The Sweeney

I was thinking, for whatever odd reason, about Cockney rhyming slang, and about linguistic regionalisms and vernacular, generally. If you’re not familiar with Cockney idiom, it takes a rhyme, and then clips off the end – the actual rhyme. For example, “lottery ticket” rhymes with “sticky wicket,” or “Lemony Snicket,” so you’d say, I forgot to buy stickies, or Lemonies. I made that up, but the most famous one Americans might recognize is the title of the early John Thaw/Dennis Waterman procedural, The Sweeney. The series is about the London Metropolitan Police robbery-homicide division, the Flying Squad. “Flying Squad” rhymes with “Sweeney Todd.” The usage generally plays off some other common reference, and the disguise factor is only once removed, not impenetrable. To someone born to the sound of Bow Bells, easy currency.

Language, and more specifically, vocabulary, is an evolving enterprise.

The Cambridge Dictionary added 6000 new words this year. Slop made the cut, in the sense of internet filler content, as did intention economy, product that AI designs, anticipating need. Others include loud looking – meaning aggressively trying to hook up – and brain flossing – immersive white noise. Cardboard box index is an economic indicator, based on shipping requirements. Or sanewashing, no explanation necessary. It’s interesting how much of it comes from information technology, an indication of how present data and data management is in our lives, and how much of it comes from processing information, our engagement with that technology. Language reflects the social and political environment.

Here’s the introductory note to Huckleberry Finn on speech patterns.

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Writers are often advised to avoid dialect, and tricky spelling, to replicate pronunciation that veers off the standard of spoken English.

I’m not sure about this, any more than I’m sure about steering clear of contemporary slang. Speech patterns are native to Down East or the Deep South, the Ozarks or the Upper Peninsula, and they demonstrate the adaption of language to place. Word order. Descriptions based on local diet, or insect life, or hair color – because a pocket of gene pool. The locals don’t remark on it; to them, it is the norm. It’s the way other people talk that’s eccentric. Don Winslow, in City on Fire, uses the term cabinet to mean a milk shake, and this is real inside baseball, trust me. It’s an expression used in Providence, Rhode Island, and nowhere else in New England (or the entire world). Up in Boston, they call a milk shake a frappe. Which, either way, means it’s got ice cream in it. A “milk shake” is just milk and syrup.

The argument, I think, is that regionalisms, or phonetic spelling, or trying to be awkwardly hip, puts too much distance between you and the reader, and there’s some truth to it.

Trudging through Joel Chandler Harris, or Kipling, for that matter, in Soldiers Three, gets old fast. The dialect is tiresome, and over-used. You have to sound it out loud to understand what’s being said. On the other hand, you hear the complaint that Stephen King uses brand names too much, as a shortcut. Eh. I don’t know. The argument for, is that these expressions ground you in specifics, and that’s the way I lean. When you read an older locution, in Twain, or Dashiell Hammett, or Jane Austen, you work out the meaning from the context – or, God forbid, you could look it up.

The sound of Bow Bells

The sound of Bow Bells

It’s said, that in East London, if you could hear the ringing of the bells at St. Mary-le-Bow church, in Cheapside, that you were a true Cockney, born within earshot. It’s a legacy turn of phrase, because the sound of the bells no longer carries as far as it did, drowned out by noise pollution. And like the bells, the metaphor fades. Specific to the place, it becomes received memory, folklore, urban legend, separate from experience.

Lost Language. Orphaned figures of speech. Forgotten devices and designs. A baggage claim of poetic license and clouded hyperbole, the rhymes and rhythms left unheard.

Newberry Crime Writing Workshop

Sometimes dreams come true.

I began my writing career as a science fiction/fantasy writer, and I know or know of many writers who attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop (founded in 1968, it later split into two workshops—Clarion and Clarion West—and spawned similar SF/F workshops) and then went on to long careers as SF/F writers. I dreamed of attending myself, but that never happened and, as time went on, my writing drifted into other genres and (mostly) settled in crime fiction.

For many years I dreamed about having a similar workshop specifically for crime fiction writers. A while back, I mentioned this in a Facebook post and discovered Warren Moore shared the same dream.

I’m happy to announce that our dream is now a reality. Warren and I are co-directors of the Newberry Crime Writing Workshop, which will offer the inaugural four-week workshop next summer. The college’s official press release follows, with links to additional information, including a way to sign up to receive email once the workshop opens to applications.

Newberry Crime Writing Workshop Press Release

Newberry, SC – Newberry College today announced the launch of the Newberry Crime Writing Workshop (NCWW), an intensive 4-week writers’ workshop for developing crime and mystery authors, taught by major figures in the field. The inaugural workshop will take place July 6-31, 2026, on the historic campus of Newberry College.

“Newberry College has always been about helping people grow and develop their vocations, whether that has meant a traditional career or some other gift,” said Professor of English and NCWW co-director Dr. Warren Moore. “This workshop is another way of doing that – we’re working to grow the community of crime and mystery writers, and to keep a popular and powerful genre of fiction vital for today and tomorrow.”

Attendees will take part in daily sessions where they will develop and share their work with one another. Each week’s sessions will be led by an instructor who is active in the crime writing field. The instructors for 2026 include Joe R. Lansdale, Cheryl Head, Michael Bracken, and Moore.

