Quotes and other memories from Malice Domestic

I just returned from this year's Malice Domestic convention, where I had a lovely time celebrating my friends Marcia Talley, Donna Andrews,Gigi Pandian, and Les and Leslie Blatt, who were, respectively, the guest of honor, the lifetime achievement honoree, the toastmaster, and the co-fan guests of honor. (There also were two honorees with whom I have no personal connection. Lucy Worsley was honored as the Poirot Award recipient, and Dorothy Gilman was remembered--Malice's term for honoring a deceased mystery community member.)

While at the convention, I saw many friends, made some new ones, sat on one panel, moderated another, hosted a table at the banquet, won the Agatha Award for best short story of 2024 (for my whodunit "The Postman Always Flirts Twice," from Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy), received some other good news (for myself and for a fellow author), saw a character naming I donated to the charity auction go for $500, and listened to authors speak eloquently--and humorously--on panels. It was a great time, even if I did lose my retainer.

Here are some quotes from the panels. My apologies if I didn't get some of the wording exactly right.

"Motivation for a killer is so important. You have to set it up right away." -- Tina Kashian

Marcia Talley during guest
of honor speech

"Cozies are popular because they make people feel comfortable. Sure, people are killing each other, but they're doing it in a nice way." -- Marcia Talley

In response to a question about the best advice you ever received: "Find your community. As much as writing is a solo effort, you can't get through this alone. You need your people to help you when you get a bad review or a plot hole or ..." -- Sarah E. Burr. (Sarah didn't trail off in that last sentence, but I didn't get the end written down, hence the ellipsis.)

"A hate crime, such as a swastika painted on a synagogue, is dark, but when the whole town comes together to paint over the swastika and support the temple, that is the cozy treatment. That is how to use dark social issues in cozies." -- Kathleen Marple Kalb, who also writes as Nikki Knight

During a discussion about enjoying novels set during World War I and World War II, despite how horrific the wars were, Catriona McPherson made the following analogy: "You can be nostalgic for a time--like the lockdown--without being nostalgic about Covid. It's being nostalgic for the time spent with your family."

"Cozies are for optimistic readers. Bad things happen, but everything is right in the end. Noir is for pessimistic readers because the ending gives them what they expect from the world." -- Paula Munier

If you're interested in learning about Malice Domestic, which brings fans and authors together to celebrate the traditional mystery every April in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, click here. The website has not been updated yet for the 2026 convention, but it should be soon. I hope to see you there next year, when the honorees will be:

Guest of Honor Annette Dashofy

Lifetime Achievement Honoree Jacqueline Winspear

Toastmaster Ellen Byron

Poirot Award Honoree Jim Huang

Malice Remembers Margaret Maron

Fan Guest of Honor Billy Aguiar

Citadel of Ignorance

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Back in June 2022, I deleted my social media accounts. I shared that news right here on SleuthSayers, enumerating the resources that help nudge me to that decision: three books and two documentaries. Each of those resources were sightly different, but they all telegraphed a truth that took a while in coming, but is now taken for granted by anyone who reads: social media rots your freaking brain.

In my 2022 post, I promised to check back in the future to let you know how my cessation was going. The future is now.

The backstory: I joined Twitter in 2010, and from that point forward, I joined everything else under the sun because everyone said it was in a writer’s best interest to do so. I did Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram. For a time, my only working blog operated on Tumblr. I created accounts on sites that lasted four minutes in the life of the Internet. (Who remembers Klout?)

Remarkably, perhaps, presciently, I never created a personal account on Facebook, but don’t let me off the hook so easily there. My wife and I did create four Facebook Pages, one for each of the books or series of books we were touting at the time. Well before my breakup with social media, I deleted three of those four because I just didn’t see the point.

At the very beginning, I took the advice of a buddy, who served as the social media guru for Barnes & Noble. He said to keep the promotion of my books and work to maybe 20 percent of my feed. The rest should be a mix of writerly service to my community (“Hey, look at this cool article I found on pitching agents!”), and personal observations and interesting tidbits from my personal life (“I cooked a ham this weekend! Look!”).

Well, I did all that, and I still felt stupid, awkward, and icky doing it. Everywhere I turned, people offered advice on the right way to do social media. Some of that advice came from the idiots that ran the publicity and marketing departments at publishing houses. Their underlying message was, “Do our jobs for us, please, since our employers have never trained us to do it properly!”

Like most people who declare themselves sick of the technology, I just didn’t know where the hell I was going to get the “content” I was expected to share on these platforms. I resented that agents and editors judged me for my low numbers of followers.

I read articles that said I should strive to be as authentic as possible, and I was at a loss how to accomplish that. (“Guys, I really, really need to share how I feel about the ham I cooked.”)

I finally dropped the pretense of promoting my work, and used, say, Twitter to disseminate a series of hilarious one-liners. I was a hoot on Oscar night, not that anyone noticed or cared. I gave up talking about books unless I adored something. Instagram became fun when I decided to simply share one photo, just one, every day. If it revolved around writing or a book, so be it. It was on Insta, for example, that I announced to the world that Pat Conroy’s cookbook was the only one I’d ever read cover to cover, because I just had to know how it ended. I still mean that. Mostly, though, I shared pics of nature, food, glasses of wine shot against the backdrop of the flowers in my garden.

You might say that social media rewarded me after I stopped caring.

And then one morning, I accidentally swiped to the right of my iPhone’s home page, revealing statistics about my daily phone usage. The phone insisted that in the last 24 hours, I had spent 3 hours and 25 minutes on Instagram alone.

“Liar!” cried I.

