AI Slop Slop Slop

Doing research so you don't have to, I've been taking a look at some of the AI Slop that's out there, and… it's worse than you think. And they're charging out the whazoo for it.

For example, on Facebook - FACEBOOK (!) - there's a series of "alpha werewolf shapeshifters romances". Tropes: Heroine - special, graced, chosen, white werewolf. An emotional / brutal betrayal and/or sexual excerpt. Then

"Click to read this spicy bestseller."

And if you click, and I highly recommend that you don't, basically it's the story of a pack of misogynistic alpha werewolves who proceed to reject, lock up, beat up, torture, throw out, kidnap back, etc. the heroine until she finally escapes and is found by someone who recognizes she's the future hope of the world (although she's never told that because plot reasons): and then it all starts over again, because...  The exact same plot, same dialog, same everything... only the alpha's name changes. And this same chapter, same story, shows up under at least a dozen different hosts, so many, that it's almost impossible to block all of them, though I am getting close.  Also, they charge by the chapter. WHAT a waste of money.

This is AI slop at its least fine, tarted up with… well, not tarted up at all.

This same marketing formula for human alpha romance novels is spreading all over Facebook too, whether "Blood Mafia" or "Billionaire Bosses" or "Dominant Dukes", etc. Think Harlequin or Mills & Boon, etc. but more graphic (and I'm not talking comics).    

Now it is true that romance novels have always leaned towards the alpha male.  Go look on Kindle, which provides cover illustrations - classic Shirtless Silks & Satins cover (often with a hint - or more than a hint of B&D).  There you can see alpha dukes (why are they always dukes? There have never been that many dukes in the history of England!), or Scottish lairds (extremely popular right now, probably because of Outlander), the (hellion / orphan / widow / heiress) he weds (or not) because (insert trope here), their fraught relationship until… 

"Click to read this spicy bestseller".

BTW, how long have millionaire / billionaire cowboys been trending?   

And on Kindle, of course, there's many the author who (?) posts a new book every week, if not more, more than any human being could ever write in that short a time. Romance, Westerns, Mysteries, Thrillers, Spies, Sci-Fi...

And it's all AI Slop.

Now, it's not slop because it has a formula. We all know there's a formula. Murder mysteries have to have a murder, clues, and someone has to solve the damn thing. Romance has to have a couple who meet, and then it's either friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, or instant love & a villain's getting in their way. Thrillers have constant suspense, twists and turns, and (generally) a villain who always manages to get away with everything until the very last minute. Etc.

No, it's not that it has a formula, the giveaway is that it has the SAME DAMN FORMULA in every single book: often the same stilted dialogue, and so many typos and irrational, unnecessary jumps in time/space - all mixed together as if there's an AI blender whirring our brains to mush, and all ignored as if they hadn't happened.

Thank God for delete buttons.

More satisfying than reading the damn stuff.

And before you think it's all the sex that gets me angry - I love a good smutty book.  I have quite a few.* And I think more of today's young men should read them,  because they might learn a few tricks.  

*If you'd like my list of hot authors, send a message via Velda either at the bar on the corner or in the dark alley behind it, and I'll get back to you. 

No, it's not the sex, what I HATE is misogyny & sexual assault & rape passed off as "spicy".  It's not. Not in my world. 

And there's a lot of it in AI slop, which makes we wonder if the algorithm used to produce it is from the Tate Bros, or Mad Men, or any other current alpha male influencer, especially those who are apparently promoting pheromone maxxing.  No showers, no brushing teeth, no wiping?  Dudes, you're never gonna get a date.  Except with your alpha male influencer, and he charges money.

Anyway, back in the early 1970s I read and enjoyed, God forgive me, Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough, a satirical novel about the NFL which was full of raunch, n-words, racism, sex, drugs, and some stories that were damn funny. Twenty years later, I threw it on the give away pile and got rid of it. I literally hadn't noticed before how misogynistic and racist the book is. As an incredibly accurate review from Goodreads says:

"Shake Tiller and Billy Clyde Puckett - and Shake’s girlfriend, Barbara Jane Bookman. Barb is the daughter of the richest man back in Fort Worth, Texas. She's described – by both guys – as almost perfect, sexy, beautiful, flawless body, smart, and always knows how to be “one of the guys”. Barb, the ultimate fantasy girlfriend, who never sleeps with anyone but Shake, but is always cool with everything the boys do, whether getting blow-jobs in a bathtub by a hired hooker or drinking themselves silly or spending the pre-Superbowl night at a party where there’s drinks, drugs, and endless girls, and of course Barb never worries about get STDs or anything like that. Just cool with the guys. And in the end, after putting up with all Shake's adolescent crap, she's still dumped by Shake, who literally leaves her to Billy Clyde."

Basically, Barbara Jane Bookman was the 1973 version of Gillian Flynn's "Cool Girl" (Gone Girl) (LINK). Making women be perfect or else for over 50 years.

BTW, once streaming became possible, my husband and I watched some old 1960s and 1970s movies, and wondered what the hell we'd seen in them.

Examples:

A Woman Under the Influence – considered John Cassavetes' directorial masterpiece, where both the husband (Peter Falk) and the wife (Gena Rowlands) are insanely heavy drinkers and fighters, but she's the one put into a mental hospital. By him.  

Five Easy Pieces, in which every single woman in the movie (except for the two lesbians headed to Alaska) is for nothing but sex, and even then the guy's a jerk about it. For that matter, same with the movie M.A.S.H. – all the nurses are for sex, and the scene where "Hot Lips" Houlihan, showering, is exposed naked, wet, and crawling on the floor of the shower to the entire camp is probably one of the least funny, most humiliating moments in movies I've ever seen.  

It is not, however, the most violent towards women. That is still reserved, imho, for 1973's The Long Goodbye (starring Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe), because of the scene where the bastard Marty smashes a coke bottle in the face of his beautiful mistress, "the most important woman in the world to me" and says, "Now, that's someone I love! And you I don't even like! You got an assignment, cheapie: find my money!" Worse, later Marlowe's back at Marty's, and there she is, black eyes beneath the bandages – still with Marty. I think that's the most shocking act of violence that's ever been filmed, because nothing happens to Marty. Even Philip Marlow just walks away, and she just sucks it up and stays.

Things got better, of course. All sorts of wonderful movies have been made with and about women who can hold their own: Three Women, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Hunger Games, The English Patient, Arrival, Nomadland, etc.

