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Being Resolute

 

Happy New Year!  Since I have the honor of welcoming in the glorious new annum I thought I might provide some Resolutions for Writers.  Not for me, of course.  Perfection is for the gods alone and I already come so dangerously close I could be accused of hubris.  These tips are for the rest of you. 

* None of my characters will be shot in the shoulder and act as if it were a mosquito bite.

* None of my female characters will use their Feminine Wiles to get information they could have received just by asking, unless such behavior  is one of their characteristics.

* None of my present-day characters will go into a dangerous situation without a working cell phone or a damned good explanation of why they had none.

* None of my stories will switch from present to past tense and back again, or first to third person ditto, without a good reason.

* None of the following words will appear in the final draft without being savagely interrogated and forced to defend their existence: suddenly, very, just, had, got.

* Villains will not explain their evil plot to captured heroes without a damned good reason. 

* None of my characters will smile, smirk, or grimace their dialog, because those words describe facial expressions, not ways of speaking.  (Sneer gets a pass.)

* No headhopping.  "George thought Frank was lying. Frank wondered if George thought he was lying.  George wondered what Frank was thinking. Alice wondered why the narrator didn't pick a goddamn lane."

* My hero will not be knocked unconscious at a convenient moment.

* My characters will not hiss a sentence with no S in it.

* A supernatural event in my story will not have a rational explanation - and then be Overturned By Something Spooky, The End.

* If I have five characters I will not name them Mary, Marv, Mark, Mike, and Mickey.

* I will not let a day go by without doing something to promote mystery short fiction, my own, or others. 

By the way, I have committed at least two of these abominations, but I swear I am reformed now.

Any additions? 

2024 Year in Review: Editing

In my previous SleuthSayers post, I wrote about how little I’ve been able to accomplish this year because I’ve been unable to establish a routine and stick to it. While I still feel like a slacker, I’ve apparently done enough that I’m having to split my 2024 Year in Review post into two parts. I’ll discuss writing and other things next post; this time I’m concentrating on editing.

This year saw the release of one issue of Black Cat Mystery Magazine (issue 15); 52 issues of Black Cat Weekly, for which I serve as an associate editor; the first six episodes of the new serial novella anthology series Chop Shop; and several anthologies I edited or co-edited.

The anthologies include:

Chop Shop, volumes 1 and 2 (Down & Out Books)

Janie’s Got a Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Aerosmith (White City Press)

Malice Domestic 18: Mystery Most Devious, co-edited with John Betancourt and Carla Coupe (Wildside Press)

Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Vol. 5 (Down & Out Books)

Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology, co-edited with Barb Goffman (Level Short)

Notorious in North Texas (North Dallas Chapter of Sisters in Crime)

Private Dicks and Disco Balls: Private Eyes in the Dyn-O-Mite Seventies (Down & Out Books)

Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House, co-edited with Stacy Woodson (Down & Out Books)

Additionally, I served as one of several first readers/judges for Tales of Music, Murder, and Mayhem: Bouchercon Anthology 2024 (Down & Out Books)

Outside the mystery world, I edited six issues of Texas Gardener, a bi-monthly consumer magazine, and 52 issues of Seeds, a weekly electronic newsletter for gardeners that, incidentally, published five short stories.

Adding all the editing projects together (excluding the Bouchercon anthology, for which my participation was more as first reader than an editor), in 2024 I had the honor of shepherding or helping shepherd 191 short stories and novellas through to publication.

RECOGNITION

This year, several stories from projects I edited or co-edited were recognized:

“Real Courage” by Barb Goffman, Black Cat Mystery Magazine #14, nominated for Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards

“Troubled Water” by donalee Moulton, Black Cat Weekly #75, nominated for a Derringer Award (Long Story) and a Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence

“Supply Chains” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Black Cat Weekly #89, nominated for a Derringer Award (Flash)

“Dogs of War” by Michael Bracken & Stacy Woodson, Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Vol. 4 nominated for a Derringer Award (Short Story)

“One Night in 1965” by Stacy Woodson, More Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties, nominated for Macavity and Thriller Awards and included in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year

