Setting as Character

 I have been working through a final draft on my latest long-form piece, and it's had me thinking a lot about setting. As a result I've begun drafting a post for Sleuthsayers on the importance of scene-setting and the need to get it right. I'll be running that one out next time around. As a table-setter on this topic I've pulled a previous post about "Setting as Character."

This particular post is from 2013, and I think it's aged well if I do say some myself, so I'm reposting it here, in hopes it proves helpful to authors out there wrestling with setting. In two weeks, I'll be back in two weeks to expand further on this topic. - Brian

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Setting. Everyone knows about it. Few people actively think about it.

And that's a shame, because for writers, your setting is like a pair of shoes: if it's good, it's a sound foundation for your journey. If it's not, it'll give you and your readers pains that no orthotics will remedy.

Nowhere is this more true than with crime fiction. In fact strong descriptions of settings is such a deeply embedded trope of the genre that it's frequently overdone, used in parodies both intentional and unintentional as often as fedoras and trench coats.

Used correctly a proper setting can transcend even this role–can become a character in its own right, and can help drive your story, making your fiction evocative, engaging, and (most importantly for your readers) compelling.

Think for a moment about your favorite crime fiction writers. No matter who they are, odds are good that one of the reasons, perhaps one you've not considered before, is their compelling settings.

Just a few contemporary ones that come to mind for me: the Los Angeles of Michael Connelly and Robert Crais. The Chicago of  Sara Paretsky, Sean Chercover and Marcus Sakey. Boston seen through the eyes of Robert B. Parker. Ken Bruen's Ireland. Al Guthrie's Scotland. Carl Hiassen's Miami. Bill Cameron's Portland.

And of course there are the long gone settings highlighted in the gems of the old masters. These and others read like lexical snapshots from the past.Who can forget passages like:

The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

—Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

Then there was Hammett's most ardent admirer (and in many ways, his successor) Raymond Chandler, a writer of considerable scope and power, was never better than when describing the sun-blasted neighborhoods of 1940s Southern California, the desperation of the region's denizens, and and black tarmac byways both connecting and dividing them in Farewell, My Lovely:

1644 West 54th Place was a dried-out brown house with a dried-out brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year's poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall. A line of stiff yellowish half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard.

And no one did it better than Ross Macdonald:

The city of Santa Teresa is built on a slope which begins at the edge of the sea and rises more and more steeply toward the coastal mountains in a series of ascending ridges. Padre Ridge is the first and lowest of these, and the only one inside the city limits.

It was fairly expensive territory, an established neighborhood of well-maintained older houses, many of them with brilliant hanging gardens. The grounds of 1427 were the only ones in the block that looked unkempt. The privet hedge needed clipping. Crabgrass was running rampant in the steep lawn.

Even the house, pink stucco under red tile, had a disused air about it. The drapes were drawn across the front windows. The only sign of life was a house wren which contested my approach to the veranda.

— Ross Macdonald, Black Money

In each of the passages excerpted above the author has used a description of the setting as a tip-off to the reader as to what manner of characters would inhabit such places. Even hints at what lies ahead for both protagonist and reader.

With Hammett it's the stink of the corruption that always follows on the heels of a rich mineral strike. With Chandler, it's a life worn-out by too much living. And with Macdonald, it's a world and its inhabitants as out of sorts as those hedges that need clipping.

Brilliant thumbnail sketches each. If you haven't read them, you owe it to yourself to do so. And each of them was giving the reader a glimpse of a world they had experienced first-hand, if not a contemporary view, then at least one they could dredge up and flesh out from memory.

With the stuff I write it's not that simple.

In his kind note introducing me to the readers of this blog, our man Lopresti mentioned that when it comes to fiction, my particular bailiwick is historical mystery. In my time mining this particular vein of fiction I've experienced first-hand the challenge of delivering to readers strong settings for stories set in a past well before my time.

How to accomplish this?

It's tricky. Here's what I do.

I try to combine exhaustive research with my own experiences and leaven it all with a hefty dose of the writer's greatest tool: imagination.

"Counting Coup," the first historical mystery story I ever wrote, is about a group of people trapped in a remote southwest Montana railway station by hostile Cheyenne warriors during the Cheyenne Uprising of 1873. I used the three-part formula laid out above.

While pursuing my Master's in history, I'd done a ton of research on the western railroads, their expansion, and its impact on Native American tribes in the region, including the Cheyenne.

I've visited southwestern Montana many times, and the country is largely unchanged, so I had a good visual image to work from.

Imagination!

An example of the end result:

Wash and Chance made it over the rise and and into the valley of the Gallatin just ahead of that storm. It had taken three days of hard riding to get to the railhead, and the horses were all but played out.

The entire last day finished setting their nerves on edge. What with the smoke signals and the tracks of all the unshod ponies they'd seen, there was enough sign to make a body think he was riding right through the heart of the Cheyenne Nation.

Stretching away to north and south below them lay the broad flood plain of the Gallatin. The river itself meandered along the valley floor, with the more slender, silver ribbon of rail line mirroring it, running off forever in either direction. The reds of the tamarack and the golds of the aspen and the greens of the fir created a burst of color on the hills that flanked the river on either side, their hues all the more vivid when set against the white of the previous evening's uncharacteristically early snowfall. 

"Suicide Blonde," another of my historical mystery stories, is set in 1962 Las Vegas. Again, the formula.

I did plenty of research on Vegas up to and including this time when Sinatra and his buddies strutted around like they owned the place.

I lived and worked in Vegas for a couple of years and have been back a few times since. I am here to tell you, Vegas is one of those places that, as much as it changes, doesn't really change.

Imagination!

Which gets you:

Because the Hoover boys had started tapping phones left and right since the big fuss at Apalachin a few years back, Howard and I had a system we used when we needed to see each other outside of the normal routine. If one of us suggested we meet at the Four Queens, we met at Caesar's. If the California, then we'd go to the Aladdin, and so on. We also agreed to double our elapsed time till we met, so when I said twenty minutes, that meant I'd be there in ten. We figured he had a permanent tail anyway, but it was fun messing with the feds, regardless.

The Strip flashed and winked and beckoned to me off in the distance down Desert Inn as I drove to Caesar's. It never ceases to amaze me what a difference the combination of black desert night, millions of lights, and all that wattage from Hoover Dam made, because Las Vegas looked so small and ugly and shabby in the day time. She used the night and all those bright lights like an over-age working girl uses a dimply lit cocktail lounge and a heavy coat of makeup to ply her trade.

Howard liked Caesar's. We didn't do any of the regular business there, and Howard liked that, too. Most of all, Howard liked the way the place was always hopping in the months since Sinatra took that angry walk across the street from the Sands and offered to move his act to Caesar's. Howard didn't really care to run elbows with the Chairman and his pack, he just liked talking in places where the type of noise generated by their mere presence could cover our conversations.