And The Return, which is the reason I don't need to see The Odyssey: the whole last chapter done by Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as Odysseus and Penelope, directed by Uberto Pasolini. Amazing. Hypnotic. Available for streaming.

But the AI Slop has got to stop.

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Decline & Fall

I mentioned in my last column that I’d been reading Gibbon’s famous history of the Roman Empire, Decline and Fall, which I’d never tackled before.  I’ve never read Herodotus, either, on the Peloponnesian War, or Xenophon’s Anabasis, two other celebrated histories.  I know them only by reputation.  There was a time, of course, when both of them were regularly taught, and in the original.  It was the mark of a classically educated scholar to be conversant in Greek and Latin, and construe his Homer and his Cicero.  

I’m reminded that when my dad got older, and retired across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire, he took up Trollope.  Trollope was enormously popular in his lifetime, a contemporary and rival of Dickens, but Trollope hasn’t worn as well as Dickens.  You suspect this is because Trollope has a narrower focus, the Barchester books (which my dad was particularly fond of), for example, are about the internal politics of the Anglican church, while Dickens had more of a roving eye, so to speak. 

After my dad died, I myself fell into a binge of Sir Walter Scott.  Quite a few of us might have read Ivanhoe in high school, but not much else, and I discovered that Scott – another guy who was a huge celebrity as a writer, while he was alive – wrote some significantly better books, Old Mortality one of my personal favorites.  St. Ronan’s Well is an attempt to cash in with Jane Austen’s public - the novel of manners not Scott’s strength - and Austen has far outdistanced him in readership mileage.  I remember also wondering aloud about this new-found attachment to a neglected 19^th-century writer, and my friend Ellen Hawkes telling me it seemed entirely natural, that in the wake of my father’s death, I was falling into the past, being  pulled by historical gravity, and revisiting his history by proxy.  (She knew the story about my dad and Trollope.)

I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve gravitated toward Gibbon in my dotage, but there’s some comfort in reading a book so unselfconsciously old-fashioned.  Gibbon’s mannerisms aren’t assumed, they’re entirely natural to the man, and the age he wrote for.  Decline and Fall was published, in six succeeding volumes, between 1776 and 1789.  As it happens, the years of the American and French revolutions, respectively.  Gibbon isn’t a synthesizer, he isn’t summarizing other histories, really, because he’s not that confident he can trust earlier sources.  A lot of the Latin was written to curry favor with whoever was newly risen to power.  Gibbon is weighing the evidence, and he’s not afraid to voice his opinion.  Much of the experience of reading Gibbon has to do with his cadences.  Once you get familiar with the grammar, and the peculiar punctuation, it swings right along.  He doesn’t sound dated, to my ear.

Writers used to insert themselves into the story.  And now, dear Reader is a common trope that we’ve abandoned, as a too-obvious cliché.  You can hark back to it with the first-person narrative, had I but known, but it’s labored, or clunky.  When you see it in a Regency writer, like Austen, though, or one of the Victorians, you don’t cringe.  You see it, almost, as period detail. 

There are conventions, unavoidably, in Gibbon, that bring you up quite sharply, sometimes.  It is a time capsule, two hundred and fifty years old.  But what seems right, to a modern reader, and which must have entertained his contemporaries, are his asides, and sly bits of business.  Here, the assassination of the emperor Caracalla, a capricious incompetent, murdered by his Praetorians.  “He was attended by a body of cavalry; but having stopped on the road for some necessary occasion, his guards preserved a respectful distance, and Martialis approaching his person under a pretence of duty, stabbed him with a dagger.  The bold assassin was instantly killed by a Scythian archer of the Imperial guard.”  In other words, he got a knife between his ribs while he was taking a leak.  The second point being that Martialis was quickly silenced before he could rat out any of the other plotters.  Gibbon doesn’t underline that.  He leaves it to you to fill in the blanks. 

There’s a whisper, in Decline and Fall, of the unreliable narrator.  Gibbon will tell you, the sources contradict each other - but here’s my best guess, and here’s why.  The other thing, is that he often speaks in a conversational tone, as if we already know the story, and he’s confiding extra detail that was left out before.  This has the effect of treating us as colleagues, and of making his history a dialogue, not a lecture.  He invites us to share his table, and does us the compliment of filling the glasses.

My main takeaway from Gibbon, stylistically, is that you can feel your way into a relaxed and amiable speech pattern that mimics common language, even if it’s not entirely natural, but rehearsed - something you might call demotic by design.  I don’t mean that it rings false, but it’s calculated.  Decline and Fall is going to run to a million and a half words, before he’s done, and he needs to find the rhythm.  Somewhere between the unmediated first-person and an omniscient third, Gibbon settles on a kind of public reveal, cautiously artless, as if presenting us with a display of many shiny distractions, some of which may prove to be treasure.  In a word, the book is fun to read. 

The lesson, if we need one, is that a little charm goes a long way.  A lot depends on voice.  Part of it is probably the 18^th- or 19^th-century locutions, and what we might say are anachronisms, but I think the appeal is simple.  Gibbon is approachable.  We should be so lucky.

The Strange Novels of Charles Williams

by Eve Fisher 

A long time ago, there was an informal group of writers, theologians, and intellectuals who collected (mostly) at C. S. Lewis' rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, or The Eagle & Child Pub: The Inklings. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein are the most famous, but in his time, Inkling Charles Williams was highly praised by Lewis, Tolkein, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and others for his amazing studies of Dante (The Figure of Beatrice inspired Dorothy Sayers' translation of The Divine Comedy), unique Arthurian poetry (Taliessin Through Logres), even more unique theology (Descent of the Dove and He Came Down From Heaven) and some almost completely unexplainable supernatural thrillers that I simply adore.

Charles Williams
by Kimberly Ferguson

Williams was a strange duck. A devout Anglican, he was known as the Magician, and was part of a mystical Christian group that practiced occult rituals while refusing to seek occult powers. Friends described Williams as a bundle of nervous, dynamic energy with 'raw charisma'. He was both passionately faithful to his wife, and carrying on a passionate, unconsummated affair with an Oxford University Press librarian. (He had to have influenced certain characters in Susan Howatch's Starbridge series.) And he wrote some of the best villains ever.

NOTE & WARNING:  Williams wrote his novels in the 1930s and 1940s, and was a man of his time, so he writes some things which are / can be offensive today: racist, sexist (although often his heroines save the day - and the world), etc.  I still enjoy them.  

