Once More With Feeling: The Summer That Was/Wasn’t

Last summer I had the distinct privilege of publishing a story in an anthology that featured the work of twenty-three of my fellow Sleuthsayers alongside my own. This was Murder, Neat: a Sleuthsayers Anthology.

In the year since, our collective labor of crime fiction love has garnered much attention and racked up a number of honors, including the Derringer Award for Best Anthology, and a Macavity nomination for fellow Sleuthsayer Art Taylor for his story “Two for One.”

In addition, Murder, Neat is currently a finalist for this year’s Anthony Award for Best Anrhology. In light of this I am reposting something I wrote last summer in support of Murder, Neat at the time of its publication.

So if you haven’t gotten your copy yet, what are you waiting for? And please, consider voting for Murder Neat for this year’s Anthony!

**********

Obie looked around. From his perch overlooking the stage from the sound platform he could easily see out over the heads of the rapidly dwindling crowd. For the first time he noticed gumball lights strobing the upper parts of the Dipper’s walls—light coming in through the club’s floor-to-ceiling front windows.

He jutted his chin in the direction of the front doors. “Wonder what that’s all about.”

Hoffman shrugged. “Spokane’s Finest,” he said. “They show up around Last Call from time to time. ‘Showing the flag,’ and all that. Shoulda seen ’em a couple of months back. Mudhoney was here. Place was packed to the rafters. Fire marshal came and shut things down before the band even took the stage. Cops hauled in a lot of people on possession beefs that day.”

“You were here for that?”

“Nah. A buddy of mine is their guitar tech. Heard about it from him. We had Blues Fest up at Winthrop that weekend. Plus, with us being out of Seattle now, don’t get over here as often as I’d like. But I’ve seen them pull this kind of shit before. Plenty of times.”

Obie said, “Doesn’t really change, does it?”

Hoffman lit a cigarette. “What’s that?”

“The cycle. The spinning wheel. What goes up must come down. Art pushes society. Society pushes back.”

Hoffman nodded and offered the pack to Obie. Obie shook his head and jutted his chin again, meaningfully. “Got one in, thanks.”

– From "The Catherine Wheel," featured as part of the new Murder, Neat: A Sleuthsayers Anthology

A genuine Spokane institution

One of the most memorable concerts in the Dipper's more recent history happened on a warm July night in 1991. A mass of alt-rock-loving kids packed into the venue to see Seattle's up-and-coming grunge group Mudhoney. Before the band even took the stage, the Spokane fire marshal shut the venue down.  

                                                                                                      – The Inlander, February 27th, 2014

I was at that Mudhoney non-event. I was not one of those arrested for possession of marijuana. (Weed has just never been my thing.). 

And over thirty years later, I made a tangential reference to it in a crime fiction story.

As readers of this blog will know by now, Murder, Neat: A Sleuthsayers Anthology dropped a couple of days back, on Tuesday, February 13th. I have a story in it, entitled "The Catherine Wheel" (excerpted above.), wherein I tried to recapture the feel of that certain summer within the context of a fictional event: a closing time shooting in the dive bar across the street from the live music venue highlighted above, The Big Dipper.

Writing fiction set in the past requires an awful lot of sense memory transcription: the way the strobe lights hanging from the ceiling blossomed into dozens of rainbows refracted by the prism of the sweat running into your eyes as you laid everything you had down on that massive dance floor at the Dipper. The way the cigarettes that guy smoked always stank. the way that girl stood. The look on your friend's face that he only got when he was struggling to not pass gas.

Not these guys-my story's about a mysticism-embodying tattoo. not a nineties English shoegaze band.

In the end these are moments, flashes we remember, or have convinced ourselves we do, and which we try to preserve like flies in so much amber. A love letter, if you will, to that magic summer between my junior and senior years of college. The summer when Mudhoney never quite played the Big Dipper. The summer when someone got murdered across the street in the Manhattan. A summer of late night philosophical discussions. A summer when there was just enough money left in your pocket for one last round to close out the evening. A summer of secrets. A summer of watching the way this girl took a drink of her beer. A summer of seeing that guy again, going home with a new one. A summer of cycles. Of eliptical orbits.

A Catherine Wheel summer.

Talking in Italics

 

Roman Centurion

Something is bugging me and I would like your opinion.

I have been listening to an audiobook of a novel by an American author.  It is set in Italy, the characters are Italian, and they speak, you'll never guess, Italian.

Which is fine.  But when there is dialog the actor doing the narration gives the characters Italian accents.

And that's what bugs me. They are speaking in their own language. Why do they have accents?

That would make sense  if there were people speaking two languages.  Think of all those World War II movies where the Americans speak English with good 'ol midwestern, southern, or New York accents, but when we switch to German soldiers talking to each other we know they are speaking in German  because of their Deutschland accents. 

But if all the characters are supposed to be speaking German then, says me, they shouldn't have accents. What do you think?

I mentioned this to someone and she suggested this could be seen as  mocking the (in this case) Italians.  I'm sure that was not the intention of the narrator.

Slightly off topic: as far as I know George Lucas was the first director to decide, in the original Star Wars movie, that American actors would speak with American accents and the Brits would talk British. Heck, they were all in a different galaxy, anyway.  And then Star Trek decided that a Frenchman named Jean-Luc Picard could speak like a Shakespearean actor.  Why not?

