist SecUnit aka Murderbot explains to its humans how a SecUnit properly programmed by Corporation Rim would fool a group of scientists into letting it invade their facility so it could kill them: "It has to wait for an instruction. If the humans say, "Who is there?" or "What do you want?" it is silent. If they say, "Tell us what you want," it says, "HOW?" The instruction is HOW. Humans: "What do you mean, how?" Invader: "HOW." Hear, Obey, Wait. It really should be HOWL. Hear, Obey, Wait, Learn. It Hears the humans' voices asking who is there and what they want. It Obeys whatever their response dictates. It Waits to see how they react. It Learns to imitate the humans' voices and reactions. Then it persuades the humans to let it in, and it kills them." No, Martha Wells didn't write that, nor did the TV scriptwriters, though I think it's kind of brilliant and in character for Murderbot. My unconscious worked it out in the creative time in which I wasn't watching the news.
Once my unconscious is ready for a nap, I get up and
Potchke with my flowers.
Do my stretches.
Eat breakfast.

Drink coffee as I go through some daily tasks on the computer that include health maintenance records and checking my finances as well as my husband's. (I manage the money. He does the housework and follows and analyzes the news.)
Look at my email and clear it all. Respond to whatever needs a response: a letter to a friend, a post on DorothyL or Short Mystery.
Do some writing if I haven't been moved to start earlier.



If you don't watch the news, how can you deal with what's happening?

As I said, my husband is the news guy. As someone who's smart enough to have been learning from history his whole life, he has a global perspective. He's kept a close eye on Ukraine since that conflict started. He's a big fan of the Ukrainians. Since the election, I've told him he has to start following the national news with equal attention. He's to report to me at once if Social Security or Medicare is in danger or if they're about to cart the Jews away. When the pogroms got bad in what's now Dnipro in 1905, my dad's parents packed the kids up and took them to America. There's no obvious place to get away to now. I have a couple of friends who moved to Mexico between 2016 and 2020. Americans, Jewish or not, might be getting very unpopular there right now. The same goes for Canada, where some of my generation of draft age young men sought refuge in the Sixties.

I refuse to get my knickers in a twist on a daily basis. Until the worst is actually happening, agita is optional, and I choose to avoid it. We do both follow the obits. It's an age thing. We've both reached the stage where we don't recognize most of the celebrities featured in AARP The Magazine as turning 50 or even many of the turning 60s. The 70s, 80s, and 90s, though, are our peeps. We want to know how old they were and how they died. As with the friends and family members we're gradually losing, we're both sad about these losses and grateful that for now, we're still healthy, productive, and reasonably happy. We don't have forever any more. We don't want to spend it doom scrolling and chewing over how our youthful efforts to make things better fell short. We don't want to spend the time we have left miserable about the past, angry about the present, and terrified of the future. So no, I don't read the news. I potchke with my flowers instead.

A Passion for Cross-Genre

One of the nominees for the Edgar Award for Best Novel this year was The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, a multiple Hugo Award nominated fantasy writer. In an Empire threatened by contagion and menacing leviathans, a murder occurs, the weapon a tree sprouting from the body of the victim.

The detectives are a female Nero Wolfe who investigates blindfolded, without leaving her home, and a magically altered Archie Goodwin. Bennett won an Edgar in 2012 for Best Paperback Original for an alternate historical noir science fiction thriller.

I'm one of thousands of authors featured on www.Shepherd.com, a online book browsing site whose founder, Ben Shepherd, claims it's a more effective way for readers to find books they'll fall in love with on the web than Amazon or Goodreads and more akin to the experience of browsing a brick and mortar library or bookstore.

He may be right, because every time I've visited the site to check my own promotional material (which is the primary reason authors join—for free), I end up falling in and following links and come away with something to read.

In order to promote one of their own books, readers are asked to pick a book-related theme ("The best…") and five exemplars. The idea is to draw kindred spirits first to your favorite books and then to your own, with which it presumably has something in common. Rather than manipulate the client by trying to list the five books that were closest in nature to the first in my longest series, I decided to be honest about my five favorite books "with characters you fall in love with." That's my top requirement as a reader for a favorite book. It didn't surprise me that the list consisted solely of genre fiction, because that's 97 percent of what I've been reading for decades. It did surprise me that the whole list of five consisted of cross-genre fiction, with not a single straight mystery among them.