My personal favorites (and I have read them all) are War in Heaven and Descent into Hell: 

War in Heaven - Opening line: “The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.” That's one way to keep you reading.

Villains: Sir Giles Tumulty (who also shows up in Many Dimensions) - His book is being published by Persimmon Publishing, where the corpse was found. He's an explorer and antiquarian, with all the charm of a cobra. See how many insults you can find in this meeting between Sir Giles and a police inspector:

"Rackstraw?" Sir Giles had said impatiently, screwing round from his writing-desk a small, brown wrinkled face toward the inspector, "yes, he came to lunch. Why not?"

"No reason at all, sir," the inspector said, "I only wanted to be sure. And when did he leave you—if you remember?"

"About half-past two," Sir Giles said. "Is that what he ought to have done? I'll say two, if you like, if it'll help you catch him. Only, if you do, you must arrange for me to see the hanging."

"If he left at half-past two, that's all I want to know," the inspector said. "Did you happen to mention to anyone that he was coming?"

"Yes," said Sir Giles, "I told the Prime Minister, the Professor of Comparative Etymology at King's College, and the cook downstairs. Why the hell do you ask me these silly questions? Do you suppose I run round telling all my friends that a loathsome little publisher's clerk is going to muck his food about at my table?"

"If you felt like that," the inspector said, holding down his anger, "I wonder you asked him to lunch."

"I asked him to lunch because I'd rather him foul my table than my time," Tumulty answered. "I had to waste an hour over him because he didn't understand a few simple things about my illustrations, and I saved it by working it in with lunch. I expect he charged overtime for it, so that he'd be two shillings to the good, one saved on his food and another extra pay. I should think he could get a woman for that one night. How much do you have to pay, policeman?"

The inspector at the moment felt merely that Sir Giles must be mad; it wasn't till hours afterwards that he became slowly convinced that the question was meant as an insult beyond reach of pardon or vengeance. At the time he stared blankly and said soberly: "I'm a married man, sir."

"You mean you get her for nothing?" Sir Giles asked. "Two can live as cheaply as one, and your extras thrown in? Optimistic, I'm afraid. Well, I'm sorry, but I have to go to the Foreign Office. Come and chat in the taxi; that's what your London taxis are for. When I want a nice long talk with anyone I get in one at Westminster Abbey after lunch and tell him to go to the Nelson Column. We nearly always get there for tea. Oh, good-bye, policeman. Come again some day."

And there's Mr. Gregory Persimmons - Head publisher, fascinated by the occult, domination, control, little children, and the Holy Grail. Sir Giles is fascinated with Persimmons, more as an experiment than anything else:

"You're going mad, you know, Persimmons, and I like watching you."

"Mad?" Gregory said, with another snigger. "You don't go mad this way. People like my wife go mad, and Stephen. But I've got something that doesn't go mad. I'm getting everything so." He stretched out both arms and pressed them downwards with an immense gesture of weight, as if pushing the universe before and below him. "But I want the ointment."

"Better leave it alone," Sir Giles said tantalizingly. "It's tricky stuff, Persimmons. A Jew in Beyrout tried it and didn't get back. Filthy beast he looked, all naked and screaming that he couldn't find his way. That was four years ago, and he's screaming the same thing still, unless he's dead. And there was another fellow in Valparaiso who got too far to be heard screaming; he died pretty soon, because he'd forgotten even how to eat and drink. They tried forcible feeding, I fancy, but it wasn't a success: he was just continually sick. Better leave it alone, Persimmons."

"I tell you I'm perfectly safe," Gregory said. "You promised, Tumulty, you promised."

"My lord God," Sir Giles said, "what does that matter? I don't care whether I promised or not; I don't care whether you want it or not; I only wonder whether I shall get more from—" He broke off. "All right," he said, "I'll give you the address...  It'll save you some time and energy if you mention me. He's a Greek of sorts—I've forgotten his name. But he doesn't keep tons of it, you know. Now, look here, Persimmons. This is two things you have got out of me, and I've had nothing in return. You'd better ask me down to wherever you hatch gargoyles."

The Greek Chemist - Unique in all the characters I've ever read, because he's...  well, read and see:

"Who sent you here?" the Greek asked.

"Sir Giles Tumulty," said Gregory, "and others. But the others I cannot name. They say"—his voice began to tremble—"that you have an ointment."

"I have many precious things." The answer came out of an entire weariness which seemed to take from the adjective all its meaning. "But some of them are not for sale except to buyers."

"I have bought everything." Gregory leaned forward. "The time has come for me to receive."

Still the other made no movement. "The ointment is rich and scarce and strange," he said. "How do I know that you are worth a gift? And what will my master say if I mistake?"

"I cannot prove myself to you," Gregory answered. "That I know of it —is not that enough?"

"It is not enough," the other said. "But I have a friendship for all who are in the way. And priceless things are without any price. If you are not worth the gift, the gift is worth nothing to you. Have you ever used the ointment?"

"Never," Gregory said; "but it is time, I am sure it is time."

"You think so, do you?" the Greek said slowly. "There comes a time when there is nothing left but time—nothing.* Take it if you like."

*BTW, that line haunted me ever since I first read it. It was the center on which I built my story "For Blood".

Later, when the Grail has been found and taken and taken again, the Greek is even more infintely weary when someone suggests taking and destroying the Grail because it's a stronghold of power, and all such strongholds must be destroyed...  

"We can do it if you like," he acquiesced. "If it is worth while."

"It is a stronghold of power, and we can tear it to less than dust. I do not understand you."

"It doesn't matter," he answered. "You will understand one day. There will be nothing else to understand...  It is all one; in the end it is all one. You do not believe each other and neither of you will believe me. But in the end there is nothing at all but you and that which goes by. You will be sick at heart because there is nothing, nothing but a passing, and in the midst of the passing a weariness that is you. All things shall grow fainter, all desire cease in that sickness and the void that is about it. And this, even for me, is when I have only looked into the bottomless pit. For my spirit is still held in a place of material things. But when the body is drawn into the spirit, and at last they fall, then you shall know what the end of desire and destruction is."

And another character's reaction to Persimmons' attempt to tempt him with the "delights of worshipping treachery and malice and cruelty and sin":  

"Satanism?  Satanism is the clerk at the brothel."  

There's some words to live by. 

Descent Into Hell - Another masterpiece of supernatural thriller, complete with dopplegangers, dancing bears, Lilith, and a man who provides a new definition of Gomorrah; also a hanged man, a hanging man, a succubus, a martyr, a poet, a dying woman, a dead man, and a few rippling graves.  