Participants will live and work on the college’s historic campus, with meals provided at the college as well. Part class, part writers’ colony, NCWW is adapting the model of other successful workshops (most notably the famed Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop) and applying it to a genre with a wide range of fans and writers.

Fifteen applicants will be selected based on samples of work and statements of purpose – writers of any level of publishing experience are welcome to apply. The workshop’s $4000 tuition will cover room and board for the four-week term, as well as instruction, and some financial aid may be available. Applications and further information will be available at the NCWW website: www.newberry.edu/ncww.

For further information on NCWW, please contact Prof. Moore at crimefictionworkshop@newberry.edu.

Though Warren and I are co-directors, he did most of the hard work putting the workshop together, and he discusses the genesis of the Newberry Crime Writing Workshop in his blog post “So, About that Big Project…”

This workshop is for writers of all ages and experience levels. So, if you can spend four weeks in Newberry, S.C., next summer learning how to write crime fiction, this is for you.

We hope to see you there.

* * *

“Banking on Love” was published in Micromance Magazine, August 20, 2025.

Moody blues.

          An expert sailor once told me it wasn’t if I’d get seasick, it was when.  Twenty five years later, it hasn’t happened.  Yet. 

            The same applies to writer’s block.  I’ve never had it, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.  By blocked, I mean what some people describe as dead in the water.  No nothing, for weeks, months or years on end.  It’s true that sometimes I’m supposed to be writing something, and I’m just not in the mood.  So I go write something else.  If I’m in the mood.  If not, I can always find something else to do, like balance my checkbook or scrape paint of an old piece of furniture. 

            If I can’t find a single thing I’m in the mood to do, I’ll check myself into our local psychiatric hospital, which is world-renowned, by the way.  Asked to specify symptoms, I’ll just say “mood disorder.”

            I once visited someone confined to that institution who complained about the lack of meaningful activity to pass the time between group therapy and unappetizing meals. 

            “They mostly want you to color with crayons, only they take the artwork away when you’re done.  I suppose to process through a Rorschach app.”

            I’d be happy with a pen and pad of paper, or at least a paint scraper if I could sneak it by security.   I’d also want to learn something about moods.  I can easily identify good moods and bad, but what’s in the middle?  So-so mood?  Neither here nor there? Is it the absence of any mood?  Is that possible?

If you believe in the Principle of Causality, there has to be reasons for moods, good mood or bad. But this makes me think of the weather.  The reason it’s raining is there’s a lot of moisture in the air, and a change in temperature causes it to condense and fall from the sky.  Science is always ready with a plausible explanation, though I've noticed the scientists are often wrong.

            According to the Pathetic Fallacy, mood and meteorology are not only in synch, ones emotional outlook is actually the cause of climate events outside ones window.  I don’t think this is true, though it might explain London fog, having met more than one dour Englishman. 

            Like meteorologists, many psychologists assert there’s an explanation for every mood state and behavior.  They just haven’t come up with much proof, such as, this just happened to you, so hence your mood.  They pretend they can do this, but they really can’t.

           

        The word mood seems like a second or third string state of mind.  When does a good mood graduate into euphoria, or a bad mood descend into the trough of despair?  These would be useful things to know, since moods seem to have such a profound impact on a person’s ambitions, say to write a novel or spend Saturday night with your disagreeable in-laws.  William Styron once defined depression as, “A wimp of a word for what is in fact is a howling tempest of the mind.”  By these lights, never being in the mood to write would, for me, conjure similar evocations.

I think the next time I sit down at the keyboard and find myself unmoved to write anything, I might wonder, well how come?  This assumes I haven’t developed a high fever, my neighbors aren’t mowing their lawns, trimming their shrubs, playing volleyball on their front lawn or teaching their children how to shoot a twelve-gauge shotgun.  Though the fact is, there is often no proximate cause for this unwelcomed disposition.  It just happens.  It could be I got out of the wrong side of the bed, though I haven’t tracked this as a triggering mechanism.  If there is a wrong side, I’ll push the bed against the appropriate wall to mitigate future harms.

            There’s nothing else one can do.  Like flights of fancy, mood is an indiscriminate thing with no control stick, no predictor, no harbinger nor recourse.  I could try harder to put a finer point on this, but I just don’t feel like it.

The Digital Detective, Pay the Piper I

Pawnee ©
Encyclopedia of Aircraft

One day, I faced company arrest, a kind of corporate detainment. Company arrest combines citizens’ arrest and house arrest. Worse, the detainment came with a threat of physical harm. I’m not sure I should name the enterprise involved, but their initials are Piper Aircraft. They are known for fine low-wing light aircraft ranging from the homely but hardy Pawnee to the gorgeous Fury.

Piper contacted me about the time I went solo in my career. I had become an accidental expert in teleprocessing, the transmission of data. Operating systems have clean well-defined edges, where every tiny piece has a distinct, often powerful purpose. Contrarily, telecommunications is fraught with errors and omissions. An OS has to maintain a semblance of recovery and control despite fried fibre optics, iced-over microwave towers, or Russian-severed Atlantic cables. Trapping entangled signals, simultaneously there and not there, is trickier than bathing Schrödinger's cat.

Fury © Piper Aircraft

The introduction began a year earlier when a phone call came in, Director of Programming Services for Piper Aircraft in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. Introducing himself as Willy, explained they were using software from my old boss Rich, as described last time. They were experiencing problems but didn’t know how to diagnose the source.