“An Honorable Choice” by Smita Harish Jain, Black Cat Weekly #96, nominated for a Thriller Award

“Making the Bad Guys Nervous” by Joseph S. Walker, Black Cat Weekly #102, nominated for a Shamus Award

“Lovely and Useless Things” by Nils Gilbertson, Prohibition Peepers: Private Eyes During the Noble Experiment, included in The Best American Mystery and Suspense and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year

“El Paso Heat” by Peter W.J. Hayes, Black Cat Mystery Magazine #14, included in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year

“Memorial” by Robert Lopresti, Black Cat Weekly #95, included in the list of “Other Distinguished Stories” in The Best American Mystery and Suspense

“The Waning Days” by Sean McCluskey, Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Vol. 4, included in the list of “Other Distinguished Stories” in The Best American Mystery and Suspense

“Off the Shelf” by Joseph S. Walker, Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Vol. 4, included in the list of “Other Distinguished Stories” in The Best American Mystery and Suspense

FORTHCOMING

While I have no control over publishing schedules, I anticipate two issues of Black Cat Mystery Magazine and 52 issues of Black Cat Weekly in 2025, and I have already delivered the manuscripts for Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Vol. 6, Party Crashers, and Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun as well as all six novellas for season two of Chop Shop. I’m also editing or co-editing several additional anthologies I hope to deliver to publishers this year, and I have a few more concepts I hope to pitch after I move some of these projects off my desk.

OPEN SUBMISSION CALL

Of all the projects in the pipeline, only one currently has an open call: Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Vol. 7, is open for submissions during February 2025. Complete submission guidelines available at https://www.crimefictionwriter.com/submissions.html

Based on all of the above, it’s safe to say I’m now more editor than writer.

And that’s not a bad thing.

The Best Essay on Top Ten Lists for 2024

It’s the season of Top Ten Books of 2024, Best of 2024, Our picks for 2024, Most Notable,  etc.  It’s a curators’ frenzy telling  us what we should value and appreciate about the year’s creative output. 

It’s natural for human beings to sort things, and we do it all the time.  It’s also not a bad thing to learn what other people think about anything, be it sanitizer wipes, Baus Haus architecture or best sellers.  It can be illuminating and helpful, since there’s too much to know in the world, and not enough time to absorb it all on your own. 

However, there’s nothing sillier than Top Ten, or Best Of lists of books, and I advise everyone to give scant regard to the frothy commotion.  Here are my Top Ten reasons why:

1.      In a few years, most of the books on these lists will be forgotten. 

2.      It’s all entirely subjective.  These lists are composed by people who have their own tastes and predilections, and though well informed, mean nothing to those of us with contrary, varied opinions.

3.      Critics and readers are not the same people.  Critics, the ones who make the Best Of lists, are heavily invested in their aesthetic judgements, and far more committed to the context in which any given work is developed.  This means they overthink everything, and are speaking more to their competing reviewers than to the rest of us.  We just want to read something we like.  That enriches us.  We don’t care about all the nonsense they care about.

 

Okay, it's for movies, but you get the idea

4.      If you asked every book reader to make their own Best Of list, and put them all together, it would likely include the entire print run of every publisher in the country. 

5.      You will never read a Best Of list without being insulted.  Or outraged.  Or mildly annoyed. They’ll leave off your favorite book or rhapsodize over a piece of crap.   It’s not worth the increased blood pressure and intestinal distress.

6.      You can’t separate popularity from artistic success.  Lousy books can sell a lot of copies, great books can fade into obscurity a day after they’re released.  Lists tend to favor books with lots of sales, whatever the quality.  They also tend to confuse social impact with literary merit.  You need to figure out what they mean by Best, which isn’t worth the time or effort. 

7.      Only time will tell which of this year’s works will endure.  Some do, for decades or centuries, because of some ineffable quality that transcend the immediate.  And even that may wane over time.  The Best Books of All Time list keeps changing.  And it always will.

8.      There is no Best.  Every work has it’s own particular charms, and saying one is better than another is like saying an apple is always better than an orange, which is better than a peach.  Not to say there are no objective criteria, but a lot of books will meet the minimum requirements, and from there, it’s up to the reader to decide. 

