Hiaasen on the Cake

I have an interesting, if not always accurate, theory. A two-part observation, actually. Country music singers seem to make good actors, and newspaper writers seem to make good novelists. Case in point: Miami Herald journalist and mystery author Carl Hiaasen.  (I won't get into examples of country singers/actors, but I still defend my theory.)

Another observation. Hiaasen has developed a pattern, with the titles of his books: most are two words each. Tourist Season, Double Whammy, Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, Skinny Dip, Nature Girl, Star Island. His young-adult novels, oddly enough, feature one-word titles. Hoot, Flush, Scat, Chomp.

I've read 'em all. I finished his latest, Bad Monkey, a few days ago. It's a delightful read, with a great setting and an intriguing plot. The location is, as usual, Florida, and this one's set in the Keys, which is even more fun. As for the plot, it's complex but believable, consisting of Medicare fraud, arson, drug trafficking, bribery, murder, and a host of other crimes, and makes for a suspenseful story.

But all that, as good as it is, is only icing on the cake. The main attraction of any Hiaasen novel, the reason most of his fans read him, is his quirky characters. No, make that outrageous characters. And yes, it doesn't hurt that they're residents of the Sunshine State--we already know from Leigh that most of the peninsula can be a loony bin. It's an extension of the old joke-theory that at one point the nation bowed up in the middle and all the loose nuts rolled to both coasts; in popular fiction, those on the east side seem to have rolled all the way down and collected in Florida.

The folks in the latest Hiaasen book remind me of those one might find in a Coen Brothers movie (Raising Arizona, maybe). Here's a sampling of the players in Bad Monkey:

Andrew Yancy -- Former police officer, demoted now to restaurant inspection duty (also known as roach patrol).

Dr. Rosa Campesino -- Miami coroner who yearns for more excitement in her life, probably because all her patients are deceased.

Bonnie Witt, a.k.a. Plover Chase -- sex-offender and fugitive from Tulsa; also Yancy's former (and sometimes current) love interest.

Evan Shook -- Hapless real-estate developer who's attempting to build a McMansion between Yancy's beach house and his cherished view of the ocean sunsets.

Nicky Strickland -- Ruthless killer and con artist, always wears an orange rain poncho. The discovery of his severed arm sets the novel's plot in motion.

Eve Strickland -- Nicky's plump, upscale, greedy, screwball wife.

Sonny Summers -- Lazy but opportunistic sheriff who busts Yancy from detective to roach inspector.

K. J. Claspers -- Freelance pilot who specializes in drug smuggling but isn't really out to get rich. He just loves to fly.

Johnny Mendez -- Retired Miami cop who made a fortune calling in tips about crimes that had already been solved.

Neville Stafford -- Island native engaged in a fight with corporate bullies who want to spoil his natural homeland (a recurring Hiaasen theme).

The Dragon Queen -- Deranged voodoo priestess who tricks Neville into selling her his "bad" monkey.

Cody Parish -- Scatterbrained, lovesick kid who fancies himself the Clyde in Bonnie Witt's criminal escapades.

Egg -- Bald, hulking henchman, real name Ecclestone. He's the Dragon Queen's boyfriend, and one of the book's worst (meaning "best") villains.

Caitlin Cox -- Nicky and Eve's daughter, and just as goofy and conniving as her parents.

John Wesley Weiderman -- Tough but sympathetic FBI agent who mistakenly figured his Key West assignment would be a vacation.

Driggs -- A demented, pipe-smoking, feces-flinging monkey who supposedly once starred with Johnny Depp in his pirate movies and has since suffered a reversal of fortune.

This is only some of the cast. How could a novel populated with characters like that not be fun?

In closing, let me say that I've always enjoyed reading humorous authors: Janet Evanovich, Christopher Buckley, Steve Martin, Charlaine Harris, Kinky Friedman, Douglas Adams, Tim Dorsey, Woody Allen--even Nelson DeMille, who writes novels with serious themes but includes something witty on almost every page. In my opinion, that kind of talent is a true gift.

Carl Hiaasen's one of the best.

Famous Last Words

Years ago, I read Clancy Sigal's novel GOING AWAY, which is a terrific book about the decline of the Old Left, in the 1950's, but I bring it up because of the epigraph, a guy on his deathbed.

"Take it away," he says.
"What, the pillow?" he's asked.
"No, the mute. I want to play on the open strings."