Willy explained Lock Haven was two hundred miles from nowhere and not easy to get to. A trip required a full day’s drive from my home, a seven hour drive without traffic, and oddly about the same via a chain of commercial commuter flights. Thus Piper Aircraft commuted by… Piper aircraft. Willy would instruct one of their pilots to pick me up and afterwards return me home. On my end, I chose Plymouth, Massachusetts not because I lived there but because my girlfriend did, and a small airport might be easier to navigate.

© Piper Aircraft

As a newly baptized student pilot, I enjoyed the ride. The pilot wasn’t a natural teacher, but he handed me right-seat controls while nothing demanding was happening, adding a few hours to my logbook. A side trip to LaGuardia found us sandwiched between two giant jets. Small planes have to be cautious about wingtip vortices, invisible whirlwinds that can capsize the inattentive.

As we flew into central Pennsylvania, eagles glided along side us rising on thermals from the spread of forests below. No pun intended, but this commute was becoming the high point of my day.

© Piper Aircraft

Loch Haven’s municipal airport was Piper’s for all practical purposes. It adjoined the company’s plant and offices. Nearby buildings housed machine shops, assembly operations, and a paint facility. Piper situated me in sort of a company residence for visitors and commuting executives. The company was relocating their headquarters to Vero Beach, Florida, so short-term housing had become important.

That set the pattern for another three visits. Willy was revealed as a bombastic fellow, lots of bark but no bite. He’d grouch, gruff, and growl, but didn’t mean it. He would help anyone who’d need it and undoubtedly made a fine father.

© Wikipedia

All but one of his programming staff were married and weren’t interested in hosting a codeslinger after hours. Jennifer was the opposite, a girl with an interesting history and no one to hang out with. We shared dinner and dialogue a couple of evenings.

Originally from the area, she’d moved east, but hadn’t drained the avgas from her arteries. Exposed to new opportunities, she’d learned to skydive, where she’d become proficient.

She related a number of high-flying tales. Once she initiated a naked jump with her skyteam, exactly what it sounds like: shed clothes and bail out nude. I guess you had to be there. The mothers of most of us, if we’re gonna die, simply hope we remember clean underwear.

© Wikipedia

Then came her moment of disaster. Unexpected winds tossed her parachute in uncontrollable arcs that caused her to crash into the ground, breaking her back. Jennifer returned to hearth and home to heal, staying with her mother and father, and working at Piper to pay the bills. She planned to resume jumping, but that was probably a year off. In the meantime, she helped form a local jump club.

Shop Talk

This turned out the first and only time I worked in a union shop. Management explained they had to get permission for me to take charge of their machines.

The union was gracious about it. At first, they kept an eye on me, but once they realized I knew what I was doing and was willing to share my knowledge, they made me welcome.

It transpired their problems weren’t serious. They simply needed a helping hand marrying equipment and software from multiple vendors. I enjoyed working with Willy and the staff, which resulted in additional visits.

Where’s Willy?

I previous mentioned my charming boss. Inevitably, I struck off on my own, not getting wealthy, but living by my own lights. To my pleasant surprise, I saw Piper’s number on my telephone. Only this time, the caller wasn’t my friend Willy.

My imagination suggested the name sounded like Manny O’Dious, the new Number 2. This was Piper’s new Director of Programming Services, but what a gutter mouth… and gutter mind.

“That stupid ƒ-er Willy managed to piss off a vice president and got his ass fired. ‘Willy.’ Can you think of a more stupid name? Anyway, you left your job undone. Get your ass down here and fix the problem now.”

Taking orders from a person I respect is remotely tolerable, but as you might have guessed, being bossed around is not  my thing. Still, I needed to make a living.

“When can your pilot be here?”

“Oh no, no. Things are different now. I’m not providing or paying for transportation. It’s not in my budget.”

Lock Haven, Pennsylvania

Lock Haven was landlocked in the remote wilds of Pennsylvania, so making the trip by commercial and commuter hops to ever smaller airports required as much as five or six hours of flight time and additional hours of rental car driving. One way required an exhausting full day of traveling, time I would have to bill for. More to the point, the client was always billed for transportation. This guy couldn’t grasp I was trying to save him money and me time.

It also rankled me that while the recent problem was unclear, I’d left no work undone.

“Sorry, have you tried to book travel between Plymouth and Lock Haven? Minimum seven hours by car, seven hours by air, and I do invoice for travel. Always. You can save two days of billed consulting with a pickup.”

“Hell no. Get your ass on a plane or a mule or whatever and get yourself here you….”

“Good bye.”

I was almost shaking with tension as I slammed down the receiver.

Who put the BOMP in the Bomp Bah Bomp Bah Bomp?

A half hour later, the phone rang, same area code 570, but different number.

“Hey, it’s Jennifer. How ya doing? I’ve been tasked with, well, persuading you to drop in. He has the budget, but see, he gets kickbacks for every budget dollar he doesn’t spend. Let me tell you what we’re dealing with…”

She went on to explain. “Shortly after he arrived, he treated himself in town to a steak dinner. Two bites from finishing, he informed the waiter the steak was tough and he would not pay for it. Nor the soup or the salad or the wine. Restaurants run on thin margins, and they swallowed hard to absorb a loss like that. He is one cheap bastard and now you’re the steak. He sees you as a burdensome expense but he needs you.”