9.      There’s no harm in reading the Top Ten list for 2024, but don’t expect to be overwhelmed with gratitude for the opportunity.  You can just as well browse around a library or bookstore, or listen to your friends and relatives, who are no greater authorities, but at least might share similar preferences.

              10.   All love is good love; all books you like are good books.  Lists are for                                            scorekeepers, snobs and fussbudgets.  

Taking Stock, Moving On

Sports franchises going through poor seasons say they're having a "rebuilding year" because it sounds better than "terrible year."  There is something to be said, though, for the basic concept of a rebuilding year--taking stock of where you are and trying to put the fundamental pieces in place for moving forward.

The end of the year is a natural time for writers, like everyone else, to take a step back, see what they've done, and think about building that foundation for the next twelve months.  As a writer, I wouldn't go so far as to say I had a terrible year.

But a rebuilding year?  Yeah, I'll cop to that.

By my count, I wrote thirteen new stories in 2024.  That's not bad, but I've had years when I wrote more than twenty (26 being my high).  My 2024 stories totaled roughly 52,000 words, for an average of 4,000 per story.  Of the thirteen, three were submitted to open-call anthologies, seven were written for anthologies I was invited to contribute to, and the remaining three were submitted to magazines.

I had fourteen stories published in 2024, which, again, is down considerably from my 2022 high mark of 21.  Ten were in anthologies, four in periodicals.  Two were reprints (details and links can be found on my website).

Other writing-related 2024 moments worth noting: I attended two conferences (Bouchercon and ShortCon), joined the Sleuthsayers, was nominated for a Shamus award, signed a contract for a collection of some of my stories, and was elected the President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (since I ran unopposed, it was a landslide).

My work with the SMFS probably accounts for some of my decline in production.  Before I was the President, I was the Derringer coordinator, as I discussed at (probably excessive) length in my very first Sleuthsayer column.  Both positions took up a lot of time I might have spent writing, but I don't regret  holding them.  The SMFS has been enormously important in my development as a writer, and if I can give something back that helps other writers in similar ways, I'm happy to do so.

What I ultimately think was more damaging was something that offers far less fulfillment or meaning: social media.  I allowed myself, at various times this year, to get sucked into the vortex of Facebook and (shudder) Twitter/X, as well as, to a lesser degree, other platforms.  It's astonishing, and distressing, to realize how much time and mental energy this can take up, if you let it.

The conventional wisdom is that social media is vital to the life of a writer these days.  We need the connections.  We need the leads. We need to actively promote ourselves.  This is unfortunate, because I'm increasingly of the opinion that social media is also toxic to the writing life.

That's only in part because of the time it sucks up.  It also promotes a mindset that is actively destructive to the kind of quiet contemplation and reflective thought vital to productive writing.  It shreds the attention span.  It offers a constant stream of distraction.  It promotes a continual buzz of anxiety, because in the world of social media everything is a crisis, everything is dramatic, everything is conflict, and the ways in which the world is on fire just multiply the longer you look.  At least, that's what it was doing to me.  How can I write a nice little murder story when hundreds of people are screaming at me that the collapse of civilization is just around the corner?

Since a certain event in early November that I will not discuss directly, I've been off social media almost entirely.  I haven't been on Twitter once, and I deleted the app from my phone, keeping my account only to prevent anyone else from taking the name.  I've made a few Facebook posts to promote new publications, but avoided looking at anything else on the site.

I'm finding this is very good for me.  I'm less anxious and depressed.  I'm writing more, and enjoying the process more.  I'm also reading more, with more sustained attention.

The problem, of course, is that to a certain degree social media is important to writers today.  It's not just a matter of promoting our work, though that is important.  It's also the place where we establish and maintain our relationships with other writers, with publishers, with readers.  Lord knows not many people are writing emails these days, let alone letters (I have no idea what the literary biographers of the future are going to have to work with).  Since the social aspect of being a writer is important to me, it feels impossible, and unwise, to sever my ties with social media entirely.

