Hammett in Celuloid

Readers of this blog may well recall that, like many of denizen of the SleuthSayers rotation (Eve Fisher, Rob Lopresti, Joseph S. Walker, Art Taylor, just to name a few), I am a long-time member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. And since our writing ideas can come from just about anywhere, it should come as no surprise to the savvy crew who constitute the Sleuthsayers readership that I get some of my best writing ideas from the SMFS email list.

Today's blog entry represents one of those times.

A thread about stories with great final lines begun, I think, by our own Rob Lopresti, morphed into another SMFSer (Bobbi Chukran) weighing in about finding a TV adaptation of Hammett's novel The Dain Curse available on both Amazon Prime TV and in abbreviated form on YouTube.

Yeah, this was NOT good.

As an unapologetic fanboy of the works of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, I am, of course, familiar with The Dain Curse (far and away the consensus choice among Hammett fans as his worst novel. I recently re-read it, and was reminded all over again how inferior it was to the rest of Hammett's canon. Of course, when you're comparing any novel to the likes of Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass Key, odds are it will definitely tend to suffer by comparison.), and with the 1970s James Coburn fronted TV project referred to above.

And it got me thinking.

Linking to any number of existing Hammett adaptations which have made it to the big or small screen might be a helpful guide for our readers who enjoy films based on great (or in the case of The Dain Curse, not-so-great) crime fiction.

I mean, the nameless Continental Op acquires a name, and that name is "Hamilton Nash." Not even a tough guy like James Coburn could do much saddled with a mouthful like that.

Well look no further! Full disclosure, there is a lot to this subject, so I will be breaking my post on it up into two entries. 

The Adaptations

Every one of Hammett's five novels has been made into a movie (or in the case of The Dain Curse, a three-hour miniseries, I think? I was twelve the first time I watched it, back in the '70s) at least once. And that makes sense. After all, with every one of his novels, Hammett practically invented a subgenre of the crime fiction milieu: 

Red Harvest: The "Town Tamer" novel.

The Dain Curse: The "Psychological Suspense" novel.

The Glass Key: The "Machine Politics/Public Corruption" novel.

The Maltese Falcon: The "First True P.I." novel (Carrol John Daly fans be damned!).

The Thin Man: The "Crime Novel as Comedy of Manners."

But what about Hammett's short stories?

Hammett cut his teeth writing short stories in an age (the 1920s) where periodicals were constantly on the look-out for content and actually paid well (Ah, the Good Old Days!), and he quickly distinguished himself as a master of the form. Stories such as "The Tenth Clew," "The Gutting of Couffignal," "The House in Turk Street," and its sort-of sequel, "The Girl With the Silver Eyes," "The Scorched Face," and "Dead Yellow Women" made both a name and fair amount of money for Hammett before he turned his hand to writing novels full-time.

And one of his absolute best stories, "Flypaper," was actually made into an episode of a SHOWTIME anthology series of noir stories entitled, "Fallen Angels" in 1994. Christopher Lloyd starred as Hammett's famous nameless detective "The Continental Op" (an "operative" for the "Continental Detective Agency," a thinly-veiled fictional version of the Pinkerton Agency Hammett himself had worked for). The supporting cast is great, too: Michael Rooker, Peter Berg (before he gave up acting for directing) and the always wonderful Laura San Giacomo.

The best part? You can watch all 29 minutes of it here, for free, on YouTube. And it is well worth your time!

Okay, now for the novels!

First there's Red Harvest, Hammett's first novel, serialized in Black Mask magazine as four related novelettes before its publication in 1929.

There are several terrific adaptations of this novel, none of them under its actual name, although the incomparable Megan Abbott is reportedly working on a screenplay for a new adaptation with Scott Frank (responsible for a lot of great stuff coming out of Hollywood, not least the script for the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight  and the terrific Monsieur Spade). You can read more about their collaboration here.