Nowadays, in this age of antibiotics, we forget that people used to take some time dying. I'm not talking about AIDS or cancer, but more generic, commonplace infections, like pneumonia, which today can usually be cleared up, but before penicillin, were pretty much fatal. People would take to their bed, and in their slow decline, their family and friends would gather around, to bring comfort and prayer, and nobody thought it odd to make note of what you said in your final moments. It might be despairing, or funny, or brave, and often very graceful. There's also the sub-genre of those facing the scaffold. Here are a few.

Give Dayrolles a chair. Lord Chesterfield
All my possessions for a moment of time. Elizabeth I
A dying man can do nothing easily. Ben Franklin
Let not poor Nellie starve. Charles II
Give the boys a holiday. Anaxagoras
I shall hear in Heaven. Beethoven
I want nobody distressed on my account. Ulysses Grant
All is lost! Monks, monks, monks! Henry VIII
I always talk better lying down. James Madison
More light. Goethe
Kiss me, Hardy. Lord Nelson
I owe Asclepius a cock. Socrates
My neck is very small. Anne Boleyn

Some of the best lines seem absolutely unrehearsed, naive in their sincerity. And some are poetry. Stonewall Jackson, shot by one of his own sentries: "Let us go across the river, and into the trees." We can easily imagine being surprised by death, but sometimes it comes by inches. My own mom died a protracted death, and it wasn't easy on her, or anybody else. When my sister and I took her to the hospital for what turned out to be the last time, she was so weak she couldn't even talk. But she looked at me, and made a scissors gesture with her fingers, snipping across her hairline. She meant it was time I went to a barber shop. In effect, my mother's last words to me were a grooming tip. It made me smile then, and it makes smile now. It was so human, and so much in character.

Perhaps the question is whether we die with grace. My favorite quote is attributed to the late actor Sir Donald Wolfit. Close to breathing his last, a friend asked him if he found death hard. Wolfit shook his head.

"Dying is easy," he said. "Comedy is hard."

Doyle When He Nodded

by Terence Faherty

First I'd like to echo Brian Thornton by thanking the other contributors to SleuthSayers for their warm welcome. I'd especially like to thank Robert Lopresti for inviting me to give this a try and Dale Andrews, who's alternating with me on Tuesdays, for the generous plug he gave me in his most recent post.

For my first post, I thought I'd write about one of my mystery writing heroes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and about one of his most interesting characteristics (from a writer's point of view): his carelessness.

Even casual readers of Doyle's immortal Sherlock Holmes stories have probably noted one egregious example of this carelessness, namely Watson's mobile bullet wound, which unaccountably shifts from his shoulder to his leg. Well, you might be thinking, in a long series of stories (there are fifty-six Holmes short stories and four longer ones), a writer is apt to get a detail of a character's backstory wrong. But Watson's wound made its famous migration sometime between the first tale, A Study in Scarlet, and the second, The Sign of Four. Not a good omen for the future, though a telling one.

I'll cite just a couple more examples I've come across recently. In "The Copper Beeches," a young governess arrives at 221B for a morning meeting, stays about twenty minutes, and bids Holmes and Watson "good-night" as she leaves. In "The Man with the Twisted Lip," Watson's wife refers to him as James, though his given name was John. Speaking of the doctor's wife, the reports of her death seem to have been greatly exaggerated, as she returns from the grave from time to time. Or was there a second Mrs. Watson? Or half a dozen?

Dorothy L. Sayers, another of my favorites, once wrote a scholarly essay that attempted to straighten out the date problems in "The Red-Headed League." She focused on four issues, one of which might be called "The Mystery of the Missing Summer." The story is set in October of 1890 but a character refers to an April newspaper article as having appeared "just two months ago." What, as current scholars might phrase the question, is up with that?

I find two features of Doyle's carelessness particularly intriguing. The first is its endurance. Okay, so Doyle wrote quickly and didn't get much help from his editors at the Strand Magazine. But who was minding the store when the stories were collected in book form? Buy any new edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes today and in "The Man with the Twisted Lip," Watson's wife will still get his first name wrong. October 9, 1890 will still be called a Saturday in "The Red-Headed League" when it was in fact a Thursday. It's as though Doyle carved his first drafts in stone.
 
Even late in his long life, by which time Sir Arthur must have known that the tossed-off Holmes tales were going to outlive his more serious literary efforts, he didn't clean up after himself, though by then he must have received hundreds of letters from helpful or confused readers. By then, too, pioneering Sherlockian scholars had published essays on all aspects of the Holmes tales, including the puzzling problems.

