The eternal sunshine of the perfect printed circuit

            Steve Jobs famously designed the inside of Apple computers to exacting aesthetic standards, even if repair technicians and recyclers were the only people who could relish the results. 

Most agree Jobs was a genius, and many also think he was nuts.  These afflictions often accompany each other, though I appreciate his impulse.   There’s a principle in sailing called good seamanship.  Examples might include coiling your dock lines in a neat circular fashion rather than simply draping them over a cleat.  Checking your position as you pass

through a channel you’ve traversed a thousand times.  Identifying yourself by the name of your craft, even when radioing a mate across the bay to come have a beer. None of these things are entirely necessary in the moment, but the ancient principle is to make proper practice a habit for those times when the mundane turns unexpectedly lethal.  Reflexively taking care of the little things extrapolates up into the significant; it becomes second nature, more a mood state than a procedure.

It seems there are a number of people for whom this is all too much bother.  It’s not the quality of the performance, they feel, only the end result.  I remember working around computer programmers who’d describe a string of code as elegant.  You could write an application that worked fine every time, but would be a tangled mess to the knowledgeable observer.  Or you could arrive there in a way that enlightened coders would find aesthetically pleasing.  My heart lies with the latter, if for no other reason than their applications would be more robust and adaptable to subsequent development.  And ultimately, far less expensive when fit into a massive project.

As an editor, I suspected any writer who disliked copyediting, or resisted fact checks.  It betrayed a recklessness of mind that put in doubt their broader artistic decisions.  Would that plot complication been solved with greater effort, would that character been better rendered with more respect for polish and precision?

        There are plenty of bestselling novelists whose work I’d describe as sloppy.  Often not with their first book, but as a series evolves, you get the feeling they aren’t really trying as hard.  The logic of these writers, and their editors and publishers, must be that if the books are selling, less care is required.  That might be true if your only criteria involves Book Scan.  There’s a market for poor quality, if a casual survey of your local Walmart is any guide, but for people like me, a well-crafted piece of fiction and a sturdy toaster elicits the same loyalty and regard.

A popular complaint is that quality just ain’t what it used to be.  Planned obsolescence is definitely a pervasive trend, though the big things, like cars and houses, are far better made now than they were when I was growing up.  Other important categories, such as power tools and crime novels, tend to ebb and flow.  The principal influence seems to be cultural disposition.  Poor quality appears to seep in when people are too pre-occupied to notice the decline, and then rally when a brand or genre starts securing appellationas like “cheap crap.”              

Mid-century pulp fiction has taken on a certain reverence by those who consider the form more authentic, unfairly denigrated in its time.  I doubt these admirers have read much of the real thing, since the product’s utility as actual pulp probably exceeded its literary merit.  I read a lot of it as a young person in search of elusive salacious content, without being particularly enriched or injured in the process.  Today, the odds are much better that any random mystery picked off the shelves will deliver a passing entertainment without the pleasure of atrocious plot structure and ersazt protagonists.

My favorite crime novels (also my favorite novels over all) were written a while ago, though I blame that more on my reading habits – and the moments in my life when these books caught my attention – than any deterioration of the form.  Getting a novel published these days is hardly a cakewalk, and those still achieving the task are closer to Steve Jobs than Mickey Spillaine.

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Vernacular

Anthony Burgess once remarked that the Elizabethan Age was word-drunk – Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Thomas Nashe (“an upstart crow”) – and as it spilled into the next century, the Book of Common Prayer published in 1604, the King James Bible in 1611, and the First Folio in 1623, we recognize the shaping of the English language into a modern tongue, a vernacular for the commons, in its meaning of the community at large.

What we see, in literature, politics, and religion, is a leveling effect. Not that the language becomes gross, or inexact; the reverse. It becomes more specific, and at the same time, includes more variety. The vocabulary expands beyond the cloisters, or the manners of court. In part, this is a function of class breakdown, the permeability of social and economic barriers: the collapse of feudalism. Also, the essential message of the Reformation is that you can have a personal relationship with God, independent of the interpretation of Scripture by the Church. There’s an obvious political message here, too. Your loyalty to any earthly power isn’t ordained, it isn’t written in stone, it derives from your consent.

I’d suggest that language – or more specifically, let’s say ‘usage’ – is an instrument of democratization. The term vernacular can be defined as indigenous, or local, such as a dialect; natural, or vulgar, or ordinary. In other words, a common manner of speech, in both senses: something everybody shares, or something you turn up your nose at.