“What happened to Willy?”

“You know Willy, he finds it fun to bluster, but one of the VPs didn’t understand him and summarily fired him without considering how to replace him. Nobody wants a career move to the wilds of Nowhere, Pennsylvania and they were lucky to land Willy. Now everybody’s bleeding.”

“How did they recruit Manny? I never heard the name before.”

“Ah. He has no computing or management experience. He was actually a BOMP salesman.”

“Bomp?”

“Bill of materials processor, like a parts list for a huge project. It’s a pretty good program despite the fact he’s a terrible salesman. I don’t know the circumstances, but he must have been in dire straits. As soon as he heard Willy had been fired, he applied and, being the only candidate, he got the job. Upper executives haven’t figured out what a bad decision that was. He thinks we’re all trying to sabotage him. Believe me, I’m getting out of here soonest.”

I laughed. “While suckering me in, huh?”

“Damsel in distress and all that. We’ll get you here, try to keep everything per usual.”

Arrested Developer

© Piper Aircraft

We planned for an upcoming holiday weekend to maximize my time on the machine. I packed my suitcase and stuffed computer gear in my flight case. As agreed, their plane arrived on time for the pickup. On my arrival, the union rep said cool beans. I never understood that expression, but someone explained I was ‘golden’.

Except with the director. He didn’t hover over me– I give him that– but asked one of the programmers to monitor me.

Within a couple of hours, I had a good idea where the problem lay. By late afternoon, I nailed it, no long weekend required.

A half dozen vendors were waiting to hear who was at fault. I entered the director’s office to spill the results.

“Well?” Manny asked. “Whose problem is it?”

“Piper’s. The issue manifests in IBM’s controller, but you didn’t follow configuration instructions. You plugged it in while ignoring the ‘Some assembly required’ notice.”

“Not my fault. My staff keeps undercutting me. Look, here’s what you will do. I’m going to give you an extra fifty bucks, no, say hundred bucks and you say you traced the fault to the DUCS package. You can convince them.”

I blinked. It was hardly worth mentioning $50 covered ten minutes on the time sheet. My old boss’s software had nothing to do with the problem, but they were the smallest and most vulnerable supplier.

“No, I want no part of that. No vendor is at fault. It’s a user error.”

“It’s a virus.”

“No, it’s not a virus.”

“You sure you won’t take a hundred bucks and let this go?”

© Piper Aircraft

“No, I can’t do that.”

“Then find your own way back.”

“What?” I didn’t think I’d heard him.

“Find… your own… fucking… way… home. I won’t provide transportation.”

“You can’t do that. There’s no way out of here, not even a rental car.”

“Tough luck. I gave you a chance.” He templed his fingers and stared musingly at the ceiling, fully in control. “Factory like ours is a dangerous place. All kinds of accidents could happen, especially after dark on a long weekend.”

That made no sense. “Don’t act ridiculous. You are threatening me over a few thousand dollars?”

“Not ridiculous to me, more like an object lesson you’re going to lose. If I was going to threaten, I’d point out the surrounding deep woods,” he interrupted his TV-speak to wave his hand toward his window, “and how dangerous forests are, hunting season or not.”

To be continued…

Matches, Mismatches, and Near-Misses

  

I've confessed many times at this blog that I watch too many movies. Even worse, if it's on DVD and I like it, I'll even sit and watch the bonus features, commentaries, gag reels, and deleted scenes that accompany it. God help me, I'm enough of a movie addict to want to find out how it was made, where it was filmed, who wrote it, who directed it, and who was sent out to fetch coffee.

Another thing that has always interested me is the casting of a movie. Everyone knows how important that is to the success of a project, but what exactly is involved in choosing just the right actor for a certain role? I have a smidgen of experience in that, because when casting calls were held several years ago for a movie that was to be made from one of my stories, I was allowed to attend the auditions. Alas, the movie was never filmed (it later died a gasping and penniless death), but what I saw of the casting process was enough to show me that trying to find a good match for the characters is sometimes easy but usually hard, sometimes satisfying but usually frustrating.

That whole line of thinking leads me to the following question: In the many movies I've watched over the years, how often did the casting really work?

Well, whatever it took to get there, here are twenty examples of what I think were successful casting choices:

NOTE: I've left out a great many of the ultra-obvious ones, like Reeve as Superman, Bridges as Lebowski, Hopkins as Hannibal, Bogart and Bergman, Newman and Redford, Beatty and Dunaway, Gable and Leigh, etc. For what it's worth, asterisks indicate the five that I felt were perfect.

1.*Sean Connery as James Bond

2. Robert Taylor as Walt Longmire

3. Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard

4. Ian McShane as Al Swearengen in Deadwood

5.*Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise

6. Russell Crowe as Bud White in LA Confidential

7.*Robert Duvall as Augustus McRae in Lonesome Dove

8. Idris Elba as Stringer Bell in The Wire

9. Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection

10. Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in Misery

11.*James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano

12. Tommy Lee Jones as Lt. Gerard in The Fugitive

13. Lorraine Bracco as Rae Crane in Medicine Man

14.*Jack Palance as Jack Wilson in Shane

15. Kelly Reilly as Beth Dutton in Yellowstone

16. Andre the Giant as Fezzik in The Princess Bride

17. Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada

18. Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder in Justified

19. Graham Greene as Kicking Bird in Dances with Wolves

20. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men

Casting mismatches:

NOTE 2: Again, I didn't include the obvious, like Cruise as Reacher, Clooney as Batman, and so forth. Asterisks indicate what I think were the five absolutely worst matches.