Ere it shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image

Walking in the garden.

That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

OTHERS:

The Place of the Lion - Platonic Ideals burst through in raw form in a small English village...

Many Dimensions - Sir Giles Tumulty is back, seeking the Stone of Solomon that gives its possesser access to other space, worlds, dimensions, and times...

The Greater Trumps - The original Tarot deck, and a chess set to die for...

All Hallows Eve - Two dead women, walking through London, looking for...

and more...

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!

I happened to find some of my short stories – in fact of most of us SleuthSayers - are appearing on Amazon Kindle for $0.99 with semi-bad AI covers.

Did I miss a contract? Not read the fine print? Should I / we be getting a nickel or a dime each, or is this simply the secondary market?  

Inquiring minds want to know.

PS:  I call it a semi-bad AI cover because there isn't a robot or android anywhere in "For Blood."  I know, details, details...  😉

What To Do With the Body... AGAIN...

Back in 2021 I wrote a blogpost about What To Do With The Body (HERE) - and I still think "the woodchipper in a boat over a good crab nursery" is probably the best idea, but try and find one of those inland.  And while I still have no intention of needing any of the suggestions, I am continually amazed by – and thankful for – the stupidity of real-life murderers.

Celeste Rivas Hernandez

D4vd – Back on September 8, 2025, 14 year old Celeste Rivas Hernandez's body – in a severely decomposed state - was found in the front trunk of a Tesla registered to musician D4vd in a Hollywood Hills tow yard. 

"The Tesla had been at the impound lot for two days after being found abandoned on a Hollywood street, investigators said. The towed vehicle was registered to Burke. Officers had responded to the impound lot "for a foul odor coming from a vehicle," said Los Angeles police.  (LINK)

Gruesome details:  

• "D4vd ordered two chainsaws, a body bag and an inflatable pool on Amazon using a fake name. Investigators say fragments of that pool were found in cut wounds on Celeste's body." (Her body had been dismembered and put in two sacks.) and 
• "D4vd traveled to a location in Santa Barbara County multiple times after Celeste's death, including the night she was murdered, and a Caltrans worker later found the teen's passport card discarded in that area in January of 2025." (LINK)  
• And LINK to a general story about the whole mess so far.  

I have questions about the whole thing:

• Why can't people get it in their heads that dead bodies quickly stink?
• Was there an accomplice?  D4vd was either one cold mf or he had help doing all the things that were done to the victim, not to mention cleaning the place up afterwards...  (NOTE to prosecuters:  check what cleaning agency worked for him.)  
• Why was the Tesla left abandoned on a Hollywood street?  You mean no one tried to steal the damn thing?  Or even just vandalize it?  Isn't that just begging the cops to find it?  
• I also want to know if her parents knew that she was "dating" D4vd at 13, and why they allowed it, but I can come up with my own list of answers to that.  

*****

Speaking of dead bodies and the inevitable stench, check out this story:

"A suspicious death investigation is underway after a body was found inside the Rodeway Inn at 1313 N. Lacrosse Street.

The Rapid City Police Department says officers were dispatched around noon on July 14 for a report of a deceased person located inside a room at the hotel. The case is being handled jointly with the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office.

The body was identified as Jason Horned Eagle, 33, of Rapid City. Police say an autopsy has been conducted, and detectives are now awaiting toxicology results and additional forensic testing to determine Horned Eagle’s specific cause of death. Based on information gathered so far, detectives believe Horned Eagle’s body had been left in the hotel room for several months, according to police.

Police also announced three people have been arrested in connection with efforts to conceal the body. Detectives say the individuals had knowledge of Horned Eagle’s death and made attempts to conceal his body in the hotel. All three are charged with Improper Disposal of a Body."  (LINK)

My Notes:

• SEVERAL MONTHS??? 
• SEVERAL MONTHS IN AN ACTIVE MOTEL???
• Where was the body hidden?  Comments on FB:
• "I've actually seen [hiding it under the bed] on a true crime channel. I managed a motel and started having the maids do deep cleaning by cleaning under the box springs. In the maintenance hallway or ceiling wrapped in plastic would be my other guesses. It's crazy what you find in the ceiling tiles. (I and the staff were trying to bring the clientele up from where it was, so it was a complete overhaul)" 
• "Manager must have managed to keep that room off the available list." 
• My input:  Did they pack the entire bathroom with ice from the ice machine?  
• Who managed to somehow avoid renting out that room?  
• Forever cross off the Rodeway Inn in Rapid City from my list of hotels in the area.  

Meanwhile, purely informational:

Trust Jack.  He knows.

Novel Ventures

For several decades now, I have been known as, and have actively worked at being, a short-story writer.

But I wasn’t always.

Early in my career, I wrote a few novels, and most of them are still available and still generating royalties. Today I’m looking back at those early-career novels.

DEADLY CAMPAIGN

I finished writing my first novel, a mystery titled Deadly Campaign, in November 1983. It was rejected by several agents and publishers until it found a home with Books in Motion and was released in May 1994.

Books in Motion published audiobooks on cassette tape and sold most of their titles at truck stops around the U.S.

In February 2003, Wildside Press released Deadly Campaign as a trade paperback, and it is still available at online bookstores.

Covering City Hall during an election year was all the excitement reporter Dan Fox needed—until he discovered Alderman Bill Franklin’s bullet-ridden body.

Who killed the alderman? Why did they do it? Fox wants the story. Everyone else wants him.

Hit men, mob bosses, politicians, and mistresses: They all have stories to tell, and Fox pieces them together while dodging bullets and fighting deadlines.

While Fox digs for the story, long-hidden secrets rise to the surface—secrets that threaten the political fabric of the city—and Fox soon discovers he’s caught in the middle of a Deadly Campaign.

JUST IN TIME FOR LOVE

I wrote Just in Time for Love, a YA romance, in 1983/1984, and for years the manuscript made the rounds of agents and publishers, finally finding a home with Hardshell Word Factory in 1998, first as an eBook and then in 2001 paired with Melissa Ford’s His Friday Girls as half of the paperback Twin Spins #1.

It is now out of print.

His father writes confessions and jokes, and the biggest joke of all is his name—Justin Tyme. But Jay, as he prefers to be called, hasn’t had much to laugh about in the years since his mother died. His father retreats into an alcohol-hazed world of denial and self-pity, reversing their care-giver roles, and forcing Jay to grow up virtually on his own.