Here's my personal list of "The best historical, fantasy, SF, and mystery books with characters you fall in love with":

• Kate Quinn, The Rose Code
• Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
• Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon
• Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
• Martha Wells, All Systems Red

You can read what I said about why I love them as well as why readers of these books might also be drawn to Voyage of Strangers, the first novel in my Mendoza Family Saga, here.

I read and write mystery because it's fiction in which something is guaranteed to happen. Most literary fiction comes across to me as a dish without salt. I've always read historical fiction, and I've been writing it ever since young Diego Mendoza popped up in my head demanding that I tell the story of how he sailed with Columbus when the Jews were expelled from Spain.

I read more and more urban fantasy and occasionally high fantasy these days because it's so imaginative and so much fun. I like speculative fiction in general, but my mind glazes over when the science kicks in. I can't read the tech in a technothriller either. And whatever I read, character, character, characters I love, well developed characters I care about are a must. That's what I'm best at writing myself, along with snappy dialogue that moves both plot and relationships forward. I haven't taken my own urban fantasy mystery series as far as a novel yet, but you can read my novelette about Jewish country artist and shapeshifter Emerald Love, aka Amy Greenstein, Shifting Is for the Goyim, and the collection of stories that follow, Emerald Love, Shifting Country Star, as e-books. I've found urban fantasy mystery is as much fun to write as it is to read.

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Opera Does It With Music

Genre fiction readers know all about plots that are tortuous and bloody. Whole genres, horror and Gothic, are devoted to terrifying the reader. On the more sedate end of the spectrum, probing the minds of serial killers and describing torture with loving precision easily become hot crime fiction trends. Readers don't mind suspending disbelief in order to admire the cannibal Hannibal Lecter who escapes prison hidden in the skin of a flayed victim in Silence of the Lambs (a book I wished I could unread) or love Dexter, the serial killer with a moral compass (first appearing in the 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter), a character any expert forensic psychologist can tell you doesn't exist and never will.

Today, good little mystery writers try hard not to plug too many coincidences into their plots. Some subgenres put limits about how over the top the atrocities will go. The revered authors of classic literature didn't worry about that. Take Sophocles, the greatest of the playwrights of ancient Greece. In Oedipus Rex, the protagonist's parents give their baby up for adoption to avoid a prophecy that he'll kill his father and marry his mother. He meets a stranger at the crossroads, quarrels with him, and kills him. Guess who? He meets a widow twice his age and marries her. Guess who? For over-the-top twistiness and gore, take Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus is the most extreme example. The Roman general Titus captures the Queen of the Goths and her three sons in war and executes one of her sons. In revenge, they rape his daughter. After a lot of reciprocal accusations of murder, killing of sons, and cutting off of hands and heads, Titus bakes the remains of the Queen's sons in a pie and serves it to her at a feast.

The plots of soap opera on modern TV are so labyrinthine and unlikely that the term itself is used to describe any sequence of events that is so excessively dramatic and complex that it beggars belief. It has become so natural to think of any melodramatic story, real or imagined, as "soap opera" that my adorable husband used the term when I read him the synopsis of Il Trovatore, the opera I was about to see at the Metropolitan Opera. I live only twenty blocks from Lincoln Center and was able to accept the last-minute invitation to the Met by a friend with front row orchestra seats whose husband couldn't make it. Giuseppe Verdi's music makes Il Trovatore one of the gems of grand opera. The story, on the other hand, epitomizes the reason soap opera was named for opera, not the other way around: a theatrical presentation with a story as ridiculous as any opera's, with the added benefit of advertising soap.

