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.

The Joys of Reading Aloud

In October I always commemorate Columbus Day/ Indigenous People’s Day with a post that refers in some way to the events of the 1490s that I wove into my Jewish historical adventure/ mystery series the Mendoza Family Saga, which has now been running for almost fifteen years with more stories to come. The key historical events, about which I wrote in the first short story, “The Green Cross,” and the first novel, Voyage of Strangers (2014), were the persecution and expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the Spanish voyages of discovery and conquest to the Caribbean, and the genocide of the Taino people.

This year I had the great pleasure of reading aloud in their entirety both Voyage of Strangers and its sequel, Journey of Strangers (2015). My first-person protagonist is young Jewish sailor Diego Mendoza, who sails with Columbus on the Santa Maria in 1492 in “The Green Cross,” which first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2010. In Voyage, Diego and his sister Rachel travel through Spain at risk of capture by the Inquisition to join Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. They befriend the local Taino, come to admire their culture with its guiding principle of generosity, and watch in helpless horror as the Christian Spaniards destroy both culture and people. Journey of Strangers follows Diego and Rachel and their friend Hutia, a lone Taino survivor, across war-torn Europe to Istanbul, where the Mendozas have settled in the Jewish community that the Ottoman Sultan has welcomed. Journey also tells the story of Joanna, one of two thousand Jewish children kidnapped by the King of Portugal in 1493 and shipped off to slavery on the pestilential Isle of Crocodiles, São Tomé.

My audience of one was a transplanted Jewish New Yorker who lives in Austin, where she’s active in the local Jewish community through her synagogue. She also does volunteer work for the Minaret Foundation, a Muslim organization that is “making Texas better through multifaith and civic engagement.” She was already a friend when she started losing her vision to rapidly progressing macular degeneration, and I had the bright idea of offering to read to her via Zoom. Our weekly reading sessions have become a high point of the week for both of us.

The theme of cultural relativism pitted against absolutism and intolerance is certainly relevant today. The parallel between fifteenth and twenty-first century anti-Semitism in Europe (and America in the twenty-first) and the contrast between the fifteenth century relationship between Jews and Muslims and that relationship in our own time provide food for thought. When my listener laughed and cried as the story unfolded, I'd say, “That’s exactly what I hoped you’d do. You’re the perfect reader!” She'd say, “Laugh and cry and learn.” Her appreciation made me glad I spent all that time crawling through the stacks of the Columbia University Library to retrieve an unpublished doctoral thesis to get details on the Enderun School that shaped the Ottoman viziers and janissaries and followed the trail from a professor at Brandeis University (my alma mater) to a professor in Tel Aviv to a footnote to find out about the Jewish women called kiras who served as purveyors and personal shoppers to the Sultan’s harem.

In fact, as I reread my own writing aloud, word by word, more than ten years after I wrote it, I could hardly believe I did all that research—into history, into several different cultures and religions, into a dozen languages. I’m still in love with my characters. That’s no surprise, since character is my strong point as a writer. I too cry at certain passages, including but not limited to the parts that made me cry as I wrote them. Not unexpected either. It’s the storytelling, the suspense I somehow manage to sustain for chapter after chapter, that amazes me. That’s the part I was never good at. But as I read my work aloud to someone who is always astonished and excited at each twist and turn of the plot, always wants more when we end a chapter or it’s time to end the session, I realized that with these two novels, by gum, I did it. Not a single chapter sags. If it did, reading it aloud, I would notice and admit it. I wanted more at the end of every chapter too. This experience blew my mind.

Neither of us wanted this exhilarating shared experience to end. So once we finished Journey of Strangers, along with the Afterword explaining what parts of it are historical and the multilingual Glossary, we went on to the rest of the Mendoza Family Saga: short stories, most of them mysteries involving Rachel, still working as a kira to the harem when Suleiman the Magnificent becomes Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1520, that first appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine. The previously published stories can be found in the e-book Rachel in the Harem, along with a novelette about Rachel’s daughter among the Knights of Rhodes that first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, a two-timeline story from Jewish Noir II, a time travel story, and the very first Mendoza story, which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 2010. But only my two favorite Texans—my audience in Austin and a certain editor of impeccable taste—know what happens in two stories yet to appear.