You may have noticed that in both examples used above I've interspersed description of the setting with action, historical references and plot points. That's partly stylistic and partly a necessity. I rarely find straight description engaging when I'm reading fiction (in the hands of a master such as Hemingway, Chandler or Macdonald that's another story, but they tend to be the exception), so I try to seamlessly integrate it into the narrative. Also, since I'm attempting to evoke a setting that is lost to the modern reader in anything but received images, I try to get into a few well-placed historical references that help establish the setting as, say, not just Las Vegas, but early 1960s Las Vegas. Doing so in this manner can save a writer of historical mysteries a whole lot of trying to tease out these sorts of details in dialogue (and boy, can that sort of exposition come across as clunky if not handled exactly right!).

So there you have it: an extended rumination on the importance of one of the most overlooked and powerful tools in your writer's toolbox: setting. The stronger you build it, the more your readers will thank you for it, regardless of genre, regardless of time period.

Because setting is both ubiquitous and timeless. Easy to overdo and certainly easy to get wrong. But when you get it right, your story is all the stronger for it.

And that's it for me. Tune in next time for more on making setting work for you.

See You in Two Weeks!

Re-Tell Me a Story

It seems that I get a lot of my ideas for SleuthSayers posts from what I see on my TV--and that's what happened with today's column.

My inspiration: The other night I watched, for probably the 20th time, A Fistful of Dollars, the Clint Eastwood movie from the mid-'60s that launched the Spaghetti-Western subgenre. And I was reminded, for maybe the 10th time, of two other films, Yojimbo and Last Man Standing (neither of them Westerns), that had almost exactly the same plot: A mysterious stranger arrives in town and pits each of two rival groups against the other for personal gain. And these three similar movies even feature similar ways that the protagonist accomplishes his goal. They're so much alike that if you're familiar with any one of them, it'd be impossible to see either of the others without immediately thinking of the first.

Legally, how can that happen?

Well, that's a simple question with a long, complicated answer that I don't want to go into. (Because I would quickly get into matters over my head. I will say, though, that I believe the Yojimbo folks successfully sued the Italian director of A Fistful of Dollars and eventually received a settlement--but Fistful was so incredibly successful, financially and otherwise, it hardy mattered.) What I do want to go into are a few thoughts about how many stories, novels, and movies ARE retellings of other stories. And that we as writers can re-tell stories ourselves, if we're careful and follow the rules. (All of us know what plagiarism is, and nobody wants that. What I didn't know, until I looked it up, is that it's derived from the work plagiarius, which means kidnapper. Which makes sense.)

Here's the deal. Basically, we can copy ideas, concepts, titles, structural frameworks, and tropes but cannot copy specific character names and traits, quotes, exact sequences of events, etc. We would also need to be cautious about things like pacing, exact settings, character motivations, and the overall "feel" of a story. I'm no lawyer and I'm certainly oversimplifying, but a lot of this boils down to common sense. For example, I could write a story about a young girl on a farm who finds herself transported into a fantasy world with magical creatures and then comes back home with a headful of helpful life experiences, but I couldn't name her Dorothy and have her help a scarecrow and lion and tin man fulfill their wishes and fight with witches.

To my knowledge I have never in any of my stories "copied" the plot of another story (maybe because my plots, like me, are sometimes a little weird). A couple of years ago, though, I did write a story featuring a private eye who, in the course of investigating a wife suspected of infidelity, wound up in the middle of a conflict involving a wrong phone number. I'd once heard a joke about that kind of misunderstanding, and I had that plot detail on my mind throughout the writing of this story--but the story itself was far different in terms of characters, setting, mood, and the theme of the idea that inspired it. The joke didn't even feature a PI, and mine wasn't even the protagonist.

Having said all that, here are several examples of movies--again, I'm using movies because many of us have seen them--that are highly similar to each other:

High Noon (1952) and Outland (1980) -- High Noon is the classic Western with marshal Gary Cooper and new wife Grace Kelly counting down the minutes until the arrival of three killers on the noon train; Outland--an entertaining movie, I thought--stars Sean Connery as a marshal on one of the moons of Jupiter preparing to fight three hitmen who are on their way to his location via shuttle, to kill him.

Battle Royale (2000) and The Hunger Games (2006) -- Battle Royale is a Japanese film about teenaged students being chosen and forced by the government to fight to the death; the plot of The Hunger Games is pretty much the same, except that the story is set in a different location and a different time (the first movie takes place in the near future and the second in the distant future).

Yojimbo (1961), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and Last Man Standing (1995) -- As mentioned, the basic plot is the same for all three, but Yojimbo is a Japanese adventure film starring Toshiro Mifune, A Fistful of Dollars is an Italian-made Eastwood Western directed by Sergio Leone, and Last Man Standing featured Bruce Willis and Christopher Walken in Prohibition-era Texas.

Shane (1953) and Pale Rider (1985) -- Shane is another American classic, with stranger Alan Ladd helping homesteaders Van Heflin and Jean Arthur fend off a cattle baron and his hired gun Jack Palance; Pale Rider features Clint Eastwood helping a group of independent prospectors defend themselves against an Old West mining company. Pale Rider is like Shane in an amazing number of ways, which I realized about halfway through the movie.

The Seven Samurai (1954) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) -- The Seven Samurai, again starring Toshiro Mifune, is about a village of Japanese farmers who hire seven samurai to help them keep a group of bandits from stealing their crops. The Magnificent Seven, with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, is about a village of Mexican farmers who hire seven gunfighters to help them keep a group of bandits from stealing their crops.

Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966) -- Rio Bravo is a Western about a Texas marshal who arrests the brother of a local rancher for murder and then has to fight off the rancher's men until the judge arrives. El Dorado is an almost-remake about a gunfighter who helps a sheriff defend a rancher's family against another rancher. The plots are extremely similar, John Wayne stars in both, Howard Hawks directs both, drunk Dean Martin in the first movie becomes drunk Robert Mitchum in the second, third sidekick Ricky Nelson (nicknamed Colorado) becomes third sidekick James Caan (nicknamed Mississippi), etc., etc.

Dances with Wolves (1990), The Last Samurai (2003), and Avatar (2009) -- Dances with Wolves stars Kevin Costner as a soldier who meets, befriends, and lives with a group of Lakota Sioux in the post-Civil War West; The Last Samurai forces American cavalry officer Tom Cruise into the same kind of situation in the 19th-centry Japanese samurai culture; and Avatar has human Sam Worthington infiltrating and befriending a humanoid tribe on a moon of Pandora in the 22nd century.