1. Roger Moore as James Bond

2. Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code

3. Mark Wahlberg as Spenser in Spenser: Confidential

4. Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Knives Out 

5.*Glen Campbell as Ranger La Boeuf in True Grit

6. Kevin Costner as Robin Hood in Prince of Thieves

7. Tyler Perry as Alex Cross

8. Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (2006)

9. Eriq La Salle as Lucas Davenport in Mind Prey

10. Denise Richards as Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough

11.*Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi

12.  Leonardo Di Caprio as "The Kid" Herod in The Quick and the Dead

13.*Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll in King Kong (2005)

14. Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman

15. Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's

16.*Matthew McConaughey as Walter in The Dark Tower

17. Vincent D'Onofrio as Jack Horne in The Magnificent Seven (2016)

18. Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg in The Stand (1994)

19. Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abigail in The Stand (2020)

20.*John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror

Casting choices that didn't happen but almost did:

NOTE 3: Asterisks mark the five that I believe would've been the worst decisions.

1. Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in Back to the Future

2. Sean Connery as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings

3. Gwyneth Paltrow as Rose in Titanic

4.*Al Pacino as Han Solo

5. Jack Nicholson as Michael Corleone

6.*John Travolta as Forrest Gump

7.*Molly Ringwald as Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman

8. Harrison Ford as Alan Grant in Jurassic Park

9. Marilyn Monroe as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's

10. Bruce Willis as Sam Wheat in Ghost

11. Reese Witherspoon as Cher Horowitz in Clueless

12. Alicia Silverstone as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde

13. Michael Keaton as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day

14. Tom Cruise as Tony Stark in Iron Man

15. Mel Gibson as Maximus in Gladiator

16.*Burt Reynolds as James Bond in Live and Let Die

17. Sandra Bullock as Neo in The Matrix

18. Johnny Depp as Ferris Bueller

19.*Frank Sinatra as Dirty Harry

20. Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones

Quick observation: I happened to notice, just before posting time, that only about half a dozen entries in that first list of twenty good casting choices were for the main protagonist. Most of them were antagonists. I wasn't overly surprised by that; no matter what kind of fiction it is--movies, novels, stories, etc.--I think believable villains are as important as believable heroes.

 

Once again, all these are based on my opinion only, and if I made these lists next week they would probably be different. Having said that . . . 

In these categories of best matches, terrible matches, and could-have-been-terrible matches, do you agree with any of them? Disagree? Can you suggest some of your own? What do you think? 

I can tell you what my late mother would've thought: All of us should get back to doing something constructive.

But ain't it fun?

So Where Do We Go From Here?

We have a lot of great police stories from over the years: 87th Precinct, The Wire, the Bosch series and its related storylines. We usually see the police as, if not heroic, then doing their jobs, even when corruption seeps in.

But then Washington, DC, found itself under federal control. The police department was taken over and National Guard troops brought in. Now we're in questionable times.

squadroom,  investigators' office

As the author of two books featuring a squad of detectives in the fictional Monticello, I have detectives, uniforms, and superiors functioning with a sense of mission, despite corruption, tunnel vision from above, and political maneuvering. And some of the heroes are from the wrong side of the law. But the rules in these stories are familiar.

Now we're in uncharted territory. So what do we do? I wish I had answers. Some may choose to confront the uncertainty head on, reflecting reality as it is. Others may lean into earlier eras, something some authors have done to eliminate the technology of the past twenty-five years. Indeed, before she died, Sue Grafton often stated that Kinsey Millhonne would never own a cell phone or send an email, keeping her firmly in the 1980s.

Another suggestion pointed at moving to smaller settings:  Small town or rural settings. The trouble is all the tools our characters use normally are in flux. Federal agencies have been altered or dismantled. The situation is so fluid, a writer could start a story with one set of rules and end a first draft with those rules out the window.

Someone coined a curse: May you live in interesting times.

I don't like that guy very much.

Great Expectations

My note: I originally wrote the sketch of this piece back before I was getting my cataract surgery, but didn't use it because (I think) at my request, Leigh guested my spot and gave me time to get the cataracts out and heal up. Our latest amazing disruption is getting new computers which I believe to be if not the 3^rd, at least the 2^nd circle of hell. But we're back up and running, and here it is!

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—"
— William Wordsworth, The Prelude

Both of those quotes are based on the French Revolution, but that doesn't matter. Really. Youth always knows that this is their time, their time to grasp the rose, the pluck the flower from the nettle, to live with all the intensity of a thousand suns. That or they know that the whole world is against them, and nothing they can do will change it. It's later in life when people look back and go, well…

"My life has been mainly one of disappointments" - Almanzo Wilder (husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder) to his daughter Rose Wilder Lane in an interview taken in his old age in the 1930s.

Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder

And here's Rose Wilder Lane reminiscing of her youth in Old Home Town, p 23, published in 1935:

"It was a hard, narrow, relentless life. It was not comfortable. Nothing was made easy for us. We did not like work and we were not supposed to like it; we were supposed to work, and we did. We did not like discipline, so we suffered until we disciplined ourselves. We saw many things and many opportunities that we ardently wanted and could not pay for, so we did not get them, or got them only after stupendous, heartbreaking effort and self-denial, for debt was much harder to bear than deprivations."