And sticking to the United Kingdom for a minute, twenty-five or so years ago there was a Britcom called Coupling. In one episode a character is trying to chat up a beautiful Israeli woman but she only speaks Hebrew.  We see their entire conversation... and then we see the same event from her point of view, so in that version she appears to be the only one speaking English.  The entire thing is hilarious but all I can find to show you is this little clip in which our hero thinks he has learned her name, but actually he suffers an unfortunate misunderstanding.*

Back to our main topic: Should those Italians be speaking with Italian accents?  Whatcha think? 

* If you have access to the Roku channel you can watch Coupling for free. The scene I am describing starts around minute 17 of an episode called "The Girl With Two Breasts."  Hey, they also have one called "The Man With Two Legs."  

Frittering

There are too many hours in the day, and I sometimes fritter them away. When I haven’t enough to do, I do even less, often spending my available time on activities that accomplish nothing more than fill time. Word games. Card games. Reading the Wikipedia entries for obscure rock ’n’ roll bands.

I find I accomplish more when I have projects with deadlines I can segment into discrete, definable tasks. I’m not an adrenalin junkie, spurred to action by last-minute rushing to meet deadlines. I like projects with far-away deadlines so I can compartmentalize each step, accomplish each step, and know that with each completed step I’m that much closer to meeting the deadline.

For example, for many years I was a regular contributor to the now-defunct confession magazines. I knew each month’s submission deadlines and, because I often wrote stories tied to holidays and seasons, I could plan ahead to know which stories to complete and when to submit them.

Writing to invitation, or writing to meet an open-call deadline, is similar. I know the submission deadline, so I work step-by-step: Generate several ideas, research (if necessary) to refine the ideas, winnow the unworkable ideas until only one remains, draft the story, edit or revise as necessary, and deliver it to the editor. Without that deadline, I fritter my time away.

But frittering around isn’t inherently bad. Sometimes it means washing dishes, doing laundry, paying bills, or, as I have the past few days, going through my file of unsold stories to see if any fit, or can be made to fit, anthology calls or the requirements of new (or new to me) publications.

I’ve also found a way to direct my frittering: I leave a list of non-writing/non-editing tasks on the kitchen table so that each time I pass through the kitchen I see something that needs to be done. (Temple has noticed this daily list and now often adds tasks to it.)

I approach tasks on the list the same way I approach writing to deadline: in discrete steps. For example, when putting away laundry, I might fold and put away towels, then an hour later deal with T-shirts. The process might appear messy (and it may actually be messy) but I usually meet my daily deadlines. The laundry is folded and put away, the dishwasher emptied, the bird bath filled, and the plants watered, all before Temple returns home from her day job.

In the spaces between these tasks, I’ve written a page on this story or a paragraph on that story, or I’ve made notes on a third story. In this way, I continually make progress on writing and editing projects that have no specific deadline.

And, sooner or later, a project with a deadline will land on my desk, I’ll have less time available to fritter away, and—for a while, at least—I’ll postpone my visits to the Wikipedia pages of obscure rock ’n’ roll bands.

* * *

“Schrödinger’s Blonde” appeared in Black Cat Weekly #202.

“The Safety Dance” appeared in Gag Me With a Spoon: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of the ’80s (White City Press, J. Alan Hartman, editor)

“Cowboy Up” appeared in KissMet Quarterly #2: A Serendipitous Summer (MM Publishing, G. Lynn Brown, editor) 

Reading between the whines.

Recently David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled, “When Novels Mattered”, where he lamented the decline in popularity of literary works. His premise was that the gatekeepers – editors and publishers – had so narrowed their selection process that general fiction had begun to cleave to an orthodox, predictable style and subject matter. That the bold literary enterprises of the past, not that long ago, have been replaced by a shrinking sea of sameness and rigid conformity to socially acceptable pre-occupations.

Saul Bellow

The change, in his mind, began with a shift in the center of gravity from Greenwich Village (a metaphor, I think, for private intellectual and artistic culture) to University MFA programs. Implicit in this is the notion that the narrow, elitist political orientation of the faculty lounge has taken over the literary arts. https://tinyurl.com/3fsu2m6k

I haven’t read much contemporary general fiction in recent years, so I can’t confirm this through my own experience, though maybe that supports his thesis. I confess that I’ve stopped reading short stories in The New Yorker, after realizing they all sounded the same, and mirroring the prevailing content of recent novels, deal with matters of little relevance to my own life, which I’m not spending in disaffected, over-educated warrens in Brooklyn and select neighborhoods of Manhattan.

It’s probably true that the publishing world has little interest in being relevant to me, one of the old, straight, suburban white males who have apparently given up on the novel form. Businesses follow the market, as they should. It’s a classic chicken/egg dilemma. So I've likely aged out of the culture. Though, since David Brooks, who's paid to be a social commentator, has noticed the same thing I have, maybe it's worth a closer look.

My research into this extends to occasional first-page scanning of books off the bestseller tables. I’m sure I’d discover some very nice composition if I’d had it in me to plow through a few chapters, but I was usually deterred by the flap copy and back cover commentary. My reading budget being what it is, I’d rather spend it on Shawn Cosby and Gillian Flynn.