If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that my behavior around these apps had become obsessive, and, ahem, compulsive. If I was out with my wife, I checked the phone when she left for the restroom. I scrolled while waiting in the car for stores to open. The phone helped me kill time on queues the way that paperbacks did in the 1980s. And while I still read short stories (because, methinks, they’re short), my reading of books had dropped to all-time lows. Like the journalist Johann Hari, whose book I mentioned in my earlier post, I felt as if my mind was too splintered to finish most of the books I started. The thought of reading an entire series of mystery novels by an author I enjoyed—the way I had as a kid—seemed exhausting. Why read the Slow Horses series, when I could just watch it?

What’s worse, after a series of troubling political events in 2016, I obsessively checked social media and three to four news sites every morning, to keep myself apprised of current events. During the Covid lockdowns, my ritual was to read aloud the morning headlines to my wife as we sipped coffee on the patio, then read aloud the articles she requested, until we were both too sick and terrified to continue.

Scrolling—whether for fun or doom—had become a problem.

For a while, to assert control over my life, I merely deleted the apps from my phone. Cal Newport, one of the authors of the book referenced in my earlier post, advised checking social media on your desktop, and only if you needed to for work. That worked for six months, then I began simply reloading the app to sneak peeks anyway.

By 2022, I had read and absorbed the message of the 2018 book by Jaron Lanier—the computer scientist who advised everyone to completely delete their social media accounts in their entirety. The man is a genius, and his arguments were based on a deep understanding of the underlying technology and the corporate structures of the social media firms he consulted with. I understood why he urged this action, but I still felt I had to maintain those accounts. (What if someone claimed my old account and pretended to be me?)

By 2022, I had watched and rewatched the 2020 HBO documentary The Social Dilemma, and digested Hari’s 2022 book, which opened with him escaping to an isolated beach community for a month, sans phone and laptop. He found that his brain returned, and he read copiously, joyously, promiscuously.

Intrigued, I took the plunge mid-year 2022. Deleted all my remaining accounts, as well as the News app on my phone. From that moment forward, I was on a permanent social media purge, and tentative-for-now news fast. A journalist friend scoffed at this when I ran into him at a funeral of a colleague: “News fast? News. Fast! Come on! Is that even a thing?”

He and others like him wonder aloud how I can live without knowing what’s going on in the world. To be honest, I do feel sad when I don’t know that some personage has died. The In Memoriam reel at the Oscars has been something of a shock for the last two years, sure.

But you know what? If something is so huge, it’s not like the rest of you peeps aren’t talking about it. I do still maintain a Feedly account. It’s keyed only to news of the genres I enjoy, articles on writing, and the book world at large. Inevitably, news of the outside world seeps into those articles. If I want to know more, I allow myself a peek and do a search. Just one, then I close the browser. When the hurricane hit our city in autumn 2024, I sat on the patio in the dark and listened to my hand-cranked NOAA radio for updates. Because that’s what you do.

And yes, it is a pain not to be able to announce when I have a new story in a publication, but I am trying to preserve my sanity. In the world beyond literature, I know that there are school shootings, wildfires, and reprehensible political behavior. I don’t want to (or need to) ride that daily roller-coaster anymore. I can’t. Like my nephew used to say when he was young and a classmate offered him a bite of a peanut butter sandwich, “No thank you. It’s not good for me.”

I don’t keep a reading journal, though I probably should. But I do read a lot of ebooks. There, the evidence is clear: in 2020 I read 12 ebooks, in 2024, 64 ebooks. Granted, a lot of those 2024 titles were single short stories or novellas, but the same is probably true of 2020. And there are still other paper books in both years for which there is no record.

While it’s nice to have proof that the void inside my cranium functions still, I am troubled by the most recent attack on my Citadel of Ignorance. Many writer friends have migrated to Substack, so my inbox and browser teem daily with their irresistible musings. Substack is social media, which means these folks can, within the body of their newsletters, refer you to still more articles that they found interesting by equally fascinating writers.

Anyone who is interesting (and many who aren’t) has a Substack. People I like or find compelling. Without even trying, I discovered Substacks by people such as Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Cheryl Strayed, Margaret Atwood, Michael Pollan, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Moore.

In the coming weeks or perhaps months, I will discover if I have the strength to unsubscribe from this new temptation, and leave it all behind. I’m sure that all these scribes have important things to say, but who has the time? If their words stand the test of time, they will have the good sense to put them in a book, where I will read them some day while waiting at the DMV, the way the good Lord intended.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

LCC Seattle: A Love Letter

 This year I attended my tenth Left Coast Crime conference. This in and of itself is unremarkable. Before 
COVID knocked the world off its axis I could usually be found at every year’s Left Coast Crime.

This year was different for a couple of reasons.

First off, LCC 2024 was my first conference of any kind since the advent of COVID.

Secondly, this time around I helped plan the whole thing in my capacity as one of LCC 2024’s three co-chairs.

My major endeavor was to set up the panel schedule, and populate said panels with panelists/moderators.

Here's a bird's eye view:

Sixty-four panels. Three-hundred fifty panelists (give or take). Mix and match. Rinse and repeat.

A cast of hundreds!

Not a daunting task at all.

But you know what? Working on the panels for Left Coast Seattle 2024 helped bring home to me all over again why I so very much love this conference.

It's the people.

Beginning with the members of the LCC 2024 Organizing Committee: Laurie Rockenbeck, David Schlosser, Scotti Andrews, Kate Jackson, Larry Keeton and Lesley Hall. Long-time friends and colleagues, we prepped for planning and running a LCC conference by running a number of writing events over the years as members of Mystery Writers of America's Northwest Chapter board.