And it was a hard life: the Wilders were happily married, but only one child, Rose, survived.  Both Laura and Almanzo got diphtheria which gave him a stroke and permanently damaged his strength and agility.  They lost repeated crops and finally had to leave DeSmet, South Dakota, to make a new home in Missouri. It was a life of hard, hard, hard work, and certainly not much of a financial profit to show for it. But they enough to live on, and were together for over 50 years... And that was the ideal, back then.  

***

I used to teach my students not just the dates of kings and wars and literature, politics, philosophy, and inventions, but as much social history as I could cram in about how people actually lived. (See The $3,500 Dollar Shirt)

For example, the Middle Ages, when (among nobility and royalty) the oldest son was the heir (unless, like Talleyrand, they were disabled)*, the second son was put into the church (whether they had a vocation or not), and the rest were either put out as pages or squires or into the church as well. The eldest daughter got the best match in the parish, unless she was disfigured in some way, and then she went into the convent along with her sisters (again, no vocation required). Frankly, medieval monasteries were the equivalent of a larder or a form of birth control – where you put all the extra children - or all the children for whatever reason - and left them there, unless / until they were needed.

But of course the nobility and royalty were the smallest percentage of the population. Most were peasants – try about 80% – and then there were merchants – about 10-15%. And again, your future was locked in as much as if you lived in caste-system India.

A peasant's only future was in being a peasant - unless they showed remarkable talent as an artist (like Pieter Breugel the Elder, Botticelli, or Caravaggio) or in some craft, or ran off/were conscripted to join the army/navy for war (see or read The Return of Martin Guerre)**. Women would marry another peasant, or – if unmarriageable for some reason or other – would become a servant. An exception was Joan of Arc, who had visions, and became a soldier and a saint in the service of Charles VII of France, and got executed as a witch for her pains.  

Towns, as always, were where the freedom from inevitability beckoned: people would run there, hoping to become an apprentice (which required a payment to the master teacher) or a servant in a wealthy house (which didn't).  Many, of course, ended up as beggars.  

And there was always the wilderness - the great forests that still existed and could hide more than Robin Hood and his merry men.  

And that really was everyone's life until the Industrial Revolution (jobs for women as well as men in the factories!) and then the technological revolution of the early 1900's, when the Model T (1908) and the radio (1920) made travel and entertainment widely available and affordable.  And advertising sprang up, seemingly out of nowhere, in the mid 1800s... and voila! Suddenly not only did all these new things exist, but people had to have them.

We have been changed, entirely, from a world in which most people simply accepted their lot and lived it, taking their pleasures as they found them:  

Peasant Dance by Breugel

But now we live in a world of choices, hopes, dreams, possibilities, all supplied to us through TV, movies, advertising, endless freaking advertising... And abundance. We live in a country where we can go to the grocery store, drugstore, hardware store, etc. and get anything we want. Or if we don't want to go out, we can do it all from our computers, and put it on our credit cards or Venmo or whatever the latest is.  

Today, most of us have central heat, air conditioning, lighting, plumbing, smartphones, televisions, computers, cars, food (pizza, hotdogs and donuts at every gas station, tacos, burgers, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, fried chicken and biscuits and whatever the latest craze is on every block), endless freaking entertainment 24/7, etc. We have choices about where we're going to eat, drink, work, and live, and what we're going to do (or not) for our living. Granted, it costs money. But we also have a lot of ways to make money, or to borrow it, some legal, some not. We've got it made.

But we want more.  

And almost every political race for almost 60 years has pushed the idea that we're unhappy and discontented and we should be, from Nixon's "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it" to Reagan's "It's Morning Again in America" to, of course, "Make America Great Again." And it's worked.

Because we want more.  

The most comfortable time and place to live in all of history - and for some, the richest as well - and it seems that everyone's seriously discontented most of the time, and feels that they're not doing / being / having enough.  We want more.  Even the billionaires want more.  And more.  And more...

***

So, what does all of this have to do with crime?  Simple.  When there is never enough, and you always need more than you have or are, well, anything can happen, from alcohol /drug /media addiction, to robberies, embezzlement, fraud, ponzi schemes, endless scams to try and drown out the feeling of utter failure… And when nothing else works, there's always suicide, murder, mass murder, and if you have enough influence or power, war.  

And the wealthy are actually just as insecure as (and apparently more greedy than) the rest of us:  They hoard every penny; they don't pay their bills.  They buy enough politicians and voila! no taxes, no regulations, no inspections.  Your employees sue you?  Take them to court... forever.  The employees will drop out first.  Hang on to every last penny no matter what.  J. Paul Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, when his grandson was kidnapped and he received a ransom note and an ear, refused to pay - he said he "couldn't afford it."  And when asked, how much money would it take to make him feel secure, said, "More." 

Probably the earliest novel about envy, greed, and shattered hopes is Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy".  Clyde Griffiths, born poor, working crap jobs, an having an affair with Roberta, another poor worker - and then he meets Sondra Finchley, the rich daughter of a factory owner, who likes him.  They date.  He wants to marry her; and he just might, except Roberta's pregnant.  What's a guy to do?  Murder...  (The 1951 film A Place in the Sun is probably the best adaptation of it: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters...)