Some other movies that are loosely based on previous films/novels/stories but that don't venture as close as those I've mentioned are Air Force One, Passenger 57, Under Siege, and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. These are all part of an unnamed sub-subgenre that began with Die Hard and feature an often reluctant hero who has to stand alone against a group of terrorists in an enclosed space like a building, ship, train, or airplane. These movies are just more proof that a certain amount of copying is allowed if you don't overstep the boundaries--or at least don't take giant steps. And there's also another way to do it: The surprisingly delightful movie Ever After, with Drew Barrymore, is an obvious ripoff of the Cinderella story, but it takes a direct and open approach by making its title Ever After: A Cinderella Story.

There are of course many more films out there that are copies or have been copied--The Lion King, Clueless, Bridget Jones's Diary, The Lord of the Rings, Cruel Intentions, Downsizing, Easy A, Freaky Friday, Yellow Sky, Romeo and Juliet, The Little Mermaid, Barb Wire, Trading Places, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Wolf Man, The Nutty Professor, The Most Dangerous Game, and so on.

So, how about you? Have you--those of you who are writers--based any of your stories or novels on stories, novels, or movies that you've read or watched? How closely do they resemble those previous stories/plots? Are you regularly inspired by previous works? Have you used them to create retellings, homages, or pastiches? If you've written a great many different stories, and if you--like me--try to keep learning from what you've seen or read in others' works, how do you keep from including/repeating some of those things in your own work?

If you do re-tell a story, be careful. I think I'll stick to new and original.

See you next week.

I Am Graduating Still

 

It’s the season of Dads and grads. My phone has blown up recently with pictures of young people in caps and gowns, sent by their proud parents. On a rainy weekday early this month I found myself in an auditorium watching a member of our family receive her hood for a PhD she’d been working on since the pandemic.

It had been a long time since I’d attended such a ceremony, so I was surprised to find myself become emotional. That’s something you’d expect to do at weddings and funerals. I forgot that education—the yearning to strive, learn, get better—is a powerful trigger for me.

In this case, I was struck with a memory from my past.

Freshman year of journalism school. I’m sitting in the seminar portion of my larger COM107 class—the first course every journalism student takes—when the professor makes a bold statement.

He says that journalism as we know it, as we’ve practiced it since the turn of the century, is on the ropes. Thought leaders now say that a person who enters the profession can expect to make seven significant career pivots in their lifetime.

We were kids. We knew nothing. His statement went right over our heads.

Then he broke it down.

I am not saying that you will have seven jobs in your lifetime. Doing the same thing seven times in a row. No.

Oh—I thought. That’s exactly what my baby brain thought you meant.

In the course of your lifetime, he went on, you will shift to radically different careers. Maybe you start out as a reporter for a newspaper, but eventually you will write press releases for an electric company, you will run marketing for a huge bookstore chain like Barnes & Noble, you will start your own public relations firm, and by the time you retire you’ll be running the fundraising arm for your local theatre company. That’s what I mean.

This happened in a classroom in the early 1980s, which meant that even Prof. Babcock—who was then and remained for decades after, a towering figure in communications research—could not foresee the impact the Internet would have on journalism. Newspapers began their death spirals when Craigslist arrived in 1995. Suddenly people had a free or free-ish place to take their classified ads, which newspapers had monopolized and charged through the nose for since the dawn of print. The loss of that revenue, and the revenue from display ads, cost newspapers dearly.

Back in 2026, as I waited for the graduation ceremony to start, I ticked off the jobs I’d had. I’d gone to school for magazine journalism. I knew I couldn’t hack daily journalism. I was a features writer at heart. I would write for the glossies, thought I.

If you squint at my resume, you would see a career that probably defied Professor Babcock’s thesis.

I wrote for children’s magazines for my first two jobs, then I jumped to a dot-com (undreamt-of in Babcock’s philosophy), then went freelance and wrote for a string of magazines before segueing to books and ghostwriting. Aside from the blip represented by that website, my career did not at all conform to a seven-career shift.

At heart I am still a writer and editor.

Babcock’s prediction came true only in the new skills I was forced to master. By the time I had books to promote and clients to woo, the practice of typing up a resume and dropping it off at the neighborhood printer to be—ha!—expensively typeset and run off on fancy paper was laughable.

The early 2000s I had to learn how to design a website. By 2009, when my wife and I published a book on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, we were designing t-shirts. (One for every signer! Collect all 56! Geez, was that a crazy idea).

Social media meant learning how to shoot photos, add text to them, and send them out into the world, often with appended music.

You know—to do the job most publishers had stopped doing.

When publishers ran a quick 'n' dirty ebook sale of one of our titles, we dropped everything and designed a promo ad to distribute on social media, the way an advertising director might do.

We learned how to pitch our books to bookstores and non-stores, landing new accounts the way sales reps would.

We learned to approach radio stations and book reviewers, the way publicists would.

Today, if you look at the website of the school I attended, they announce with some puffery that they are preparing students for careers in digital journalism. They have stopped the charade that they are teaching for a one-track career. Graduates, they say, must be ready to tell stories across multiple platforms.

Every year, when I do our taxes, I am amazed by the sheer number of software programs our household subscribes to. And I’m sure you, my fellow 21st Century scribes, are in a somewhat similar situation. Some more than others, no doubt.

It is only when I step back and recall that I entered my freshman dorm toting an electric typewriter…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school taught us to set type by hand, just to give us a feel for the origins of that quaintly ancient technology…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school later ditched that very same type lab—sold off all those wooden trays of backwards lead letters to the art school across the street, retired the elderly pressman who ran the hand-cranked press…and filled the lab space with gleaming IBM personal computers in my senior year…

It is only then that I can appreciate the shift in time.

This came to me in a flash, all at the start of that graduate school ceremony, and I could not shake the grateful thought that I am graduating still.

A while back, I decided to build an online store for our books and stories. Many writers have done this, and it felt like a good, long-term goal. If nothing else, it would be a place to refer all those people who ask, “What’s the best place to buy your books?” (They say this as if they haven’t wandered into a bookstore in ages, which—sigh—they probably haven’t.)

It took me two years, but the store is finally live. It took that long because I needed to learn or relearn a lot of new skills. Guess what? (The Declaration Signer t-shirts are back!) Next up: I am teaching myself to record my short stories. I have bolted the microphone to the dining room table.

Why would anyone want to stop learning?

A person my wife interviewed for her first narrative nonfiction book arrived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1940s to work as a lab chemist on the Manhattan Project. Few employees in the Secret City knew what they were working on, but Virginia, a trained scientist, surmised the truth. How could she not?

I miss Virginia. I enjoyed getting to know her during the writing of that book. She was kind enough to let us live at her home while Denise conducted her research so we didn’t have to keep shelling out for hotels.

By then Virginia was in her late eighties, walked with two canes, was partially blind, and wore two hearing aids. Each morning she headed to her office to wake her Mac. She had her screen zoomed to the highest setting so she could read the news in 120-point type. She prized her e-reader because the technology allowed her to do the same with books.

On one of those visits, she told us that she had enrolled in an exciting new class for the coming semester at the senior center. The instructor was a young physicist from the national lab.