Il Trovatore, the Troubador, is the leader of the rebel forces in a 15th-century Spanish civil war. He and his principal opponent, the Count, are both in love with the same lady. The Count seeks a gypsy woman, called a witch because she looks like "a hag" (ie old and poorly dressed) and can shift shapes (the villagers saw an owl—they're a superstitious lot). Her mother "bewitched" the Count's infant brother, so they burned her at the stake. The daughter got even by throwing the baby into the fire. It turns out that the rebel leader is the son of the gypsy witch (the daughter). Of course, the lady loves him, not the Count. Four acts later, it turns out that the Troubador is actually the Count's baby brother. The gypsy woman threw the wrong baby into the fire. Oops. The lady offers herself to the Count as the price of freeing her lover. He nobly refuses, but it's too late. She's taken a slow-acting poison. The Count finds out the enemy he's imprisoned is his brother. But it's too late. He's already beheaded him. Curtain.

The music is glorious. But don't you love mysteries? We ask the reader to suspend disbelief so little compared to opera. A coincidence here, an act of heroism there. A logical conclusion.

What Makes An Anthology The Best?

The SleuthSayers anthology, Murder, Neat, edited by our own Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman, has had the distinction of being named one of the finalists for the inaugural Derringer Award for Best Anthology in an impressive field of 2024 short crime fiction anthologies.

I've edited two anthologies and contributed stories to almost a dozen including my own. I've also had a story included as an "Other Distinguished Story" in a volume of Best American Mystery Stories—an honor that means the notoriously critical series editor picked it as one of fifty out of a field of several thousand, but that year's guest editor failed to select it as one of the twenty to include in the anthology.

So I feel qualified at what seems a good moment to talk about some of the elements of excellence in an anthology.

Any anthology needs focus. This may be provided by a theme, restriction of the setting or authorship to a certain region, or limitation of submissions to a particular group or organization. All the contributors to Murder, Neat are current or former SleuthSayers. The theme, some aspect of alcohol, bars, and drinking, was chosen after much lively discussion among the blogfellas.

 The highly regarded Noir anthology series from Akashic Books was fresh when it began with Brooklyn Noir. It now runs to more than a hundred books. I've heard that the publisher is deeply committed to publishing stories on a variety of aspects of the chosen location as well as a genuine noir flavor. On the other hand, the concept of the "anthology noir" has been a runaway success far beyond the original publisher's series. I wrote a story for Jewish Noir II (2022). The stories ranged from Biblical to paranormal to historical to modern, the genres from noir to comic to speculative, the settings spanned the globe. Submissions were by invitation only, but not all of the contributors were Jewish.

Some editors choose to engage potential readers through a mix of beloved authors and fresh voices. Those are the anthologies in which half the stories are by invitation, the other half by open call. I've never made it into one of those. I tried to seed my own anthology, Me Too Short Stories, with a few well-known authors along with open submissions in hopes of attracting a better publishing contract. As it happened, a political issue was raging at the time, and the more courted authors were the first to abandon ship. I persisted and ended up with a book of wonderful stories that failed to get the attention it deserved.

Apart from market considerations, the best anthology is one in which every story is a winner. I got that in the end with Me Too Short Stories. All the stories adhered to the theme, but each of them did it in a different way. None of the writers was famous, but all were terrific at working cooperatively and appreciated a strong editor. Even when fifteen or twenty or two dozen stories are all about bars or all about Jewishness or all about crimes against women, they can be as different as each writer's voice and way of building a unique structure on the three-cornered foundation of plot, character, and writing or storytelling.

Once the editor or editors have selected the stories, they must put them in the best possible order. This is a creative act, akin to putting together a single-author collection of short stories or poetry, and I assure you it produces endorphins. A well arranged anthology starts with a pie in the face—a first story that grabs the your attention (especially in the library or bookstore or in the Amazon sample) and makes you want to read on. The second and third stories must also make you want to read on, and they must be entirely different from the first and from each other—dark and light, tragedy and humor, horror and cozy, snappy dialogue and brooding narrative. And one of the very best must be saved for last, so you close the book with a smile or a sigh of satisfaction.