Doyle might have recognized in this correspondence and in the critical literature an unlooked-for benefit from his mistakes. I find this benefit to be the second intriguing characteristic of Doyle's carelessness: its appeal. Far from turning readers off, it draws them in. It makes the Sherlock Holmes stories a particularly interactive form of fiction.

All fair play mysteries are interactive to the extent that readers are invited to solve the crime along with the detective, but the Sherlock Holmes stories take interaction to a whole new level. Like Dorothy Sayers, generations of writers, who presumably had better things to do (like dogs to walk and lawns to mow), have taken up their pens to try to reconcile or explain away Watson's two wives and the "long interview" in "The Copper Beeches" and so on. (One of Sayers' explanations for the date problems in "the Red-Headed League" was transcription errors caused by Watson's poor handwriting, perhaps the earliest argument against cursive.)

In the process, the Sherlockians scholars have created hours of enjoyment for readers who love the stories and maybe even helped the stories live on. It's enough to make an author cast a jaundiced eye on writing-manual advice of the "revise endlessly" variety. A little carelessness might actually be good for the soul of a work. To paraphrase Holmes himself, once you have eliminated actual spelling errors, whatever remains, however improbable, might be better left alone.

Growing the Language

Barney and Clyde, The Washington Post, December 1, 2012

Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

                                      The Bells, First Stanza
                                      Edgar Allan Poe

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.

                                      Warren G. Harding

    So, you are doubtless wondering, what exactly does Edgar Allan Poe have in common with Warren G. Harding?  The italicized words set forth above are the clues – both “tintinnabulation” and “normalcy” basically did not exist until used by Poe and Harding, respectively.  Poe’s made up word, derived from the Latin word for "bell", tintinnabulum, entered the English language largely because it fit Poe’s pentameter.  Harding’s invention, or at the least popularization, of the word “normalcy” is predictably baser, deriving from the existing word “normality” and Harding’s political aspirations, which required a less high-falluting word to garner the support of the voting public. 

    These two words eventually gained entry to most dictionaries, but prior to besting that bar they were “sniglets.”  “Sniglet” is itself a made-up word, and one that, I will admit, I had not encountered until I heard a weatherman in Washington, D.C. use it several weeks ago.  A sniglet is defined (simply) by the Urban Dictionary as a word that should be in the dictionary but isn't.  The “should” part of this may be a bit generous – the word “irregardless,” for example, an illegitimate progeny of “regardless” and “irrespective,” qualifies as a sniglet and is used often.  At least for me it continues to grate.  (With apologies to my Tuesday partner in crime Mr. Dean, my wife and I had a law school professor who used to scratch through "irregardless" whenever it appeared in a paper or exam and write in the margin “this is only a word in New Jersey!”)

    As noted, “sniglet” is itself a "sniglet".  The word was invented by Richard Hall, a comedian and actor in the 1960s.  Hall published several books of sniglets and also, for a time, had a newspaper column devoted to these wannabe words.  While Hall coined the word sniglet, the concept was previously more broadly encompassed by the word “neologism,” which encompasses not only a newly coined word or phrase, but also a newly offered idea or theory.  Some skips and jumps through the internet reveal that neologisms or sniglets often make their assault into accepted speech from the springboard of literature.  Science Fiction, for example, has reportedly given us the then-new words “laser,” (Light Amplification through Stimulated Emissions of Radiation) in 1960, and “robotics” in 1941.  (Thank you, Mr. Asimov).  Other then-new additions to the language that sprang from literature include “nymphet,” from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, “Orwellian,” from the themes set forth in George Orwell’s 1984.  And as descriptive nouns we have a “Scrooge,” a “Pollyanna,” someone who is “Quixotic” as well as those who are “Sadistic,” (derived from the practices of the Marquis de Sade). 

    Commenting on the need for the English language to fluidly grow, Thomas Jefferson stated the following in an 1831 letter: 

I am no friend, therefore, to what is called Purism, but a   zealous one to the Neology . . . .    The new circumstance under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An American dialect will therefore be formed; so will a West-Indian and Asiatic, as a Scotch and an Irish are already formed.

So, it is often we, the writers, who are either responsible for all of this or, at the very least, carry the ball by repeating, in dialog, that which we hear around us.  Print adds legitimacy.