Or perhaps there’s no real contradiction. My grandmother actually wrote a letter to R.J. Reynolds, back in the Bronze Age, complaining about their slogan, “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.” Amazingly, somebody in PR actually wrote her back, saying basically that their target audience wasn’t grammar-adjacent, so suck it up.

This is the Bad Money Drives Out Good argument, and I’m not sure I’m on board with it. Chandler, in The Simple Art of Murder, remarks that Hammett took murder out of the drawing room and dropped it in the street.  

He goes on to say a number of other things, some of which I disagree with, but his point is that the supposed gentlefolk of the English country house were given the bum’s rush, and the effete Philo Vances were shouldered out of the queue by the more muscular and less fastidious Sam Spade, or the Continental Op. It’s an exaggeration, and the hard-boiled and the cozy still keep company, but Chandler’s put his finger on it.

It’s no secret, either, that Chandler wasn’t a big fan of Mickey Spillane, and he clearly feels Spillane is pandering to the market, the brutality, the contempt for women, the furious, feverish psychological dream landscape, but at the same time, Chandler recognizes the inevitability.

This is an old conversation. The more accessible literature becomes, or citizenship, or Holy Communion, is the mystery cheapened, or diluted? For the previous initiates, yes. The literate, the propertied, the baptized – the chosen ones. Who wants to give up the secrets of a fellowship that sets you apart? By definition, it excludes the other, the unwashed, the unread, the unholy. We make it too easy for them. They should have to jump insuperable hurdles, rehearse impenetrable, Talmudic catechisms. Once you open books to these people, libraries of knowledge, you no longer hold the keys. You lose the power of voice.

Mickey Spillane, in any case, is fish in a barrel. I happen to like Spillane (“How could you?” “It was easy”), but you can understand how Chandler would think he debased the culture.  Chandler’s a snob. For our purposes, let’s pick somebody else. Chester Himes. Himes is definitely genre, and Coffin Ed and the Grave Digger don’t fit all that comfortably into Chandler’s “down these mean streets a man must walk who’s not himself mean,” but Himes is giving us Harlem from the native perspective – although Himes seems like an outsider looking in, dispossessed, and always an exile, the books are still unapologetically black.

We see something similar in science fiction and fantasy over the last, say, thirty to forty years. There was very much a time when it was boy’s club, and pretty much white boys, too.

Alice Sheldon published as James Tiptree, under the probably accurate assumption that SF readers wouldn’t buy stories by a girl. The community is notoriously cranky and hidebound, for all that they’re supposed to be looking to the future.

Ursula Le Guin made waves with The Left Hand of Darkness (ambiguous genders), and then along comes Chip Delany, not only colored, but queer. Sakes alive, the pearls that got clutched.

The lesson would appear to be, that opening the door to opportunity doesn’t water the whiskey. Our literature, our world, is reinvigorated, even reinvented. This is the purpose of a living language. It undermines orthodoxy, and in an Age of Lies, we could use a few choice words.

ENDINGS: You Must Satisfy the Reader!

“Your first page sells the book.  Your last page sells the next book.” — Mickey Spillane

In all my classes and workshops, we talk about satisfying the reader.  As authors we make a ‘promise to the reader’.  We establish this promise in the first few pages and chapters.  Who will this story be about?  What genre?  Is it romance, mystery, thriller, western or one of the others?  Readers are attached to different genres, whether we authors like it or not.  We have to be aware that when we promise something, we need to fulfill it.

As an example: a thing that drives me crazy is when books are promoted as mysteries, and they are really thrillers.  I like murder mysteries; my favourite book is an intelligent whodunit, with diabolically clever plotting.  In a thriller, the plot usually centres on a character in jeopardy.  Not the same. 

As authors, we want to satisfy the reader, and that is exactly what Mickey Spillane was getting at in the quote above.  To do this, we need to know what the reader expects.  Here’s the handout I use in class to explain the different expectations in the main genres of fiction.  (Note: there are always exceptions.)

ENDING EXPECTATIONS IN THE GENRES:

ROMANCE:  The man and woman will come together to have a HEA (happy ever after) after surmounting great obstacles. 

MYSTERY/Suspense:  In a whodunit, the ending will reveal the killer.  In a thriller, the protagonist will escape the danger.  All loose ends will be tied up.  Justice will be seen to be done in some manner.  (This does not mean that the law will be satisfied.  We’re all about justice here, and the most interesting stories often have characters acting outside the law to achieve justice.  In mystery/suspense books you probably have the most opportunity for gray.)

