I'm Only Here To Steal Your Stuff

20th Century Fox

Everyone remembers the burglars from the Home Alone movies. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern scope out a tony Chicago suburb to see who's going to be gone at Christmas. Pesci even disguises himself as a cop stopping by to warn neighbors of a burglar in the area. This is a clever variation on the murderer who joins the search party for his victim. Of course, little did they realize one eight-year-old boy would get left behind and have to fend for himself. Macaulay Culkin is an early Millennial, raised the same as most Gen X'rs. As a Gen X'r myself, I must warn potential criminals how we were raised on a lifetime of Warner Brothers cartoons, specifically Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Roadrunner. You, oh would-be felon, are not even Elmer Fudd in this equation. You are Wile E. Coyote. This is the part where you hold up a sign that says, "Yikes!"

Up until Joe and Daniel get their asses handed to them by a Warner Brothers-trained kid who's already had to fend for himself for a week, they're actually quite the professionals. Joe brazenly impersonates a police officer to get potential victims to reveal their holiday plans, and they methodically hit a list of homes on the list. But...

Burglars aren't always the brightest bulbs in the bunch, both in fiction and in real life. Daniel Stern decides to stop up the kitchen sink in each house and leave the water running. He says it's their calling card. "We're the wet bandits!" Uh huh. You're leaving a trail of evidence, my friend. Never mind the kid in one of your target houses who would grow up to have a fine career in Acme's R&D department. All they needed was the attempt to clog little Kevin's kitchen sink before the kid unleashes cartoon Armageddon on them, and police can go back to every house with flood damage in the neighborhood.

But it seems to be a regular occurrence. Full crews of burglars work with amazing precision. Recently, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow was burglarized while he was playing. Here in Cincinnati, where he lives. I've been by his house before, long before he owned it. The houses in that particular neighborhood are not easy to get to nor easy to penetrate. But penetrate they did. And this crew worked methodically. They had already gone through homes in Indian Hill, where Cincinnati's wealthy live. Burrow was a ripe target because it's a big house. But...

Joe Burrow is a high-profile target. Rob the vice president of marketing for Proctor & Gamble, and while the Indian Hill Rangers will do their best to catch the culprits, it's not going to make the news. Rob a Bengals player who played in a Superbowl and is frequently featured nationally on ESPN and Fox Sports, and all four local news stations and probably national news outlets, and suddenly you find out why La Cosa Nostra has a strict code of silence. Attention brings the law. 

Worse, we are in an era hostile to foreigners. The burglars in question were from Chile. Make of that bit of nonsense what you will. But now, in a case that might have involved a state bureau of investigation or a sheriff's department to coordinate among difference forces, and probably the FBI, you have now attracted ICE. Good or ill, that's most definitely unwanted attention. 

And then they took selfies with all the swag they stole from Joe Burrow. Nice. Because posting to social media means you don't have to pay for all that flood damage. 

I'm currently working on a short story where a drywall crew is robbing homes in a tony lakeside village. They have access to their victims' homes, so they use the victims' own tools to raid the houses, then lock the doors behind them. But...

Most of the victims have Costco memberships, and a lot of recent hauls from the warehouse store disappear, along with all the beer in the fridge. It unravels when one crew member tries to disable an electrical substation on the night of a thunderstorm to cover their shutting off the power to the houses. Unfortunately, there's this thing called arc flashover that can reduce a person to a blackened cinder while another is pulled over with boxes of snacks in nice Costco-sized boxes and several cases of beer. Oops.

Burglary is proof clever and smart are not exactly the same thing.  

Burglars Beware! (more silly stuff from my standup days)

(With apologies to both Monty Python and George Carlin)

I write about the mob.  This might lead some people to believe I am an expert in crime.  As there may be law enforcement officers reading this post, I'm not going to write about that.  Instead, I'm going to talk about crime prevention. (*Waves* to relatives in Palermo.)

Somebody who didn't know about my alleged area of expertise tried to sell me a home security device the other day.  Apparently, this device is rigged so that it would alert me when someone was breaking into the house.  This amazed me, in that - if I am home - I usually know when someone is breaking into my house.  Rather than announce his presense ("A Burglar, Madam") it would seem to me a lot more useful if someone would invent something that would bog the intruder over the head.

But I don't need fancy home security systems because there is no possible way a burglar could get past my secret weapon.  It's cheap and it's foolproof.  It's so fiendish, I expect it will soon be outlawed at the next Geneva Convention.

Let me put it this way: if the Spanish Inquisition had known about it, everyone would have confessed to everything.

To wit:
LOCATION: Madrid, 15 something-or-other, in a damp dungeon (not even a three-star)

"Stubborn, eh?  Still won't confess?  Okay, Cardinal Wolsey - bring out the secret weapon!"
(horrified gasps all around)

"Not the (gulp) not the..."