    As we approach 2013 it is interesting to look at previously aspiring words and phrases that “passed their finals” and gained admittance  into the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 2012.  Newly legitimized words for 2012 include:

• Man-cave
• Sexting (Alexander Graham Bell must be rolling in his grave)
• Earworm (denoting a song you can’t get out of your head)
• Bucket List
• Energy Drink
• Aha Moment
• Game Changer
• F-Bomb (as in “Dropping the F-Bomb”)
• Gastropub
• Mash-up (Something created by combining items from two or more sources).

    Although writers can nudge the language in new directions, as the foregoing discussion and examples illustrate, there are some places that the language simply will not allow itself to go.  Thus, while Lewis Carroll is discussed prominently as a contributor of sniglets or neologisms, more often than not Carroll’s imagination proved too great for the more conservative tastes of evolving language.  No greater example of this exists than his poem Jabberwocky from Through the Looking Glass, composed almost completely of substantive words that are still aspiring to existence but never made it.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
  The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
  And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
  And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
  He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

"The Unicorn in the Garden", or God Bless You, Mr. Thurber

I freely admit that Thanksgiving is not my favorite holiday. In my household, there were only the three of us, which meant that I was outnumbered. With neither church nor company, there was little occupation for my parents other than to eat, drink, and fight. In the immortal words of Laura Ingalls Wilder, "It was a queer, blank day," and sometimes more. The turkey was good, and the stuffing superlative, but I got the same at Christmas, and we had more variety in the way of entertainment.

Robert Benchley

But we all have our escape hatches, and mine was books, for which I give grateful and ever-lasting thanks. Especially humor. When I was a child, my grandfather found a copy of "The Thurber Carnival" lying on the street and gave it to me. At the same time, someone else gave me a copy of "The Benchley Roundup" and I was hooked - and warped - for life.

Here are some of my favorite quotes, just to warm us up:

Benchley - "A freelance writer is a man who is paid per word, per piece, or perhaps."

Thurber - “You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”

James Thurber

Benchley - "Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous."

Thurber - “With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”

Benchley's work was, 99% of the time, the classic humorous essay. Thurber's work ranged far more widely, from wistful to sardonic to straight-up reporting to literary analysis. (He wrote what I consider the best essay on Henry James' writing ever - "The Wings of Henry James", in the November 7, 1959 issue of the New Yorker.) And then there are his parables. Here, for our Thanksgiving entertainment, is "The Unicorn in the Garden", the obvious predecessor of "The Catbird Seat", and in both cases, one of the neatest ways of getting rid of someone unpleasant I have ever found. Not that any of us would be interested in that...


The Unicorn in the Garden

by James Thurber
reprinted from
Fables For Our Time Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him.
"The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; now he was browsing among the tulips. "Here, unicorn," said the man, and he pulled up a lily and gave it to him. The unicorn ate it gravely. With a high heart, because there was a unicorn in his garden, the man went upstairs and roused his wife again. "The unicorn," he said,"ate a lily." His wife sat up in bed and looked at him coldly. "You are a booby," she said, "and I am going to have you put in the booby-hatch."
The man, who had never liked the words "booby" and "booby-hatch," and who liked them even less on a shining morning when there was a unicorn in the garden, thought for a moment. "We'll see about that," he said. He walked over to the door. "He has a golden horn in the middle of his forehead," he told her. Then he went back to the garden to watch the unicorn; but the unicorn had gone away. The man sat down among the roses and went to sleep.
As soon as the husband had gone out of the house, the wife got up and dressed as fast as she could. She was very excited and there was a gloat in her eye. She telephoned the police and she telephoned a psychiatrist; she told them to hurry to her house and bring a strait-jacket. When the police and the psychiatrist arrived they sat down in chairs and looked at her, with great interest.
"My husband," she said, "saw a unicorn this morning." The police looked at the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist looked at the police. "He told me it ate a lily," she said. The psychiatrist looked at the police and the police looked at the psychiatrist. "He told me it had a golden horn in the middle of its forehead," she said. At a solemn signal from the psychiatrist, the police leaped from their chairs and seized the wife. They had a hard time subduing her, for she put up a terrific struggle, but they finally subdued her. Just as they got her into the strait-jacket, the husband came back into the house.
"Did you tell your wife you saw a unicorn?" asked the police. "Of course not," said the husband. "The unicorn is a mythical beast." "That's all I wanted to know," said the psychiatrist. "Take her away. I'm sorry, sir, but your wife is as crazy as a jaybird."
So they took her away, cursing and screaming, and shut her up in an institution. The husband lived happily ever after.

Moral: Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and may all your unicorns lead to high hearts.