Words, Words, Words

"Words, words, words." Millennials may not recognize the quotation from Hamlet. ("So many one-liners!" my husband, self-educated until later in life, exclaimed in pleased recognition the first time I took him to see the Olivier movie.) But words are alive and well in the twenty-first century, although they've had to perform some bizarre contortions in order to survive. A couple of topics on the subject have been kicking around in my mind for a long time. I'm putting them together to offer to you today.

First, the unnecessary new locution to replace a perfectly serviceable one.
tasked with for being assigned, ordered, told to do something, or having a job
going forward for from now on
gifted with for given, esp a gift or present
curated for picked, chosen, or selected
role for job or position

Example: In her role of assistant office manager, Eloise was tasked with gifting everyone with a personally curated token of their birthdays and promotions going forward.

Anachronistic example (alas, they exist in today's historical fiction): "Soldiers of the legion!" the centurion said. "Going forward, you will be tasked with representing Rome at all times. I am gifting each of you with a pilum and gladius to kill the enemy, a shield to defend yourself, and a shovel curated by the camp prefect to dig a latrine every time we make camp."

Now let's move on to my second topic, this one not a peeve but an object of fascination: the expansion of the English language around the globe, definitively replacing French at the twenty-first century lingua franca, as it were. How do I know this is so? By watching TV via streaming services in a multitude of languages—with subtitles, on my laptop, in my own home. It's become one of my great pleasures, along with reading, for an evening's relaxation.

I started with French crime shows, such as Candice Renoir, Astrid, and Lupin, since I'm fluent in French and need only a glance at the subtitles now and then to keep up, though I'm glad they're there. I noticed immediately that Candice and her colleagues in Sète in southwestern France, who are very slangy, and Lupin, who's in Paris but very "street," since he's a gentleman crook, use such terms as le blackmail and le kidnapping, even though there are perfectly good French words for both: le chantage for blackmail and l'enlèvement for kidnapping. Astrid, who's neurodivergent and very formal—she won't even tutoyer her best friend, police detective Raphaelle—doesn't take these handy shortcuts. Raphaelle and her Parisian police colleagues speak a classier, more careful French too, though they've been known to say a potential suspect is clean after doing a background check.

Since then, I've watched multiple shows, mostly police procedurals or political thrillers, in Danish, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Dutch, Luxembourgeois (in which the characters occasionally spoke four languages within a single sentence), and others, and in every one, the dialogue was heavily larded with English, even when the characters were not, as they sometimes were, communicating in English in order to speak with native speakers of a language other than their own. As you must know, the English word, an Americanism, that's become most universal is a simple okay. The same for cool. But some others are also popular, and some, as used in certain countries, are just plain fun.

sorry seems to be used universally in German and Finnish
thank you used interchangeably with other languages; everyone understands it
Christmas Korean for Christmas
shopping Korean for shopping
marketing Korean for marketing, as far as I can tell
spindoctor Danish for speechwriter, publicist, or political official's communications director


On Dicte, about a Danish police reporter, I caught safe house and network but was too absorbed in the show to write down others that I heard.

And on Luna and Sophie, my favorite German show, about two delightful police detectives in Potsdam, I managed to get a whole list:
control freak
spooky
blackout
end of story
nice try
shit happens
one stop shop
And there was one proverb I loved. Luna used it to turn down a new colleague who asked her out for a drink after work.
"Schnapps ist schnapps und job ist job."

In fact, so deeply has English sunk in its hooks that the German dictionary lists "job" as a synonym for arbeit (work), saying it's used umgachschpratlich (colloquially). With words like that, the most dedicated English language chauvinist surely doesn't want German and other languages to die away altogether.