“What’s the course?” we asked.

“The history of transuranic elements,” she replied.

God willing, I will be like her someday: Approaching my ninth decade and still learning. The only way to be, as far as I am concerned.

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

It's Still a Mystery

At a signing in a bookstore years ago, a lady (a.k.a. potential buyer) stopped at my table, picked up one of my books, pointed to the word STORIES on the cover, and asked me, "How many?"

"Forty," I said.

"Are all of them mysteries?"

"Well – they're all crime stories."

Which, thank goodness, turned out to be what she considered a satisfactory answer. But I realized later that I could have just said– and been truthful in saying– "Yes, they're all mysteries." Why? According to most of the editors I know, certainly those of the bigger mystery magazines and the best-of-the-year mystery anthologies, any story that contains a crime can be labeled a mystery. Which makes sense. After all, both Columbo and Poker Face are considered mystery series even though not a single episode involves a whodunit, and crime novels like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Mr. Mercedes, Get Shorty, A Simple Plan, The Day of the Jackal, etc., are always found in the "mystery" section of the bookstore even though they're not traditional mysteries. I re-read Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight recently, which reminded me that Leonard, who was named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America, once said – and I'm paraphrasing – that he had never in his life written anything in which the identity of the villain was concealed until the end.

My point is, we who write crime stories, whether they involve a murder or not and whether they're whodunits or not (most of mine are howcatchems or howtheygotawaywithits) can safely call ourselves mystery writers.

Now, having said that … the mystery genre has a number of subgenres:

Cozy

These stories usually feature a protagonist who has no professional experience but is drawn into the plot by chance. The setting is limited – a bakery, an antique store, a coffeeshop, a small town, etc. – and there's no graphic violence, sex, strong language, or controversial topics. The murder, robbery, or whatever crime it is, takes place off-screen, the title is punny and/or catchy, and the tales are often "series" stories or novels featuring recurring characters. I've had almost 150 of those lighthearted mysteries (mine are probably more "amateur sleuth" than "cozy") published in Woman's World magazine.

Example (novel): The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Hard-boiled

These gritty stores feature tough but good-hearted detectives with a strong personal code of honor and justice, who happily bend the rules and reject authority while fighting to do the right thing in a corrupt system. This subgenre is sometimes combined with the noir or PI subgenres and – unlike cozies – usually include plenty of violence, sex, and profanity.

Example: LA Confidential by James Ellroy

Police Procedurals

The protagonists here are official law enforcement folks who investigate a case and use technology, legal procedures, and forensic evidence to track down criminals. These stories are sometimes whodunits and – like hard-boiled stories – feature violence, drugs, street language, etc. They focus more on the investigation than on the criminal, and creating them usually requires a familiarity with, or a great deal of research into, the daily workings of a police department. A possible hint, here: In the procedural short stories I've written, I've attempted to hide my ignorance by setting them in fictional cities, since fictional cities have fictional police departments whose rules might differ a bit from the real world.

Example: The Black Echo by Michael Connelly

Locked-room Mysteries

These feature "impossible" crimes committed in an enclosed space with no obvious solution. Sometimes they're murder mysteries, but they might also be robberies in which there's apparently no way the robber could accomplish the theft. The fun for the reader is in the puzzle, in trying to figure it all out before the big "reveal" at the end.

Example: The Three Coffins/The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr

Private Eye

The protagonist here is a professional private investigator, not a police detective, though he or she is often an ex-cop or ex-military. This subgenre frequently overlaps with noir and hard-boiled. I've written a few of these, beginning in 2020, in response to a submission call by Michael Bracken for a special PI issue of Black Cat Mystery Magazine. I was fortunate (and amazed) to later have that story win the 2021 Shamus Award (thanks, Michael!), and it introduced me to a new and fun kind of mystery writing. Not that it matters, but my favorite PI writer is probably the late Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser novels.

Example: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Noir

Noir stories and novels have protagonists who are usually deeply flawed in some way, and easily manipulated. I've heard it said that a noir story just means a dumb guy's smart girlfriend talks him into committing a crime, and that's probably a pretty good description. I've said myself that it's any crime story that includes a dark room crisscrossed with the shadows of Venetian blinds. (If you've seen those movies, you know what I mean.) I also like neo-noir, as in the movie Body Heat.

Example: Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

Caper

Caper stories are usually told from the POV of the crooks, and describe the planning and execution of a crime, like a kidnapping or a bank heist. I've written lots of these, and I love 'em. Sometimes the bad guys win, sometimes the good guys, and little attention is given to the solution to the crime. My story that was included in the recent SMFS anthology of Derringer-winners was sort of a humorous caper story, and I can tell you they're great fun to write.

Example: The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake

Traditional

Traditional mysteries feature a crime committed in a closed setting by an unknown antagonist, several possible suspects, and a detective (either police or private) who figures out and reveals the identity of the villain. I've heard these described as fair-play mysteries because enough clues are provided for the reader to try to identify the villain before the protagonist does.

Example: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

Mystery/Thriller

I've seen this listed as a subgenre but I think it's also sort of a catch-all to describe suspenseful mysteries that don't fit easily into other categories. They're crime stories with more action and tension and anticipation than some mysteries offer, and they also have faster-moving plots with lots of twists and reversals. In fact, this kind of story is mostly what I write: tales of ordinary folks, not necessarily cops or PIs, who wind up in dire situations and have to find/fight/shoot their way out.

Example: Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

Paranormal

Paranormal mysteries involve otherworldly or supernatural elements. My favorites of these – as a lifetime Twilight Zone fan I have written many of these stories – often feature some kind of time travel or fantasy/telepathy/magic element. An interesting point: If a crime is involved, there are usually a few mystery magazines and mystery anthologies around that might be receptive to them, and – like humor or caper stories – they're truly fun to write.

Example: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Historical

Historical mysteries are generally set at least fifty years in the past. That of course includes the fascinating (to me) years of gangsters, prohibition, organized crime, etc., in the mid-20th Century, an era which has served as the backdrop for many of my stories. (It also includes the Old West – I've written a lot of Westerns, some of them featuring a San Francisco-based private detective – but for some reason I don't think most editors consider Westerns to be historical fiction; the Western is a genre of its own.) One thing I've heard about historical fiction that I consider interesting: Historical mysteries must be written by authors who are not contemporaries of the time in which the stories are set. In other words, the Sherlock Homes stories are not considered to be historical fiction because they're set during the time in which they were written.

Example: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

As mentioned earlier, there can be considerable overlap between these subgenres: the dividing lines get blurry pretty fast. Also, there are more subgenres that I didn't list because they're self-explanatory: courtroom, mystery/romance, humorous, whodunits, solve-it-yourself mysteries, etc.