The first of these is Akira Kurosawa's 1961 masterpiece: Yojimbo. It stars Toshiro Mifune as a masterless samurai in Medieval Japan, and follows the central premise of Hammett's novel (the Continental Op subverting expectations and manipulating competing factions in the town he's just arrived in, setting them up to take each other out). You can watch it here. It is well worth your time!

Up next is Sergio Leone's 1964 spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars, shot in Spain, with a largely Italian cast, it made Clint Eastwood a star (Leone is reported to have said of Eastwood's acting, "He has two expressions: 'hat on,' and 'hat off.'" That tracks.). It's nothing short of a shot-for-shot remake of Yojimbo. So not a direct adaptation of Red Harvest, but rather an outright theft of Kurosawa's adaptation. Kurosawa himself said in a letter to Leone not long after the film's release: ‘I’ve seen your movie. It’s a very good movie. Unfortunately, it’s my movie.'"

Did he really NEED to act?

Still an enjoyable movie. And you can, of course, catch it from any number of streaming services, including here.

Nearly forgotten these days is the great Walter Hill's take on the Hammett novel: 1996's Last Man Standing, starring Bruce Willis. It gives Kurosawa a writing credit, and yet is set in the same period as Hammett's book (the 1920s), with the location is moved from the frontier mining towns of Montana to the Texas Borderlands. Willis does a great job, it's full of action, and features solid performances all around, especially from Christopher Walken as the film's Big Bad. And he is (unsurprisingly) scary. You can find it lots of places, especially here.

It's Walter Hill, and it's Bruce Willis and it's Christopher Walken (And did I mention William Sanderson and Bruce Dern, too?), so it is also well worth your time!

And the final entry for this week's post is an early '80s entry very much in the vein of the aforementioned Monsieur Spade. A fictional take on the life of Hammett during the early years of his writing career, it's titled simply Hammett. Directed by Wim Wenders and the immortal Francis Ford Coppola from a script written in part by mystery writer and Hammett Scholar Joe Gores! Furthermore, it features the always watchable Frederick Forrest (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Hammett) in the title role.

The resemblance really is uncanny.

As if this wasn't enough, this film features the great Peter Boyle as the detective Hammett used as the inspiration for the Continental Op. Boyle is, as always, fantastic. As is Marilu Henner as Hammett's "inspirational" librarian neighbor. Fans of Hammett's work will find all manner of easter eggs in this one.

Definitely worth your time!

And the best part? It's available for free on YouTube. You can watch it here!

That's it for me this go-round. Next time we'll finish walking through the film adaptations of Hammett's work. See you in two weeks!

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

For a little over a year, I've been attending the monthly meetings of a mystery book club at my local independent bookstore. It's been a lot of fun, particularly since they tend to choose books that don't quite match my normal reading tastes, with a strong emphasis on recent cozies and domestic thrillers. It's always good to read outside your comfort zone.

This month, though, the club made one of its periodic forays into classic territory, with Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train. Several members, it turned out, are Christie enthusiasts who have read all her works, often more than once, while others were encountering her for the first time. This led the group to consider an interesting question: what book did the hardcore Christie fans think would make the best introduction to her work for a new reader?

I immediately thought this would make good fodder for a SleuthSayers column. Considering some of my own favorite writers and series characters, what one book would I choose for a new reader, and why? What story would best capture what I loved about that author, and be most likely to bring the newbie back for more? 

So here's how I'd answer the question for ten (or nine, depending on how you count) members of my personal pantheon. 

REX STOUT: I've written before about my love for Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, and the Manhattan brownstone they call home. This is definitely a series where I wouldn't give a new reader book #1 to start with. Fer-de-Lance is a fine novel, and Wolfe himself is already there almost complete, but I don't think Stout had yet refined Archie's voice. Given how important the brownstone is to what I find most appealing about the books, I'd also eliminate the entries where Wolfe ventures out into the wider world, though some of those (Some Buried Caesar, Too Many Cooks) are excellent. Ultimately, my choice would be And Be A Villain, in which a man is murdered during a live radio broadcast. Wolfe and Archie are at their sharpest, the key supporting characters are present in fine form, and the mystery itself is satisfyingly complex, with a surprising resolution. Some would object to this choice on the basis that the novel is the beginning of the "Zeck trilogy," introducing the only recurring villain in the Wolfe stories, but I think the book stands up fine on its own.