Over the course of the year we spent planning this event, no task went unaddressed. No request for assistance went unanswered. Rinse and repeat thousands of times.

And then there were the volunteers. Dozens of them, especially the indomitable Theresa from Texas! Talk about a group stepping up and going above and beyond!

A quick shout-out to LCC's national board, too: Stan and Lucinda, Les and Leslie, Mike Befler, and Janet Rudolph (who was unfortunately unable to attend). There is a lot of institutional here, and boy, did they pit it to good use!

And let's not forget our Guests of Honor (Robert Dugoni and Megan Abbott), Fan Guest of Honor (the Indomitable Fran Fuller), and our hard-working Toastmaster Wanda M. Morris (whose dance party was the hit of the conference!). You all showed up, shared with us, laughed with us, and make this conference such a wonderful experience for so many!

Toastmaster Extraordinaire Wanda Morris!

Circling back to the panels for a moment:

I didn't have a single interaction with a potential panelist or moderator that was anything other than pleasant. Questions proved both probing and insightful, and the conference went so much better for the input of the folks on the panels. Is it any surprise that the con went off so well and a good time was had by all, in light of the splendid contributions of these authors/editors/aspiring writers and fans? If you attended even a single panel, I think you know what I'm talking about.

We had around 550 attendees-so many old friends, and so many new faces to get to know! All in all, just a great, fun experience.

Just as we have come to expect from Left Coast Crime!

More in two weeks!

Pure Luck!

A few weeks ago, I got talking to my gal pal and colleague Sydney about the good or bad luck we writers can have during our careers, and I said, "Oooh, that would make a great topic for SleuthSayers!  Why don't you write it?"  Bless her, she did!  I really enjoyed her take and hope you do too.

Pure Luck!

by Sydney Leigh

With the recent passing of St. Patrick's Day, I've been thinking about the idea of luck.  The term 'luck of the Irish' has its roots in the late 19th century during the gold rush in America.  Several Irish miners made their fortunes and the expression was born.

But the concept of luck is not strictly for the Emerald Isle.  In fact, it seems to span across the globe, from a range of places and cultures.  There are all sorts of different objects and rituals that are believed to bring luck.

Today, one of the most obvious places it can be seen is in sports.  From community league hockey to major league baseball, there are all sorts of rituals that athletes seem to subscribe to.  Superstitions abound and can often explain seemingly inexplicable behaviour.  For example, have you ever noticed a pitcher tap his leg twice before throwing a ball, or a big hitter refusing to shave a beard or wash a uniform?  This can often be explained by the player's belief that the behaviour will result in a win.  We are talking about elite sports players who are making millions of dollars!

Within the publishing world, luck often plays a role.  Bad luck comes in waves, such as the shutting down of small presses, which leaves authors scrambling and without a home.  Agents and editors leaving the business can also be a big blow to authors.

When good luck prevails, it can be a tremendous help.  I was introduced to my dream agent at a time she was looking for something light, making me feel like I'd struck gold.  Other authors have found luck when putting themselves out there.  Desmond P. Ryan, author of A Pint of Trouble Mystery and The Mike O'Shea Series, explains his good fortune:

I keep meeting people who end up being instrumental in my career.  And, without meeting one of those people, I wouldn't have met the next.  They are THAT clearly linked, including how I met my agent and signed two book contracts back to back.

Award-winning author, Melodie Campbell, who has over 200 publications, tells us how luck can also play a role in spreading the word about your book.

In my writing career, nothing makes me smile more than this bit of luck that took place prior to Covid.  I was on the speaker circuit and agreed to do a presentation on the History of Humour (and how we write it) for a large retired teachers association in the metro Toronto area.  About 200 people were in attendance, and the talk went very well, but sales of my books were, alas, not as robust as usual.  Teachers, apparently, use libraries!   I perked up when a few days later I got a call from The Toronto Sun, asking to interview me.  Apparently, one of the attendees from the talk had a niece who worked as a reporter for The Sun, and was full of praise for my comedy.  The Toronto Sun article came out, and it was a full-page doozy.  They called me Canada's "Queen of Comedy," something I've been grateful for ever since, and not just for the quote.  To wit: a producer from Sirius XM saw the article, contacted me, and I've been on radio with them more than a few times.  It continues:  the alumni magazine at Queen's University is writing a feature article on me for the spring issue.  To this day, I marvel at the luck I had from doing a speaker event that was initially disappointing, but turned into the biggest networking experience of my life.  Needless to say, my publishers have loved all this exposure!  Moral:  don't turn down any invitations, as you never know who might be in the audience.

When luck is on your side, it can make a difference.  Is it possible to turn bad luck into good?  Hard to say.  But given persistence and a willingness to keep putting yourself in a vulnerable position will hopefully pay off eventually.  For some it comes faster and easier than others.  And with that, I wish you all good luck in the coming year.

Are there any rituals that you would like to share that bring you luck?  Or do you dismiss the idea all together?

Sydney Leigh spent several years running a seasonal business, working in the summer so she could spend cold months in cool places.  Now she writes cozies and thinks about murder.  She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and served on the board of Crime Writers of Canada from 2018-2021.  Peril in Pink, the first book in the Hudson Valley B&B Mystery Series came out in March 2024 from Crooked Lane Books.  You can find her at http://www.sydneyleighbooks.com

 

 

MURDER, NEAT, or The Twenty-four Bar Blues

    

    Murder, Neat came out on February 13, and I'm thrilled to be included with so many of my talented friends, twenty-three of them, to be exact. All twenty-four stories involve a person in a bar, and I've been invited to tell you a little about mine. 