FANTASY/Sci-Fi:  The battle will be won for now, but the war may continue in future books.  You should give your characters a HFN (happy for now) – at least a short amount of time to enjoy their
victory.

WESTERN:  The good guy will win.  Simple as that.

ACTION-ADVENTURE:  The Bond-clone will survive and triumph.  Sometimes the bad guy will get away to allow for a future story.

HORROR:  Usually, the protagonist will survive.  If not, he will usually die heroically saving others. Hope is key.  If readers have lost hope, they will stop reading.

LITERARY:  Again, the reader must be satisfied by the end of the story.  The protagonist will grow from the challenge.  He/she will probably be faced with difficult choices, and by the end of the story, the choice will be made.  In other stories, it may be that by the end of the story the protagonist discovers something she has been seeking: i.e. The Progress of Love by Alice Munro

ENDINGS – The argument against using real life for your plot. (Why things that really happened to you don’t make good novels.)

       “I am always telling my writing students that the anecdotes that make up their own lives, no matter how heart-wrenching they may have been for their subjects, are not in themselves stories.  Stories have endings.  Endings are contrived.  In order to come up with a great ending, you’re probably going to have to make something up, something that didn’t actually happen.  Autobiographical fiction can never do these things, because our lives contain few endings or even resolutions of any kind.”   Russell Smith

Remember what we do: Fiction authors write about things that never happened and people who don’t exist.  Remember what fiction writers must provide:  The ending must satisfy the reader.

So:  Don’t tell a publisher that your book/short story is based on real life.  The publisher doesn’t care. They are only looking for a good story.

Melodie Campbell is the author of the multi-award-winning Goddaughter series.  Book 6, The Goddaughter Does Vegas, is now available at all the usual suspects.

On AMAZON

Mike Hammer: Through a Glass, Darkly

David Edgerley Gates


The start point here is that Ralph Meeker wandered into my mind's eye, I'm not sure why, but I remembered a play called Something About a Soldier. It went maybe a dozen performances when it opened in New York, but I'd seen it in a try-out run. Shows used to open in Toronto, and then travel to Boston or Philadelphia, working out the kinks on the road before they got to Broadway. This one starred Sal Mineo, along with Kevin McCarthy and, yup, Ralph Meeker.

My first Mike Hammer was Darren McGavin, on TV. The series lasted two seasons in syndication, half-hour episodes, black and white. (I'd prefer to draw a veil across the later version - meaning no disrespect to Stacy Keach - but seriously, a show that manages to make both the character and the star appear brain-dead, and then wastes Don Stroud, into the bargain? Please.)

Now. Mickey Spillane. I, the Jury sold more than six million copies, domestic. An interviewer asked Mickey how it felt to be a best-selling author. He told the guy, "I'm not an author, I'm a writer." The story goes that he cranked out the first book in nineteen days. What you have to realize about Spillane, and Mike Hammer, is that the books are very like fever-dreams. They come out of a collective unconscious. Spillane just gives voice to it. He doesn't second-guess himself, and Hammer isn't the kind of character who's plagued by doubts. I, the Jury still has a shocker of an ending, even these days. A lot of people thought it was snuff pulp, utter trash. Spillane, again. "People eat more salted peanuts than caviar." He was tapping into something, no question. A generalized postwar unease, an appetite for the sensational, vicarious thrills. Hammer smacked punks around and dished out vigilante justice with relish. He was brute force. He was the raw, elemental, unreconstructed Id.

Ralph Meeker never made it big. He had some good parts over the years, The Naked Spur, Jeopardy, Run of the Arrow, Paths of Glory. Did a fair amount of television. Got a lot of attention for Picnic, on stage, in 1954, but he turned down a chance to do the picture, and it went to Bill Holden. He's probably best known for his Mike Hammer in Kiss Me, Deadly. Thing is, though, the Mike Hammer of Kiss Me, Deadly is not only odd, he's for sure not Spillane's.

The received wisdom seems to be that Robert Aldrich was hostile to the material. He certainly reshaped the story and the character. Aldrich wasn't at this point the marquee-name director he later became, but he'd had a solid hit the year before with Vera Cruz, and he was able to write his own ticket with his next movie. He and Meeker make Hammer pretty repellent. His saving grace is that there ain't no quit to him, he just keeps coming. In the context of the story, though, this comes across less as grit and determination than as psychopathology. Hammer's a bully, a thuggish bottom-feeder.