So this is the dilemma I face going into 2025: how do I reap the benefits of social media without paying the costs?  I'd honestly be interested in hearing how other writers deal with this problem.  Do you use social media?  Which platforms, and how much?  How do you keep it in check enough to not interfere with your writing?  Is social media, for you, ultimately a boon or a curse?

Whatever your answer, I hope everyone reading this had a productive 2024, and I wish us all a better 2025 than we might be expecting.  See you in January!

My Five Favourite Comedies of All Time – A Christmas Week List!

Many people know I got my start writing stand-up, which morphed into a syndicated humour column, which morphed into the kind of fiction I write now (generally off-the-wall capers, progressing to slightly more respectable loopy mysteries.)

John Floyd's column on sequels in movies had me thinking and rethinking my 'desert isle' list.  That is, if I could only take 5 movies with me to a desert isle, what would they be?

And of course, they would be comedies.  Christmas week is always the time I re-watch my favourite comedies.

(Aside:  I have 'desert isle' lists for almost everything - crime books, literary books, classical music, rock music, cocktails, beer, desserts - yes, of course you need desserts on a desert isle, darling. This is my desert isle, and I can design it the way I want.) 

But back to comedy movies.  I'm looking here for movies with sustained comedy, as opposed to popular rom-coms that have a scene or two that are memorable.  

Here is my list of the best of the best, from someone who has made their career in comedy.  Note that many of these are British.  I am not (I'm Canadian) but my dad was.  This possibly explains my own style of writing (which seems perfectly normal to me, but apparently others consider wacky.)

With that in mind, I hope some of these are new to you. I envy you if you haven't seen these before!  You are in for a treat.

1.  The Wrong Box

How can you go wrong with a cast like this?  Dudley Moore, John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Peter Cook, Peter Sellers...  Add in the best hearse chase scene ever imagined (with horse-drawn hearses).  I don't want to give it away, but when a box containing money gets mixed up with a box containing a statue, which gets mixed up with a box containing the dead body of the Bournemouth strangler... The Salvation Army women are just a scream.  I could quote lines, but you'd have to see it to appreciate it.  Let me just say... "This is Julia Finsbury...soon to become...Julia Finsbury!"  (final scene - an absolute hoot.)

This is my favourite movie of all time.

 

2. The Pink Panther

This was the first adult comedy I saw as a kid, and I love it even today.  It may have inspired my own reverse-robberies in The Goddaughter's Revenge.  How can you not giggle at the fancy dress ball, the apes, the crazy car chase, the marvelous thwarted seduction scene with the champagne exploding under the covers...

And Peter Sellers with Capucine. Sellers at his very best, and with her serene classiness, Capucine was made for the part. 

 

3.  A Shot in the Dark

The sequel to The Pink Panther, and many (like my friend John) would say the better movie.  I adore both.

Mike (husband) says I am unusual in that I like guy humour.  Well, if this is guy humour, he's dead on, because the scene of Peter Sellers holding the 'strategic' guitar at the nudist camp always has me giggling. 

 

4.  The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming

Can you tell this movie had a Canadian in the pilot seat?  I can't imagine how subversive this movie must have seemed at the time, in the midst of the cold war.  Alan Arkin is magic as the Russian submarine lieutenant charged with leading a small group of Russian sailors on a rescue mission through hick town USA. Again, I point to the dialogue.  Pure gold.

Tommy (accusing his dad):  "Yer a trader!"

Mom:  "That's traitor, Tommy, traitor."

 

5.   Here we have a dilemma.

I lean towards giving the no. 5 spot to Some Like It Hot, with strong honorable mentions to The Producers, We're No Angels, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Support your local Gunfighter, and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Okay, I may need a bigger island.

What are your favourites?  I'd like to hear.  Are any of these new to you?  Let me know if you watch them and appreciate them (or like me, love them to death.)

---

Melodie Campbell is the author of 18 novels, 60 short stories and over 200 humour columns. She spent a lot of time in the corner at school, as a kid.  Soon to come...