    I didn't start playing guitar at open mics until my mid-sixties, but before the pandemic shut things down, I played at five venues regularly, two of them monthly and the others either weekly or bi-weekly. Obviously, my playing improved considerably. So did my understanding of audience dynamics.

    One monthly venue was kid-friendly church with a large and appreciative audience. I saw several teens get their first taste, and some of them were already terrific. The other monthly venue was a Kinghts of Columbus, a small building with a bar, but only six stools and as many tables. It wasn't a large enough crowd to get rowdy, and the manager liked having the musicians play, so we didn't have to deal with hecklers.

    My favorite weekly gig is a pizza joint that serves only wine and beer and has regained its pre-Covid vibe. It features some killer musicians, including a sax player and a woman who plays both keyboards and cello. We even have a banjo player and a dulcimer player occasionally, and the place hosts Connecticut Blues Society jams.

    Both other weekly gigs were in bars, my least favorites, but the most conducive to a crime or mystery story. Alcohol lowers inhibitions and restraint, so there's more potential for someone to make a bad choice. Because the space tends to be louder, so is the music. If you go in to play acoustic folk or blues, people may not listen to you. Or, they may not be able to hear over the general voice (and TV sports?) level. Bar bands lean toward country or classic rock, like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tom Petty, or Elvis. The instruments include solid-body guitars and maybe a bass and drums. By its very nature, the music is more aggressive, maybe because of the volume, or maybe the songs themselves. The Doors and AC/DC have a subtext that's different from, say, Peter, Paul, and Mary.

    That's where my story comes from. A local band covering rock songs in a bar with bargain beer on tap is a cauldron for bad impulses and worse choices. And if a pretty woman shows up dressed in a whole lot of not much, the good ol' boys will turn into bad ol' boys. If that pretty woman knows what she's doing, things can go to hell in a hurry. And there you are. Or there I was. Rob and Leigh announced the theme of the Murder, Neat collection--someone walks into a bar--and it could lead into either noir or a bad joke. I thought both at once, so we start with a woman snappin' her fingers and a-shufflin' her feet, dressed to thrill, and with jokes and puns about drinking or music.

    My opening line popped into my head almost immediately. That seldom happens, so I thought it was a good omen. Many of my story titles are also song titles, and when the opening scene materialized, I heard the Searches singing my title, too. The song even mentions guitars, so I just let the beat carry me on to the big finish.

    I hope you like it, from the orange slice on top to the cherry at the bottom. Do you remember that 12-string guitar riff that kicks it off?

    "When You Walk in the Room." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAvvsxu-JJ8

Stealing From The Best

 I hope you aren't sick of hearing about Murder, Neat, because here we go again. I am thrilled to teeny little sub-atomic bits to have a story in the SleuthSayers anthology.  

In "Shanks's Sunbeam," Leopold Longshanks has lunch in a tavern with a fellow mystery writer who tells him that a mutual acquaintance has been accused of Doing a Bad Thing.  It is probably not a spoiler to tell you our hero saves the day.

But what I want to talk about is the name of that lunch companion: Procter Ade.  I made up the first name but the last is a homage to my inspiration.

I have written here before about George Ade.  Early in the last century he was a midwestern humorist and journalist.  He is mostly remembered for his Fables in Slang.  These were a series of short stories he wrote which satirized human nature and social mores.  Since he wanted people to know that he knew slang didn't belong in a newspaper he capitalized all the guilty words and unusual uses (Much as I did above with "Bad Thing")

.  Here are three of his opening sallies:

"One Autumn Afternoon a gray-haired Agriculturalist took his youngest Olive Branch by the Hand and led him away to a Varsity."

"Once there was a home-like Beanery where one could tell the Day of the Week by what was on the Table."

"Once there was a Financial Heavy-Weight, the Mile-Stones of whose busy life were strung back across the Valley of Tribulation into the Green Fields of Childhood."

And since the stories were fables they all ended with morals:

"In uplifting, get underneath."

"A good Jolly is worth Whatever you pay for it."

"Give the People what they Think they want."

Dublin

Not too long ago I was thinking about one of my favorite Fables and I realized I could steal a plot device from it.  The result is "Shanks's Sunbeam."  If you would like to read my inspiration you can find it here. But I urge you to read my story first.  I'd rather spoil Ade's story than mine.

By the way, "Sunbeam" also involves memories of my pre-Covid trip to Ireland.  I'm sure that makes future visits tax deductible, right?

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of Murder, Neat.

Hitchcock and Sherlock

  

Like many of our readers here at SleuthSayers, I love short stories. I love reading them and writing them, and I've been doing both for a long time. Writing shorts, for me, started thirty years ago--I submitted my first stories in late 1993--and even then I leaned toward mystery/crime stories. I also wrote some westerns, science fiction, etc.--and still do--but I especially like mysteries. 

I won't get into a lot of things about markets and marketing, but I will mention that two of my stories have appeared in the past few weeks in two of my favorite mystery publications: Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. AHMM, as most of you know, has been around since the 1950s and publishes once every two months, and SHMM started out maybe a dozen years ago and publishes irregularly--but both have been good to me and both have editors I like and admire. 

My story in AHMM (Nov/Dec 2023 issue) is "The Zeller Files," and is different in a couple of ways from what I usually write. This story is a mix of two genres--crime and science fiction. It's about a guy named Eddie Zeller, who once survived an alien abduction and was told by his captors that they would return for him someday. When he and his wife Lisa discover that another couple supposedly kidnapped in the past by these same otherworldly beings have recently moved to the town where the Zellers live, Eddie fears that these alien forces might be gathering all the onetime abductees together so they can again be taken, in one swoop--and maybe this time for more than just observation and release. There is also a crime involved, and there's a fair amount of the chasing and zapping and paranoia that you usually find in an X-Files kind of story.