I did have an urge, promptly squelched as impossibly Quixotic, to write to Mr. Brooks and suggest he take a look at the recent output of mystery and thriller writers, whose books and short stories are wildly creative and diverse, and blessedly unencumbered by slack-jawed conversation and self-obsessed ennui. Many of these books are selling quite nicely, thank you.

Patricia Highsmith

If he responds that these aren’t the sort of literary works he’s addressing, but rather genre fiction, I would happily mount my exhausted hobby horse and declare there is little or no difference between a finely written crime novel and a literary novel that includes a bit of crime (e.g. The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Great Gatsby.)

My friend Reed Coleman gave me permission to repeat something he once said on a panel. When asked to differentiate literary novels from mysteries, he said, “Books without plots.” Reed’s a very erudite man, widely read, but I get his point. While many fine literary works are well-plotted, they often get away with none at all. This is not true with a mystery. It can be heavily character driven, with a familiar story line, but it has to have a plot, usually a very clever one.

Plots are really hard, but it’s our responsibility to provide the best we can for our readers. And without this, we mystery writers would never get past an agent, much less a publisher. Having spent the last twenty years plying the mystery trade, I just don't read anything that doesn’t have a good story – a narrative arc, with something meaningful at the end. It feels like modern fiction is much less concerned with this task than with swirling examinations of the characters and present-day zeitgeist, fine dissections of mood, emotional conflict and social ramifications. Okay, but not for me.

I’ve lately been pleasantly engaged by Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, which manages atmospheric narrative, character development and challenging plot intricacies as adroitly as any MFA professor could ever hope to emulate. His style ignores the editorial bias toward clipped, clean language, and takes a more arch and entirely British approach to leisurely, but ever-compelling description, with pacing to match. (He obviously never benefitted from American editors and pundits who coach crime writers to “get right in there from page one and grab ‘em by the throat!”)

This tells me that you can enjoy beautifully crafted prose delivered with slicing wit and detailed description, and also get a fun story in the bargain. You just have to meander around the crime fiction aisle at the bookstore or your local library.

Joseph Heller

I was an undergraduate English major, and have an MFA in Creative Writing, as it turns out. I’m not aware of the syllabi of those now similarly incarcerated, but in my day (listen up, whippersnappers), the reading lists were all over the place. I read everything David Brooks notes as the meaty Great Novels of our shared past, and then some. I read an awful lot of books, and cared not a wit which genre or calendar period they fell into. This is one reason I give myself a pass on bulking up even more at this late date. But I still feel a little bad that I’ve forsaken something that meant so much to me when I was younger and more gluttonous, gobbling up anything that was printed and stuffed between two covers. Now I know as much about contemporary fiction as I do the music of recent Grammy nominees, which is dangerously close to zero.

With one exception. Amor Towles is as good as anyone ever. If you know of any authors who might compare, please let me know.

Guest Post: What Kind of Relationship Do You Have With Your Writing?

This month, I'm turning my column over to a guest, Eric Beckstrom. I've been friends with Eric, a talented writer and photographer, for some thirty years, and I'm pleased to have the chance to let him address the SleuthSayers audience on a topic I'm sure many of us can identify with. As Eric mentions here, his first published story appeared in the 2017 Bouchercon anthology--an enviable place to make your debut, given the competition for those spots! What's even more remarkable is that he's since placed stories in three more Bouchercon anthologies (how many other writers have been selected for four? Certainly none I know of). His latest, "Six Cylinder Totem," will be in the 2025 edition, Blood on the Bayou: Case Closed (available for preorder here). Without further ado, here's Eric!

— Joe

What Kind of Relationship Do You Have With Your Writing?

Eric Beckstrom

We all have a relationship of craft to our writing, or however you choose to put it--relationship, interaction, approach--but I find myself wondering whether other writers also think about their relationship with their writing as a truly personal one--a nearly or even literal interpersonal one, as distinguished from simply craft-centered and intrapersonal. Maybe every writer reading this column experiences their writing in that way, I don't know. That is my own experience– closer to, or, in practice, even literally interpersonal. It is intrapersonal, too, but I also relate to my writing as this other thing outside of myself, like it's a separate entity. The relationship has been fraught. Sometimes– much more so now– it is functional and healthy, sometimes less so, and, for an interminably long time, it was dysfunctional right down to its atomic spin. It includes compromise, generosity, forgiveness, impatience, resignation, joy, trust, fear, just like any other important relationship in my life. The current complexity of the relationship is a gift compared to when it was an actively negative, hostile one, defined by avoidance, fear, and resentment, with only the briefest moments of pleasure and appreciation.

That was years ago. Then, one night, I made a decision that changed my relationship with my writing forever in an instant: I let myself off the hook. More on that later. I understand, of course, there are many very accomplished writers among the SleuthSayers readership, and that perhaps everyone moving their eyes across this screen has also moved well beyond anything I have to say here; but if you ever trudge or outright struggle with your writing--not the craft connection, but the relational one--then maybe there's something here for you.

One of the most common pieces of advice or edicts offered by established writers to budding or struggling writers is, "Write every day," "Write for at least an hour each day," or some variation thereof. This advice is always well-intended, but in my view it seems awfully essentialist. Sometimes it even seems to stem from writers with--I'm being a little cheeky here--personality privilege, such as those who have never or rarely had difficulty with motivation; or from other forms of privilege, like growing up in an environment that encouraged and nurtured creativity or was at least free from significant obstacles to creativity.