Human Ecology and Meaning-Making

Last fall, I visited my granddaughter at Cornell University, where she’s an undergrad in the College of Engineering, currently a junior majoring in something called Operations Research and Information Engineering. It says something about the state of language in the twenty-first century that this writer and old English major tells her friends, "It's really data analysis," hoping this will make it more comprehensible to those of us who remember when language was meant for us to speak clearly to each other.

Numbers shine brightly in my granddaughter's mind. Her numeracy fills me with awe. But she's articulate as well and has many other gifts and skills. She plays guitar, indeed, had asked her dad to bring her guitar with him when we came to see her that weekend. She started doing competitive hiphop at age three and is on a dance team at Cornell. She even choreographed a piece for a dozen dancers last spring. And she thinks. We had wonderful conversations during the visit. I also had time to see how the university—-not only Cornell, because this is a sign of the zeitgeist—-is using language these days.

One sign that made me tear my hair even as I laughed was blazoned on the building that presumably houses what at Harvard is called the Divinity School and at Fordham, the Theology Department. It said OFFICE OF SPIRITUALITY AND MEANING-MAKING. I assume the intention was to label belief in the ineffable and exploration of the unseen, including everything and offending no one. The term spirituality is a fine one. As a crackerjack editor, I say it does the job. I'd delete meaning-making. Were they afraid atheists would picket them? They should have worried more about sticklers for felicitous prose.

My granddaughter has an eclectic group of friends. She'd told me one of her roommates had a double major in pre-med and English, so I led with that when I met her.

"Oh, I'm not majoring in English any more," she said. "Now I'm doing pre-med and fashion."

"I can't fault you for dropping English," I said. "But fashion is a major?"

"It's in the College of Human Ecology," she said.

"What on earth," I said, "is human ecology?"

"Oh, it's where they put everything that doesn't fit anywhere else."

I'd call inventing a term with that definition meaning-unmaking, though I admit human ecology has a fine ring to it, seducing us into believing that it means something. I don't know if academics or marketing professionals wrote the university catalog, but they produced some grand word salad by way of artistic verisimilitude. (I know, I know, human ecology really is a thing. I googled it after I wrote this post. Nonetheless...)

Sez the college website:

High-quality education, research and public engagement are the cornerstones of the College of Human Ecology and its academic departments, which include: Psychology, Nutritional Sciences, and Human Centered Design.

We prioritize innovative collaboration and are fueled by a powerful, interdisciplinary and applied approach to improving lives.

Our undergraduate academic majors are firmly grounded in the social, natural and physical sciences, and design to create dynamic, interdisciplinary fields of study. This allows our students to explore their interests in a broader context and to understand and analyze issues from multiple perspectives. . . there is no prescribed way to prepare for careers in business, health/medicine, or law, or just one way to be creative in the college. . .

Majors include design and environmental analysis, fashion design and management, fiber science, global and public health, human biology, health, and society, human development, and nutritional sciences.

Whatever.

I suspect it's of a piece with the headlong rush toward AI's takeover of language. In the twenty-first century, the idea is not to make meaning, certainly not clearer meaning or new meaning, but to take the meaning language already offers us and complicate, distort, obfuscate, and ultimately lose it.

In It For The Long Haul

As every writer of short crime fiction knows, the fabled Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, matched only by its sister publication Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as a market, is notorious for the interminable amount of time between submission and response. The reason is simple: editor Linda Landrigan reads every one of the immense number of short stories submitted herself, and, as I've heard from her own lips, admits to being "a slow reader." No matter how many times I and other experienced writers share this explanation with the short story community, it's so unfathomable to some that they keep trying to figure out a system, like gamblers who don't believe in the laws of probability.

Does she read writers she knows first?
Will I get penalized if I send too many stories?
It's been a year, and I haven't heard. Does that mean it's more likely to be an acceptance than a rejection?