The second difference about this particular tale is that it's one of only a few stories I've sold that were set during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the characters wearing masks and avoiding crowds and dealing with a whole different kind of paranoia. I think both these oddities made the story more fun to write, and--who knows?--might've been what appealed to the editor. At any rate, I was grateful but surprised when AHMM bought it.

The other story is "The Three Little Biggs," in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine (Issue #32). Its a little different also, from my usual, but it's on the other end of the spectrum from the AHMM story. "The Zeller Files" is longish (5600 words), it's more SF than mystery, it's sort of intense, it's set in the (recent) past, it has only a few characters, and it's a standalone story. "Biggs" is short (900 words), it's a whodunit, it's lighthearted, it's present-day, it has a lot of characters, and it's a series story. In fact it's the umpteenth installment of what I long ago started calling my "Law and Daughter" mysteries, featuring small-town sheriff Lucy Valentine and her bossy mother Frances. 

In this story, Lucy and Fran investigate the strange death of wealthy rancher Elijah Biggs, whose three weird offspring have gathered at the ranch to celebrate his birthday and found his dead body instead. There's a lot of inheritance-squabbling between the siblings in this story (I told a friend last week that it's a bad-heir-day mystery), and if you read it I hope you'll find that the solution fits Aristotle's famous description of endings that are "both unexpected and inevitable."

Quick questions. Everyone reading this probably knows about AHMM, but are all of you familiar with Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine? (It's a publication of Wildside Press and the editor is Carla Coupe.) Have any of you submitted stories to them, or been published there? If so, have you found them easy to work with? Please let me know in the comments. I really like the magazine, I've had a number of stories published there over the years, and I hope it'll be around for many more.

How could anyone resist two magazines with those names in their titles?

Coming attraction: In two weeks my friend Josh Pachter will be here to tell you about his--and several of our--experiences with a new short-fiction market called Storia.

See you then.

Grift, Misinformation and the Long Arm of the Law

We often hear about the long arm of the law, suggesting that the justice system has far-reaching power. There is one place that the justice system doesn’t appear to be reaching: grifters who put people’s lives at risk.

These ‘influencers’ spread misinformation about snake oil cures for everything from diabetes to cancer. People die. No one pays the price. 


So, we’re learning that lying and killing people with lies isn’t a punishable crime. 

Mystery readers like myself have an innate need for justice to done. We want the arm of the law to be long enough to reach those who harm people, particularly if they kill them.

We’ve seen the rise of anti-vaccine misinformation reach so far into people’s psyche that not only are they eschewing COVID vaccines but also all vaccines - children are now dying of vaccine preventable disease like measles. For goodness sake, the news recently cited pet owners who are refusing vaccines, including rabies, for their pets because of autism fears.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has focused on the educational aspects and points out that, using various methods, 850,000 YouTube videos with harmful or misleading COVID-19 misinformation videos have been removed. However, this is a drop in an ever filling bucket. 

The WHO has joined various organizations asking for legal polices to stop misinformation but stop at outlining these policies - because it’s complicated. 

Legislators in various countries have made many attempts to rein in dangerous misinformation through regulation of tech giants. There have been suggestions of legal interventions that, “criminalize the dissemination of medical fake news”  The latter is so fraught with definitional problems that it’s not a good option, but certainly speaks to the increasing concern about putting people’s lives at risk.

So indulge me while I spitball some legal ideas with no legal training at all but with a strong sense of ‘what the heck can we do’? 

What if we start very small? What if there were some cases where people were harmed and they then sue? A few of those might make a dent in the growing rise of grifters. Nothing like fear and case law to stop wrong doing. 

Here’s a sample grift and my fantasy. The grift is real, you can find it here.

Now, this may seem like a small problem compared to many other forms of misinformation and certainly, the reach of this is much smaller. But starting small makes it easier.

This woman claims to cure eyesight, so what if someone was ‘cured’ and then got into an accident driving? What if they sued her for damages? 

One small victory against grift might start a snowball effect. It’s a simple grift - eyesight cure - and a simple test - either eyesight is better or it’s not. I’m a fan of starting simple. 

It also is the extension of existing laws protecting people. If a doctor gives medical advice or therapy in the form of pills etc. and a patent is harmed, that doctor not only risks the loss of their medical license, but also jail time. So why not extend this to all medical therapies? 

While I’m spitballing and fantasizing, here’s another one: drugs for every disease need to follow rigorous testing guidelines. What is stopping legislators from demanding this from all ‘cures’ for all diseases? Then the grifters could be held legally liable for damages or even sued for putting their ‘cures’ in the public domain. This simple levelling of the playing field for all cures is fair, understandable by the public and simply extends existing laws around medical interventions. legal and regulatory measures.

I know this seems simple – nay, simplistic – but there may be a place for simple, clear solutions that start small, alongside looking at large scale changes to social media content. There is less support for stopping misinformation when it is an abstract concept and just the word ‘information’ gives an opening for demands for freedom of speech. To be clear, medical intervention is not covered under free speech protection, nor are drug manufactures able to claim free speech regarding the claims they make for their drugs. This also fits a justice model we are familiar with: if someone causes harm or death to another by any means, they are criminally responsible. This is one small way that the long arm of the law can extend its reach. 

The Mystic Chords of (Literary) Memory

Guy Pearce having a completely unmemorable day

 Two things straight from the jump:

First, I have been blessed from birth with an excellent memory.