© Eric Beckstrom,
LowPho Impressionism

Or maybe those edicts about the right way to approach writing aren't nearly as pervasive as I have thought, and it's more that my (more or less) past hypersensitivity turned my hearing that advice four or five times into a hall of mirrors back then, fifty-five times five in how I felt it reflected negatively on me. Back when I was struggling for my life as a writer, I heard it as judgment. "Eric, you don't writer every day, let alone each day for an hour or two. Therefore, you are not a real writer because you obviously don't have the passion everyone says you'd feel if you were. You are a piker: you make only small bets on yourself, and to the extent that you make writing commitments to yourself, you withdraw from them."

While advice around commitment, writing schedules, regularity, and habit, is, on the face of it, sound, it has a hook on which I used to hang like someone in a Stephen Graham Jones novel or the first victim in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That hook has barbs of guilt, fear, imposter syndrome (not to mention nature-nurture baggage). It also has barbs forged from practical challenges like having to work full-time and having other commitments, and being too mentally exhausted to sit down and write at the end of a day of all that. Until the night I let myself off the hook, I used to absorb those writing edicts as barbs into flesh. As profoundly, debilitatingly discouraging.

For sure, that's also on me. Also, on my upbringing. Also, on the third-grade teacher who called my very first story silly and unrealistic. But, at the end of the day, it was on me to change how I relate to writing. From the age of ten and decades into my adult life, yearning to write, but blocked by inhibitions and other stumbling blocks I'd never learned to turn into steppingstones, I absorbed the standards set by established writers as slammed doors, guilty verdicts, and commandments I had broken.

Here's what happened the night I let myself off the hook– off other people's hook.

I was sitting in front of the TV feeling conflicted, as I felt every night. I knew I ought to go into the other room, turn on the computer, and write. I longed to do so– it was a physical sensation– but couldn't bring myself to. I hadn't been writing, so I wasn't a real writer, right? And since I'd finished very few writing projects, I had limited evidence of talent anyway. All my Psych 101 childhood baggage was there, too, present, like that longing, as something I felt as you'd feel someone slouching behind you in the town psycho house, reaching for your shoulder.

Then, for some reason– and I don't know where this came from– I said out loud to myself "You know what? Screw all that. Screw the edicts and other people's standards. Screw the judgment you feel from others and screw the self-judgment. If you write tonight, great. If you don't write tonight, then don't castigate yourself. Maybe you'll write tomorrow."

In that moment, a strange kind of functional (as differentiated from dysfunctional) indifference triggered a profound letting go which permanently changed my relationship with my writing. And, finally off the hook, having made a deliberate, defiant choice to stop judging my writer self by others' standards and even by my own standards at the time, that very same night, I turned off the TV, turned on the computer, and started writing. Years later (not all my hangups disappeared in one night), after I began making the effort to submit stories for publication, one of the first ones I ever completed, over a single weekend just weeks after I finally began writing in earnest, landed in the 2017 Bouchercon anthology as the first story I had published.

Since then, I've encountered, or perhaps just become more capable of seeing and absorbing, more down to earth, approachable advice and insight offered by others. William Faulkner said, "I write when the spirit moves me." Now, he also said, "The spirit moves me every day," but his words contain no edict or implied universal standard, no judgment. Jordan Peele added an entirely new dimension to my relationship with writing, and, I will share, to my approach to life, with his suggestions to, "Embrace the risk that only you can take." One of the most practical, wise, simple, and compassionate insights I've gotten from another writer– and because of that component of compassion, this insight most clearly describes my current, far more healthy interpersonal relationship with my writing– came from a good writer friend, who, when I described my ongoing struggle with tackling large writing projects, said, "You know, I think it's just about forward progress, whatever that means to you." I also recall the wisdom of another friend who, when I told him about some life issues I was struggling with at the time, said, "That's good. If you're struggling it means you haven't given up. Don't stop moving, don't stop struggling." It's not advice specific to writing, but it sure works.

Nowadays, for me, forward progress could be a single sentence I drop into a story right before my head hits the pillow. It could be a cool ending to an as-yet nonexistent story. Or an interesting first sentence. An evocative title without even the vaguest notion of what plot it might lead to. A single word texted to myself at 2:00AM because it strikes me as belonging to whatever I'm working on. I often do research on the fly, so forward progress is sometimes a link to some article I drop into a given story doc, which I keep in the cloud so I can do that from wherever, whenever. And yes, sometimes forward progress is pages of fast, effortless, final-draft quality writing.

But I never measure my "progress"--those quotation marks are important--by the number of words or pages, though if I make good progress in that way I consciously, usually out loud, give myself credit. And, submission deadlines notwithstanding, I rarely measure my progress according to some timeline. Some days, and I hate to say, sometimes for weeks, I don't write a word, though if that happens now it's almost always due to external constraints rather than resistance; and that is in itself forward progress with respect to my relationship with my writing, upon which the writing itself, and really everything, depends. But that doesn't mean I'm not making forward progress with respect to writing itself, because during those stretches of not writing paragraphs and pages I'm still doing everything I've noted, like simmering ideas, writing in my head and emailing it to myself later, reading like a writer. It's a delicate and, yes, sometimes fraught, balance between self-compassion and self-discipline--after all, what relationship is perfectly healthy?--but these days my relationship with my writing is more characterized by compassion, generosity of spirit, and confidence. Stories have greater trust that I will finish them, and I have greater trust that stories will lead me where they want to go. Even if I don't know where a story is leading me, or I think I do but it changes its mind, or if my confidence flags, or it just seems too difficult to finish, the two-way charitable nature of the relationship between my writing and I has transformed how I approach these situations: at long last, more often than not, that is in a healthy, functional way.