Then there's the MacGuffin. Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street had come out in 1953, two years before. Fuller has a little more of the Commie menace in his picture than Aldrich does, but I don't think either one of them really cares much about the politics, it's a handy dramatic device that heightens the paranoia. And stuffing the H-bomb in a suitcase? Not all that farfetched in this day and age, but back then it was pure science fiction. Story elements you wouldn't associate with Mickey Spillane, in other words. His brand of hysteria is more likely to be sexual, or maybe gun porn, but he was always red meat, never a Red-baiter.

Last but not least, the visual style. Kiss Me, Deadly is relentlessly claustrophobic, with a lot of tight close-ups, which are all the scarier when the face is Jack Elam's. (The cinematographer was Ernest Laszlo, who did seven pictures with Aldrich.) You don't think of Aldrich as a guy who uses shock effects - or at least, not like Fuller - but he's got his arresting moments. And the design of the movie, the set dressing and decor, is 1950's garish contemporary. Hammer's apartment, for one. You couldn't live with that furniture, let alone the artwork he's got on the walls. It's oppressive.

So, what have we got? More than an artifact. Kiss Me, Deadly is disturbing. It throws you off-balance from the beginning, the darkened highway, and the woman running into the headlights. The less than certain POV, an unreliable narrator. The sudden stops and starts, the false flags. Hammer manipulated by sinister forces, utterly indifferent to him, and taking his frustrations out on people who can't help themselves. This is beyond noir, it's nihilism, the lowest common denominator. Everything's a transaction, and everybody's for sale. It's all about negotiating a price. You have to wonder whether Aldrich really means to leave us with nothing but the taste of ashes in our mouths,

The Bradbury Building – Screen Star

Well, I had a post all written, even pulled pictures for it, and was ready to go. Then realized I had signed a non-disclosure agreement and, therefore, have decided not to run it. But since I did the photo here of me in the long white hair figured I’d run at least that anyway and let you all try to figure out what that post was about…

In the meantime, I’ll talk about the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles. A famous LA landmark and one that’s been in tons of movies, many in the mystery and noir genre. It played Philip Marlowe’s office in Marlowe, starring James Garner. Some people say that Marlowe had his office here in Chandler’s books, but there’s no real proof of that. Oh, and of course, it makes an appearance in several of my stories.

Today, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places and was designated a National Historic Landmark. It’s also a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, as well it should be.

Bradbury Building interior

It was commissioned by Lewis L. Bradbury, a goldmining millionaire, and opened in 1893 (old by LA standards), a few months after Bradbury’s death.

According to Wikipedia, “The design of the building was influenced by the 1887 science fiction bookLooking Backward by Edward Bellamy, which described a utopian society in 2000. In Bellamy's book, the average commercial building was described as a ‘vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above ... The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior.’ The influence of this description can be seen in the Bradbury.”

The Bradbury Building 2005

The outside of the building is a rather plain brick façade. But inside, you’re in for a treat. The Bradbury is built around an atrium-like central court. The ceiling is a gigantic skylight that lets in natural light, which falls on glazed brick, polished wood, marble and wrought iron railings throughout, giving it warm and changing light throughout the day. The birdcage style elevators are something to see.

In my novel-in-progress, The Blues Don’t Care, I describe it this way: “From the outside the Bradbury Building looked like any other office building, brown brick and sandstone in an Italian-Renaissance meets L.A. style. Inside, it was like being transported to a great European palace or maybe a train station of the industrial age. Bobby had heard of this building, though never had occasion to visit. He was awed by its breathtaking beauty. A glass skylight let shards of light fall on glazed brick and wrought iron grillwork. Marble flooring. Bobby stopped for a moment to catch his breath before heading to the open-caged elevators. He told the operator his floor, rode to the top, walked to room 501.”

Details of elevators and glass ceiling

The Bradbury is an office building and various types of businesses lease space there. Today one of those lessees is the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division, so be good if you visit…

The Bradbury in DOA

The Bradbury is the star of many books/stories, movies, videos, commercials and TV shows. It made its first screen appearance in China Girl (1942), filling in for a Burmese hotel. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Michael Connelly, Max Allan Collins and others have used the Bradbury in their writing.

It features prominently in the original version of D.O.A. (the good version!), I, The Jury (based on Mickey Spillane’s novel), Mission Impossible (the old TV show), the Jack Nicholson movie, Wolf, and more.

Videos by Janet Jackson, Genesis, Heart, Earth, Wind and Fire and more.

More recently, it shows up in Blade Runner, The Artist, CSI NY, etc.

The Bradbury in Bladerunner

To say I love this building would be putting it mildly. It’s a fantastic place. And if you ever come to LA make sure to hit it in downtown at 304 South Broadway.