Then, they move to O’Shea, where his father manages a mobile home park, and Jay begins yet another year as the “new kid” in school. He has a lot to learn—about life, his father, and himself, but most of all, about love. And it all begins the day Jay meets Cindy Hamilton.

PSI COPS

I wrote Psi Cops, a science fiction police procedural, in 1987/1988, and sent my first query to an editor in March 1988. I received several rejections and a request for revisions from an editor at Berkley (which I did, but they passed on the revised version), and I ultimately placed it with Books in Motion in 1994.

In February 2003, Wildside Press released Psi Cops as a trade paperback, and it is still available at online bookstores.

Geeks and freaks.

That’s what Detective Sergeant Tony Carvelli thinks of Psi Cops until he’s faced with a sadistic serial killer who leaves no evidence behind.

In a near-future St. Louis, after sexually-transmitted diseases have been eliminated and sex without commitment is a lifestyle for much of the population, Carvelli investigates the deaths of women dismembered in their own bedrooms.

Carvelli still believes in the old values: love before sex and investigation before technology. When Psi Cop Colleen Allison is assigned to the case against his wishes—thanks to his new partner, recently-promoted Detective Phil Palmer—Carvelli resents her and everything she represents.

Fighting against time and against each other, Carvelli, Palmer, and Allison struggle to find the killer before he strikes again.

ALL WHITE GIRLS

I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve lost the paper trail for my first private eye novel, All White Girls. So, I don’t know when I completed the novel, nor how many agents and publishers may have passed on it. I do know Wildside Press released it as a trade paperback in May 2001 and later released a hardcover version. It is still available at online bookstores.

One young woman is missing. Another is dead.

They were drawn to Windy City like moths to a flame, but the city’s bright lights can’t illuminate every dark corner. Hidden in the alleys and back streets and in a three-block-long stretch of strip clubs and adult bookstores are the men who prey on young women like these: the pedophiles, pimps, and pornographers.

When former partners, unlicensed investigator Big Dick Rickenbacher and Homicide Lieutenant Salvador Castellano, find their cases overlapping in this violent world of sexual depravity, old flames rekindle, old secrets finally surface, and old crimes demand retribution.

STUD

Sometime in the mid-2000s, I discovered the first chapter of an erotic romance I had drafted in the early 1990s. I picked it up again and finished writing Stud just before I sent my first query letter to an agent in September 2008.

I collected a string of rejections from agents and publishers for the next few years and finally released Stud in July 2011 as a Kindle-only title on Amazon, using my Rolinda Hay pseudonym.

Christiana Kern is already overworked as the top customer service representative at Wett, Inc., the country’s largest printer of special interest magazines, when her boss assigns her a new title. She isn’t eager to accept the additional responsibility…until she meets Bobby Ray Cartwright, the sexy rancher publishing the start-up magazine. It isn’t long before business and pleasure mix and Christiana learns that Stud isn’t just the title of Bobby Ray’s new publication. Soon Christiana is having the best sex ever and is facing life-altering decisions in and out of the bedroom.

SHORT STORY FOCUS

I’ve had many other books published—mostly short story collections—but I have no completed and unpublished novels buried in my files.

Given the length of time it took to write and find homes for each of my novels (11+ years for Deadly Campaign, 14+ years for Just in Time for Love, 6+ years for Psi Cops), is it any wonder I shifted my focus to short stories?

---

“The Tattooist” was published in Black Cat Weekly #253.

Favorites, Genrewise

FYI, today's post is sort of a continuation of--or at least is related to--a SleuthSayers column I posted a month ago called It's Still a Mystery. The subject of that post was mystery-fiction subgenres, and the subject of today's post includes all kinds of genres and subgenres. This one came about because of a discussion I had last week with several of my relatives (actually my wife's relatives) about favorite movies. 

I have mentioned before at this blog that I love movies, and my discussion with our kinfolks went beyond overall favorites and into which movies are our favorites in different genres. (We focused more on movies than on written fiction because there was more common ground there--we were more likely to have seen the same movies than to have read the same novels or stories.)

So, for what it's worth, I came up with a list of my favorites, not only of mystery/crime movies but of movies across the board. Be aware, though, that in this case favorite does not always mean best. I do recognize the excellence and quality of films like Citizen Kane, Schindler's List, Rashomon, Sophie's Choice, Sunset Boulevard, and so on--but alas, those are not my favorites. My favorites are those I enjoyed the most, and that I find myself watching over and over again. (Yes, I do that, because I have all these on DVD--it's enough to run my wife crazy).

Having said that, here's my list. Please note that I've invented all kinds of subgenres to put them in, which was almost as much fun as picking the favorites.

Movies:

Crime -- L.A. Confidential (1997) 

Science Fiction -- Aliens (1986)

Western -- Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Romance -- Casablanca (1942)

Horror -- The Thing (1982)

Comedy -- The Big Lebowski (1998)

Fantasy -- Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)

Adventure -- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Drama -- 12 Angry Men (1957)

War -- Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Sports -- The Natural (1984)

Swords & Sandals -- Gladiator (2000)

Traditional Mystery -- Knives Out (2019)

Horrific Mystery -- Psycho (1960)

Noir -- Double Indemnity (1944)

Neo-Noir -- Body Heat (1981) 

Gangsters -- The Godfather (1972)

Spies -- Goldfinger (1964)

Buddies -- Lethal Weapon (1987)

Serial Killer -- tie: Dirty Harry (1971) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Prison -- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Heist -- Die Hard (1988)

Con-game -- The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

Medical -- Medicine Man (1992)

Romantic Comedy -- Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

Romantic Crime -- Witness (1985)

Romantic Fantasy -- Always (1989)

SF Comedy -- Galaxy Quest (1999)

Western Comedy -- Blazing Saddles (1974)

Laugh-Out-Loud Comedy -- Airplane! (1980)

Musical Comedy -- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1996)

Australian Western -- Quigley Down Under (1990)

Neo-Western -- No Country for Old Men (2007)

Time Travel -- Back to the Future (1985)

Time-travel Romance -- Somewhere in Time (1980)

Superheroes -- Superman, the Movie (1978)

Monsters -- Monsters (2010)

Futuristic -- Escape from New York (1981)

Creature Adventure -- tie: Jaws (1975) and Jusassic Park (1993)

Kids' Adventure -- Third Man on the Mountain (1959)

Coming-of-Age -- Stand by Me (1986)

Dogs -- Old Yeller (1957)

Horses -- The Black Stallion (1979)

Animated -- Dumbo (1941)

Christmas Movie -- It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Journalism -- Broadcast News (1987)

Disasters -- The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Alien Invasion -- Signs (2002)

Another note: It's probably obvious that many of the above picks are cross-genre and could fit into several different categories. Some, like the following, are so genre-mixed I couldn't decide where to put them. But they're still favorites:

The Man from Snowy River (1982) -- Australian Western romance

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) -- Southern courtroom-drama coming-of-age mystery

The Princess Bride (1987) -- Comedy fantasy adventure romance

To finish off this silliness, here are my favorite TV and cable/streaming series.