A less romantic take but just as classic (in its own way) is American Psycho:

Patrick Bateman: New card. What do you think?
Craig McDermott: Whoa-ho. Very nice. Look at that.
Patrick Bateman: Picked them up from the printer's yesterday.
David Van Patten: Good coloring.
Patrick Bateman: That's bone. And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.
David Van Patten: It's very cool, Bateman, but that's nothing. Look at this.
Timothy Bryce: That is really nice.
David Van Patten: Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?
Patrick Bateman: Nice.
Timothy Bryce: Jesus. That is really super. How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful?
Patrick Bateman: [Thinking] I can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine.
Timothy Bryce: But wait. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Raised lettering, pale nimbus. White.
Patrick Bateman: Impressive. Very nice.
David Van Patten: Hmm.
Patrick Bateman: Let's see Paul Allen's card.
Patrick Bateman: [Thinking] Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even has a watermark.
Luis Carruthers: Is something wrong, Patrick? You're sweating. (IMDB)

And then he's off to kill somebody… Anybody.  

Great expectations are very dangerous.

---

*Talleyrand. The eldest son of his house, he was put out to nurse in the countryside for his first few years (normal for the time; following the king was a full-time job) where he was permanently lamed in an accident. His parents then made his younger brother the heir, and put Talleyrand boy into the Church, where he became the most dissolute, loose-living, atheistic Catholic Bishop since the Borgia pope. He was also one of the few noblemen who survived the French Revolution AND the Directoire AND Napoleon AND the Bourbon Restoration… Tough and wily.  

**The Return of Martin Guerre - One of Gerard Depardieu's best roles.

---

Star-gazing in Seattle

 

In August my family went to Seattle for the World Science Fiction Conference. Worldcon is a huge annual event (more than 6,000 full members, plus hundreds more who dropped in for at least one of the five days).

A few of the panels I attended: *Why Anthologies?, *No Wrong Way to Write Folk Songs, *Bring on the Bad Guys,  *Alternative Histories from Outside the West, *Cascadia's Many Climates, *Growing Food and Eating in Space, *The Sounds of the Sound,  *An Hour of the Strange, Unusual, Creepy, and  *Home Recording for Non-Techies. 

A lot more than rehash discussions of Star Trek, huh?

I spent a few hours on the Information Desk answering questions for attendees (often the answer was "I don't know." Communication in an ever-changing environment of 6,000+ people is a challenge).  Notice in the picture that some brilliant soul wrote out all the FAQ's, and even put them in alphabetical order.  My people!

One of my favorite totally random moments: I was on an escalator going up while a man going down yelled at his phone: "Stop autocorrecting piroshkies!" Very good food around the Seattle Convention Center, by the way. And speaking of food, Anne Harlan Prather passed on a bit of advice she received for people with a lack of appetite: Eat brightly colored things. They are full of anti-oxidants. 

The Hugo Awards were given out.  They are similar to our Anthonys, voted on by the convention members. I mention this because the winner of Best Novel was The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, which was also a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel, and how often does that happen?  I read it and it is terrific.  Think Nero Wolfe on a planet where most of the technology is based on vegetation.

Some actual titles panelists mentioned: Lesbians in Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered, Thyme Travelers, "Syphillis Sysiphus," My Tropey Life: How Pop Culture Stereotypes Make Disabled Lives Harder, and Unidentified Funny Objects.

A few panels deserve more discussion. One was "Is it Appropriation? Writing the Other."  Moderator  James Mendez Hodes said "A cultural consultant is when you hire someone to tell you you're a racist." Hodes is, of course, a cultural consultant. Panelists talked about outsiders "wearing the culture as a costume."

When asked for an example of cultural appropriation Annie Carl talked about  able-bodied actors playing disabled characters. (She noted that the blind engineer in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was played by a blind man. I might note that panelists also enthusiastically supported Killers of the flower Moon and Chief of War.) Gregg Castro talked about "Indian shopping," which is when writers looking for a Native American who will approve whatever they hope to write. Panelist K. Tempest Bradford runs an educational website, Writing the Other.  She noted that after a certain Beyonce song came out White friends asked her to explain it. "Am I the Beyonce whisperer?"  Shay Kauwe said, approximately, that writer friends will ask her "Can I do this?" when they should be asking "Should I do this? Why am I doing it?" 

I loved the Editing Pet Peeves panel.   Elektra Hammond won my heart by saying her number one complaint is authors who give characters similar names.  Yes!  Another panelist mentioned an author who sent a book pitch to 100 authors - listing them all in the "To" line.  There was a lengthy passionate discussion of hyphens vs em-dashes and en-dashes.  Heather Tracy: "When in doubt ask your copy editor. They will be happy to talk to you for an hour about em-dashes." Editor Atlin Merrick: "I have had new writers treat me like a servant." Also Merrick: "Read the guidelines and you're in the top 30%. Be easy to work with and you're in the top 10%. Send me humor you're in 5%."

The panel on anthologies was particularly interesting. One panelist called them "curated collections." Publisher William C. Tracy pointed out that they are more expensive, since so many writers need to be paid. A lot of them in the science fiction field are funded by kickstarters, with an average of $7500 being raised.  

Oh, and as for payment, here's a shocker.  Reckoning Magazine pays 15 cents per word, Clarkesworld almost as much. 