My questions for you are:

If you're a mystery/crime writer, what kinds of subgenres do you write? Which give you the greatest pleasure to write? – have you specialized in those? Which do you like most when it comes to your reading? Have you intentionally mixed any of these subgenres? Can you think of others I've missed? Which do you think are the easiest to write, and the easiest to sell to an editor/publisher?

One final hint. If you've written a mainstream story that you can't seem to sell, insert a crime someplace within it and send it to one of the remaining mystery magazines, or a crime anthology. I've done that, and it works. Well, sometimes it works.   

Sherlock Holmes Actors

Recently I have been thinking about immortality, not the human and aspirational kind, typified by one of our billionaires who apparently wants to sleep his way to eternity, but the curious immortality of certain literary creations. What mysterious secret ingredients has kept folks like Oedipus and Antigone, David and his rival Goliath, Medea, and Orpheus, and the notables of the Hindu epics evergreen and ever present?

New Young Holmes series

Sure, a strong connection to an historic religion is a big help, but not essential, considering the continuing presence of our genre's Sherlock Holmes. Not content with retelling his adventures in every medium except dance and opera, we have retired him, married him, gifted him with a daughter and saddled him with multiple bee hives.

He's been treated for addiction – by Sigmund Freud, no less; brought into the 21st century with Sherlock, and just recently restored to callow youth by Young Sherlock, wherein he works as domestic help in Oxford, crashes parties with a louche undergrad named Moriarty, and gets acquainted with a Chinese princess who is a master of both armed and unarmed combat.

Is anything new possible? Well, yes. In The Final Problem, Arturo Perez-Reverte has come up with an angle that I confess I exploited nearly a decade ago: a mystery employing not the great man himself, but one of his impersonating actors. Together, The Final Problem and my own Holmes Impersonator stories provide two more ways to exploit the great detective.

I did not have ambitions to enlarge Sherlock's already expansive realm when I ventured into Holmes territory. I had hopes of breaking into a lucrative weekly supermarket tabloid, and I had come up with what I thought was a clever plot. In the service of this idea, I needed a detective and for reasons unknown, the Holmes Impersonator arrived.

A journeyman actor, employed by regional theaters and the dinner circuit with occasional voice- over or advertising work, my detective makes some extra cash with a regular gig at The Sherlock Holmes Museum, a small private Connecticut outfit with a slim budget and a constant need for donors. I thought he was ideal; the tabloid editors thought differently.

But the Impersonator was resilient. He found a home at Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine where he proved to be a clever guy, a useful narrator for six outings, and surprisingly observant. His flaw is his appearance. As child visitors to The Sherlock Holmes Museum invariably observe, he doesn't look like Sherlock. Indeed, tapped for a PBS revival of Sherlock Holmes, the famous play that made star William Gillette rich enough to build Connecticut's one and only castle, he gets cast as Watson.

The Profile

No such troubles for Perez- Reverte's Basil Osmond, who has the hawk nose and elegant physique of the famous Sidney Paget illustrations. Basil has instant credibility, because he not only looks the part but has played it in over a dozen immensely popular films.

Clearly based on Basil Rathbone, the famous 20th century Sherlock, Perez- Reverte's detective comes with an encyclopedic knowledge of Conan Doyle stories, an almost instant recall of Holmes' famous lines, and the savoir faire of having temporarily been rich and famous and on intimate terms with both London's West End and Hollywood royalty.

Such a character clearly deserves a mystery, and The Final Problem soon sets one for him. Basil has been sailing with a producer who may cast him in an upcoming television series. A storm strands them on a Greek island, one conveniently equipped with a luxury hotel inhabited by other temporarily stranded visitors.

Long time mystery fans will recognize that this setup is far from the atmospheric fogs of Baker Street. We are, in fact, in Agatha Christie territory with nine visitors, the hotel proprietor and three in staff, and very soon we have a corpse, a lot of questions, and no way to get help from the police.

Granted the authority to conduct an investigation, Basil, at first reluctantly and then with considerable flair and enthusiasm, sets to work, assisted by a fawning Spanish mystery writer and fellow Holmes buff.

The plotting, more clever than plausible, gives Basil scope, even if the somewhat awkward epilogue makes clear why Agatha Christie favored dramatic revelations before the assembled suspects.

So, here are our two alternative performers. The low- budget Holmes Impersonator, modest but effective in the compass of short fiction and a small locale, and a famous Sherlock in a luxury setting and the Christie- type plot suitable for a full length novel. Are there room for more such characters? I suspect so.

And what of the secret ingredient, the source of such characters' longevity? I am still far from a solution, but part must be the presence of what the great Scottish philosopher David Hume declared essential to knowledge: a clear and distinct idea.

Sherlock provides that in spades: the pithy phrases, the investigative dictums, and, of course, the instantly identifiable costume. Put a dog or a cat in a deer stalker and an Ulster, hand them a meerschaum pipe and either is instantly recognizable as a detective of this very special type. With a brand like this, no wonder other writers are tempted to enlist him in their literary ventures.

Location, Location, and... What Was It?

 I was looking at A Textbook Case this week, the SleuthSayers page I created as a sort of informal manual on writing fiction. It consists of about sixty essays I wrote here and at other blog sites.  

I noticed that I had only one piece about settings, and  that one was about imaginary places.  This didn't really surprise me because I am not a big fan of descriptions of setting.  Elmore Leonard famously advised us to leave out the parts people don't read, and that is how I tend to feel about those descriptions.  But I admit they have their place - sometimes.

You can find some excellent essays on setting here at the SleuthSayers website.  In one of them I found this comment from O'Neil DeNoux:  "Setting is not just the name of a place or time period, it is the feeling of the place and time period. It includes all conditions – region, geography, neighborhood, buildings, interiors, climate, time of day, season of year." 

Good starting place.  I began thinking about descriptions of setting that really stood out for me and a few came to mind:

* The beginnings of Chandler's novels.

* Elizabeth Peters' descriptions of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings  in various Amelia Peabody novels.

* Doyle's descriptions of  Dartmoor  in Hound of the Baskervilles.

* Tony Hillerman's description of the Navaho Reservation.

* Hong Bay in William Marshall's Yellowthread Street novels.

Personally I am much more interested  in interior settings: descriptions of houses and rooms.  How many full size reproductions have been made of 221B Baker Street?  Rex Stout provided a detailed plan of Nero Wolfe's famous office but that doesn't prevent people from arguing with it or (very common)  picturing it in mirror image.  

If you want a real master class in describing interiors in an interesting manner open any of Mick Herron's Slow Horse novels.  Near the beginning of each one you will find a description of Slough House; each version is different, and each is intriguing. 

All this came to mind because I have a story in the current issue of Black Cat Weekly and setting is important in it.  All the tales in my "Bad Day" series take place in Brune County, which is fictional, but "A Bad Day For Good Samaritans" centers on a park which is very much based on a real one in my city. 