"Yes! (fiendish giggle)  Get the little pieces of LEGO!"

"ARGH! No please!  No! I confess!"

It works like this:  You step on the itty bitty piece of Lego, whereupon it pierces your bare foot, sending searing needles of agony all the way up to your brain.  This in turn causes all of your bones to suddenly melt and turn you into a pain-filled gibbering mass of jelly on the floor.

I don't know if you have ever walked barefoot across a minefield of individual Lego bits, but believe me, our intelligence agencies have missed out on a good weapon.  Marbles have a similar effect, but those little plastic Lego corners kind put the icing on the proverbial meatcake (man, am I mixing comedy sketches here.)

Methinks the Lego people have missed a terrific marketing opportunity here.  In fact, right after this column is done, I'm going into business.  "Killer Lego" should be on the shelves by Christmas, ready to be scatter on floors everywhere.  Hopefully, before relatives arrive.

Actually, if you really want to keep burglars away, it's simple.  And yes, I actually heard this from the horse-er-relative's mouth.  Throw a few ride-um toys on the front lawn of your home - preferably boy ones.  Then everyone will know you have kids, so there couldn't possible be anything of value left inside your house...

Melodie Campbell writes funny books about the mob.  But she denies that THE BOOTLEGGER'S DAUGHTER is a roman a clef.  You can judge yourself.

 on AMAZON

Titles & Expectations

by R.T. Lawton

In days of yore, people used words and phrases that have fallen out of usage in modern times, but words and their use were as powerful then as they are today. Change one word in a phrase or a title and the whole meaning can change.

Take for instance, the medieval era where titles let everyone know what position in life a titled person had and therefore gave expectations as to how you perceived that person and what their duties were. At the top of the hierarchy were the kings and queens. Everyone expected that the ones holding these titles would rule over the people and lands where they held dominance. Next level down were dukes, barons and others, depending upon how the king set up the organizational chart. Your next class of titles, if you will, were more of a job description than a rank, but they still gave everyone an expectation for what the person with that title did in life. These titles fell into labels such as blacksmith, huntsman, cook, scullery maid, etc. However, you add one word to the front of that title, such as head or assistant and that huntsman can move up or down in job position. The power of words and the receiver's expectations.

This brings us to story titles. When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came out, the book became a bestseller. The author then put out two more books with titles which started with the same first two words. Next thing you know, there are lots of titles starting with The Girl... Agents, editors, publicists and yes, even authors, quickly realized the potential salability of a book with a title starting with the words The Girl... So now you have The Girl on the Train, The Girl in the Spider's Web, The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes, The Girl With No Past, The Girl with The Lower Back Tattoo, The Girl You Lost and several others. The marketing thought here being that there would be a positive carryover from the success of Stieg Larson's novels to the expectations in potential buyers of books with similar sounding titles. And, that marketing thought seems to have some credibility. Once again, the power of and  the expectations of words.

Thus, the words you choose for your story titles should produce the type of expectations you want in potential buyers of your works, plus help convert those buyers into becoming continued readers of your future publications. A kind of gather ye fans while you may, sort of thing. Naturally, to do this, it's best if you have a title that's intriguing, gives the reader an idea of what's in the story and maybe even brands the stories (assuming they are a series) for the author.

In my case, I tried to do all three for the ten titles in my Twin Brothers Bail Bond series in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. All of these titles have either the word bond or bail in the title. In these stories, the firm's proprietor and his bail agent manage to obtain some high value collateral from dastardly criminals and then render these clients as deceased, thus making extravagant profits from their demise. The one story with the word bail in it, "The Big Bail Out," is a play on words, since it involves both bailing out a financially troubled corporation and the crooked officers of that company having a fondness for their hobby of skydiving.

"Resolutions"- 9th in Holiday Burglars
AHMM Jan/Feb 2017 issue

In the fourth of my five series in AHMM, the Holiday Burglars series, each story is connected to a caper during a holiday. In this series, I put a play on words in each title. For instance, "Click, Click, Click," the first in the series concerns Christmas. Many of you probably remember some of the words to the song Up on the Housetop. "...up on the housetop, click, click, click, down through the chimney with good Saint Nick..." Well, in this case, Beaumont and Yarnell dressed as santas have entered the back door of a residence in order to steal the cash a drug dealer temporarily conceals in Christmas packages under the tree. Unfortunately for them, the counted houses from their position in the alley instead of from the street side like their informant gave them the information, therefore they have now entered the home of a fanatical NRA member. The clicking sound the two burglars hear is not reindeer hooves on the roof, but rather the clicking noise a big handgun makes when the hammer is being cocked.