Weekly network TV series:

Crime -- Hill Street Blues (NBC)

Mystery -- Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS and NBC)

Western -- Have Gun Will Travel (CBS)

Neo-Western -- Justified (FX)

Western mini-series -- Lonesome Dove (CBS)

Science Fiction -- Star Trek (NBC)

SF/Fantasy -- The Twilight Zone (CBS)

Drama -- Lost (CBS)

Comedy -- Cheers (NBC)

Spies -- The Man from U.N.C.L.E (NBC)

Medical -- ER (NBC)

War -- Combat (ABC)

Cable/streaming series: 

Crime -- The Wire (HBO)

Mystery -- True Detective (HBO)

Western -- Deadwood (HBO)

Neo-Western -- 1923 (Paramount+)

Fantasy -- Game of Thrones (HBO)

Horror -- The Walking Dead (AMC)

Drama -- tie: Mad Men (AMC) and Landman (Paramount+)

Comedy -- Bad Monkey (Apple TV+)

Journalism -- The Newsroom (HBO)

War -- Band of Brothers (HBO)

Swords & Sandals -- Rome (HBO)

Spies -- Slow Horses (Apple TV+)

Gangsters -- The Sopranos (HBO)

I'm hoping all these might at least bring back some memories--they sure do for me. Another FYI: I'm well aware that I left out many movies that I love, like Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Shane, Chinatown, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, Forrest Gump, High Noon, Star Wars, Tombstone, Rocky, etc., and series like The West Wing, M*A*S*H*, Seinfeld, Frasier, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, Better Call Saul, and Yellowstone, but I had to stop somewhere, and I wanted to try for only one entry per category. Just shoot me.

My question for you is, what are some of your favorites, for both the big and small screens, and which favorites of mine did you hate? (I won't be offended; anyone who admits that he loved Blazing Saddles and The Man from U.N.C.L.E is used to criticism. But hey, confession's good for the soul.)

Next time, I plan to stop playing and get back to the subject of writing. Stay cool!

Anyone Can Write: Be a Lion! Be a Pirate!

 

Write like this.

If you have kids or grandchildren, you have probably encountered the animated Pixar movie, Ratatouille, about a French rat whose dream is to cook his filthy little heart out. The film’s mantra, expressed by a legendary chef who is deceased through much of the story, is “Anyone can cook.” Chef Auguste Gusteau’s egalitarian dictum drives the plot of the film, and inspires and ultimately uplifts our rodent star, Remy.

Gusteau’s words pop into my head every time I re-read Brenda Ueland’s charming book, If You Want to Write. I don’t re-read many books, especially books about writing, but I do find myself turning to Ueland every year and I get something out of it each time. For many years I kept a few extra copies in the office to share with friends.

This time I picked it up because I had re-read a short story I’d written a few years ago that I now felt certain was, as long as we are on a French theme, merde.

I can’t believe I sent this to an editor!

What was I thinking?

No wonder they rejected it!

And like that.

That’s when I knew it was time to dig out Brenda and dip into her wisdom. Her book first saw the light of day in 1938. Ueland was born to Norwegian Americans who settled the American midwest. A judge for a father, a suffragette for a mother. Ueland lived and worked in New York City in the early teens of that century, counting among her friends radical writers such as John Reed and Louise Bryant, and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. (Watch Warren Beatty’s film Reds, to get up to speed.)

I can’t tell you much about Ueland’s literary output. She wrote for the major magazines of her days such as Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, in addition to newspapers and radio shows. She married three times and had many lovers. Some of her short pieces have been published in collections. She walked nine miles a day on her best days, and treasured that time because it’s when she did her best thinking.

When she returned home to Minneapolis after Greenwich Village, she wrote a column for the Minneapolis Times, and—lucky for all writers everywhere—began teaching writing classes in 1934. Not at Iowa. Not at Harvard. Not at Yaddo. Her pulpit was the YMCA in the Twin Cities.

Her students were men and women, rich and poor, sales clerks and housewives, hopeful magazine writers, self-important men of business, and people on the edge. Many of them had grown up in farm country, and carried memories of that life. They came each night to listen and learn and try their hand at something they had always dreamed of.

It is clear that Ueland learned as much from them as her students learned from her. After giving a speech at a local writers’ conference one year, she received so many comments from admirers that she finally compiled her observations and lessons into a slim volume that lifts me every time I turn to it.

How could you not be cheered by the very first chapter, which echoes Chef Gusteau, entitled: “Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say”?

The book is eighteen chapters and only 179 pages long. She’s a fan of William Blake and quotes or references him 45 times. She has consumed all of Van Gogh’s letters, and quotes or discusses him 17 times. There are asides on de Musset, Plotinus, Mozart, Tolstoy, Kreisler, Saint-Beuve, Ibsen, Inge, and an interesting scene featuring Sandburg, about the time he visited her in Minnesota and they took a chilly stroll around her beloved Lake Calhoun.

In other words, as she warns us early on, her book is technically about writing, but she is really speaking about anything you long to do. Her true subject is the creative life, for creation, she reminds us, is at the heart of what it means to be human.

Her thesis: As children we learn to tell stories and we’re fantastic confabulists. We intuitively know how to shape a tale with a beginning, middle, and end. Then we get older and freeze up when we sit down to write. Why? By then legions of teachers have made writing seem far too serious. If we dare to set a pencil to paper, we have been schooled, we must follow rules or...we will fail.

Ueland taught her students to set down their words as plainly as possible. If they learned to get out of their own way, they would get to the heart of their stories. “Art is infection,” she says. (Another chapter title.) If the writer feels passionate about what they commit to the page, the reader cannot help to feel it too.