And it's a good thing, too, because for reasons I won't get into here the relationship between my writing and me has become a truly existential thing that sways the cut and core of my life. This thing has been described as a need, a compulsion, a yearning. In Ramsey Campbell's story, "The Voice of the Beach," the protagonist-writer says, "If I failed to write for more than a few days I became depressed. Writing was the way I overcame the depression over not writing." I am grateful to have reached the point where writing is something I want to do, not just something I must do to reduce bad feelings. Writing has become something that I do because, yes, if I don't then I feel sad and unfulfilled, but that's no longer the principle motive. For decades, I yearned to reach a point where I would write because it brings fulfillment and pleasure, even when it's hard or I don't feel like writing in a given moment or on a given day. I am relieved to have reached that point, even if I'm not very "productive" compared to most other writers I know of. That's no longer a hook I hang on. These days, for me a hook is a good story idea, a good opening line or a great title, and the only barbs are the ones my characters must contend with.

That is what I wish for every writer, whether well-established or yearning to begin: a satisfying and healthy relationship with your writing, and, in the words of my friend, forward progress, whatever that means to you.

© Eric Beckstrom, LowPho Impressionism

Confessions of a Recovering Police Procedural Author by Des Ryan

My good friend Des Ryan is guesting here today, and he's always entertaining! As are his books. I'm particularly fond of his newest Mary Margaret cozy series, which never fails to have me chortling. Read below, to see how it all came about, in the twisty-turvy way that is real life…

— Melodie

Confessions of a Recovering Police Procedural Author

by Des Ryan

Whenever someone asks why I write crime fiction, I tell them it's because I'm lazy.

The truth? I spent thirty years as a cop - fifteen as a detective - with the Toronto Police Service. So I got three decades of R&D in my back pocket. I write The Mike O'Shea Series, a gritty police procedural grounded in real homicide investigations I've worked. Pretty convenient, right?

But here's the twist: I also write what the Brits call cozies.

Say what?

It's true. I spent thirty years chasing killers and now I write cozy crime fiction. Go ahead, laugh – I sure did.

So how did that happen? Well, remember the pandemic? Around the same time the world shut down, my then-wife decided she was unhappy - and I was the reason. Kind of like being a lifeboat in the North Atlantic, and deciding you didn't like the only other person aboard. Not exactly the moment to toss them overboard, but there we were.

I ended up in a tiny basement apartment, alone, with one window just big enough for a wet, terrified cat to maybe escape through.

What to do? Write the next Mike O'Shea novel, of course. I had a contract for three more. Easy.

Except it wasn't.

I couldn't go there. Not then. It was too dark - even for me. I'm the guy who's seen heads blown off, twenty-storey jumpers, and what's left after no one checks in for weeks. And I just couldn't sit in that space anymore.

So I didn't.

Instead, I puled a minor character from the O'Shea series - Mike's recently retired, mildly Machiavellian Irish mother - and built a whole new world around and her eccentric, relentless, absolutely lovable crew. Together, and despite the best efforts of the global police network, they not only solve murders but usually squeeze a confession out of someone along the way.

Two books published, and one in dev edits, two more under contract - and a couple of traditional mysteries on deck - and I'm still writing. Just not what most people expect.

These days, the crimes are fictional, the killers a bit more polite - and honestly, I'm having a hell of a good time.

Turns out, you can spend a career staring into the darkest corners of humanity and still find your way to stories filled with charm, mischief and the occasional rogue "woman of a certain age." I'm not saying it's therapy- but it's close.

My name is Detective Desmond T. Ryan (ret'd) and I write cozy crime fiction.

Seriously.

---

Desmond P. Ryan’s thirty-year career as a Toronto Police detective informs his crime fiction, blending real-life policing experience with a deep understanding of human nature. He worked in some of the city’s most challenging divisions, handling everything from routine investigations to high-stakes cases, providing a foundation for the authenticity in his novels.

Desmond’s writing captures the complexities of crime and justice with both compassion and resolve, portraying heroes and flawed individuals alike. His intimate knowledge of urban neighborhoods adds rich depth, grounding his stories in universal themes, with a touch of humor to keep things grounded.

---

Only One Writer in the Room

I've talked about whether or not to listen to music while writing. No two writers are the same. I often need music, except in those quiet hours before the day begins. Then I need silence. But later in the day?

Yeah, I need my tunes. But that comes with a caveat. Deep Purple's "Highway Star" or jazz instrumentals do not disrupt the story flow. But I can't have a storyteller singing or rapping. As such, no post-Animals Roger Waters and no Carrie Underwood. The former I find kind of annoying anyway. I was thrilled when Floyd became a trio led by David Gilmour because I want to hear Floyd, not Roger's daddy issues morphed into geo-politics. Carrie?