***

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Bradbury Building interior: By Luke Jones - originally posted to Flickr as Bradbury Hotel, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7271823

Bradbury Building 2005: By Highsmith, Carol M., 1946- photographer, donor. - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pplot.13725.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.العربية | čeština | Deutsch | English | español | فارسی | suomi | français | magyar | italiano | македонски | മലയാളം | Nederlands | polski | português | русский | slovenčina | slovenščina | Türkçe | українська | 中文 | 中文（简体）‎ | 中文（繁體）‎ | +/−, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16340394

Detail of elevators and glass ceiling: By JayWalsh - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30719803

Bradbury in Bladerunner: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2276721

No Sex, Please, We're Skittish

by Eve Fisher

"If you mention sex at an AA meeting, even the non-smokers light up."
--Father Tom, "Learning to Live With Crazy People"

Agatha Christie

And so do a lot of mystery writers and readers.  There are those who write and/or love cozies, and want everything as asexual as they think Agatha Christie was.  Except, of course, that if you actually read your Agatha Christie, there's a lot of hot stuff going on:  In AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL, Ladislaw Malinowski is sleeping with both Elvira Blake and her mother Bess Sedgwick, and that fact alone is one of the major drivers of the plot.  In SAD CYPRESS, Roddy Welman's sudden, overwhelming attraction to Mary Gerrard makes everything homicidal possible.  And, in at least three novels, a man's lust for one woman, combined with his lust for money, makes it possible for him to marry and murder a rich wife.

Then there's the noir crowd:  

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
― Raymond Chandler, FAREWELL, MY LOVELY

“I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.”
― James M. Cain, DOUBLE INDEMNITY

Brigid O'Shaughnessy: “I haven't lived a good life. I've been bad, worse than you could know.”
Sam Spade: “You know, that's good, because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we'd never get anywhere.”
― Dashiell Hammett, THE MALTESE FALCON

In noir, EVERYTHING is about sex.  That and greed.  But mostly sex, and often violent sex. (Prime examples are probably the "rip me" scene of James M. Cain's THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE - and Mickey Spillane's VENGEANCE IS MINE, in which - and I think it's the first chapter - he beats a woman before having his way with her and she loves it all.)  The noir guys all moon over the virgins (Walter Huff over his victim's daughter; Mike Hammer over Velda), but the women who obsess them are anything but. And so of course they hurt them, twist them, torture them, betray them, all of the above.  Truth is, after a long day in noir-land, you want to yell at them, "Try somewhere else besides a bar to meet women!   Buy the girl some flowers!  Try to stay sober for ten minutes!" but it's all a waste of breath.  (Except, apparently, to Nick Charles who got a clue and a rich wife.)

And spies...

Spy stories, of course, depend on global locales, tech wizardry, constant weapons, supervillains, and a high body count for both sex and death.   Women, women, women, of all ethnicities, although Russian spies are a perennial favorite.  (Is it the accent, or the idea of nudity and fur?)  I just read a novel in which the male American spy and the female Russian spy were mutually obsessed, madly, madly in love/lust/etc., to the point where I really thought that the cover should be of her holding him against her exceptionally large chest, hair flowing like a female Fabio...  Anyway, sex drives these plots as well, no matter what the spy or the supervillain think, because - besides providing objects of rescue, thus securing another reason for the ensuing sex - 90% of the time at least one of those women is going to save the male spy from certain death. The game is to figure out which one by, say, page five.  

Horror.  Sex = death.  The survivor's a virgin.  What more can I say?  

So, to all of those who say that mysteries are all about cerebral detection, and that there isn't much place for sex in them - WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?  

As Oscar Wilde once said, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”  

You could look it up...

Genre & Its Discontents

There was a recent newspaper article on the wire services - courtesy of the Houston CHRONICLE - about video games now being treated seriously as an academic subject. Not simply gaming design, which is a career path, but themes and narrative, studying the art of the medium. The first thing that struck me was there's sure to be pushback, from more conservative circles, a sense that this is frivolous, or another sign of the impending doom of Western Civilization.

What's the world coming to, that we seriously look into the origin story of Batman, for example, and the dark graphics of Bob Kane, or the influence of MAD Magazine on American culture? There was a time, not that long ago, when comics were seen as a malign presence, poisoning youth. (See SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, published in 1954, which led to mutterings in Congress.) The comic book industry got ahead of the curve with the so-called Comics Code, akin to the Hays Office in the movie biz, which self-censored content. These days, Archie Andrews takes a bullet and dies in a pool of blood. What's next, Nancy Drew comes out to her dad as a lesbian dominatrix, or the Hardy Boys cook meth in their garage? The mind boggles.