Her favorite Van Gogh story: At first he did not know he wanted to be a painter. He lived in London, studying to be a preacher. Sitting in his dingy flat, he peeked out his window at the rainy night. A lamppost, a star—that was all. In the midst of writing a letter to his brother, he stopped and wrote, “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And he proceeded to draw on the page of his letter what he saw in front of him. Ueuland writes:

[T]he moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

Why don’t we all do as Von Gogh did? she asks.

“[B]ecause we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.”

She did not critique her students’ work. No. In chapter eight, when she begins to share samples of their writing with us, she explains her process. Congratulate them. Celebrate their wins. Then, ask them questions:

I am blessed with a fascinated, inexhaustible interest in all my pupils—their thoughts, adventures, failures, rages, villainies and nobilities. “Tell me more. Tell me exactly what you feel when you tried to kill the man.”…“You say ‘his muscles rippled through his shoulders.’ Did they really ripple? Did you really see that?” Then the young novelist’s excited defense: “Yes, they did! His muscles were so big they seemed to burst the seams of his coat!” Myself: “Well say that! Hurrah! Put it that way. That’s alive, great!”

In another section, she shares the work of a young Irish woman who works in a stultifying sub-basement as a department store stenographer. The lass writes a simple essay about a trip she has taken to Wayzata, Minnesota. It’s so rich, your heart breaks reading it. Van Gogh could not have rendered Wayzata more beautifully.

Ueland then quotes passages from flashy magazine stories of her day. She singles out sections she feels have fallen short because the writers did not adhere to her first rule: be true to yourself. They got caught up in writing what they thought would sound literary, and she can sense it.

No, she says. Write from the heart. Write simply. Write what you feel or know to be true. Only that will connect with readers.

Now, look, I did not say that this was a book about how to write fiction. Yes, she does touch on the topic, and even proudly quotes a fun passage by a student who has written a mystery. But to me, every time I read the book I come away feeling that her true gift was helping students overcome their fear and craft fine personal essays.

If I were teaching a group of new writers, this would be the text I’d read to inspire myself, and them. I read Ueland to more fully understand my compulsion to embark on this insane career. If someone were just starting out and asked me for advice, I’d hand them this book, and have.

Just reading the titles of her chapters fills the room with light:

Chapter 2: “Imagination is the Divine Body in every Man”—William Blake 

Yes, that is the title of the freaking chapter.

Chapter 7: Be careless, reckless! Be a lion, be a pirate, when you write 

Chapter 14: Keep a slovenly, headlong, impulsive, honest diary

Chapter 18: “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star”—William Blake

I will warn you that she was also a writer of her time. When she celebrates Columbus in a footnote, calling his discovery the gift of imagination, Tonstant Reader nearly frowed up. I may be wrong, but none of the luminaries she cites in her inspirational stories are women. She does, however, celebrate the work of her female students.

She supported herself and her daughter on her writing after her first marriage ended. She knew the life of a single mother, but she urged her female students to make time for their writing, believing that committing to one’s dreams set a fine example for one’s kids.

“If you would shut the door against your children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.”

She describes a funny scene in which she poses for some young girls for three days while they paint her portrait. She remarks how quiet the children were while they were “playing”—and how interesting the final, unschooled works of art were.

(Sidenote: What adults can learn about art from children is the theme of a new book—Don't Call it Art, by Austin Kleon, that I've been hearing about all week. Funny that I should re-encounter this anecdote by Ueland around the same time.)

Ueland set a swimming record in her eighties. She was 93 when she died in 1985. By then, she’d been knighted by the King of Norway and written some six million words. That figure awed me once. It still does, but I now see it as a reasonable allotment for someone who supported herself her whole life by her pen. Yet I cannot help thinking that her true worth was measured by how she enriched the lives of her students and helped them to see that their voices mattered.

Judging from the number of different versions of this book found online, I surmise that it is now in the public domain. If you do seek it out, choose the editions published by Graywolf Press, the nonprofit publisher in Minnesota that has been entrusted by the Ueland estate to keep this work in print since the 1980s. You don’t want to go wrong; the book is filled with delicious footnotes that poor publishers can easily screw up. If You Want to Write is Graywolf’s bestselling book, for good reason.

My copy.

The current Graywolf edition.

* * * 

BSP: My wife's new book arrives next Tuesday. I hope you check it out.

See the video on YouTube.

Learn more at Denise's website.

Check it out on Bookshop.org, not the place run by the billionaire.

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

Setting the Scene

 Happy June! Happy Summer!

Time for a bit of "writing craft talk."

Specifically, setting the scene.

I have written here before about using "Setting as Character," and I'll be dealing with setting again today, just a different aspect of setting.

Specifically "establishing setting," or, put more prosaically, "setting the scene." And I'll be sharing examples of authors doing so effectively in a whole host of ways.

First things first; it's important to separate short stories from novels, as, due to differences in length, short stories tend to drop their characters right into the scene fairly quickly, where novels have more space with which to work. Let's start with short stories.

Short Stories

The following scenes are written by authors who also wrote (and have been celebrated for) novels. We will revisit their scene setting in the section on novels:

Friday night is fight night at the Steiner Street house. This particular one was my first idle evening in several weeks. I had gone up to the rink, fitted myself to a hard wooden chair not too far from the ring, and settled down to watch the boys throw gloves at one another. The show was about a quarter done when I picked out this pair of odd and somehow familiar ears two rows ahead of me.

–Dashiell Hammett, "The Whosis Kid"

   *    *    *

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry

Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

It had been open about a week and it wasn't doing any business. The kid behind the bar was in his early twenties and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life.

There was only one other customer, a souse on a bar stool with his back to the door. He had a pile of dimes stacked neatly in front of him, about two dollars' worth. He was drinking straight rye in small glasses and he was all by himself in a world of his own."

–Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

   *    *    *

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this
side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

"Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway

   *    *    *

Three authors celebrated for both their short stories and their novels. The interesting thing? As you’ll see when we pull examples from their long form work, the approaches of these three celebrated early 20th century authors don’t vary markedly from their approaches in their short stories.

Put simply: “Drop ‘em on in it, and let the reader know right away something is 'off.'”

Hemingway especially was known for the brevity (some would call it “terseness”) of his style. Any number of literary analysts have alluded to Hemingway’s early training as a journalist while working first for The Kansas City Star, and then moving to Europe, where he went to work for the Toronto Star during the 1920s as having been incredibly influential on his style.