A Connecticut Yankee In Jim's TBR Stack

 I spent 15 years going through Stephen King's canon, skipping a few screenplays and Faithful, as I am not invested enough in the two baseball teams I grew up on, let alone the Red Sox. Why so long? For starters, life. I got divorced twice during this process, I changed jobs three times in that period of my life. My current wife had a catastrophic health crisis a few years ago. And, dude, I write. I may not sell much, but I write. Also, King writes. A lot. Sixty-five novels and novellas, plus two hundred short stories. And he's still writing. 

But now that we're down to a leisurely 1-3 books a year by Maine's most celebrated writer, whose canon am I going through now?

That would be one Samuel Langhorne Clemens from Hannibal, MO, and later of Hartford, CT. AKA Mark Twain. One of my first buys on Kindle was a collection of all his novels, short stories, and essays. I focused on the books. I also began reading in earnest when I read his massive and deliberately chaotic autobiography. I just now finished the books. I still have the short stories and essays to go through and bought three print books: Letters from Hawaii (compiled by his request after his death by Albert Bigelow, his editor and responsible for the earliest and shortest iteration of his autobiography), The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, and Short Stories and Tall Tales. These last three I will read in the new year. 

So how was reading Twain different from King? Well, for starters, horror isn't Twain's bag. He can write a scary story, but that's not what he's about. Also, King seems embarrassed to do non-fiction. Twain shines at it. I find his travelogues much more interesting than his novels. Yes, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are brilliant and the classics they deserve to be. But Recollections of Joan of Arc is actually better. And the later novels, a pair of Tom Sawyer sequels clearly written for a quick buck and A Horse's Tale, aren't quite as good. Twain, like any writer, is at his best when he wants to. That's probably why the three volume brick stack that is his autobiography is so readable. It's disjointed, so you can pretty much pick up anywhere, and it's your favorite uncle spinning stories. And even when Huck narrates, which he does in dialect, there's no character voice. It's Twain telling the story. 

But the essays, many of which are in early form in the autobiography, are Twain's bread and butter. Twain left home and became a reporter. If he were around today, he'd have a travel blog (and no doubt a YouTube channel: Sammy C Travels the World.) It's what makes Old Times of the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator so engaging. 

The shorts, of course, play right into this. I tried to read Mark Twain's Library of Humor, which featured many humorists of his time. I wasn't laughing. One can say it was the product of the times, but that doesn't obligate me to like what the others wrote. I also find Boston-area puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards unreadable, and I was forced to study him in high school. (Hawthorne pretty much made a career out of skewering that culture.) It was the times he wrote.

I read Twain in parallel with King before I focused on finishing his canon. Unlike King, there have been no new Twain stories or works since Volume III of his autobiography debuted in 2015. So while King has work in the pipeline (and probably will not slow down should he die soon), Twain is pretty much complete.

So, who's replacing Twain as the author whose canon I'm working through? I'm about halfway through William Shakespeare. So once I've read the short stories, I'll be averaging a play a month. However, as someone recently commented in my post about The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare is meant to be watched, not read. (The sonnets notwithstanding.) So, in 2025, I plan to watch one Shakespeare play a week, which will take less than a year.

Welcome to the Dirty 30s

Recent statement cropping up on a lot of social media about the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare Insurance over some other social media posts lionizing Luigi Mangione:

"A healthy society doesn't lionize vigilante killers. 

But we don't live in a healthy society."

My response:  Really?  We don't lionize?  Kyle Rittenhouse leaps to mind.  I remember members of a certain party saying, "I want him to be my Senator", and urging him to run for office, even though he took a semiautomatic rifle (a Smith & Wesson M&P 15) out of state (from Illinois to Wisconsin) to a BLM riot. Seventeen year olds don't do that unless they're looking to shoot someone and he did. Daniel Penny, just acquitted for using excessive force in killing a homeless mentally ill man who was yelling at people on a subway, was taken to the Army & Navy game where he sat with President Elect Trump, VP Elect Vance, and Elon Musk.  Seems a little like lionizing to me...  Not to mention the long, tragic, on-going tradition of lynching.  