This goes back to an older division of the spoils, low-brow vs. high-brow. Or the related question, does commercial success compromise literary integrity? ULYSSES got

tied up in court for a dozen years, remember, over whether it was obscene. Its publication in the U.S. led, for better or worse, not just to LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER seeing the light, but MY GUN IS QUICK. Spillane's books were wildly successful, and struck a deep chord, but the critics took him over the coals, the brutal sadomasochism, the perceived contempt for women, the casual Red-baiting. Not that Mickey gave a rat's ass. He wrote a book in three months, and spent the other nine months fishing off the beach.

The issue is their staying power. Who would you rather read, Spillane or Melville? No disrespect to MOBY-DICK, but most of us are gonna go with the more lurid and accessible.

G.K. Chesterton once remarked that any informed person knows the difference between literature and printed matter. (Chesterton, of course, wrote the Father Brown mysteries, so you couldn't call him a snob.) Genre writing - gothics, Westerns, thrillers, SF and fantasy - has for a long time been condescended to. So have novels themselves, for that matter. Early on, they were thought of as unserious, books for women, who were frivolous by nature. Maybe it's the comfort zone. There's a shapeliness to fiction, unlike life, say. Fiction of itself is a construct, a pattern, a design. Life is messy, and unresolved. Stories are rounded and complete, and usually have a satisfying punchline, mystery stories in particular. I don't think of this as a weakness. There's something to be said for the familiar. That doesn't mean it's paint-by-numbers, or unoriginal. You don't let it get stale. You write faster and smarter. You don't settle for less, although sometimes less is more. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

We'll leave the last word with Spillane. (Spoiler ahead.) I, THE JURY ends with Mike Hammer and the killer alone. They have a sexual history together. She tries working her wiles on him yet again. Hammer isn't having any. He shoots her in the belly. She sinks to her knees. "How could you?" she asks him tearfully, holding in her stomach, blood leaking through her fingers.

Mike looks down at her. "It was easy," he says.

http://www.davidedgerleygates.com/

A Curious Incident

Though, in my mind,  publication of nine fiction books gives me a license to lie, I'll be truthful with you. I was not enthusiastic about blogging today.

I've recently been promoting Callie's A Corpse Under the Christmas Tree, trying to decide where to launch KUDZU RIVER, making changes suggested by the editor in The True HAUNTING of JULIE BATES, and expanding "An Odor Yet to Come" from its original short story form to a full-length horror novel. With all of this plus the holidays and three immediate family birthdays (as well as my own) in December, I hadn't given much (correct that to "any") thought to blogging.

In addition to all of the above, I became "a lady who lunches" during December, having had the pleasure of lunching with several long-time friends who were back in SC for the holidays.  One of them is a talented artist who moved to New York when we graduated from USC way back when. (Remember, Dixon, USC is the University of South Carolina as well as Southern Cal.)

"If you haven't read it already, you need to read this," my friend said and handed me a paperback with an orange cover as I joined him in my favorite Italian restaurant.

"Is it a mystery?" I asked.  I read a lot of books that aren't mysteries, but that genre is my "go-to" for relaxation.

"Look at the first line on Chapter 7, page four," he said.

Seven chapters by the fourth page?  But I opened the book to page four.  It read "This is a murder mystery novel."

"Didn't you teach students with Autism?" he asked and then continued without waiting for my reply.

"This book is written from the point of view of a fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger Syndrome."

I dropped the paperback into my purse, and we had a wonderful visit over our lunch of shrimp and lobster risotto with amaretto bread pudding for dessert. (Yes, I realize that's a high-carb lunch, but we were celebrating.)  I didn't think any more about the book until that night.  I planned to read only a few pages, but I didn't put it down until the last line, which happened to be Chapter 233. (More about that later)

The book is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon. (Absence of capital letters is Haddon's decision, not mine. As some of you know, I LOVE using caps.)

It's not a new book.  It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the Best First Book category in 2003 because it was Haddon's first novel for adults though he'd been previously successful in children's literature.  He also won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for the curious incident of the dog in the night-time that same year because though Haddon called this his first book written intentionally for adults, his publisher marketed it to both adult and child audiences.