Shakespeare, the bedroom, and Liz as prophet

Rootling in my virtual files for material old enough to recycle, I found the following post from my first group mystery blog, Poe's Deadly Daughters, which I wrote with fellow authors Sandra Parshall, Julia Buckley, Darlene Ryan not yet aka Sofie Kelly, and others. On rereading, it struck me as still a propos, even prophetic in its time.

June 24, 2010

English, the Language of New Words

My husband, who has limitless intellectual curiosity, informed me the other day that Shakespeare added 1,700 new words to the English language, including “bedroom.” Googling for confirmation, I found that figure came from a Dutch techie named Joel Laumans. Other online sources put the figure at 2,000 and even 3,000. Laumans explains that many of the new words were not pure original constructs, but the result of Shakespeare’s willingness to juggle parts of speech, turning nouns and adjectives into verbs and so on.

I nearly drowned in the deep end of Google, as one can so easily do while surfing the Net, checking out this claim. The Random House Dictionary puts the first use of “bedroom” around 1580-90, while the earliest performances of Shakespeare’s plays took place in roughly 1590. My husband suggested that the use of a room dedicated to sleeping was an innovation at that time. I had no trouble believing this when he said it. I know that privacy in the bedroom is a modern concept. Royalty in Queen Elizabeth I’s time had scads of people present when they got up and dressed, and the poor shared quarters out of necessity—as indeed they still do. We take the function of our rooms for granted. But when I lived in West Africa in the 1960s, even sophisticated urban locals kept the refrigerator in the living room, where everyone could see they had one (and handy for serving cold drinks to visitors as well), though that had changed by the time I visited again in the 1980s. It was a grand theory, but my husband was wrong. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which puts “bedroom” in the 1610s, points out that it replaced the earlier “bedchamber."

Laumans’s other examples range from “addiction” to “zany.” Random House puts “addiction” at 1595-1605, right in Shakespeare’s period, though the Online Etymology Dictionary points out that the original usage referred to a “penchant” rather than “enslavement,” from the Latin addictionem, a “devotion.” “Zany” comes from the Italian dialect zanni, a second-banana buffoon in the commedia dell’arte. I didn’t find any date or attribution of its use in English to Shakespeare in the online dictionaries.

English in particular, perhaps partly thanks to Shakespeare, lends itself to the creation of new words. We have beat out the French, who codified their language in the 17th and 18th centuries and have been fighting to keep it stable ever since, as the global lingua franca for just that reason. We say “restaurant,” “boutique,” and “savoir faire.” But they say le weekend, le brunch, and le Walkman. Also le blog, googler ("to google"), and surfer sur ("to surf on") Internet. [In 2025, as I have written on other occasions, the French have given up. English is the new lingua franca, and they say okay, cool, and shit with the rest of us.]

As an old English major, I can still rejoice in Shakespeare’s linguistic exuberance. My husband googled the playwright’s language in the first place because we had just watched the movie Shakespeare in Love for the umpteenth time, enjoying the in-jokes and how brilliantly writers Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman caught the Shakespearean voice. The other reason the topic is so fascinating is that we are currently living in a period when the invention of fresh language rivals that of Elizabethan times. In my high school math class, a “googol” was merely a big number: one with a helluva lot of zeroes after it. A “weblog,” didn’t exist, so it couldn’t be abbreviated to “blog.”

“Surf” was certainly a word. Yes, we had oceans in the 1950s, and they featured what Random House calls “the swell of the sea that breaks upon a shore” or “the mass or line of foamy water caused by the breaking of the sea upon a shore.” The noun had even been turned into a verb, “to float on the crest of a wave toward shore.” But now we channel surf and surf the Web. It’s an apt metaphor, because [here comes the prophecy] these days we seem to be rushing toward an unknown shore, much like that in the final image of Shakespeare in Love. It’s exciting and scary, because it seems equally likely, at least to me, that this shore could turn out to be planet-wide destruction on which our species breaks or further proliferation of technology that leads us toward a destiny in the stars.

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.

What Matters Today

I've written a number of New Year's blogs about how long it's been since I made yearly resolutions—how futile they are, how quickly broken—and how helpful it is to concentrate on living one day at a time without obsessive regret or anticipatory dread. So what's important on this day, today, that's all I've got for now?