AGATHA CHRISTIE: It means forgoing the pleasures of Poirot, but in my view there's no finer way to meet Dame Agatha than And Then There Were None (hey, are all my choices going to start with "and"?). What's not to love? A fiendishly clever plot with plenty of inventive twists, an incredible setting, a cast of memorably nasty characters--everything great about Christie is on full view here, including the darkly cynical tone that gives her work such lasting depth. The atmosphere in this one is anything but cozy, and there's a reason writers are still ripping this premise off after almost a century. Now, if you must have Poirot and his little gray cells? It may be too easy an answer, but I'd have to go with Murder on the Orient Express. (If you must have Miss Marple, you must ask someone else, as the character's never done much for me.)

ROBERT B. PARKER: I've also written before about how formative the Spenser novels were for me when I began reading adult crime fiction. I still relish them, but there are particular challenges in introducing them to a new reader. The first Spenser, The Godwulf Manuscript, isn't much more than a Chandler pastiche, with little indication of what would later make the character distinctive. The second, God Save the Child, introduces Susan Silverman, but is one of several early books in the series with gender politics that have aged very poorly. The book I've reread most often, A Catskill Eagle, relies heavily on the reader's prior knowledge of Spenser and Susan's relationship. So my recommendation for the reader new to Spenser is The Judas Goat, in which our man goes to Europe to track down a group of terrorists. The case is fast-paced and exciting, and Spenser is formidable without yet being the invincible superman he'd be in the later books. The climatic showdown, at the 1980 Montreal Olympics, is a terrific action sequence. Most importantly, the book has the lively, funny interactions between Spenser and Hawk that are usually the highlights of any Spenser outing.

RICHARD STARK: Once again, I've written before of my devotion to Stark's novels about the coldly efficient professional thief Parker, for my money the best series of crime novels ever written. They're all great, but I think one perfect entry point is The Score, in which Parker joins a gang with a seemingly foolproof plan to rob every business in a small mining town in a single night. As always, things go wrong, and the pleasure comes from watching Parker scramble to deal with the multiple complications and still walk away with the loot. In addition to the novel, the comic book adaptation by the late, great Darwyn Cooke is most definitely worth seeking out.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Stark, of course, was a penname of Westlake's. While Stark's Parker novels are the best straight crime books ever written, Westlake used his own name on the Dortmunder series, about a thief cursed with the worst luck of anyone in the genre, and darned if they're not, by a mile, the best comic crime capers. It's kind of not fair that one guy should be so damn good at both. I think most Dortmunder fans would recommend new readers simply start with the first book, The Hot Rock, but I'd actually go with a much later entry, Drowned Hopes. Here, an ex-con recruits Dortmunder and his regular crew of misfits to help with an unusual problem: the town where he buried his loot is now underwater, thanks to a dam built while he was in prison. Worth the price of admission just for the scene where Dortmunder tries scuba diving. For bonus points, the novel also includes an unusual crossover: in one chapter, the characters from Joe Gores's DKA series make an appearance. Gores and Westlake cowrote the chapter, which also appears in the DKA novel 32 Cadillacs. So this book can actually introduce you to two top-tier crime series!