From the Bristol Blotter

I get to spend the weekend at the pen - I know, I need to start behaving better - so I am busy getting ready for that.  So, to prove that there are just as many crazies outside as in, (as well as to give myself a little breathing room) I submit the following.  These are all from a friend of mine in Tennessee, who provides me with "The Bristol Blotter" - available on-line and on Facebook.  All true, sadly, hilariously true:
From the "it's so hard to get off their radar" list:
* Someone called from to report “a suspicious black sports car that followed him home from Walmart [and] keeps riding by his residence.”

You have something that I want:
* A guy reported that his “baby’s momma locked him out and took the tags off his car.”

* "his girlfriend threw him out and he needs to get in and get his clothes because he has an interview tomorrow."

One man's exam is another man's...
* A man told police that another guy assaulted him “while attempting to give him medical treatment.”

Buyer's remorse takes various forms:
* Police went to a car lot where an “irate customer,” upset over his recently purchased car, threatened to run over the sales manager. Store employees said the angry customer “circled the parking lot, stopping in front of the sales manager, began revving up the engine causing excessive smoke, and lurched forward stopping short of striking the sales manager.” The manager in question was afraid that the unsatisfied customer would return “because of his explosive demeanor.”

With friends like these:
* A man reported that his “friend” of four years pulled into a nearby alley, got halfway out of the car wielding a knife and said, “I got something for you.” The man, who knew only his friend’s first name, responded: “If you want to fight, come on” and started toward his antagonist. The friend then scurried into his Oldsmobile and left.

From the "if it were only that easy department":
* When a man had his sister’s cell phone turned off “due to payment issues,” the sister got mad and threatened to vandalize his car. The sister, in turn, told officers that the brother “had been leaving threatening letters on the windshield of her vehicle.” Police told them to stop leaving one another messages.

Also known as, "You called us for WHAT?":

* Some kids were “playing baseball in the road.”

* Someone came in to report they’d lost their license plate, but weren’t sure where or when.

* "she advised she'd been drinking all day..."

* A man "found a bird in his yard and it can't fly ... wants to speak to an officer."

* A woman told police she was taking some medicine that she's been taking daily for about a month but she doesn't know why she's taking it.

And my favorite:

*Someone called to report a suspicious squirrel... 
 

Good luck with that one, officer! 

Now That Is Funny

During the first week and half of July, the temperature here in Knoxville ranged from 95 to 100 degrees. My air condition system quit at the beginning of the heat wave, and the temperature in my house climbed to over 90 degrees. All I could do was sit in front of my 20 inch fan, watch TV, and think about a subject for my post this month. I decided to comb my local and online newspapers for funny stories about the bizarre behavior of us humans.

Nudity Prohibited

A guy here in Knoxville did chores in his house and yard buck naked until he was arrested for indecent exposure. He has lived in the neighborhood for over 10 years and during that time has embarrassed his neighbors as he traipsed about his property in the nude. He rode his lawn mower naked while mowing his lawn. Although the neighbors called the sheriff’s office many times, the deputies weren’t able to catch him until a neighbor recently saw him using a chain saw to cut up the branches of a toppled tree while naked and immediately called the sheriff’s office. A deputy arrived just as the guy ran into the house and caught him before he could put on his clothes. Being arrested probably won’t stop him from practicing his constitutional right to go naked on his property.

Butt Enhancement

You all probably read this story in the NY Times. A woman in Georgia visited several cities and set up a pseudo doctor’s office in hotel rooms. Her customers were people wanting big rear ends. She would inject their buttocks with commercial silicone and use glue and cotton balls to prevent leakage. I wonder whose intelligence is the more questionable: the pseudo-doctor who thought she could get away with practicing medicine without a license, or her customers who were stupid enough to go to her for buttock enlargement? 

Hooray For The Bear

With nothing else to do, and sitting in the cool of my new air condition system on July 14 about 9 in the evening, I watched a reality show for the first and probably last time. The show was called “Stupid Daredevil Stunts.” The scene that caught my attention involved a big black bear and a bear trainer. The bear was in an enclosure in a nature reserve, and when the trainer entered the enclosure, that bear stood up on its hind legs as if to challenge him. The trainer picked up a stick and started hitting it on the head and nose. Well, sir, that bear knocked him down and started smelling and pawing him. Outside the enclosure, the trainer’s helper tried to call the bear away: “here chubby, here chubby.” 