Let's start with what it's not. It's not whether I lose weight or who won the election (not today or in any way I can influence). It's not whether someone I love says, "shoulda went" or a writer friend think it's okay to split the infinitive. It's not how many steps I walk or how many stories I write. It's not whether a small press accepts my new poetry manuscript or I have to publish it myself. It's not even whether my work sells any copies. The IRS claims writing is just a hobby anyway (unless you're James Patterson, Michael Connelly, or Lee Child), and I'm beginning to suspect they may be right.

What does matter is art, and that includes well executed fiction and poetry that connects the artist to the reader and/or listener. Art. Nature. Love. Affection. Kindness. Friendship. Belonging. Language. Emotion. Spirit. Beauty. Connection.

If I can touch another person today, I've done something of value. It may be as simple as hugging a friend met unexpectedly on the street. Mailing my annual holiday letter to the widow of the friend in Australia with whom I exchanged such letters for fifty years. Seeing by my sales for Kindle that a new reader is bingeing on my series and laughing and crying over my characters. Reading my work to an audience and knowing they are moved by the quality of the silence. And speaking of silence, shutting up and listening when that's what another person needs. I've been a therapist for forty years now, and I still have work to do on that particular skill.

It's hard to stay in the present when the future beckons. Whether that future is enticing or terrifying, it's the realm of anxiety. And thinking about it today won't make a bit of difference. A simple acronym, WAIT, may pull me back: Why Am I Thinking? Instead, I can connect with something that matters right now: someone I love, some facet of art or nature that moves me, some part of myself that connects with something deeper or higher, however I may conceptualize it. My role model for existing utterly in the moment: a breaching whale.

Reading and the Holidays

This is an updated version of a post I first wrote in 2008.

Holiday shopping season is upon us, and not only do books make wonderful presents (to give and to receive), but books also played a part in shaping my perceptions and expectations of the holidays. I suspect that this is true for many people.

One of the great opening lines in literature is Jo's lament in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” Yes, all the way back in 1870, there was no surer way to disappoint a child than not to provide Christmas presents. Thanks to Alcott’s high moral Transcendentalist principles, what the March girls actually do is quit complaining, decide to put their annual one-dollar spending money into presents for their mother instead of treats for themselves, and end up giving away their festive holiday breakfast to an impoverished immigrant family with too many children. Generations of American girls have internalized the lessons in that story.

I can’t remember the name of the children’s book in which the family had a tradition of reading Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aloud on Christmas Eve, but the idea of such a tradition has stuck with me all these years. I also remember that the youngest boy was in the choir, and there was great tension about whether he would be able to hit the high note in his solo, “Glory to God in the highest,” presumably from Handel’s Messiah. (He did.) I shouldn’t have been paying attention to Christmas at all as a kid, but my Jewish parents were so afraid we’d feel deprived if we couldn’t participate in the general fuss that we decorated what we facetiously called a “Chanukah bush” and got stockings stuffed with presents on Christmas morning. Today, there’s an abundance of books about Jewish families celebrating Chanukah, including entries featuring Curious George, the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Grover, Clifford, and Oy, Santa! But I don’t remember any back then.

In my ecumenical present-day family, we celebrate both holidays. Rather than reading aloud, for many years we watched movies made from the great books already mentioned: Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and the Gillian Armstrong version of Little Women, which my husband and I both liked in spite of the the terrible miscasting of Winona Ryder as Jo. At my forty-fifth college reunion, I learned that a friend and her family read Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales aloud every year. So I know that the tradition of holiday reading survived into the new millennium.

Even today, no gift list in our family is complete unless it includes at least one book. In 2008, I said I wasn't happy unless there was at least one fat hardcover by a favorite mystery author that I wouldn’t have bought for myself under the tree, so I can curl up on the couch with it at some time during the long, lazy day. Now, I'll happily take an Amazon gift certificate so I can gobble up a whole series and binge on it on my Kindle. In 2008, books were the present of choice for my stepdaughter and her husband, who live in London, because we could order just what they wanted from their amazon.co.uk wish lists and have them shipped free. These days, we send money, and some of it still goes for books.