JOHN D. MACDONALD: Just as Hawk is vital to the best entries in the Spenser series, so the most memorable books about Travis McGee, MacDonald's "salvage consultant" hero, tend to be the ones with the most involvement from Meyer, the philosophically inclined economist who serves as McGee's unlikely best friend. So while it might seem perverse to choose the next-to-last novel in the series as an entry point, I'd still go with Cinnamon Skin, in which Meyer is central to the plot and present in almost every scene. When Meyer's beloved niece and her new husband are killed in a boat explosion, he and McGee set off on a cross-country quest to find and punish the guilty party. There's some great detective work in this one, and a memorably cold-blooded bad guy. Of course, the McGee books are only a fraction of the work put out by the highly prolific MacDonald. For a non-series taste, try The Executioners, which has been the basis of three (increasingly unfaithful) filmed versions under the title Cape Fear.

ED MCBAIN: Choosing a starting point for the 87th Precinct novels is just about impossible, partly because of the sheer scope of the series (55 novels over fifty years!), partly because it features a sprawling ensemble cast instead of a single hero. There are a few plot threads which run through several novels--Detective Steve Carella's relationship with his wife, the recurring villain The Deaf Man--but by and large you can read the series in pretty much any order. It's been persuasively argued that the books really constitute a single long novel, one of the greatest ever written about New York City (thinly fictionalized as Isola in McBain's universe). McBain didn't invent the police procedural, but the 87th Precinct is surely the grandest incarnation of the form in mystery fiction. Forced to choose an introduction, I might go with Eight Black Horses, in which the Deaf Man returns to exact revenge. It's got a clever plot and shows the main characters at their most human--but I might be choosing it just because it's one of the ones I've most recently reread.

LAWRENCE BLOCK: Two of the greatest figures in the history of the American PI were introduced in the 1970s. Robert B. Parker's Spenser is the paragon: well-read, absolutely committed to an admirable code of honor, a superb cook, irresistible to women, and very nearly undefeatable with either a gun or his fists. As much as I love Parker's writing, by the last third or so of the series, Spenser had become essentially superhuman, impervious even to aging, and the endless scenes of him and Susan congratulating each other on the perfection of their relationship had gotten a little old. Spenser's contemporary, Block's Matt Scudder, is a much different, and ultimately much more human and thus more compelling, character. Scudder tries to do the right thing, but he's deeply flawed, most notably by his alcoholism, which remains a central theme of the series even after he joins AA and sobers up. You could start the series from the beginning, but to jump in at a point where Block has fully mastered Scudder's voice and world, go with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a flashback novel set during Scudder's drinking days that features a compelling plot and one of the all-time great titles.

SUE GRAFTON: Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. There's no doubt that Grafton got better with experience, but there's also no doubt that her "alphabet" series about California PI Kinsey Milhone was strong from the start. Watching Milhone's character develop over the course of the series is one of its main pleasures, and best appreciated if you're with her from the start of her journey: "A" is for Alibi. It's not a perfect book (you'll see the end coming a mile away), but it will make you eager to spend more time with the character. It remains a tragedy that the series never reached Z. 

STUART M. KAMINSKY: The (IMHO) underappreciated Kaminsky had several series characters, including Florida process server Lew Fonesca, Chicago cop Abe Leiberman, and Moscow inspector Porfiry Rostnikov. I frequently return to them all with pleasure, but my favorite is Toby Peters, a down-on-his luck PI working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. Peters works for a different celebrity in every book, and Kaminsky, an accomplished film scholar in his professional life, fleshes out the stories with rich detail about the period and the biographies of the real-life figures Peters encounters. As in all of Kaminsky's series, there's an expansive and highly entertaining cast of supporting characters and an engaging combination of melancholy and humor. Mostly because it's where I started, I'd direct new readers to the second Peters entry, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.

Agree? Disagree? Who are your favorites, and what do you think would make the most effective starting points for readers new to them?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Edited by Adam Meyer, In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Genesis came out from Down & Out Books last year, shortly before that publisher went, well, down and out. As a result, the book never got the attention it deserved. I'm delighted that, earlier this month, a new edition of the book was published by Audecyn Books, and is now available in both print and electronic editions. It's a great set of crime stories, including contributions from my fellow SleuthSayers Stacy Woodson, Michael Bracken, and Barb Goffman. My story, "Just a Job to Do," is about a bodyguard, assigned to a mobster's wife, who develops her own ideas about what protection really means. Don't miss your second chance at this one!