Here in America, it's all about who gets vigilanteed. And it's assumed that some people are untouchable. And we all know that.

BUT – The simple truth is that there comes a point where the "common man" has had enough of being ripped off and used, and... crap happens. Let's use the Way-Back Machine and go to the Great Depression (1929-1939), when the most common folk heroes were bank robbers. 

A little history first:  The banks in the Roaring Twenties had invested a tremendous amount of money - too much money, most of their customers' money - in the roaring stock market.  So when the stock market crashed, they closed, a polite term for went bust, collapsed, went bankrupt.  And as those banks failed, people tried to withdraw all their money from both the collapsing and surviving banks, which only made things worse.  Banks liquidated loans and other assets.  800 banks in 1930, 2100 in 1931, 9000 by 1933.  

And there was no FDIC - which was created by FDR and which federally insures our deposits to this day - so if a bank failed, people who had any money in those banks lost it all, with no hope of getting it back.

MY NOTE:  Certain people in the post-January 20, 2025 world want to abolish the FDIC because...  reasons...  No history, but "reasons"...

Meanwhile, there were a lot of small rural banks which were unregulated. (Again, times have changed.) They'd grown up after WW1, when the world needed a lot of corn and cotton.  As farmers bought more land, real estate went up.  As real estate went up, farmers took out more loans. As the economy tanked, these banks called in their loans, but farmers didn't have the money.  And the Dust Bowl hit - the "Dirty Thirties", which was a severe drought (up to 8 years in some areas) exacerbated by "deep plowing" which led to soil erosion. Crops failed. No money. Result?  Foreclosures, foreclosures, and more foreclosures.  The banks took the farms, booted out the farmers, and then sold the land at a nice profit to someone else - anyone else.  

The result was that about 3.5 million people left the Great Plains - 86,000 moved to California the first year - trying to find a place and a way to live.  They weren't welcomed with open arms. They were called "Okies" and "Arkies" and treated as subhuman. (Is any of this sounding familiar?)  

Anyway, all of these people - and more - blamed the banks for taking their land.  They hated the banks.  And so when various armed gangsters started robbing banks, they became folk heroes. It didn't matter that they often killed people during their robberies. Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd (who allegedly destroyed mortgage documents when he robbed a bank), and many more were heroes, because they were fighting back against the filthy banks that had taken everything the common people had. They even (sometimes) gave (some) money away, just often enough to make them Robin Hoods in the public eye.

And these modern day Robin Hoods / folk heroes showed up, in legends and ballads like Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, which included "Tom Joad", "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues". 

They also showed up in the serious literature of the day:  John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (published in 1939) Ma Joad told her son Tom Joad about Pretty Boy Floyd: 

"I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks. He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be…He done a bad thing an' they hurt 'im, caught 'im an' hurt him so he was mad, an' the nex' bad thing he done was mad, an' they hurt 'im again. An' purty soon he was mean-mad. They shot at him like a varmint an' he shot back, an' then they run him like a coyote, an' him a-snappin' an' a-snarlin’, mean as a lobo. An' he was mad. He wasn’t a boy or a man no more, he was just a walkin' chunk of mean-mad. But the folks that knowed him didn' hurt 'im. He wasn' mad at them. Finally then run him down and killed 'im. No matter what they say it in the paper how he was bad – that’s how it was."

When it came out, The Grapes of Wrath became a bestseller that was banned and burned in many states, but also read voraciously.  And it won the Pulitzer Prize.  

Bonnie & Clyde, of course, got the full movie treatment, more than once - 1967's Bonnie & Clyde (directed by Sam Peckinpah) is the most famous. And there are a lot of songs written about them:  

Merle Haggard's "Bonnie & Clyde" (Link)

And here's one, in French, sung by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot.

And you can read Bonnie Parker's own account of their career in "The Trail's End" Here.

Meanwhile, John Dillinger probably has the most movies made about him.  Lot of people have sung about him, written about him (William Burroughs loved him and hoped he was still alive), and played him in the movies...  