Christopher, the first-person narrator, shares characteristics with several Autistic individuals I've known, and Haddon doesn't tell them--he shows them.  There are 233 chapters because Christopher has a fondness for prime numbers and uses them instead of cardinal numbers for chapter headings.  He only eats foods that are red or green.  His parents expand the variety by adding red food coloring to less colorful dishes. Christopher is brilliant in math, but he is terrified by new experiences.

Is this a murder mystery as the author proclaims?  Well, there is a murder.  The story opens when Christopher discovers a neighbor's dog stabbed to death with a "garden fork" stuck completely through and anchoring the body to the ground.  A "garden fork" is what we call a pitch-fork here in the South.  He decides to investigate and solve the murder and to write a book about how he does it.

The Boston Globe described the curious incident of the dog in the night-time as "gloriously eccentric and wonderfully intelligent." There are five pages of acclaim for the book at its beginning.

As I usually do when I enjoy a book, I sought more information about the author.  Mark Haddon was born in 1962 in Northampton, England.  He wrote his first book, Gilbert's Gobstopper, in 1987 and followed this with several more children's books, many self-illustrated.

One of the things I found interesting about Haddon is several Internet sites about quotes from him concerning writing. Three of my favorites are:

                                           Reading is a conversation.  All books
                                           talk.  But a good book listens as well.
                                                                             Mark Haddon

                                           Most of my work consisted of crossing
                                           out.  Crossing out is the secret of good
                                           writing.
                                                                             Mark Haddon

The second quote is especially true of my own writing because my rough drafts tend to ramble and require a lot of crossing out.  

Reader questions for today:  Was I just out to lunch in 2003 when the curious incident of the dog in the night-time was published?  How many of you had heard of this book before today?

Have you read other books that claim to be mysteries, but turned out to be far more?  If so, what are they?

Do you ever read genres other than mystery just to study some aspect of the writer's style?  If so, I recommend the curious incident of the dog in the night-time as an excellent study in voice. (Besides, if you don't read it, you won't know who killed the dog.)

I've shared before that there are writers with whom I would like to have spent some time. Examples: I would really love to have sipped some (maybe a lot) of bourbon with William Faulkner.  I met Mickey Spillane in his later years, and I'm Christian, but I would like to have known him before he became religious. This list could go on forever, and perhaps, due to John M. Floyd's influence, one day I may use that list as a blog-starter and even add some writers I wouldn't care to visit and why. I'd be willing to pass up my two favorite lunches (prime rib and/or lobster) to have lunch with Mark Haddon to talk about writing even though he's a vegetarian.  

Until we meet again, take care of . . . you.

Fast Times

By Fran Rizer

In my youth (a hundred years ago), no young lady wanted to be labeled as "fast," and I wasn't.  Yet, looking back, I did seem to always be in a hurry.  I started school a year ahead, finished high school in three years and my first college degree in three years, which put me in a high school classroom teaching senior English at age nineteen.  The older I grow, the more I realize how truly little I knew back then.

For my newest "baby" to be delivered around October since it's a Christmas story, it needs to be completed by June.  This didn't scare me because books two and three were written and edited in six months each, but it did start me thinking about how long people spend writing a book.




Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell spent from 1926 to 1934 writing Gone With the Wind, working steadily except for brief periods of discouragement in 1927 and 1934.  Harper Lee devoted three years to producing To Kill a Mockingbird.  More recently, Heidi Durrow says she worked on The Girl Who Fell from the Sky for thirteen years.

Anthony Burgess

What's the other extreme?  Who are the writers who claim to have churned out best sellers in very little writing time? 





Anthony Burgess said that A Clockwork Orange was "knocked off for money in three weeks."  But more impressive than that is the backstory.

In 1959, Burgess was told that he had an inoperable brain turmor and would be dead within a year.  Hoping to provide for his wife after his death, Burgess wrote five novels in the next twelve months. A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962.  Burgess lived another thirty years (died in 1993) and left more than thirty novels.

Mickey Spillane wrote his best seller I the Jury in nine days.  It sold seven million copies in three years.

It's said that The Running Man  took Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) only three nights.  There are some claims though that a lot of it was lifted from previous manucripts King wrote.

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac's actual writing time for On the Road  is touted to have been three weeks, but he'd spent seven years traveling the USA and making notes.  Another interesting fact about On the Road is that Kerouac wrote it on a 119-foot long scroll of paper so that he didn't have to keep inserting sheets into his typewriter.  The scroll  has been exhibited in museums and libraries around the world.