Second, as a rule, I dislike, unreliable narrators.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that unreliable narrators have their place in literature in film and in art. Look no further than Guy Pearce’s character in Christopher Nolan’s superb Memento. 

That said, it is easy to get the unreliable narrator wrong. No examples of that here, because the point of this piece is not to call out other writers.

Instead, I’m gonna talk about how unreliable memory can be from personal experience, discuss my attempts to document, same, and end with a few recommendations of work by authors, who do seem to get the unreliable, or “memory-challenged” narrator right.

First off, my own experience with memory.

I'm a trained historian. Names and dates are my jam, as are long, detailed event sequences. More than that, I have a sharp memory for sound, especially conversation. If I hear it, I can usually recall it very clearly.

I'm also fifty-eight years old, had COVID fog that took forever to shake not too long ago (a couple of years ago), and am finding myself reaching for words in ways I never really experienced before the past couple of years. On top of that, I have at least three family members in recent generations who suffered from dementia in their golden years. Two of them had scar tissue from brain surgery and the third had other potential outside causes for their dementia. Still makes me wonder and makes me nervous, usually at the same time.

Having a close-up view of family members losing their memories is as good a reason as any for my personal distaste for unreliable narrators with memory problems. Sort of a "there but for the grace of God go I" sort of thing, I guess.

But there's also the fact that the unreliable narrator can be misused to bail a lesser-skilled author out of the requirement that they "play fair with the reader." Again, no names, but I have also read many examples of just this sort of lazy writing.

And even when it's effectively rendered, it can still come across as manipulative in the extreme. Don't get me wrong. I am all for moving the reader. That is the writer's job. "Moving" a reader and "manipulating" them are hardly the same thing. I am aware there might be those who may disagree with this conclusion. I invite them to write their own blog post and expound upon their point of view there (or drop a friendly disagreement into the comment section below!).

Which is not to say that I don't recognize a successful attempt to pull off the unreliable narrator when it's done well. (Again, see Memnto above). In addition to Nolan's movie, I've got three pretty well-done examples for those who might interested in exploring this sort of subgenre of the mystery/thriller world. Two of them I've read myself, one highly recommended by the mighty Jim Thomsen, editor extraordinaire, and his recommendation is good enough for me.

So here they are: one well-known, the other critically acclaimed, and the third, as I said above, new to me:

1. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane 

I'm pretty sure that once I brought up the notion of an "unreliable narrator," many of you immediately thought of this best-selling novel from a best-selling author, and the successful movie it spawned, starring the highly skilled Leonardo DiCaprio. I don't want to say too much for those of you who haven't read it, but suffice to say that I found this a terrific and inventive use of the unreliable narrator (who I really liked.).

Oh, and if you want to see what happens when Christopher Nolan and Leonardo DiCaprio team up to play around with memory, I highly recommend the wonderful Inception.

2. In the Woods by Tana French 

This one won a ton of well-deserved awards (The Edgar, Barry, Macavity and the Anthony, all for Best First Novel) when it was published in 2008. From the outset, French plays fair with the reader. On the very first page she sums up the point of view of the narrator, Dublin police detective Rob Ryan thusly: 

"What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this—two thing: I crave truth. And I lie."

What follows is a dizzying descent into hell in one of the best psychological novels ever published. Powerful, well-executed, and utterly believable.

And while I admire the work and how French pulled it all off, I can't honestly say that I liked the novel. I sure didn't like the narrator (I hesitate to call him the "protagonist," for reasons I won't go into because I do not want to spoil the story for those who have not read it). I also wouldn't say I enjoyed reading the book. I felt moved and I felt it affected me. For some people that's enough. 

But saying that the book "stuck with you" is not the same thing as saying you liked the book/enjoyed reading it. And all I can admit is that it stuck with me.

3. Oblivion by Peter Abrahams 

This is the book Jim Thomsen recommended, and not having read it, I can't say much about it except that the memory component of it kicks in when the POV character (private investigator Nick Petrov) suffers a brain hemorrhage arising from a tumor. Shenanigans ensue. If Jim says it's good, that's enough for me. It's going on my TBR list and I'll likely report back once I've finished it.

And on that note, it's time to wrap things up here. Thanks for reading, let us know what you think in the comments, and if you have recommendations/reactions to the opinions I've staked out above, would love to see that sort of thing in the comments as well.

Hope you're enjoying your summer, and as always....

See you in two weeks!

Never Too Old

My birthday is February 28th, the end of our shortest month. I was born way back in the 1900s. I don't intend to tell you the exact year but it was after the Great Depression. What I will tell you is after having published over thirty-five short stories, three novels, co-editing two anthologies and co-editing two non-fiction books. After nominations for several mystery awards and winning a couple, I now have a new publishing credit. I've co-authored a song. 

 

My good friend, john Arthur martinez, singer/ songwriter/ guitar player/ musician/ producer and I wrote and published a song titled "The Phone Call." 

 

It's now out on his fifteenth CD, titled Three White Spanish Horses, yes 15th. This on the heels of number 14, For The Love of Western Swing which was awarded Western Swing Song of the Year in 2020, by The Academy of Western Artists. He also performs the song and if I'm in attendance at his gig,  gives me recognition as his co- writer. Which is nice.

I first became aware of john Arthur (and yes, he usually doesn't capitalize his first or last name) in 2003 when he was a contestant on Nashville Star, an American Idol-styled country artist television show, set in, you guessed correctly, Nashville TN. My husband, Elmer and I visited our daughter and family in Nashville and Karla asked if we had watched this television show. I said, "no." So happened it was playing and she turned on the TV while telling us about this young man from the Texas Hill Country. Actually, he'd said he was from Marble Falls. We were living in our RV and camphosting at a State Park twenty miles away. After we got back home, we continued watching the show and voted each week for john. He came in 2nd on the show, beating out 3rd place, who was a 19-year old Texas girl named Miranda Lambert. You may have heard of her because she is the one who became and still is really FAMOUS.