 Well, here is a little report I wrote on Facebook in 2020 about something that happened to me: 

The pond this week

My story begins with a similar situation except the mother is nasty (conflict is the kernel of fiction).  So I went to some trouble to describe the place.  But the other scenes in the story are afterthoughts, with hardly more than a few words of description.

The pond in 2020

I suppose the point I am making is that you don't go deep into setting unless it is crucial to the story.  That could mean it is part of the plot (as in mine) or part of the mood.  But as always in short stories, the rule is not one word  should be included that doesn't move the story forward.

Now over to you: what are your favorite fictional settings?


 

  

How to Maintain a Career in Fiction Writing

 Today, I'm combining the wisdom of two authors I much admire, Benjamin Stevenson and John Floyd.

Two nights ago, I hosted/interviewed Australian author Benjamin Stevenson on stage at the Centennial Theatre in Burlington, Canada.  To say I was 'outnumbered' is an understatement:  Benjamin's book "Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone" has sold a million copies!  I don't believe I've sold even half that if you were to combine all my books, short stories, and comedy pieces put together.  (Okay, the newspaper columns had audiences in the millions, but that wasn't fiction.)

It was an electric night on stage with Benjamin, as we both got our start writing standup.  Lots of fun!  But some of the things we talked about have really resonated with me after the event.

Benjamin said it takes him two years to write a book.  (It takes me one year.  I sit in awe of cozy writers who can write three a year, frankly.)  We both agreed on one thing:  We have to be really excited about a book project to sit down, bum in chair, and write every day until that one project is done.

Excited.  I've thought back to my own career as a novelist, and can see that this drives me as well.

I didn't start as a novelist.  I began life as a short story writer.  But when the short story market began to shrink, I started to think about meeting the challenge of writing a novel. 

My first series is still my bestselling individual series.  Rowena Through the Wall was epic fantasy, or what they would call Romantasy these days.  It was featured in USA Today some years ago, and took off (a top 50 Amazon bestseller, all books.)  That series was great fun to write, but once I finished it, it felt that fantasy was kind of done for me.  I looked around for something that would excite me. 

This brings me to John Floyd's column from a few weeks ago, The Old Genre Switcheroo, about moving between genres or subgenres.  I realized that this is what I've been doing.  It's how I've stayed excited, while continuing to write novels.

My next series was The Goddaughter mob caper series.  You can't get more different from dark ages fantasy than that!  A contemporary mob goddaughter in Hamilton doesn't want to be one, but keeps getting dragged back in to bail out her family.  

Totally different genres with different rules.  What they did have in common?  Both series were high comedy.   

When that series ended, I looked around for another genre or subgenre that I could get excited about.  Something that would challenge me, and provide a host of fresh ideas.

Which led to The Pharaoh's Curse Murders (out this week!) and the historical Merry Widow Murder series.  Still humorous, but with the challenge of a 1929 setting and - new for me - classic mystery plotting requirements.

Challenging and therefore exciting, for this writer. 

What does all this prove?  This is what I've learned:

The secret to having a multi-decade career in fiction writing is to be versatile.  Move where the market goes.  Keep yourself fresh by exploring new genres or sub-genres.  

Versatility.  Which begs the question, what's next for this writer, after The Kennel Club Murders, out April 2027?

I'm excited to see.  

Melodie Campbell is the winner of ten awards, including The Derringer and the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence, for her 21 novels and 60 short stories.  She didn't even steal them.

NOW AVAILABLE AT B&N, AMAZON, CHAPTERS/INDIGO AND INDEPENDENTS! 

 

 

Avignon and All That

"During a January closed-door meeting at the Pentagon, a Trump administration official reportedly warned a Vatican ambassador that America had the military power to do whatever it wants in the world, and that the Catholic Church had better take its side.
While the sourcing is limited, the American government confirms the meeting happened (if not the wording used) and Christopher Hale confirms that “some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year [for the celebration of America’s 250th].” All of which certainly puts the Pope's comments against American violence in Iran in a different light.
But what’s getting a ton of attention is both the worst sourced, and most intriguing, piece: that an American official in that meeting invoked the Avignon Papacy." (LINK)

Why does that matter? Well, bringing up the Avignon Papacy to a Pope – any Pope – is pretty much a direct threat.

Back in the High Middle Ages, before the Calamitous 14th Century (and thank you, Barbara Tuchman, for one of the greatest histories ever written), i.e., the 1300s, there was only one official church in all of Western Europe, the Church, catholic and Catholic. Everyone was born into it, and it was integral to everything. The Church told you what was right and what was wrong, how to get to heaven, how to love your fellow man, how you should work, how you should live, how you should treat each other. All the social services that government and various non-profit organizations do today were then done by the church and the (often forced) largesse of the wealthy: welfare to widows and orphans, hospitals, asylums, orphanages, schools, etc.

The Church was like breathing, it was all around you. And that was fine with most people. The High Middle Ages, from 950 to 1300, has been called the Great Age of Faith. Cathedrals were built. Crusades were fought. And it helped that it was what's known as the Medieval Warm Period, a/k/a the Climatic Optimum: perfect weather, good harvests, often great harvests, fat bellies...

And then it all went to hell in a handcart, thanks to the Hundred Years' War (between England and France), the Black Death (where a third of the world OR MORE died, and that was just the first go-round), and the Avignon Papacy (a/k/a the Babylonian Capitivity of the Church) and the Great Schism. These three things shattered everything.

AVIGNON AND WHAT CAME NEXT

The papal palace in Avignon

Jean-Marc Rosier from http://www.rosier.pro

So let's start off with a problematic Pope, Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303): He was from the Gaetani family, wealthy Italian nobility. (Back then, it was pretty normal for a Pope to be elected from among wealthy Italian families and would be so for a very long time.) And it had been expected that he'd be elected to the papacy, but it didn't happen.

Instead, a monk named Pietro Angelerio, a hermit monk was elected by a fluke of frustrated cardinals (who were tired of wealthy noble Italian families running everything, and this was way before the Borgias). Pope Celestine was extremely holy, and wept when he was dragged from his cell to Rome. He was easily persuaded to resign a few months later, probably by Boniface, who was immediately elected Pope.

NOTE: Celestine had been promised he could return to his hermitage, but instead Boniface had Celestine arrested and imprisoned until he died.

Pope Boniface accomplished a lot, including the Regulae Iuris, a collection of legal principles, which is still used as a source for deciding matters of canon law. But his most infamous achievement was the papal bull Unam Sanctam – which declared the pope's jurisdiction over both temporal and spiritual powers: "We declare, announce and define that it is altogether necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff."

This wasn't new: it was pretty much believed throughout Western Europe. Not in Eastern Europe, where the Orthodox Church still considered the Bishop of Rome as just another Patriarch among many. The Catholic/Orthodox schism over papal authority goes back a very long way...