That bear ignored him, probably because his name wasn’t “chubby.” Anyway, the trainer played dead and after a little more smelling and pawing, that bear walked away. I imagine the bear was thinking: “if I kill this fool, that other fool will call those idiots with guns, and they’ll come and kill me. They ain’t gonna listen to my self defense argument that I was just standing my ground. I just better get the hell away from here.” 

Update

As you all know, I’ve been keeping up with the case of the three men who were tried, convicted, and sentenced for the carjacking, torture, and killing of a young couple. The original trial judge, Judge P, admitted using pain pills and engaging in other criminal activities during the trials of the three men. He was replaced by Judge G, who ordered new trials without holding hearings on whether Judge P’s behavior caused any errors in the cases. The DA is appealing Judge G’s granting of new trials. Recently one of the defendants decided to take matters into his own hands. He filed a motion invoking his constitutional right to a speedy trial. 

John Hancock Signs Constitution

Like a lot of folks, I don’t think any one of the murderers should get a second chance to prove his non-innocence.

Lawyers and Writers, Oh My!

Whether they are prosecutors, defense attorneys, ambulance chasers, or out and out shysters, lawyers have become a major part of the mystery genre. Comedians have made careers from joking about lawyers, but mystery writers with a background as lawyers have been the ones laughing all the way to the bank and to the New York Times bestseller lists.

One of the first American lawyer as sleuth characters was Mr. Ephraim Tutt, created by Arthur Train in 1919. Mr. Tutt, a "wily old lawyer who supported the common man and always had a trick up his sleeve to right the law's injustices", appeared in several volumes of short stories from 1920-1945.

What's the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?

One is a slimy, bottom dwelling scum sucker. The other is a fish..

Erle Stanley Gardner practiced law for two decades before creating the most recognized name of a lawyer in literature, Perry Mason. Mason debuted in 1933 in The Case of the Velvet Claws. More than eighty novels, a series of movies in the 1930's, a radio show and the acclaimed television series, "Perry Mason" starring Raymond Burr which ran from September 1957-May 1966 followed. As the dapper lawyer whose skilled examination of cross address, Mason deduced the real culprit when the police could not and practically compelled the guilty party to confess on the witness stand. Burr became the quintessential Perry Mason and reprised the rolein a series of made-for-TV movies in the 1980's.

If you are stranded on a desert island with Adolph Hitler, Atilla the Hun and a lawyer, and you have a gun with only two bullets, what do you do?

Shoot the lawyer twice.

Scott Turow was a former assistant United States attorney before he became a successful writer. His first legal thriller published in 1987 was Presumed Innocent featuring Rozat "Rusty" Sabich accused of murdering his colleague, prosecutor Carolyn Polhemus.

D. R. Meredith worked as a legal secretary for her lawyer husband. Her first mystery concerned a body discovered beneath a large barbecue pit during a city celebration in The Sheriff and the Panhandle Murders published in 1984. Meredith writes the John Lloyd Branson mystery series from her home in the Texas panhandle, beginning with Murder by Impulse, published in 1988.

How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?

How many can you afford?

Linda Fairstein is a former prosecutor specializing in crimes against women and children and served as head of the Sex Crimes Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office from 1976-2002. Her mystery series feature Manhattan prosecutor Alexandra Cooper.

Richard North Patterson was a trial lawyer who won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his first legal thriller, The Lasko Tangent, with his character, U. S. Attorney, Christopher Paget.

What's the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead lawyer in the road?

There are skid marks in front of the dog.

William Manchee is a Dallas attorney who writes a series about a Dallas attorney, Stan Turner.

William Bernhardt is a Tulsa former attorney who writes the Ben Kincaid legal thrillers.

Southerner John Grisham is a handsome former lawyer who writes tales about (sometimes) Southern lawyers who invariably are portrayed by handsome actors with or without Southern accents. (But the stories are always accented by backgrounds of knowing the laws and how people break them and try to get away with it.)

Whether you are interested in reading about a lawyer who is out to right the injustices of the world or simply one trying to do the best job he can for his client to one who will take any case he can get just to pay the bills, the mystery world has something out there just for you. And often, one of those lawyer-types are the ones writing them. Thank God for lawyers. Without them, comedians would have to find someone else to make fun of and the readers everywhere wouldn't have half as much fun in the bookstores finding a great thriller to curl up with on the couch.

*** Many thanks to comedian Jason Love for authorized use of his great cartoons. Find him at jasonlove.com and doing a terrific standup comedy routine when he isn't writing his own brand of lawyers jokes and cartoons.