Flash forward to 2007, I was newly-widowed, had gone thru a mastectomy, 4 months of chemo, to insure against re-occurance, which worked because I am still cancer free after 17 years. I was still in my RV but was 10 miles closer to Marble Falls. A mystery writer friend, Russ Hall who  Elmer & I knew from our bookstore days,  knew of my Elmer's passing, knew of my cancer & chemo. He also knew I had recently fallen smashing my right humerus, which needed surgery, and that I was looking for ways to keep busy. 

 

Russ had encouraged me for a couple of months to go a local restaurant, he often attended, which featured local singer/songwriters. One, john Arthur, from the aforementioned television show, was gigging on Thursday nights, and the other Mike Blakely, also a western/historicalnovelist, sang on Tuesday nights. I had met Mike  several years before when he and I were on a writer's panel one night at Austin Community College.  We both had been invited, along three other writers of different genres to talk to a creative writing class. Plus when Elmer and I owned Mysteries & More bookstore in Austin, we had carried some of Mike's books.

I began attending both music nights at River City Grille and over time became fairly good friends with both Mike and john Arthur.  They each had previously been offered a record contract in Nashville but each had decided on their own to go the outlaw way of previous Texas outlaw singers, like Merle, Waylon and Willie. That meant some leaner times but they are free to write, sing and record their own work at their own pace. They were friends who wrote songs together and harmonized on each other's CDs. 

In 2011, I moved into a house in Cottonwood Shores and realized JAM lived five streets over and almost directly behind my house. I banked where one of  john's sisters is Vice-President, and where his mom also works. His wife, Yvonna, is my hair stylist. She  is one of my BFFs and the Martinezs are my Hill Country family.

For several years, JAM & I have talked about writing songs together, but it seemed as though the time was never right. He gigs in Central Texas locations, several afternoons or evenings each week, sometimes traveling to Fort Worth, Waco, or Austin. He also sings in New England, Florida, Montana, California or Arizona each year. Once a year he toured France, Germany, Austria & Switzerland until Covid shut down travel. European tours in 2020, 2021 & 2022 were cancelled. During that time, he upgraded his home studio becoming a producer for several central Texas artists. It also gave him more time for writing songs so we got serious about writing together. 

One song idea I had was about a person you loved who could sense your mood or thoughts. Sort of like a mindmeld.  JAM's creative brain sent him to remember a long ago friend who kept him on the phone one long night when he needed reassurance about his music. We chatted or texted & he wrote the music, then we had to rearrange or change some words to fit the rhythm or to make the words rhyme. 

"The Phone Call" is that song and just out on john's latest CD, titled Three White Spanish Horses  available now on his website; johnArthurmartinez.net.  Or you can buy the song for 99 cents here.

Getting the Best of It

This is my fourteenth annual list of the best short mysteries of the year.  It is selected from my best-of-the-week choices at Little Big Crimes.  If  you cite this list please refer to it as "Robert Lopresti’s ‘Best of the Year’ list at SleuthSayers,” or words to that effect, not as the SleuthSayers' 'Best of the Year' list. Hard as it is to believe, some of the other twenty-odd bloggers here may have opinions of their own. 

Fifteen stories made the list this year, one fewer than 2021.  Nine are by men, six by women.  Two are by fellow SleuthSayers. Six authors have appeared here before.  

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine provided three stories.  Akashic Press, Ellery Queen's Mystery magazine, and the Mystery Writers of America anthology each had two.

Six of the stories are historicals, three have fantasy elements, and two are funny.  Okay, enough number-crunching.  Let's start tearing open envelopes.

 

Barnsley, Pam. "Street Versus the Stalker,"  in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine,   November/December 2022. 

Gina is an inner-city teacher and a genuinely nice person, the kind who makes friends easily with people you and I might cross the street to avoid.  When some of these folks notice a van following her in a suspicious manner they react, much like antibodies to an infection.  But they are busy and not the best organized crowd, so it is not certain whether the good guys will win...

Bethea, Jesse. "The Peculiar Affliction of Allison White," in Chilling Crime Short Stories, Flame Tree Publishing, 2022.

I have a story in this book.

It is the late nineteenth century in rural New England. A young girl claims her illness is being caused by vampires.  The irrational villagers believe her bizarre story and are digging up the graves of the supposed monsters.  If her uncle the doctor can't stop this madness corpses are not the only ones who will be harmed.  

Braithwaite, Oyinkan, "Jumping Ship,"  in The Perfect Crime, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Harper Collins, 2022.

Ida is a photographer, specializing in baby pictures.  Her boyfriend wants her to take photos of his new baby.  Only catch is, it will be at his house and his wife will be there.  She doesn't know Ida is sleeping with hubby.  What could possibly go wrong?  Very creepy story.

Breen, Susan. "Banana Island," in Mystery Writers of America Presents: Crime Hits Home,  edited by S.J. Rozan, Hanover Square Press, 2022.

Marly is a scam-baiter for the IRS, engaging with scam artists, ideally to catch them, but at least to keep them busy so they are not robbing the gullible.  She has been engaging with a Nigerian, but can't convince him to ask for money.  To raise the stakes she tells him about the situation her family is facing, a real estate mess that has entangled her family.  Who exactly are the good guys? Twisty tale.

Breen, Susan.  "Detective Anne Boleyn,"  Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine,  May/June 2022.