None of the above. My most recent wait for an acceptance was from submission on February 18, 2021 to March 25, 2022 (400 days). The story was published in September/ October 2023. My most recent wait for a rejection was from August 13, 2022 to November 14, 2023 (458 days). The latter more lengthy wait time matched the experience of other writers for both acceptances and rejections of 2022 submissions.

Publication in AHMM (and EQMM) can be the crowning glory of a short mystery fiction author's career and/or a stepping stone to awards and other kinds of recognition. It certainly bestows great credibility and respect with on the writer with peers and readers. If the only reason you write mystery short stories is that you're too impatient to write mystery novels, something's wrong. Writing is not a quick fix. Not even for a poet. Not for a writer of flash. Not even drabbles. Or haiku. If you're a writer, one way or another, you're in it for the long haul.

My relationship with AHMM is not the story of my longest waits. If you want to count my writer's journey as a whole, I first said I wanted to be a writer at age seven and didn't publish my first novel till my sixty-fourth birthday. Death Will Get You Sober took three years to sell. I joined Mystery Writers of America hoping to make connections, queried 250 agents, and had an agent for a year who wanted to change the title and failed to sell the book. A friend, trying to be helpful, gave the manuscript to his editor at St Martin's—-a non-fiction editor. It sat on the guy's desk for two and a half years. The third time I attended MWA's annual Agents and Editors party (a useful, beloved, and now vanished Edgars Week institution), I had finally overcome enough shyness to approach a St. Martin's editor and say, "May I tell you my sad story?"

A week later, Death Will Get You Sober reached the hands of a mystery editor who loved the book but wanted me to rewrite it, turning my second first person protagonist into a sidekick. Three weeks later I emailed him to say, "You were right. I did it. You'll love it."

He wrote back, "I'm so sorry. I'm leaving publishing to go to law school." Before he left, he gave the ms to legendary mystery editor Ruth Cavin, then pushing ninety, and two years later, it was published.

As an example of a wait I didn't wait for but the publisher seemed to believe I would, here's a story about my second poetry book, Gifts and Secrets, published by New Rivers, a respected small press, in 1999. We still sent paper manuscripts with an SASE (stamped self-addressed envelope) in those days. Three years after the book was published, I got a scribbled postcard from another press I'd sent it to, rejecting it and suggesting that I change the title. The editor proposed various random lines from my poems, missing the point that the theme of "gifts and secrets" held them all together. He'd probably steamed the stamp off my SASE and used it to pay his phone bill.

I turned eighty this year, so I have a right to say I'm in it for the long haul, whether "it" is writing or life in general. I had a conversation with book blogger Aubrey Hamilton not too long ago about poet Rupert Brooke, whose reputation is becoming tarnished as his letters, long suppressed, get published. We talked about how Brooke, who died at 28, and the other World War I poets and the Romantic poets, like Keats, dead at 24, never got to write the poems they might have if they'd attained maturity. I'd say the same of Sylvia Plath, who killed herself at 31, and even Anne Sexton, who did the same at 46.

Women poets like these influenced my own work as the earlier male poets did not. But I write very different poems now from the poems I wrote at forty or fifty. I’ve just completed and begun submitting my first poetry book in twenty-five years. The title: The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle. For fiction writers too, life experience adds depth and breadth to what we have to say and gives us the patience and self-control to take our time.

SleuthSisters, Movies, and the Bechdel Test: Part II

The last time our beloved SleuthSayer buddy John Floyd, who everyone agrees watches way too many movies, listed his favorites, fellow SleuthSayer Melodie Campbell and I both commented, "You are such a guy, John!" What did we mean? What does John's love for Casablanca, The Godfather, and The Big Lebowski have to do with gender? Aren't they all great films? Yes, but. Melodie gave me the best way yet to explain why many women may admire these films but not necessarily adore them when she told me about the Bechdel Test.

The Bechdel Test, created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who now says she was only kidding at the time but thinks it's cool that it's worked so well and come to mean so much to women who love movies, is a simple three-part measure to apply to any movie.