The only folk hero (so far) who beats him is Jesse James.  I think Jesse James is proof that bank robbers have never been that unpopular among the "common man".  When I was a little girl, my grandmother would sing "Jesse James" to me as a treat.  I'll never forget her wavering voice singing the refrain, "The dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave."  You could tell where her sympathies lay.  Here it is, sung by Johnny Cash:  

BTW, in case you're thinking that this is a grim message for the day after Christmas, you need to read more Dickens.  First of all, Ebenezer Scrooge would be an obvious target for a folk hero's bullet - and was threatened with an ignominious death by the deceased Jacob Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Future.  And then there's Dickens' The Chimes, so bleak it makes Cormac McCarthy look cheerful. Yes, Dickens does supply the mandatory happy ending, but until then... it's a treatise on the ultimate result of Victorian economic theory and practice (pay the poor the absolute minimum and step on any of them who objects), and a legal system designed to eliminate the poor the hard way (lock them up if they don't starve first). This fun read for the holidays is available for free here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/653/653-h/653-h.htm

Or you could just take a walk down some of the poorer streets of your city... Talk to some of the elderly who are working at hardscrabble jobs to make ends meet, because their Social Security isn't enough. To some of the working class parents, both of them working two jobs to pay for everything, and always falling behind. To that woman, living in her car because she lost her job, the bank foreclosed, and she still can't figure out how it all happened so fast. To the elderly man who divorced his wife, not because he doesn't love her, but because she's in a dementia ward, and the only way to keep her there is to let the nursing home take all the money, while he lives in a little apartment on his Social Security and works one of those hardscrabble jobs to keep himself alive. To the family of the teenager who got meningitis/encephalitis and was in the hospital for almost a year and got smacked with $1 million in debt...  And that was AFTER a chunk of it was forgiven by the hospital...  

The #1 reason for bankruptcy in this country (66.5%) is medical debt.  

Sooner or later, something's gonna give.  

Jesse Walters, "United Health"

Deadly Tropics

The search goes on, for something watchable.  Ghosts, on CBS, streaming on Prime, is terrifically charming (and very light), and I’m not the only one to think so.  A wide circle of my friends, a group with widely divergent tastes, are smitten with it.  I’m also much taken with The Musketeers, although I aired some of my grievances in a Substack column a couple of weeks ago.  But more narrowly, looking in the genre of criminal enterprise, I’ve been toggling back and forth between BritBox, Acorn, and MHz – I only allow myself one subscription at a time.

Shetland is back, Season 9.  Blue Lights kind of lost me, in the second season, I don’t quite know why.  Scott & Bailey ran five years, and I wish there were more: I could watch Amelia Bullmore in damn near anything.  Troppo left me cold, even with Thomas Jane.  I took a flyer on The Jetty, because Jenna Coleman, how could you not?  (I was a huge fan of Victoria, which is admittedly a royal soap, but I thought it was more engaging than The Crown.)  The Jetty collapses of its own weight, as it telegraphs every beat of its glaringly familiar reveals.  Sorry. 

I’m pleased, therefore, to give you Deadly Tropics.  (Not a great title, and the original, Tropiques Criminels, isn’t any better; you wonder why imagination failed.  They could have called it Martinique Heat – almost anything would be better, to draw an initial audience.)  What the series very definitely is not, is a French knock-off of Death in Paradise, to which it’s been compared.  Just for openers, Tropics is nowhere near as annoying.  Paradise, which I’ve continued to watch faithfully (even through the ghastly Kris Marshall years), depends on a repetitive trope, and let’s be honest, fatigue sets in.  Deadly Tropics is much more of a policier, and strains credulity a lot less.  I could do without the exasperated male superior, mopping his brow and fretting that les femmes will embarrass him, but nothing’s perfect.  Baseline.  New commanding officer sent to Martinique from Paris to take over the homicide squad.  (Her former husband’s a bent cop, and she shouldn’t be tarred with his brush, but she is.)  Resistance from her ranking junior officer, also a woman, with radically different approach to policing.  Blah-blah.  New girl actually born on the island, but left as a child; has lots of family there, but doesn’t speak Creole, doesn’t really know the culture, although she herself is black.  The local woman cop - who, as it happens, is white - is a lot less structured in her methods, as relate to work, and her personal life.  This is mostly window-dressing, because the team manages fine, after some early missteps.