You will notice Breen has  two stories in my best-of-the-year list this time.  Only Brendan DuBois and Jeffery Deaver have managed that before.

An American tourist named Kit is poisoned to death in the Tower of London.  Before she can get used to being dead Anne Boleyn arrives.  The queen  comes across as a tragic figure, very sharp except for her blind love for that nasty husband of hers.  The two wronged women manage to help each other out in surprising ways..

Haynes, Dana "Storm Warning,"  in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2022. 

 

This is Haynes' second appearance on my list.  Jordan  is a wealth Texas oilman.  The insurance company is sending an expert to examine his collection of rare paintings.

The inspector's assistant is a beautiful blond woman who looks a lot like Jordan's wife Lizette did when she first met her husband.  This does not make Lizette happy.  Then a tornado warning forces the characters to retreat to the storm-proof basement.  Did I mention that Jordan keeps his firearms collection down there?     

Hockensmith, Steve. "The Book of Eve (The First Mystery)," Death of a Bad Neighbour: Revenge is Criminal, edited by Jack Calverley, Logic of Dreams, 2022.

I have a story in this book.  This is the second appearance in this column by my friend and fellow SleuthSayer Steve Hockensmith.

Abel has gone missing and his mother Eve is looking for him. The role of Watson is filled by a certain snake.   Much of the pleasure here is in the way it's told, the language of the characters. A very funny story that manages to be surprisingly moving as well.

Latragna, Christopher, "The People All Said Beware,"  in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2022.

It's St. Louis, MO, in 1955.  Henry is a professional gambler who works mostly on a steamboat called the Duchess.  One day he learns that the ship will be off-limits on Saturday due, according to rumor, to a mob wedding. Henry thinks it odd that the management of the ship would close down on the busiest day of the week, so he begins to investigate. Like a classic John LeCarre tale, or a set of matryoshka dolls, each secret exposed only reveals another secret, right up to the end. 

McCormick, William  Burton. "Locked-In,"  in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine,  January/February 2022.

This is the fourth time McCormick has made my best of the year column.  That ties him at the top with David Dean and Janice Law. McCormick and I sometimes critique each others work before it gets submitted for publication. I saw a version of this story back in 2019. 

It's 1943.  An insurance man named Jeff has just rented a house in a new city. He accidentally locks himself in the cellar.  Now he  has to attract the attention of a passer-by who happens to near his lonely alley.  But the person he attracts is not interested in rescuing anybody...

McLoughlin, Tim, "Amnesty Box,"  in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Akashic Press, 2022.

The publisher sent me a copy of this book.

The protagonist is a postal service police officer in New York City. To speed up the occasional metal detector check they must run on post office customers he invents the Amnesty Box.  Customers can drop into this cardboard box anything they know they shouldn't be taking through the metal detector.  The catch is they won't get the dumped items back.  "Even on a slow day we would collect a couple small bags of weed and a few knives." A harmless-enough trick until something much more dangerous is dumped in the box... 

Jonathan Stone, "The Relentless Flow of the Amazon,"  in Mystery Writers of America Presents: Crime Hits Home,  edited by S.J. Rozan, Hanover Square Press, 2022.

It is the beginning of the great lockdown, "the time of boxes.  Everything delivered." Annie and Tom,  new to their suburban neighborhood, are getting tons of boxes which they leave in their garage to give the virus time to wander off.

One day they get an Amazon box they are not expecting.  It contains two plastic but clearly real guns...

Subramanian, Mathangi  "On Grasmere Lake,"  in Denver Noir, edited by Cynthia Swanson, Akashic Press, 2022.

The publisher sent me a copy of this book.

Nithi is a young woman who lives with her mother and her father, the brutally abusive Jason.  But now Jason is dead and Nithi feels guilt about that, and about other things as well.  The situation looks very bad but then it takes a delightfully  unexpected twist.  

 

Vincent, Bev. "Cold Case,"  in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Issue 12, 2022.

Roger lives in Texas.  One frosty morning he finds a dead man sitting on his porch. When the police arrive he refuses to let them into the house, due to COVID fears, which does not endear him to the shivering constabulatory.  Roger is retired but not scared of technology, which he uses intensively in his unofficial investigation.  Very witty story.

Joseph S. Walker, "More Than Suspicion,"  in A Hint of Hitchcock, edited by Cameron Trost, Black Beacon Books, 2022.

Walker also made my best-of-the-year list last year. 

A small town in Colorado,  just after Pearl Harbor. Hannah is the projectionist in the town's movie theatre. Supply chain issues leave her running Hitchcock's classic movie Suspicion over and over.  Darlene, new in town, comes to see it almost every night. 

Darlene hates the film's ending, in which the husband turns out to be innocent and the wife merely imaging the danger she is in.  "The end is the only part that's a lie.  A pretty lie, but still.  He kills her.  Of course he kills her."  Darlene has a secret.  Hannah, it turns out, has one of her own. 

Zelvin, Elizabeth, "The Cost of Something Priceless,"  in Jewish Noir II, edited by Kenneth Wishnia and Chantelle Aimee Osman, PM Press, 2022.

This is the second appearance here by my fellow SleuthSayer. Zelvin has written other novels and stories about the Mendozas, a fictional family of Sephardic Jews, some of whom sailed with Columbus. This story begins with a letter from a modern Mendoza bequeathing to her granddaughter the family's most precious treasures: a necklace and the documents proving it belongs to them.

Intertwined with this tale is the third-person story of how Rachel Mendoza really acquired the necklace half a millennium ago.  Let's say that both women found their way through considerable difficulties.