On the end of the scroll is a note in Kerouac's handwriting.  He states that a cocker spaniel ate the last lines, so no one knows the original final words.  That sounds an awful lot like some Colonel Parker business to me, and if you believe it's the gospel truth, please let me know because I've got a bridge for sale in New York, and I'll give you a real deal on it!

Until we meet again, take care of . .  .you! 

To Fathers, Step-fathers, Adopted Fathers & Foster Fathers

As I write this it is June 17th, Father's Day, however this won't be posted until the 18th which is the day after Father's Day. But I'd like to talk a bit about fathers. I had two. My dad and my step-dad. They both were decent, honorable men who did the best they could for me, helping me reach adulthood as a productive, considerate, educated woman. I lived with my mother and my step-father, Charlie Pierce. I only spent two or three weeks with my birth father or as I called him, my "real" dad, Tom Barrow. It was difficult as a child to only see my father for such a short amount of time each summer. When I returned back home to my mother's house, I usually cried for a week or two, knowing it would be another year before I saw my dad again. I didn't understand it at the time and the idea of joint custody or even more reasonable longer visitation was not an accepted idea. My father wasn't married the first few years when I visited with him. And I think I must have been nine or ten before we had those visitation weeks. My mother and father had divorced when I was around two years old and shortly after that my father went to China and India as an Army man during World War II.

I do remember him visiting me when I was six years old. I was living with my grandmother in Houston, TX at the time. My mother was working at an aircraft factory, Consolidated, in Fort Worth and it was very difficult to have and take care of a small child with the hours she worked. My grandmother and her husband lived ten miles from the city limits of Houston on a dirt road. One day, a yellow taxi drove up to our house and a tall, lean man in an Army uniform got out of the car. It was my dad. He was home on furlough and wanted to see me. I was just getting over chicken pox and I got so excited that my red-spots seemed to pop out again. Of course it was just the excitement.

My step-father has been gone since 1995 and I miss him a lot.. He and I had a lot of problems during my teen age years but I think that's fairly normal. Teenagers are an alien species as I have mentioned before. Charlie had a lot of little sayings, like "I ain't had so much fun since the hogs at my little brother." Don't ask me to explain that one. And the standard when I asked him for money was, "If money was germs, I'd be as sterile as St. Vincent's hospital." You get the picture. One saying he had that stayed with me all these years was "There are two things in this world that can't be beat. One is a good education and the other is a good reputation." Those are words to live by for sure. I miss you and love you, Daddy.

My dad has been gone for twenty-four years and I miss him almost daily. Immediately after I graduated from high school, I moved to Fort Worth to live with my dad and step-mother. I graduated from school on Friday night and started to X-ray school on Monday morning. And during all those year afterwards I spent a lot of time with them and we grew very close. We made up for all the years we had not been together. I'm very glad he got to know my late husband, Elmer. They were alike in many ways and they were close too.

My dad loved to read and he had scads of books, mostly mysteries. Mostly private-eye mysteries and from the time I was about 12 years old and visiting my dad in the summer, he was handing me books by Mickey Spillane and Richard S. Prather and Erle Stanley Gardner. I was in heaven reading their books. Of course they were hard-boiled and womanizers (well, Perry Mason wasn't but Donald Lam was) but I just loved the style of writing these guys wrote and enjoyed the mystery plots. I decided then and there if I ever did learn to write it would definitely be mysteries and mostly likely private-eye stories. And most of my short stories did feature my female PIs Jenny Gordon and C.J. Gunn.

One major thing my dad taught me was, to do what you love. And if you can make a living at that, you're ahead of the game. That's true. I loved being in the medical field, but my unspoken dream was to write and be published. I'm really glad my dad lived long enough to read many of my short stories. He died before my novels were published but I'm sure where ever he is, he's read them as I wrote them.

The other big thing my dad taught me is that you can't live in the past with regrets. And you just can't wallow in guilt about mistakes you made. And he didn't mean not to acknowledge your mistakes, but learn from them. Everyone fails at some things and that's the way you learn how to succeed. This is very true in writing too (you thought I never would get to the point about writing didn't you?).

The only way to ever learn to be a better writer is to keep writing. When someone who knows about writing and is willing to pay you for writing gives you a critique or suggestion about your writing, then pay attention and learn. Few people are born with enough talent to be a good writer. However, you can learn how to write and how to write very well, but you have to learn from your mistakes.

Actually all the great writers that I know were not "born" writers. They were just persistent and willing to learn the craft and then learn the business or lean on someone who could guide them to the right way to become published.

So today, I say, Happy Father's Day to my dad, Thomas Lee Barrow. I love you and I miss you.