The King of France was Philip IV a/k/a "the Fair" (apparently he was handsome), and did his best to expand French lands. He spent a lot of time at war with England, also with Spain, Flanders, etc., while setting up an alliance with Scotland (the "auld alliance" began with him), conquered Flanders, and made contact with the Mongols with the idea of future military alliances. The trouble is, all that cost money. He was always scrambling for money, and got it a variety of ways, such as arresting bankers and seizing their money.

(Later, under the next Pope, Philip IV pitched a huge fight with the Knights Templar, who had financed most of his war with England, and sent troops to arrest all the Templars in France, accusing them of sacrilige, idolatry, homosexuality, financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. And seized all their large assets…)

But then Philip IV levied taxes on the French clergy of one-half their annual income. Neither the Church nor the papacy would put up with that... Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericos Laicos, forbidding the transference of any church property to the French Crown.

So between the two bulls, Philip IV of France saw a threat, and held a little assembly of his own in Paris in April 1302. Nobles, burgesses and clergy met to denounce the Pope and pass around a crude forgery*, Deum Time ("Fear God"), in which Boniface supposedly claimed feudal suzerainty over France, an "unheard-of assertion". Boniface denied the document and its claims, but – insanely – reminded Phillip that previous popes had deposed three French kings. (Also a few English ones, including John Lackland.)

*I know, you thought social media and fake news were modern, right?

And that ticked Philip IV off enough to call for a council to depose Boniface on charges of heresy, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, simony, and sorcery. Boniface prepared to excommunicate Philip, and in order to stop him, Philip hired some thugs who attacked Boniface and imprisoned him for three days without food or water. Boniface was rescued by a group of Italian nobles, but the pope died of his treatment within a month.

Depiction of the death of Boniface in a
15th-century manuscript of Boccaccio's De Casibus

Pope Clement V (r. 1305-1314)

With Boniface's death, King Philip IV promptly bribed the college of cardinals, and Boniface's successor was a Frenchman who revoked Unam Sanctam. And in 1309 King Philip IV moved Clement and the papacy to Avignon, France. Clement brought with him all the French cardinals, papal bureaucracy, etc. In exchange, Philip promised him protection from anything like what happened to poor Boniface.

And there the papacy stayed, at Avignon until 1377, a period that's known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.

In case you're wondering, this was a disaster for the Church, because the church expenses skyrocketed. Why? Well, they're in France, and the papal states are in Italy, and the papal states are where a lot of the papal wealth comes from. And the money isn't flowing regularly, so papal taxes went up even more. And, since the pope and his court were in France, and dependent on French support, they rubber-stamped all of the French king's policies and decisions. Especially since, of the 134 cardinals that were created during these 70 years, 113 of them are French.

But it really helped French royalty. A nice, tame Church that could pretty much be controlled…

Gennadii Saus i Segura

A map of Rome, showing an allegorical figure of Rome
as a widow in black mourning the Avignon Papacy

But that's medieval history - why does it matter that someone brought that up to today's representative for the Pope?

The big deal is that the Avignon Papacy began with a king sending a bunch of thugs to capture the Pope, and then setting up his own pope on his own land and controlling the church for 70 years.

Anyone in the Vatican would, and probably did, see "mentioning" it as a threat.

BTW, back in the day, things got worse. Eventually a pope returned to Rome, but instead of things getting back to normal, the French contingent elected yet another Pope in Avignon. So now there were two Popes, one in Avignon, one in France, each excommunicating the other, and all of the others' followers...  Eventually there were three popes...  Briefly... But that's another story, for another time.

Some Great New Books

Books. Books. Books.

I read a lot. Last year, for instance, I finished more than 200 published books (and many short stories and unpublished novels and short story manuscripts). One thing I enjoy as much as reading is telling people about books I love. And since today, March 31, is the last day of the first quarter of 2026, this seems a good time to talk about my favorite mystery/crime books published in the last three months. 

 

 Finlay Donovan Crosses the Line

Elle Cosimano's wonderfully funny and fresh Finlay Donovan series is back with its sixth book, Finlay Donovan Crosses the Line. I think it's the best one since we were first introduced to Finlay and her nanny/best friend/unintentional partner in crime, Vero (short for Veronica), in Finlay Donovan is Killing It. The series begins with Finlay--a romantic-suspense author and single mom juggling two small kids, an annoying ex-husband, money problems, and a book deadline--being mistaken for a hit woman. 

Each book is madcap and fun, this newest one especially. It has Finlay, Vero, and friends trying to clear Vero of charges that she stole a lot of money that her old college sorority raised from illegal poker games. The story is engaging, with tons of twists, strong characters, a great voice, and clever, interesting writing. I laughed out loud often. If you haven't checked out this series yet, don't wait. The first novel is being adapted by Tina Fey for a TV series on Peacock. Take my advice: read the books first. While you could start with the sixth book, you'll get much more enjoyment by reading them in order. 

 The Bookbinder's Secret 

There are a bunch of books with this title. I am talking about the one written by A. D. Bell. This is a debut novel, but it doesn't read like one. It is set in England at the start of the twentieth century. The main character, Lily, is an accomplished bookbinder (she is technically an apprentice but it is in name only). While repairing a book, she finds an old letter hidden in the binding, and it leads her to a dangerous mystery that she is compelled to investigate. 

This novel has wonderful characters, a well-drawn setting, and an intriguing story. The voice is melodious, and the writing is strong. Plus you get an inside look at bookbinding. What reader wouldn't like that? I did have a quibble: Lily didn't quickly figure something out that seemed obvious to me. But a book needn't be perfect to be recommended, and I definitely recommend this one.

  

Murder Will Out

This is another debut, and I have to thank Kristopher Zgorski for talking about it recently and thus bringing it to my attention. Jennifer K. Breedlove's Gothic-ish novel, set on an island off the coast of Maine, won the Mystery Writers of America/Minotaur Books First Crime Novel Award last year, and I see why. 

The story opens with Willow returning to the island where she spent summers as a child. She has come back to attend the funeral of her beloved yet long-estranged godmother, Sue. It turns out that Sue recently inherited a mansion (a haunted mansion--but it's not scary-haunted), and her death--occurring the day before she was supposed to get married--looks awfully suspicious to Willow. With the help of new friends, including a resourceful librarian and a smart, brave, charming corgi, Willow is determined to find out what happened. 

This book has strong writing and an engrossing, complex story. The author makes great use of the setting, especially the house and the ghosts. I appreciate how the main character grows by the end and finds her place in the world. And of course I love the dog. I did find the large cast of characters a little hard to follow at times. And I have a problem with a legal issue affecting the plot that the author (and her editor) overlooked. It could have been resolved with an additional sentence or two. Nonetheless, this is a book I enjoyed and recommend.