"Two Cadillacs" already has its own story spinning up in my head. And then we have the most noir country song since "Goodbye, Earl": "Blown Away." First time I ever heard a story about a girl using a tornado to kill her abusive father. Guess there was enough rain in Oklahoma to make that happen.

I used to blast Metallica when I was younger. They put out this thundering wall of sound that drowned out the world. Now I have a persistent ringing in my left ear. It's not bad, and sometimes, ambient noise tamps it down. But I'm not in my thirties anymore. I may listen to Van Halen or Metallica in the car, but when I write, I find myself drifting more toward jazz. While it could be, its vocal songs are not stories as often as other genres. Plus it has more instrumentals than rock or country or, especially, pop. Acts in the other three genres, along with hip hop, are dependent on someone fronting the band. You need your Robert Plants and Taylor Swifts and Blake Sheltons. And hip hop, which is more rhythm than melody to begin with, is a lousy genre for instrumentals. Ludacris, for instance, has some of the best backing tracks in the genre, which really make his songs pop. Take out the vocals, however, and it sounds like half a bar of some interesting synth on a loop.

But jazz? Strip the vocals off "My Favorite Things," and you have a playground for Miles or Coltrane (and later, his wife, Alice) or the Marsalis brothers. In jazz, voice is more an instrument than something to be supported by the backing band.

And pop, which is all about spectacle, needs a charismatic person to draw in the audience. Hence, most pop acts are solo, often an outlet for songwriters these days. I've heard my share of country instrumentals. The genre can use more in this era of Spotify blandness. But rock? There's always room in rock for sending the vocalist on break. Like when Stevie Ray Vaughan took on Jimi Hendrix's classic "Little Wing."

Once Again Proving that Reality is Stranger than Fiction

In case you're wondering why I haven't been on the SleuthSayers much lately, I had cataract surgery on each eye, one on one week, and the other 2 weeks later, and an endless supply of eyedrops in between and going on, as far as I can see, until mid-August.  

The surgery actually wasn't as bad in one way as I feared it would be. But they put me (and everyone else) in a giant chair (well a chair made for people much taller and bigger than me), a surgical chair, and that wheeled around, lowered, sat up, flattened out, etc., like a hospital bed. But the top of my head just reached the  bottom of the headrest, and while they brought me a pillow, it all just didn't fit. (I've found the same thing with today's furniture, again, all made for giants, which is why I go furniture shopping at the Hotel Liquidators store.)

Meanwhile, the surgery itself was fascinating for a young adult of the early 70s.  Besides the endless eyedrops, after scooting down to the headrest like a caterpillar (if only I had transformed into a butterfly by the end of it!) I was taped down to the headrest (and, btw, my arms were also encased like a caterpillar; and yes, there was a part of me that thought instantly of the movie Coma).  

And then things happened.  No pain, no scalpels, but it definitely was psychedelic. A group of what looked like rocks, different colors, that changed, and vanished and came back and did that some more.  And then it was over. And they sat me up and rolled me back. Two hours and they were done. My eye dripped all the way home, and all evening along with my sinuses were dripping. But it was done. Ditto the other eye.  

Meanwhile, things did not slow down just because I was seeing fuzzy: 

For the criminally minded, we've had the usual weekly/twice weekly arrests of child predators and child porn. We've had a lot of hit and runs of late. And we had two beheadings in South Dakota this year:

• Yankton, South Dakota (January 2025): Craig Allen Nichols Jr. was charged with murder and manslaughter after the decapitated body of his girlfriend, Heather Bodden, was discovered in her apartment. Bodden's head was located in a trash bag inside the apartment, along with bloody clothing and weapons. Nichols had a history of prior arrests and had been recently released from a mental health facility.  Well, he's in jail, he's going to prison, one hopes to the mental health unit.  
• Clark, South Dakota (July 2025): Bowen Fladland was charged with the murder of his mother, Marlene Fladland, after her decapitated body was found in their front yard. He allegedly admitted to assaulting her, kneeling on her neck until she was deceased, and then using a tool to remove her head. Fladland had a history of domestic violence against his mother, including a prior aggravated assault conviction.  He's in jail, and he's going to prison, probably to share the prison's mental health unit with Mr. Nichols.

Then again, they both might get the death penalty. If so, they'll still end up in prison in Sioux Falls.  

BTW, is this a new trend in murder?  

Anyway, speaking of prison, our prison task force is finalizing a location in Sioux Falls for a new state prison with a $650 million budget (which is after 3 cities turned us down for the new prison), our legislature passed a ban on sanctuary cities (we have none), and the state ended the fiscal year with a $63 million operating surplus, which will be set aside for a rainy day, and when that comes, we still won't see any of it. I know South Dakota.

We also had 200 new laws come into effect as of July 1, 2025.  

My least favorite:  Senate Bill 100, which allows college students to conceal carry firearms on campus if they have an enhanced permit. 

“There is a lot of concern that we’ll see in coming time that it is unfounded and that we can get along just right, honoring and respecting our Second Amendment rights the way they were intended,” Governor Larry Rhoden said. God only knows what that sentence means. 