Does the movie have at least one scene in which (1) two women characters talk (2) to each other (3) about a subject other than a man (or men)?

I grew up in a household in which the women—me, my mother, and my sister—outnumbered the lone man, my dad. Add in a gaggle of loquacious aunts, maternal and paternal, on holidays—I've recently learned that the linguistic technical term for the constant interrupting in any New York Jewish gathering is called "overlapping" and is a feature of our "dialect"—and the men could barely get a word in edgewise. At age 92, my mother, who by then called herself "the oldest living lawyer," made friends with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was twenty years younger. The first time they had lunch together, we asked Mom, "What did you talk about?" "Everything!" she said. And that's what I want women in movies to talk about too.

In Part I, my SleuthSister Melodie discussed why it's important for all of us to have movies that pass the Bechdel test: for some, characters that we can relate to and admire; for others, frequent reminders that women have more interesting things to talk about than men, men, men.

If you missed Melodie's post, you can read it here.

Now, here are some examples: 26 (a double baker's dozen!) wonderful movies that pass the Bechdel Test (in no particular order):

1. Enchanted April

Four women seeking respite from their lives in dreary post-World War I London are unexpectedly transformed by a month in a castle in Italy.

2. Hidden Figures

Black women's work as mathematicians at NASA was crucial to America's success in the Space Race; their story is finally told.

3. The Help
The women who work as maids to the young white wives of Jackson, Mississippi just before the Civil Rights movement risk their jobs and their safety to tell a woman journalist the truth about how they're treated.

4. Nyad
A woman in her sixties comes back from repeated failures to swim from Cuba to Florida, with the support of the woman friend who coaches her.

5. Fried Green Tomatoes
Two pairs of women form enduring friendships: a modern housewife in need of empowerment with an old woman in a nursing home and an independent woman in the 1920s with an abused wife in need of an escape route.

6. Little Women

Four sisters share dreams and ambitions in Civil War-era New England. Seven movies have been made of the novel that more American women still read for pleasure than men read Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn.

7. Erin Brockovich
A single mother fights environmental crime and corporate greed in a small community.

8. Norma Rae
A millworker finds her voice when she leads a fight to unionize.

9. Made in Dagenham
Women strike for equal pay at a Ford plant in Britain.

10. Songcatcher
A woman in the 1930s goes to Appalachia to collect folksongs and learns more than she expects to.

11. Beaches Two very different women's lifelong friendship begins and is renewed on beaches.

12. Marvin's Room
A dying woman seeks a bone marrow transplant from members of her dysfunctional family.

13. Howard's End

Two Edwardian sisters devoted to each other, culture, and their independence diverge on issues of class and how to use their privilege for good.

14. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
A group of aging British women and men relocate to India in hopes of a more satisfying life in their later years.

15. Still Alice
A brilliant woman facing early onset dementia struggles to connect with her daughters while she can.

16. Monsoon Wedding

The prospect of a wedding stirs up secrets in a prosperous Indian family.

17. National Velvet
A little girl with an eccentric but loving family dreams of winning the Grand National on a horse she won in a raffle.

18. Nine to Five
Three women friends plot revenge against their abusive boss

19. Girl, Interrupted
Two girls in a locked psychiatric institution become friends.

20. After the Wedding
The birth mother and adoptive mother of the bride meet, and their complicated history is revealed.

21. Calendar Girls
A group of respectable British women raise money by posing nude for a calendar.

22. Bend It Like Beckham
Two girls from different backgrounds become friends after being rivals at football (soccer to Americans).

23. Boys On the Side
Three young women join forces on a road trip that becomes a trip on the run.

24. Julia
The writer Lillian Hellman tries to help her friend Julia, who works against and is ultimately killed by the Nazis.

25. Outrageous Fortune
Two actresses who hate each other become friends in a mashup of buddy, spy, and caper movie.

26. Steel Magnolias
The women in a small Louisiana town shares their joys and sorrows at the local beauty salon.

How many of these have you seen?