A Field Guide to Murder

The final book I'm recommending is also a debut. Written by Michelle L. Cullen, A Field Guide to Murder has two main characters, Harry--a sixtysomething anthropologist who's no longer traveling the world thanks to his broken hip--and Emma, his twentysomething nurse. When one of Harry's neighbors calls him begging for help right before she dies (murdered, of course), no broken hip is going to keep him from finding out whodunit. And Emma, dissatisfied with her life, is happy to help him. 

I enjoyed how both characters grow throughout the book. And I loved watching them learn to lean on each other as they investigated, developing a sweet father/daughter-type relationship. The book has a slow start and a lot of characters, but once I got into it, I was invested in the mystery and especially in Harry and Emma. The writing was good and, at times, funny. A solid debut. 

 

Overall, all four of these books are recommended. As I said, the Finlay Donovan series is up to book six, and the other three books are the first in their series. I'm looking forward to the next book from all of these authors. I hope they are released sooner than later.

Before I go, I don't usually mention here the release of books I edited. But today happens to be the publication date of Let Nothing Astonish You by Lauren Opper. This intricate whodunit is set in part in a Gothic mansion in small-town Connecticut. It is Opper's first novel, and it comes with a blurb from none other than Meg Gardiner: "A lively mystery rich with atmosphere, a vivid cast of suspects, and some delicious twists. Enjoy!" I couldn't say it better myself. 

Happy book birthday, Lauren! May your writing career be long and bright.

 

 

 

 

 

A Sleep or A Scrape

As part of an irregular series of blogs looking at notable trials from this month in history, I'd like to enter Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine. Let's revisit 1845 and the murder trial of Albert Tirrell. Although old, the case offers an opportunity to consider the roles of defense attorneys, prosecutors, and novel defenses. 

Twenty-two-year-old Albert Tirrell was no paragon of virtue. The scion of a wealthy Weymouth, Massachusetts family, he left his wife and two children to maintain a relationship with Maria Bickford, a prostitute living in a Boston brothel. Although they traveled and were constantly together, she refused to abandon her profession. Maria was successful in her work; she could afford a maid and expensive clothing. The relationship between Bickford and Tirrell was described as volatile. Maria reportedly said that she enjoyed quarreling with Albert because they had such a good time making up.  

In September 1845, local authorities charged Albert with adultery for cohabiting with Maria while married. He surrendered, posted a bond, and returned to Maria.

Albert visited her at her disreputable boarding house after her last customer on October 26^th, 1845. Late that evening, the proprietor saw and heard the couple arguing. The next morning, the proprietor and his wife heard a scream and a heavy thud from the upstairs room. They heard someone running down the stairs and out the door. Maria was found on her back, a neck wound nearly cutting off her head. Someone had set fire to the bed on which she lay. At the foot of the bed was a bloody razor. A man's walking stick and vest in the room were found spattered with blood. The landlord also found a letter addressed with the initials, "A.J.T. to M.A.B."

National Police Gazette

At about the same time, Albert Tirrell arrived at a nearby stable and requested a horse. He had gotten into a little scrape, he reported. When the police tried to find Tirrell, they discovered he had fled. From Weymouth, Tirrell traveled through Vermont to Canada. There, he boarded a ship bound for Liverpool. Bad weather forced the ship back to port. He journeyed to New York and booked a boat for New Orleans. He was arrested in Louisiana.

Tirrell hired Rufus Choate to defend him. A protégé of Daniel Webster, Choate is considered one of the great American lawyers of the 19^th Century. An outstanding orator, he was famous for delivering the “longest sentence known to man.” (1,219 words)

The prosecutor presented a strong circumstantial case, relying on the abovementioned facts. The witnesses, however, all resided in the brothel, and no one was beyond impeachment. Additionally, no one witnessed the murder. Still, robust evidence pointed toward Albert Tirrell.

Then Rufus Choate began his defense. His strategy was three-pronged. Maria may have killed herself, the defense argued. Choate’s associates impugned Maria’s character and suggested that suicide was “almost the natural death of persons of her character.” This theory suffered, however, from the violent nature of the injury to her neck. The defense team also presented evidence of Albert’s good character before he was ensnared by the lascivious Maria. Choate suggested another resident of the boardinghouse might have done it. And finally, the defense argued that if Tirrell had killed her, it was while he was sleepwalking.

A parade of friends and family testified to his sleepwalking habit beginning as early as age six. They elicited testimony that the somnambulism had increased in frequency and manifested bizarre behaviors. These episodes, according to his family, included window-smashing and threatening his brother with a knife. The dean of the Harvard Medical School testified that a person in a somnambulistic state could rise, dress, kill, set a fire, and escape.  

It is an essential element of most crimes that the defendant intended to commit the offense. As a society, we criminalize behavior that a person knows or should know is wrong. But if they don't understand, then punishment serves no purpose. Usually, this applies to young children or to the insane.

Harvard Art Museum

On March 27th, 1845, Rufus Choate gave his closing argument to the jury. He began by telling them he did not intend to take up much of their time. He then talked for five hours non-stop. The court recessed for a meal, and when the court resumed, Choate continued for another hour and a half. He spent much of the postprandial argument focused on somnambulism.

The jury deliberated for two hours before acquitting Tirrell.

The strategy worked again when the prosecutor tried to convict Tirrell of arson for setting the room on fire.

Tirrell later wrote to Rufus Choate asking the lawyer to return half his legal fee. He argued that he shouldn't have to pay so much for a case where it had been too easy to persuade the jury of his innocence.

I do not want to leave the blog with the impression that somnambulism serves as a get-out-of-jail card. According to an internet search, the defense has been tried perhaps sixty times. Most of the time, it has not been successful. Sleep scientists say it would not work today; Tirrell's behaviors, especially the flight, cannot be explained by sleepwalking. Even Tirrell did not get away completely. He went to prison for the original adultery charge. The judge refused to dismiss the case and sentenced him to three years.

Besides an interesting fact pattern, the case highlights the roles of the prosecutor and the defense. The government must prove each element. The government needs a clear message to explain the defendant’s actions. It has a problem, even today, when a victim comes from a marginal or ostracized part of the community.

The defense, meanwhile, succeeds when it undermines even one necessary element of the government's case. To do this, sometimes an astute lawyer presents a unified theory; other times, he or she scattershoots. Sometimes, the defense merely picks at the government's case, testing its reliability and challenging the credibility of the witnesses on which it rests. In other cases, the attorney prosecutes the defense—putting forward an alternative theory that explains the evidence and exonerates the client.

Choate tried all of the above. He picked at and maligned the government's evidence. He highlighted matters the prosecutor had not brought up--chiefly an eyewitness. He also put forward several alternatives. Choate's chief theory, the one that keeps the murder case of Albert Tirrell in the public eye, was the defense of somnambulism. A novel defense that in this case worked. 

Albert Tirrell's murder trial is the March Trial of the Month.

Now go get a good night's sleep.

Until next time.