Cozy up

            In Raymond Chandler’s famous essay, The Simple Art of Murder, he eloquently provided the artistic and intellectual foundation of hardboiled crime fiction.  As one of his committed devotees, I lapped it up, and eagerly followed his direction (unwittingly, not having yet read the essay) with my own hardboiled series, trilogies and standalones.

            That notwithstanding, I’ve never believed that embracing one form, or sub-genre, requires rejecting all the others.  I lean more toward the omnivorous, having begun my reading life with my mother’s handoffs of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout and Earl Stanley Gardener.  And all on my own, Arthur Conan Doyle.  Lately I’ve been back at it, with a deeper appreciation for everything that Chandler condemned, realizing that these presumed shortcomings are actually the point.

            You might have noticed there’s no surfeit of cynicism, treachery and immorality on display in our daily newsfeed.  This was equally true in the first half of the 20^th century, probably more so, since they experienced two world wars and economic upheaval we can only imagine.  What most people wanted to do was escape, and these master hands understood just how to provide the ideal transport.  But as I read now, having lived the intervening years in the back alleys and mean streets of Noir fiction, is that there was much more to it than that.

               

                Looked at objectively, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes are exceedingly bizarre individuals.  Even with their loyal sidekicks and benighted enablers, they exist entirely apart from general society. Introverted to the edge of misanthropy, riddled with obsessive compulsions and hints at dark caverns of the subconscious, any would fit nicely into one of Marlowe’s sidetracks.  It isn’t just that they easily read the criminal mind, they empathized, familiar with the moral ambiguities that entangle even the most callow and supercilious.  All three are honorable men, yet none could be called trusting or emotionally available.  All would afford an interesting date, but you wouldn’t want to move in together. 

            Anyone tempted to belittle Agatha Christie should give it a try themselves.  In particular, her prose has a distinct clarity, efficiency and immediacy, required for packing a lot of setting, character development and extravagant plotting into fairly compact spaces.  She never wastes a sentence, much less a full passage, on anything unessential to her story.  I relish Marlowe’s circuitous diversions and introspections, but it would be fair for Christie to say, ”For pity’s sake, young man, get to the point.”

            

            In order to have the description “mystery” appended to any work, it needs to have a puzzle.  It’s no accident that ”Ludwig”,  a new show from Brit Box, features an actual puzzle creator thrust into a career of solving mysteries.  You may seek out Agatha Christie as an unthreatening pastime, but you better be on your mental toes, the plots so thick with clues, both portentous and incidental, that I’m tempted to open a spreadsheet.  Even then, you may not be able to crack the code, since she had only a passing loyalty to the principle of fair play.  Modern mystery critics would find this irredeemable, but I like to point out that no such problem ever occurred to Arthur Conan Doyle.  Sherlock isn’t only a deductive genius, he spends a lot of time offstage performing capers we only learn about in the final pages when the mystery is triumphantly solved for us. 

Speaking of Brit Box, a first-rate mystery needn’t unfold at an English country estate, though for me, the form achieves its most sublime in the presence of Jeff caps, sheep, ancient pubs and a whole population of flinty, emotionally repressed tea drinkers.  I find refreshing the absence of histrionics (who needs grief counselors when you can put on the kettle or have a barman pull a draft), abundance of deadpan humor and rich colors muted under permanently overcast skies.  Along with the nobility of simply carrying on despite it all. 

Using Real Life in Fiction

As writers, we often mine our lives for bits and pieces we can incorporate into our stories, from setting them in places where we have lived to basing murder victims on despised employers. Sometimes, though, our lives provide much more than incidental inspiration.

I’ve had two stories published this year that draw heavily on events and experiences from my youth, and both were written in response to convention anthology calls for submission.