All I know is that all of my fellow retired colleagues from SDSU agree that we are SO glad we are no longer teaching, because there's a percentage of students (small, but enough) who are unstable and have a tendency to go off like a firecracker. Plus most of us taught a class or two in the Rotunda, which was just what it sounds, a rotunda containing pie-shaped classrooms with tier after tier of seats for students, leading down to the poor teacher at the bottom, who was a standing duck if one of those unstable students decided to exercise their "Second Amendment rights the way they were intended."

My favorite is HB 1067 which defines the term “must” to mean a mandatory directive and does not confer any discretion in carrying out the action so directed. And then goes on to say that "shall" means the exact same thing.  Soooo glad that's cleared up. 

And another polygamous sect has taken over the compound in rural Custer County, about nine miles southwest of the small town of Pringle, blends into the landscape just like other properties in the southern Black Hills that used to belong to the Warren Jeffs group of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Thankfully, Mr. Jeffs is now serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for sexual assault on a child. 

But there's apparently more where he came from, and this time it's the Order, – aka the Kingston Order, the Kingston Group, the Davis County Cooperative Society (DCCS) or the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ (LDCJC), and while they're not officially affiliated with the FLDS, they practice most of the same stuff:  polygamy, incest, child abuse, child labor violations and fraud, according to the Associated Press.  (LINK)  

BTW, if you want to see the place, some of the buildings at the property have recently been posted as available for rent on Airbnb.  

Sigh…

Well, at least I can see better.

Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith died the week before last. I met him at Left Coast Crime, in Santa Fe, some years ago. I’ve always been a huge fan, and I’m very sorry he’s left us.

Gorky Park was published in 1981.

It was a big deal. At this remove, we might not remember just what a big deal it was. There’s the famous story that when Smith’s agent Knox Burger sent the book out, he asked for a floor bid of a million bucks, hard-soft – and Random House took the bait. There’s the allied fact that you couldn’t elevator pitch the novel, it wasn’t Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger as twins. Publishers are scared of anything new, but if it’s too familiar, it’s dismissed as derivative. Editors read for rejection, Henry Dunow once told me, the first sentence they have to read a second time is the last sentence they’ll read. Gorky Park didn’t pay any attention to this. The book played by its own rules.

It was sleight of hand, and I didn’t snap to it right away.

He takes a situation that almost feels commonplace, the police procedural, which observes certain conventions, and with the accretion of detail, drifts into the Twilight Zone. Because the details themselves throw you off. Here’s one. Two cops, working a homicide, talking in the one guy’s office. While he’s talking, the guy takes his phone off the hook, puts the receiver on his desk, and dials the operator – this is the Soviet Union, it’s the 1980’s, they’re rotary phones – but he doesn’t release the dial, he sticks the eraser end of a pencil into it, and stops the dial from turning back. The two dicks keep right on talking, neither of them remark on this, since it’s routine. They know their phones are bugged, and this trick creates static on the line. They take for granted they live in a surveillance state, and if they can generate a little aggravation for KGB, so much the better.

The effect these physical details have is to make you realize there’s a psychological effect. These people are muted. They self-censor their speech, but they self-censor their thoughts. Arkady Renko, the senior homicide detective, has had plenty of practice, and he has to unlearn his survival mechanisms, the habit of policing his own doubts, if he’s to have any hope of winning back his self-respect, let alone unravel the case, self-respect being the first victim of moral exhaustion.

There are eleven Renko novels, the last, Hotel Ukraine, published just before Martin Cruz Smith died. As striking and original as Gorky Park is, my money’s on Red Square (1992) and Wolves Eat Dogs (2004) as the best books in the series. And while your math may differ, my own personal favorite happens not to be a Renko book – as good as they are. The one I like the best is Stallion Gate, which is about Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, during the war. (I read it long before I moved to New Mexico.)

I was talking to him, on the sidelines of Left Coast Crime, and when I mentioned that I’d been a Russian linguist in the military, he grinned, and told me he didn’t speak any Russian.

I was like, Wait, what? How did you come up with that vocabulary thing in Red Square?

[SPOILER ALERT]

The title, Red Square, refers to the urban space in Moscow, and the climax of the novel takes place there, with Boris Yeltsin making a cameo on top of a tank. “Red Square” is also the name of an avant-garde painting by Kazimir Malevich, long thought stolen by the Nazis, which turns up on the black market. A language misunderstanding throws everything into disarray. “Where is Red Square?” is the question, in English, on the dead man’s fax machine. Russian has more than one word for “square,” however. “Red Square,” the physical place, is translated as Krasnij Ploshchad’, but “Red Square,” the geometric shape, comes out as Krasnij Kvadrat. And everything turns on this. For lack of a nail, the shoe was lost.

I think, in seriousness, that there are writers who change the way you look at writing. I don’t mean the use of language, so much, as I mean a sense of what can be done. Sometimes, something enormously simple, and you say to yourself, What did they do there, and how did they do it? I’ve mentioned Mary Renault, in that regard, John le Carré, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley. I want to add Martin Cruz Smith to the batting order. He had a gift for the reveal, for turning the last card face up.

Everything Is Fodder (especially torture by broccoli)

This is a reprint of a column I ran three years ago, with minor updates. I hope it is helpful to you (and amusing too).

Things many people find difficult to do:

• Lose weight
• Follow directions
• Not give unsolicited advice on social media.