One of the great shopping pleasures these days is buying books for my granddaughters. Talk about books I’d never order for myself! In the 21st century, there are children’s books about everything. On a visit in 2008, the almost-two-year-old had me read her one entitled It’s Potty Time, with separate illustrated editions for boys and girls, and it’s only one of dozens on the subject. Last year, she got books about sports marketing and business—her dream career is managing an NFL superstar—and her older sister, who's at Cornell, got books about hikes and excursions around Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region.

What books are on your holiday gift list? What books, if any, shaped your image of how holidays should be?

Tartan Noir

I’m writing about novels again, this time about a group of splendid Scottish novelists (yes, yes, they all write short stories too) whose work is collectively known as Tartan Noir. Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina are the three best known to Americans. I could focus on the women, who include Lin Anderson, Alanna Knight, and Alex Gray, self-titled Femmes Fatales. Anderson and Gray are co-founders of Bloody Scotland, Scotland's leading international crime writing festival. But today I’d like to share my enthusiasm for two terrific male authors: Christopher aka Chris Brookmyre, who’s long been one of my favorites, and Doug Johnstone, whose work I discovered by chance (in fact, while reading the Acknowledgments in Val McDermid’s latest Karen Pirie book) last year.

Both Brookmyre and Johnstone are Scottish to the core. Brookmyre is a satirist and master of humor who’s often been compared to Carl Hiaasen. His earlier novels rant a bit about Scottish politics, which may baffle or bore the American reader, but as his work comes into its full power, he brings ample compassion as well as keen observation to his characters, giving them wit and emotional intelligence, and brilliant plotting to his stories. Johnstone brings to his fiction an eclectic background as a nuclear physicist and rock drummer that adds breadth and depth to the crime and mayhem. Besides dealing with their lives, their relationships, and the extraordinary situations they’re thrust into, his characters reflect on the meaning of the universe and the fragility of human life and planet Earth.

My highest recommendations for Christopher Brookmyre go to the three final novels in the Jack Parlabane series, not counting “Easter eggs” that appear in some of his later books. The Parlabane books really function as standalones, because Jack’s life changes so much from book to book.

Dead Girl Walking Jack’s career as a journalist has just been destroyed by a scandal when he’s asked to find a young rock superstar who’s gone missing. An immersive plunge into the world of sex, drugs, and rock & roll and a nuanced blend of character and mounting suspense.

Black Widow One of the twistiest psychological suspense novels you’ll ever read. Jack investigates the death of the husband of surgeon Diana, who’s been doxed on the Internet in revenge for her blog about sexism in medicine. I defy the most skeptical, after reading Diana’s voice, to say a man can’t write a feminist woman authentically. But is Diana the victim, or is something else going on?

The Last Hack (Want You Gone in UK) Jack teams up with a young hacker whose mother is in prison, leaving her the sole support of a sister with Down's. Hacking, social engineering, twists and turns wrapped up in surprising bonds between unusual people and the empathy that cushions Brookmyre's razor-sharp satire and diamond-hard brilliance.

Doug Johnstone's The Skelfs is so far a six-book series set in Edinburgh about a three-generation family of women who combine two occupations: funerals and private investigation. The first is A Dark Matter. Dorothy, the matriarch, plays drums and nurtures talent in the young. Her daughter Jenny struggles to find herself when a marriage that seemed perfect turns into a relentless fantasmagoria.  

Granddaughter Hannah, a graduate student of astrophysics, ponders the nature of the universe as well as her place in the family. Johnstone is another male writer who can speak in authentic women's voices. He also invites the reader to explore an authentic insider's Edinburgh, dark corners, glorious views, numerous cemeteries, warts and all.

In the course of the series, social, philosophical, and environmental issues get a good airing and a brisk shake along with the family drama and the ins and outs of undertaking. In the latest volume, Living Is A Problem, the Skelfs are getting into eco-friendly burials, and the investigations involve drones, Ukrainians, panpsychism, and a lot more.