Come back in two weeks for my favorite quotations from the con.  Until then, keep watching the skies!

Breaking a Writing Rule to Humorous Effect

Two years ago, the fine folks at Crippen & Landru released an anthology called School of Hard Knox, in which all the stories broke one of the ten rules handed down by Father Ronald Knox back in the golden age of mysteries. Last year, I was pleased to be asked to contribute to the follow-up anthology, in which all the stories would break one of the twenty rules for writing detective stories handed down by golden age author S. S. Van Dine. That book, titled Double Crossing Van Dine, was released two weeks ago.

When Donna Andrews, one of the editors of these two anthologies (along with Greg Herren and Art Taylor), asked me to write a story, I quickly looked at the twenty rules to see which one might inspire me. As soon as I saw rule #3, my mind was off and running. This rule states:  

"There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar."

Heavens, we wouldn't want a little love--and lust--to gum up the works.

Or would we? 

What if, I thought, a private eye is hired by his next-door neighbor to solve a case dear to the PI's heart, but at the same time his ovulating wife is eager to get pregnant, and she keeps trying to lure him to bed. It is an amusing premise. I figured this scenario would drive Van Dine up the wall. It is exactly why he declared there should be no romance in detective stories--a desire for amour should not impede an investigation. 

But I wasn't done. I love writing funny stories, and I had an idea to ratchet up the humor: Every seductive step the wife takes gives her husband an idea for the next step he should take in his investigation. In the end, it is the wife's desire to distract her husband that leads him to solve the case. 

Take that, Van Dine! I think if he were to read this story, "Baby Love," he might decide he was a bit too harsh with rule #3. In the right circumstance, amour could be just what the detective needs.

I think Van Dine's ghost is working at the
fortune cookie factory.

I hope you will check out this anthology, which has a great list of contributors and an introduction by Catriona McPherson. The trade paperback version can be bought from the usual sources, as well as directly from the publisher. Just click here. (You also can purchase straight from the publisher a clothbound numbered edition--signed by the editors--with a Van Dine pastiche written by Jon L. Breen thrown in.) I believe an ebook version will be coming out soon too. 

Imaginary Friends

by Janice Law 

Like a lot of small children, I had an imaginary friend. Not surprisingly, since I was passionately fond of animals, mine was a Mr. Fox. On wet afternoons, I would go down the hall to what had once been a chambermaid's room and get into the dressing up box. As this included a moth eaten jacket of some indeterminate blond fur, I assume the contents came from the "big house" across from the estate garage that held our apartment. There was a variety of vintage dresses and hats with feathers and a necklace of green beads.

Attired in this ancient finery, I would make my way back down the dark wood paneled hall, knock on our kitchen door, and greet my mother with the formal curtesy Edwardian Scots women used: Good afternoon, Mrs. Law. 

Mother would, in turn, greet Mrs. Fox, who came in for milk and cookies and what my mom would call a wee natter.

I've thinking about imaginary friends, both childhood and literary lately, because Ray Wilde, one of my characters, seems unexpectedly to be hanging around, moving from a useful if ephemeral narrator ( "The House on Maple Street") to what recently became his fifth outing. He's becoming that peculiar being, an adult imaginary friend, which is one of several relationships writers can have with their characters.

There are writers, way more clever than I am, who know everything about their heroes, who write up their back stories, examine their genealogies, and honestly claim to have created their protagonists from start to finish. I suspect they are people who do not like surprises and who enjoy control over their creations and plots.

I take a different tack. Characters, whether sparked by invention, observation, or historical knowledge– and I have written examples of each– first appear casually. They are useful in presenting a story. They have an interesting voice and suggest interesting adventures, but they are one-offs, imaginary acquaintances, if you like. 

Characters like Eddie and Tony in "The Smart One" (now appearing in Crimes Against Nature) or Grant ( "Up and Gone" in a recent AHMM) whisper in some inner ear and then depart, almost certainly never to return. They are creatures of one particular story and have no life beyond it.

Converted mill

I thought that would be the case with Ray Wilde, my middle-aged private detective whose modest agency I set in one of our old eastern Connecticut mill towns. I needed a narrator for an idea I had about teen athlete steroid use, and it was not Ray, but the house of the title, ( "The House on Maple Street") that really jump-started the story.

Basically, I knew nothing about Ray beyond his profession, his past work as a cop in a larger town, the make of his car, the condition of one damaged knee, and his attitude of tolerant skepticism. I was surprised when he turned up again with a part-time bookkeeper and an older client who turned out to be most unusual. "The Client" later appeared in The Best Mystery Stories of 2021, so Ray rose in my estimation, although I still expected nothing more of him.

Clearly he had other ideas. "The Man from Hong Kong," appearing in the MarchApril issue of AHMM, is where I learned that Ray has interesting friends, quick reflexes, a long disused Glock, and an older home that probably needs work. What about his personal life? Significant others? Family?  I haven't a clue. We are not at that stage yet.

more Ray Wilde territory

Will we ever be is the question. All I know is that he keeps showing up. A story about a man who loves Halloween decorations has gone out and another story is even now in the computer. But Ray's a cagey fellow. Just this week, I learned that he pitched softball in the Twilight League; aside from that, his personal life remains opaque. I think, though, that we are now on good enough terms that I can consider him an imaginary friend, a grown up Mr. Fox.