“GLASS BEACH”

Work on the first story—“Glass Beach,” published in the January/February 2026 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine—began when I read Bouchercon 2020’s call for submissions for California Schemin’, in which each story has a California theme.

I spent a great deal of my childhood and teen years in California and, when no story ideas sprang immediately to mind, my wife suggested I write about my childhood. So, I wrote a paragraph about how my stepfather spent his free time:

Glass Beach, abutting MacKerricher State Park near Fort Bragg, California, is a tourist attraction visited by tens of thousands of people each year, but it wasn’t always. It started life more than a century ago as the town dump, and, in the early 1970s, not long after the dump officially closed, my stepfather played a key role in transforming it into the attraction it became. He spent weekends combing the beach for scrap metal and sorting what he found into cardboard boxes kept in the trunk of his 1966 Chrysler New Yorker.

This is true, and this paragraph became the opening paragraph of the story. Later, I added the second paragraph, and this is where a true story about my teen years starts being fictionalized:

The extra money my stepfather earned selling the scrap metal allowed us to eat a little better and dress a little better as he struggled to pay off my mother’s medical and funeral bills. I was a teenager then, plodding my way through high school, and I had no appreciation for all that he did. A stocky ex-Marine thirteen years older than my mother—thirty-three years older than me—he belonged to a generation I neither comprehended nor respected, and it was clear he felt the same about mine.

Though my mother died during my senior year of high school and I lived with my stepfather for several months after her death, “Glass Beach” begins the summer before the protagonist’s senior year, his mother having passed away during his junior year. But the relative ages of the characters match that of me, my mother, and my stepfather, and my stepfather was a “stocky ex-Marine.”

And there the story sat until well past the deadline for California Schemin’. I had a beginning, but I had no story until one day I decided the protagonist and his stepfather uncover something at the dump that ties into a long-ago crime. The two of them—along with the protagonist’s best friend and his best friend’s widowed mother—must deal with the consequences of that discovery.

Throughout the rest of the story, I write about Fort Bragg, California, and my high school years as filtered both through a memory that may have grown foggy with age and the need to create a compelling piece of fiction.

When I finally finished the story, I had missed the anthology deadline by more than a year. I ultimately placed “Glass Beach”—after revising the end based on suggestions from Linda Landrigan—with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

“UNDER THE PROCTOR STREET BRIDGE”

Work on the second story—“Under the Proctor Street Bridge,” published in Time After Time (Thalia Press), March 2026—began after I read the call for submissions for Left Coast Crime’s 2024 anthology A Killing Rain, which was to include stories set in and around Puget Sound.

I lived in Tacoma, Washington, beginning the summer before sixth grade and continuing until part way through ninth grade. I returned after my mother’s death to live with my grandparents for a year before moving to Illinois.

So, I again wrote about my childhood. Similar to how I began “Glass Beach,” I placed the events in a historical perspective:

There is so much I know now that I didn’t understand during the summer of 1971. I was thirteen then, soon to start ninth grade at Mason Junior High School, and I spent most days with Tommy O’Connor, the third of seven children—and the only boy—living in a three-bedroom house across the street from the home I shared with my widowed father. The Vietnam War was winding down, Richard Nixon was running for re-election, and many teenaged veterans were more than a year away from voting in their first presidential election following the July passage of the 26th Amendment.

I didn’t pay much attention to the news, and Tommy’s mother wouldn’t let him and his sisters watch it for fear they might learn what their father was doing halfway around the world and why people spit on him and other soldiers when they returned home.

Like the protagonist narrating the story, I was thirteen in 1971 and soon to start ninth grade at Mason Junior High School. One of my friends lived across the street with six siblings (though not all girls as in the story), and his father served in Vietnam.

So, the first two paragraphs are mostly true and truth is mixed with fiction throughout the rest of the story. For example, I often found bicycle parts under the Proctor Street Bridge, and I built Frankenstein bicycles from them. But bicycle parts aren’t the only things the protagonist and his friend find under the bridge.