For anther title in the series, Labor Day," yep you guessed it. Beaumont, Yarnell and their protege The Thin Guy are descending in a creaky old elevator from the penthouse they just burgled while its owner was off on a Labor Day excursion. The elevator makes a few stops on its way down to take on and unload passengers. Shortly after a very pregnant lady gets on, the elevator becomes stuck between floors. The baby picks this time to enter the world. Firemen, police and news crews are soon aware of the stuck elevator and the pending birth. The only person on the elevator who is remotely qualified to assist in procedures involving anatomy is The Thin Guy who used to be employed as an assistant mortician. The words are all done in fun.

So how do you create your titles? Do you brand? And how? Do you find particular words as powerful or intriguing or more likely for potential readers to buy your story? Or, even for you as a reader to pick up a book in the store and open it to see if your interest continues beyond the title? Do words commonly seen in titles, words such as devil, blood or murder affect your thinking in titling or purchasing a book?

Chime in on your opinions, creative thoughts and branding ideas through titles.

No. 1197

It came in the mail.
Writers generally look forward to the mail arriving. Not the bills and junk mail, but the contracts and checks a writer gets for creating work good enough to be put up in print. And sure, we get a little ambivalent, with both hopes and fears, upon receiving those first envelopes from an agent, or editor since they could be a positive or a negative. They could be a glorious validation of our creative genius (also called an acceptance) or the dreaded rejection (what do they know?).

This particular piece of mail I got last month could be called an acceptance of sorts, but not one I was looking for at the time. Can't say I was too surprised to get it though because it's happened twice before in the ten years since we moved here. But why now? After all, we had a trip planned with non-refundable airline tickets, and as everyone knows, airlines recently raised their prices for a customer to change the dates on their tickets.

Guess I could have asked for a postponement, but the letter said it would only take a day or two of my time. Okay, there was a four-day window before flight time, so I took a chance. If circumstances looked bad after I got there, then I could always request a postponement at that time and ask for a later date when my schedule seemed to be more open. In any case, I know they really don't want me. None of them have in the past, even though it has been my desire to participate.

You see, once again my name has come up and I have been summoned for jury duty. My juror number is 1197 and I am supposed to appear in county court at 8:30 AM on a specified day. A lot of instructions are listed in the letter, plus there is a questionnaire form I am supposed to fill out and bring with me. The first part of the form is all background on me. I've known me for a long time, so that part's easy. Next, I check the box for Post Grad and then the NO box for Previous Jury Service.

Now I come to all the little check boxes concerning other background about me, the part which has always gotten me bounced from a jury panel in the past. I check YES for Have You Ever Been Involved In A Court Proceeding Other Than Jury Service. This is quickly followed by checks in the box for The Case Was Civil, also one in the Criminal box, again for I Was A Party To The Case and for I Was A Witness To A Case. Seems my 25 years in law enforcement tends to mean one lawyer or the other in a pending trial has concerns about me sitting on their jury panel. But, according to the rules, no occupation is automatically excused from jury duty. Thus, I am required to go through the motions.

So, the night before, as instructed in the summons, I call the designated telephone number after 5:30 PM. The taped message says numbers 601 through 1,000 must report on the following morning for jury service. Numbers 1,001 through 1,250 are on standby, must be prepared to respond at an hour's notice and are required to call the designated telephone number again at Noon on the following day to see if they are needed then. Okay, looks like No. 1197 has got a second chance with the standbys. I sleep well that night. Comes Noon, the taped message now says the standby group does not need to report, our service obligation as jurors has been fulfilled.

Ah yes, rejected again.

Now, we all know people called for jury duty often make jokes about trying to get out of jury service, some of them serious about their trying or their success. I have even laughed about some of the ploys people used or claimed to have used to get off jury duty. In fact, I found one set of circumstances so bizarre that I used it in a short story ("Independence Day") about one of my Holiday Burglars who ended up on a jury panel for a fellow burglar. In short, it seems a real-life potential female juror raised her hand when the judge asked if there was any reason why any of  the potential jurors in front of him should not serve on a jury.

"Yes ma'am," inquired the judge upon seeing her hand.
"I'm not feeling well," was her reply.
"Not feeling well? What is the problem?"
"I think it's the medicine my doctor is giving me for my cocaine addiction."
"Ma'am, you are excused."

Okay, becoming a juror can be an inconvenience. And, okay, people can joke about different ways to get off jury duty. But, I am pretty sure those same people would quickly be screaming about THEIR RIGHTS if the peer jury system was somehow abolished. So, if a little of my time being spent as a juror is one of the requirements for me to live in a free society, then I'm willing to to have the inconvenience of being called. I know that if I were innocent of an accused crime, I would want some jurors who were fair-minded and interested in true justice, not someone who is aggravated about being summoned and is trying to get out of their duty.

Now on the other hand…