You can count me among "many people" when it comes to the first item. But with the other two, I know about their prevalence because I have been a victim of them.

A victim, I say!

Yes, yes, I occasionally give unsolicited advice, but it's always with hesitation. An explanation for why I'm wading in. An apology even. Other people, I've found, don't have such qualms.

An example (one of many): During the height of 2020 pandemic madness, I posted on Facebook that I had a lot of broccoli in my house but the dressing I'd gotten in my last grocery pickup didn't taste good. I mentioned the three other condiments I had at home (salsa, ketchup, and butter) and asked my friends if any of them would work with broccoli, as I had my doubts. (I hadn't thought of melting the butter--once that option was pointed out, it was a doh moment.) At any rate, I also made clear that I don't cook and had no other ingredients in the house, so I requested that my friends not make alternate suggestions of condiments to use or ways to cook the broccoli. I thought I was pretty clear.

Then the following happened. The conversation has been greatly condensed since I received more than 300 responses. Names have been removed to protect the guilty.

Friend A

Roast it in the oven with olive oil and sprinkle some Parmesan cheese on top. It’s not hard. Or steam it and top with butter and a squeeze of lemon juice. 

Me

Don't have olive oil, cheese, or lemon. 

Friend A

Ok—just steam and add butter. Do you have Italian dressing. You could use that as an olive oil substitute.

Me

Nope, I don't.

As you can see, I was calm at this point, merely reminding Friend A that I didn't have some of the items she suggested I use.

Friend B

A nice, sweet balsamic vinegar. I like white balsamic.

Me

I don't have vinegar (and I don't like it either). More for you!

See how pleasant I was? This was early going.

Friend C

I roast broccoli with garlic and chopped up bacon.

Me

I have no garlic and I don't like bacon.

Friend D

Saute in some olive oil with garlic. Squeeze on some lemon before eating if you have some. Delicious. Or roast tossed in olive oil with a little garlic salt or sea salt or Goya adobo seasoning.

Me

I don't have any olive oil or garlic. Or lemon. Or sea salt or adobo seasoning. And sauteing and roasting means cooking. I don't cook. 

Friend E

Add it to something you like ... or, as others have said, butter is good, and I'd add some seasoned salt. I like sprinkling blends from Penzeys Spices on various foods. Their Salad Elegant would be great on broccoli.

Me

I don't have seasoned salt. I wasn't kidding about the only possible toppings I have in the house. Butter, salsa, and ketchup.

Friend F

The extent to which people cannot comprehend the state of your pantry is deeply hilarious to me.

Me

I am less amused.

Friend F

Would definitely think twice about hiring your fb friends for a job that requires ability to follow instructions.

She (Friend F) wasn't kidding. But I steeled myself and kept reading the responses.

Friend G

I would boil some water, add a ton of salt, and blanch the broccoli for like 2-3 minutes. Then drain and chill.

Me

Blanch?

Friend G

Extremely easy. [Lists a link for how to blanch.]  

Note to the reader: Not extremely easy.

Friend H

Really tasty: sliced zucchini or yellow squash, plus a red sweet pepper, sauteed in olive oil or butter with garlic and sweet red onion or green spring onions. Add a little basil for punch, but it isn't required.

Me

[Mouth hanging open.]

At this point, I stopped responding to almost all the comments, most of which were suggestions of other things I should cook using food I didn't have in the house. Me. The person who doesn't cook and who certainly would not be going to the market for the suggested foods. (Add one picky eater who doesn't cook and the height of the pandemic and you got hell no.) 

Occasionally, though, I became so incensed, I did respond.

Friend I

Saute in a pan, with ginger, olive oil and garlic, 1 T corn starch, and 1/4 cup of water.

Me

I DON'T COOK!

Friend G

This post has turned absurd, and I love it.

Me

That makes one of us

Friend J

Two of us! Sorry, Barb.

Me

It's like people are trying to give me a stroke at this point.

Can you feel the stress? Years have passed, and reading all these comments is aggravating me all over again.

You may be wondering why I'm sharing all of this with you, other than for your amusement. It's because of something I often say: Everything is fodder. If you're looking for a story idea, mining current events or events in your own life is often a good place to start. I took this condiment conversation and my associated aggravation and put it to good use when the fine folks at Malice Domestic put out a call for short stories for their anthology titled Malice Domestic 16: Mystery Most Diabolical.

What if, I thought, a low-earning spendthrift without any morals is the only living relative of a rich elderly woman. He decides to friend her on Facebook, aiming to drive her crazy with unsolicited advice so she'll have a heart attack and die and he can inherit all her money. That sounded pretty diabolical to me. 

Five thousand words later, the idea became my short story "Go Big or Go Home," which is the lead story in Mystery Most Diabolical. The book was released in 2022. And yes, it has Facebook conversations just like the one above.

Regular readers of this blog may recall how I also mined my history before I wrote "The Postman Always Flirts Twice," which came out in the fall of 2024 in the anthology Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy. Being pressured to go on a date with your mailman isn't great, until you use it as starting point for a short story three decades later. Which reinforces the point of this column: everything is fodder!

To those of you with Macavity Award ballots, this postman story (which won the Agatha Award in April) is now a Macavity finalist in the Best Short Story category. I invite you to read it before the voting deadline at the end of this month. To read it online, click here.