(Only years later did I realize that the parts I found likely came from stolen bicycles, which helped inform “Under the Proctor Street Bridge.”)

This time, I finished the story before the anthology’s submission deadline, but it didn’t make the cut. It did, however, meet the needs of Time After Time, an anthology of mysterious tales inspired by history.

OTHER EXPERIENCES

Other stories mine my experiences—the Morris Ronald Boyette private eye stories, for example, take place in Waco, and many of the settings are real or fictionalized versions of real places—but no stories draw as much from my life as do “Glass Beach” and “Under the Proctor Street Bridge.”

* * *

Boots, BBQ, and Bloodshed, which I edited for Sisters in Crime North Dallas, releases July 1.

Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked gets new life in a July 1 rerelease by Audecyn Books.

Fifty years since our first date

In a couple of days, on June 24, 2026, it will be the fiftieth anniversary of my first date with my husband, and I can't resist marking the occasion with a celebratory post. If you'd told us that evening that we were launching a fifty-year relationship, we'd have laughed our heads off.

We met at the Free Association, an anarchist free school on West 20th Street off Fifth Avenue long before that block's gentrification. After a few months of snappy banter and a couple of heated political disputes, he invited me out for a beer at Paula's, a lesbian bar on West 11th Street off Greenwich Avenue in the Village. Both places are long gone, but Paula's was resurrected briefly in the alternative New York of Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022). As his character Bernie Rhodenbarr says, “There were guys who came there on a regular basis, and not to hit on lesbians. I guess they liked the atmosphere." We were so skeptical about the evening going well that we each invited a friend along.

We had little in common beyond our zest for political dialectic—the left’s fancy word for arguing at that time. And we both were readers. My favorite book was Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. I was also reading P.D. James, Ellis Peters, and Patricia Moyes. He was reading Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, and Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. By two years later, much had changed. In a poem titled “Insomnia,”* I wrote nostalgically about

. . . love among the leaflets and petitions
we had no place else to go
all we had then is gone
the strangeness, the friendships, the poverty
we have nothing left of that
except each other

Change is a constant in a fifty-year relationship. At the beginning, nobody thought we’d stay together, including us. Today, we’re still discovering unexpected ways in which we’re so different we’d be incompatible if we hadn’t also spent fifty years on working out how to get along. When we married, we talked about growing old together but didn't quite believe it would happen or could have imagined what it would be like. He’s retired and I’m in that liminal space between setting myself a rigorous standard of productivity and doing as much or as little as I like, happy as a bee knee deep in pollen.

He’s currently reading The Triangle of Power by Alexander Stubb, current president and former prime minister of Finland. I read a book a day or sometimes two in three days. Right now I’m particularly enjoying Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, a riff on the Holmes canon that may be my favorite since Laurie King created Mary Russell. On our various electronic devices, I stream videos, mostly French and Korean series, also British and other English-language cop shows, rarely American. He hangs out online with global gaming friends he’s made over the years, listens to short story podcasts, and watches videos on art restoration, cooking, archaeology, and what’s going on in the world. I can’t get him to watch a movie with me, even on the rare occasion when it’s one I think we’d both enjoy. As I said, we’re different.

A lot of people ask us how we make it work. Certain aspects anyone can try at home (that’s the work). For the rest, you have to be lucky. You have to love each other (that’s the luck). It takes a lot of work, especially if you’re different: talking to each other; not always being right; letting go of expectations, including that you’ll agree on everything and do everything together. You can’t expect perfection. It doesn’t exist. You find that your beliefs and ways of doing things are not the absolutes you thought they were. What a liberating surprise, once you get used to the idea.


*included in my first poetry collection, I Am the Daughter, and in a volume of Best Poems of 1980 (Monitor)

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"

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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"

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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

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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.

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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. 

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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

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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...?

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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

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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.

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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!