In other words, the show starts with a concept, and then essentially discards it.  There’s a genuine chemistry between the leads, Sonia Rolland and Béatrice de la Boulaye, and the scripts are spry and tight.  The scenery is lush, the locations feel authentic, the politics and so on seem to fit.  I don’t know from sex tourism, or the music scene, say, but it all has a gloss of reality.  As with Candice Renoir, the police procedures may or may not be exact, but you get a strong sense of the Caribbean, just as Candice gives you the Mediterranean influence.

The mysteries themselves aren’t taxing, but they’re not formula.  About half the time, you can guess it’s the dad, or the ex, or the plastic surgeon.  The storylines play fair, and they aren’t gimmicked.  I’ll settle for plain old GBH, and a garden-variety blunt instrument.

Joyeux Noël!

Making Fictional Fodder from Emotional Wounds

What better thing to think about on the day after Festivus, in the hours before Hanukkah begins, and on Christmas Eve Day–all holidays that many people spend with family–than childhood emotional wounds. Often inflicted by family, of course. They can be terrible for kids and the adults they become. But for crime writers, they are gifts bundled in tissue paper and boxed with ribbons and bows, waiting to be unwrapped.

Do you enjoy reading or watching How The Grinch Stole Christmas?

There wouldn't be much to the story if the Grinch weren't a terrible being. He wouldn't sneak into the homes of the Whovians and steal their tinsel, toys, and trees if something hadn't happened to him to cause him to be so terrible. He wouldn't abuse his poor dog Max and tell little Cindy-Lou Who that he was Santa Claus if he didn't have an emotional wound driving him. Yes, yes, I know. Some have said that maybe he is so grinchy because his shoes are too tight or because his heart is two sizes too small. But how did his heart come to be so small?

I bet back in his childhood someone was mean to him. Maybe other kids. Maybe someone in his family. Maybe both. Bad for the Grinch and bad for the Whovians and bad for dear old Max, but for readers of the Dr. Seuss classic, the Grinch's emotional wound is pure gold. It drives the Grinch's actions and it gives him room to grow. A character arc in a half hour? Oh, yes, dear reader. The Grinch proves it can be done. Short story authors, take note.

Festivus pole

It isn't much,
but then again,
neither is Festivus.

© Matthew Keefe

The Seinfeld episode “The Strike” also shows how childhood emotional wounds can be wonderful entertainment fodder. This is the episode about Festivus. If young George Costanza had not been forced each December 23^rd to listen to his father detail his grievances, if George had not been raised in a home without a Christmas tree but with a tinsel-less aluminum pole–tinsel is distracting, you know–if George had not had to participate in the Feats of Strength each year, he might not have grown up to be a man who claims to make donations to a fake charity he created in order to get out of giving Christmas gifts.

Sure, you may be thinking, even without Festivus, George would have been doomed to become an extremely flawed adult because he grew up with Frank and Estelle as his parents. But that just shows the depth of his emotional wounds. Thanks to the suffering he experienced as a child–and yes, as an adult–TV viewers got to enjoy nine years of a complex, flawed character who drove many amusing storylines, even the ones that ultimately were about nothing. And viewers still can enjoy them, thanks to the wonders of syndication.

One of my stories that was published this year involves a man, Ethan, who suffered childhood emotional wounds at the hands of his father, and like with the Grinch and George Costanza, those wounds plague him to this day. Ethan can practically hear his father whispering in his ear whenever he doesn't measure up to some ingrained standard. Then he seeks refuge in his favorite comfort food. When that coping mechanism becomes unavailable, adult Ethan acts out. His childhood emotional wounds drive the man and thus the action in the story. Want to know more? You can read this story, “A Matter of Trust,” on my website by clicking here. It isn't funny like many of my stories, but I hope readers find it compelling.

Happy holidays and happy new year to you all. May you reach January without any new emotional wounds. The ones you writers have are likely more than enough.