And that’s likely true. Hemingway himself repeated stated that the only “how-to” book he ever consulted was The Kansas City Star’s “Star Copy Style Sheet.” For his part Hemingway called it: "the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing."

Hammett, too, developed his style on the job as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency-writing up things like case files and surveillance reports. Is it any wonder then, that Hammett, like Hemingway, varied his approach to scene-setting very little in between short stories and novels?

As for Chandler, learning to write fiction "on the job" was pretty much the opposite of his experience. Graduating from Dulwich College, he received a first-rate classical education, and wrote poetry that went unnoticed, before chucking it all and moving out to California and developing an accounting system for an oil company that led to several promotions before an abrupt dismissal for drunkenness.

Novellas

Novellas, once left for dead largely as a result of the advent of television scripts, which tended to be about the same word count as novellas (and infinitely better paying), have begun a long, slow comeback thanks to the ebook revolution.

You won't see them advertised as such most of the time, but take a look at the word count on some of the indie thrillers out there and we are talking long short story/novelette/novella length. Here's a scene being set pulled from the pages of an actual novellas (and it's one of mine):

“You ain’t Clute."

I turned in the speaker’s direction. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You ain’t Clute,” the man repeated. He sounded as if his mouth was full, in that manner distinctive to tobacco chewers.

I looked about the makeshift train platform. A rude log cabin abutted it and everywhere the green of the forest pressed in upon it. A chalked sign above the only door read “Coal Creek.” The platform itself wholly consisted of uncured logs, cut into planks so recently the soles of my shoes were already tacky with resin. Aside from the crew tending the locomotive which had carried me up the spur line from Renton, there were only three people on it: the hatless, bald, barrel-chested man asking about “Clute,” a Chinaman in suit and tie, standing diffidently a respectful distance behind the speaker, and me.

–Paper Son by Brian Thornton

Shorter in length, so still honoring the short story's economy of language, and dropping the main character right in it, while signaling to the reader that the scene described is not 'normal.' There are novellas out there (Conrad's Heart of Darkness comes to mind) that take their time building the setting. Conrad was a hell of a writer and could pull that sort of thing off, as is attested by the continuing popularity of his writing even in this day of Tik Tok-eroded attention spans.

Novels

The final turn took me around a shielding wall of popsicle cedar trees to the forecourt of the Montgomery place where a soft pattering fountain sprayed cool water in through the car window. The mansion was an L shape with the front door in the crease of the elbow. It was a nice family home if your family was everybody in Kansas. The windows were small and many and a heavy roof hung over it all like a furrowed brow. A low row of garages stood at the side. The doors were open and identical black Packards winked and gleamed in the shade, big as trains but better kept, perfectly waxed and ready to serve, glinting side by side. I parked my dusty Olds, got out and went up the steps to the front door.

-The Second Murderer by Denise Mina

As I stated above, novels are allowed to take their sweet time. And a skilled writer like Denise Mina knows how to make use of every word, to say nothing of employing sly wit (The "Kansas" line.).

Compare the above with a similar scene penned by the great Ross MacDonald, below.

   *    *    *

The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea. The road looped round the base of a brown hill into a canyon lined with scrub oak. 

“This is Cabrillo Canyon,” the driver said. 

There weren’t any houses in sight. “The people live in caves?” 

“Not on your life. The estates are down by the ocean.” 

A minute later I started to smell the sea. We rounded another curve and entered its zone of coolness. A sign beside the road said: “Private Property: Permission to pass over revocable at any time.” 

The scrub oak gave place to ordered palms and Monterey cypress hedges. I caught glimpses of lawns effervescent with sprinklers, deep white porches, roofs of red tile and green copper. A Rolls with a doll at the wheel went by us like a gust of wind, and I felt unreal. 

The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. Even the sea looked precious through it, a solid wedge held in the canyon’s mouth, bright blue and polished like a stone. Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small.

– The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald

Different rich people. Different approach to delineating the difference between their world and that of the protagonist, as stand-in for the reader. 

   *    *    *

And then you have the gritty realism of a Michael Connelly police procedural:

The patrol officers had left the front door open. They thought they were doing her a favor, airing the place out. But that was a violation of crime scene protocol regarding evidence containment. Bugs could go in and out. Touch DNA could be disturbed by a breeze through the house. Odors were particulate. Airing out a crime scene meant losing part of that crime scene. But the patrol officers didn’t know all of that. The report that Ballard had gotten from the watch lieutenant was that the body was two to three days old in a closed house with the air-conditioning off. In his words, the place was as ripe as a bag of skunks.

– Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly

  *    *    *

And the grim winter of Ann Cleeves:

Fran Hunter had a car but she didn’t like using it for short trips. She cared about global warming and wanted to do her bit. She had a bike with a seat on the back for Cassie, had brought it with her on the Northlink ferry when she moved. She prided herself on travelling light and it had been the only bulky item in her luggage. In this weather though a bike was no good. Today she wrapped Cassie up in her dungarees and coat and the wellingtons with the green frogs on the front and pulled her to school on a sledge. It was January 5th, the first day of the new school term. When they set off it was hardly light. Fran knew Mrs Henry already disapproved of her and didn’t want to be late. She didn’t need more knowing looks and raised eyebrows, the other mothers talking about her behind her back. It was hard enough for Cassie to fit in.

– Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

Fran is a preoccupied mother trying to navigate the social maze which is elementary parenting, and Cleeves manages to set the scene queickly and deftly, leaving the point of view character preoccupied by mundane thoughts, heading toward school, and...?

  *    *    *

Katherine Anne Porter was a writer of power and a master of penetrating imagery. As such (and as a rough contemporary of Conrad), she deftly does double duty with setting the scene below from her short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Not only does she take the long way toward describing where her main character actually is, but also manages to convey to the reader the unsettling fact that she is not where she ought to be from the very first sentence.

In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice, the streaks of light were dark blue and the whole house was snoring in its sleep.

– Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

  *    *    *

And let's close with another example from Chandler's work. Setting the scene at the beginning of 1939's The Big Sleep:

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

  *    *    *

A quick confession: I generated the images used in this post using a terrific graphics-proficient creative AI called Midjourney. And how did I do it?

I took each of the entries above and used them as the prompt for what  eventually became the image I would use to illustrate each entry.

Good writing is descriptive. Great writing puts you right there. With or without an AI assist.

And on that note, that's all for me this time. What tricks do you use in your scene setting? Feel free to add them in the comments, and let's talk all about setting the scene!

See you in two weeks!